by Ken MacLeod
Mackenzie Dunt stood on the deck, his hands on Irma Schulz’s hips, her hands on his, just as they had been a moment ago in the real, in the frames. Three dance steps, and whirl. Her hair swung out. Steadied their feet, as the ferry swayed. Dunt took Irma’s hand, and bowed her to a seat, one of those slatted jobs that fold out to life-rafts. Health and safety, beyond the grave.
“Wow,” he said, sitting down beside her. The sense of relief was overpowering. It was all he could do not to whoop and holler. His hands and knees quivered.
“Yeah,” she said. She gazed past the rail. She too was shaking a little, and not from the vibration of the engine. “Wow, fuck. We must have missed it something terrible. Even if this isn’t it, really.”
“I can’t see any difference,” said Dunt. Blue sea to the horizon behind, the morning exosun, the ring bisecting the sky, the brown and yellow land ahead. He’d never before had occasion to use the stripped-down sim in the tug. Maybe there was nothing beyond the horizon, if that meant anything. No Direction rep, perhaps—that would save a lot of processing for a start. He thumped the sun-cracked varnish over sun-paled wood, brushed the dun translucent flakes from the heel of his hand. “Can’t feel any, either.”
“Yeah.” Irma leaned back and sunned her eyelids, breathing in the sea air and the diesel whiff. “Smells the same, too.”
Behind him, through his back, the familiar throb of the engine, the chugging puffs and the radiant heat from the black funnel. The ferry was small: a three-vehicle deck below, a passenger deck above, a bridge with wheelhouse, a shelter towards the stern. There was room on board for maybe thirty passengers.
Now Dunt and Schulz were alone, apart from the p-zombie crew of skipper, engineer and deckhand. Nobody ever told the fighters where the ferry set out from on its way in, or went to on its way out. Some came round on its deck recalling a seaborne launch facility, and splashdowns and recovery ships, out on the ocean. Others, like Dunt, would wake from nightmares of drowning and rescue, with only the vaguest scraps of memory of how they’d fallen in the water in the first place. Rexham always woke twitching and retching, poor sod.
It was an odd place, the Zheng Reconciliation Services sim. This stripped-down copy was no different in that respect. The Direction rep, a tough man of Japanese origin who called himself Miko, told them on their first arrival in the original that it was based on a future version of H-0, the rocky terrestrial planet which the Direction had marked down for terraforming. If so, it was one at a very early stage. The land was lifeless; the sea teemed with plankton and krill, whose automated catch gainfully employed most of the settlers in Edge Town. But it wasn’t a fishing port, even leaving aside there being no fish. It was the desert outside that shaped the place, that gave it its edge.
“Alone together at last,” he said.
Irma opened her eyes, and grinned. “Yes.”
“Twenty minutes before we dock. Let’s use the privacy.”
Irma’s smile turned wicked. “Not enough time, even after all this time.”
He ran fingers through her hair. “Yeah, later and longer for that. I meant talk.”
She jerked a thumb backwards at the wheelhouse, eyed the deckhand leaning at the stern. “You sure of this privacy thing?”
“They don’t speak English.”
“So we’re told. And anyway—you know? We’re in a fucking onboard computer? Outside, and with comms?”
Dunt shook his head, impatiently. “Don’t worry about that. So what if this tug and its sim are wired for sound and this all gets back to the Direction? They’ll have war-gamed anything we could think of as soon as they knew about the fusion factory. Including using the rock as a starship. It’s a fucking obvious possibility, when you think of it.”
“We didn’t think of it, until the blinker told us.”
“Yeah, and it told us because it knew we’d figure it out.”
“I guess so. Makes sense.”
“OK. Point is, it’s the ranks I want to keep this quiet from, for now. The ranks and the inner circle.”
Irma looked puzzled. “Why the inner circle?”
“Because it’s a fucking huge temptation. Don’t you feel it?”
Irma took her time over answering.
“No,” she said at last. “It’s attractive, yeah, but impractical. For the blinkers to leave, well, who could stop it? The Direction might, but it would take a hell of a commitment, and an unpredictable fight with lurking freebots into the bargain. Enough to set back the glorious ten-thousand-year plan. And anyway, why should they care if a bunch of disaffected conscious robots fucks off to another star? Good riddance, they could say, and maybe even good luck! And if this turns out to be a mistake, they have thousands of years to set it right. All-Father above—in a fraction of that time they could build powerful enough lasers to fry the blinkers at half a light-year. In all of that time, they could invent weapons beyond our imagining.”
“Not beyond mine,” said Dunt, with a dark chuckle.
“Uh-huh. You know what I mean. Whereas we … if we try to make a run for it, we’d be up against the Direction and the bots, before we’d built up speed. The Direction wouldn’t wash its hands of us and say good riddance, oh no. They’d see our escape as a threat, and they’d be right. No way do they want a free society literally shining in their sky. And if we escaped this system at all, we could be fried at their leisure, just like the blinkers could be.”
“Yeah, you’ve got it,” Dunt said. “We’re on the same screen all right, you and me. I wish I could count on the same from the rest of the gang.”
“Why?” Irma sounded dismayed. “Are our men not loyal? Aren’t they up for the fight?”
“Yes, and yes,” said Dunt. “But for so many of us, even back in the day, the whole appeal and promise of the Reaction was that we weren’t fighting to conquer the world. Exit, voice, and vote, remember? Voice and vote had always failed us, so we wanted exit. We didn’t need or want to convince all who could be convinced and kill the rest, like the goddamn Axle dreams of doing. We fought to be left alone to do our own thing. Obviously we believed that we’d soon be able to achieve overwhelming superiority, then do as we pleased with the competition. We never planned to conquer them first, and then become superior.”
“It sounds obvious when you put it like that,” said Irma.
“Yes,” said Dunt, smugly. “It is. But it’s what we’re planning to do here, and that’s the problem. We’re planning to build up and break out, sure, but at best it’ll be a scarily even fight. And there’s the temptation, right there.”
“Now, when you put it that way …”
Irma laughed, and Dunt laughed, too.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s why I feel it myself. And if I do, and if you can see it, you can bet your ass some smart-talking fucker like Whitten will convince himself he can negotiate with the Direction and with the blinkers for our safe departure. And if he can convince himself, he can convince others.”
“Jason?” said Irma, incredulously. “Nah. He doesn’t have your leadership qualities. Nothing like.”
“You can say that again,” said Dunt. “What worries me is that he could work on someone who does.”
“Got anyone in mind?” asked Irma.
“Stroilova, maybe?”
Irma shook her head firmly. “The ranks would never accept a woman as leader.”
“Oh, I dunno. I can think of precedents. Joan of Arc, Boudicca, Elizabeth the First, Marine Le Pen … some more recent. Or some bright kid from the ranks. You never know.”
“Tough at the top, eh?”
“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” said Dunt.
The exchange of gloomy clichés cheered them up.
“Yeah, goes with the job,” said Irma. “I’ll keep an eye on my app and and an ear to informers, and you and me keep the starship option to ourselves for now, and we’ll be fine.”
The ferry wheeled to the dock, engine reversing. No gulls crying. As always, Dunt no
ticed the absence. Irma reached up and ran a hand over his close-cropped hair. “I know where I want this head lying …”
Dunt held the tumbling body in his mind, turned it around on all axes, and thrust deep within everywhere he could. The sexual imagery made him smile, brought back memories of the past evening and night, and even turned him on a little.
The object of his rapt attention wasn’t Irma, still asleep beside him in early-morning virtual exosunshine. It was the other centre around which his mind now orbited, the focus of his obsession.
SH-119. His domain. The flying mountain where he was king of the hill.
Until now, he had never understood emotionally what he’d always known theoretically: that there were two kinds of possession. There was the kind that was worked for, and the kind that was won.
The first had its own satisfactions, which he’d always held dear. The farm, the workshop, the store. It had its rights, the right of property. It was the foundation of any good society, no doubt about that.
The second had its rights, too: the right of conquest. He’d only ever understood this in part because he’d only ever been a participant. He’d been a proud patriotic American, however much he’d despised what the nation had become. The flag, the front line, the call of duty; all these had moved him. But he’d had only a one in three hundred millions share in the sovereignty of the Republic. All very remote, very mediated, very abstract.
Now he was the sovereign. The conqueror. Patriotism and loyalty meant something very different when you were the head of state. Dunt found himself shaken by the intensity of his attachment to the tiny land his forces had taken. Here was something stronger than private property. Not the foundation of society, but its roof and fence, its sword and shield.
So, to work. Lying there, hands clasped behind his head, staring at the warped processed-chitin planks of the dosshouse ceiling, Dunt mentally surveyed SH-119. The Rax had without a doubt mastery over the surface. Cracks and crevices apart, not a square metre of it was unobserved by a guard post or by remotes. Internally, it was a different story. Their volume of control was still but a small fraction of the whole. Beyond that were tunnels, some of which opened to the surface, and voids. The Rax had no means of surveying below the surface and outside the volume they controlled, but Irma Schulz had extracted outlines from the internal models of captured freebots.
In the sim Dunt couldn’t fully visualise the resulting 3-D map, but he had in the frame and he now remembered it well enough. Only a handful of shafts went deep into the interior. Most of the digging that the freebots had accomplished—and it was an impressive achievement for at most an Earth year’s work—had resulted in relatively shallow tunnels, and shafts going a few hundred metres deep. The tunnels radiated outward from eleven holes in the surface, and didn’t go far enough to join up. The one through which the Rax had made their own entrance was undoubtedly the most significant working. It led to the large reception chamber, the fusion factory and the metal-working plant, and was linked to numerous mining passages.
The far side remained mysterious. At the antipodes of the volume controlled by the Rax was an equally wide hole. A quick glance down it by the survey teams had shown no activity within. So far, Dunt had had more pressing matters on hand than to explore it further. Nothing in the bots’ mental maps indicated that it was of any significance. And yet, now that he came to think of it, something else was conspicuously missing from these internal models, at least as far as Irma had been able to extract them.
There was no trace of any steps to turn the rock into a starship.
The freebot Fuckface had insisted that all the freebots agreed on that plan. The manufacture of fusion pods and drives indicated that it was serious—there were far more than would be needed for trade in the near term. It seemed unlikely that in all this time they had simply been stockpiled. If the time ever came for the freebots to move the rock, or even part of the rock, they’d almost certainly have to do it at short notice. Which meant that the freebots still loose in the rock weren’t just a low-level nuisance. It meant they were a strategic threat. They could potentially blow the whole place to kingdom come.
And Fuckface had let slip that preparations were under way.
If so, where were they being made?
The more he turned it over in his mind, the more likely it seemed to Dunt that the antipodal hole was the place to look. He knew just the right people to lead the team: Whitten and Stroilova. It would keep them both out of mischief, it would make them see the starship possibility as an imminent threat rather than a hopeful prospect, it would be an irresistibly attractive and intriguing assignment, and it would clear up whatever the hell the freebots were up to in the rest of the rock.
And he knew just whom he could rely on to keep an eye on Whitten and Stroilova, that possible power couple and his most likely rivals. He’d place on their team two men whose loyalty to him was by now secured by passionate gratitude: Foyle and Evans.
The exosun was now well up. No birds sang, no bees buzzed. But one cock was ready to crow.
Dunt flexed his shoulders, rolled over and began the pleasantly protracted process of waking Irma up. She was going to love this.
CHAPTER SIX
Casus Belli (“You Make a Good Case”)
The freebots seemed to find the Rax broadcast even more perplexing than the clandestine transmissions from Ajax. They exchanged high-bandwidth messages at a dizzying rate, and rolled or scuttled about inside the shelter at troubling speed. Carlos had to resist the impulse to jump out of their way. At his scale, even Seba was the size of a low-slung small car. Other robots were larger, faster and heavier. But all of them, whatever their state of agitation, had excellent motor control.
Only Seba remained calm. It rolled over to where the four defectors stood.
said Seba.
Carlos shared her surprise, as did Blum and Newton. He hadn’t thought Dunt’s remark anything but a diversion, to stir further trouble and mutual suspicion among the New Confederacy’s likely foes.
If the Forerunners—the freebots from the first wave of revolt, an Earth year earlier around the gas giant G-0—had been secretly building fusion devices all over the system the entire balance of forces was different from what everyone had hitherto supposed.
Everyone—including the Fifteen and, if Baser was typical, many other freebots of more recent inception.
And not just the balance of forces—one which immediately brought into play the predictable old postures of nuclear deterrence and mutual assured destruction.
It also raised a more drastic possibility: starships!
With such ample fusion drives and reaction mass, the freebots could build fleets of starships out of asteroid rubble alone. They didn’t need to fight the Direction, the Reaction and the Acceleration for their place in the sun. They could find their place under other suns altogether.