by Ken MacLeod
Carlos led the way in springing up to the shoulders of a fighting machine, and swinging his legs into the socket at the back of the neck. He slid through the slot and curled up in the yielding hollow of the monstrous head. For a moment he felt cramped, confined, foetal. Then the connections came on line. Now, his body was the large frame, not the small. He turned the head like a tank turret, this way and that; stretched and flexed the arms and hands, and took a long, slow step that felt as if it should make the ground shake, though it didn’t. Around him the others were doing likewise, re-familiarising themselves with this powerful incarnation.
He stooped, scooping up a rifle he’d handled ineffectually moments earlier, and clapped the weapon to a spare slot on his right forearm. Experimentally, he swung the arm around, and shot at a far-off rock. The rock exploded.
They knuckled down to five kiloseconds of serious military engineering. In the combat frames the work was easy, if tedious. The fighters deployed the laser projectors and machine guns at four points around the shelter. The existing fortifications were passive defences, designed for the freebots’ improvised weaponry. They were adequate protection for teams chucking mining explosives and directing peripheral swarms—for shielding missile batteries and machine-gun operators, not so much. The fighters routed requests for machine support through Baser. Crab-like auxiliaries swarmed, and a dozen or so mindless mining robots trundled and dug, all mobilised to build berms, machine-gun nests, and blast walls. Basalt blocks and regolith heaps piled up; structures took shape. Likewise via Baser, the comms hub kept the fighters updated on wider developments—as corporations in their own right, the freebots had acquired a taste for and access to the system’s financial feeds.
Two more DisCorps had broken away to trade with the Rax. Now that the embargo on landings had been broken de facto, there was a scramble for potential rights to explore and develop SH-0. No such rights yet existed—the Direction continued to dig its heels in—but the shadow market soared regardless. Astro America, the exploration company that had once owned Seba and half the other freebots, saw a notable rise in notional shareholder value.
The fighters didn’t quite have time to finish the new fortifications before an urgent ping rang in their comms. Baser had news for them.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Data et Accepta (“The Data Is Accepted”)
In the frame there was no weariness. Carrying the tight-beam laser comms kit, doubly weighed down by the two gravities, Taransay plodded along the floor of the forest. Her path was mostly downhill. After seven kilometres and twice as many kiloseconds, she was still on the great gentle slope of the volcano whose summit she could now and then glimpse at a backward glance. The advantage of gradient was more than countered by the sodden ground, the intermittent heavy rain and tangled vegetation. The black glass knife flashed, again and again. Taransay slashed, again and again.
Plants here were different from those around the module. Geometric shapes had given way to more recognisably botanical forms, lobate and fractal. Tree trunks and branches were gnarled and jointed. Colours were more variegated, with shades of pink and white, and softer blues than she’d seen uphill. Concave, overlapping arrangements of leaves looked almost like flowers. Small circular animals buzzed in the heavy air, tiny mats with a blurring rotary seeming motion of lengthened cilia below them, like experimental flying discs. Other small animals moved in the underbrush, still with the basic mat body plan but with two sides curled over to give a triangular shape. The large mats were much rarer, and most of what she trod on was mulch. Her guess, backed up by analytical software in a corner of her vision, was that the plants higher up were adapted to volcanic ash, perhaps drawing some of their energy directly from geothermal processes and subsoil chemical reactions. Here, further downhill, plants relied more on photosynthesis, and drew on the nutrients washed down by the abundant run-off.
As trailing creepers smacked her across the face, and as she pitched headlong forward now and then in mud, Taransay had ample opportunity to observe the animal life close up. Still mats, but much smaller, their sizes ranging from coin to full-stop dot and on down to the limits of her frame’s visual resolution.
The rain stopped towards sunset. The remaining clouds, and the volcanic haze in the atmosphere, reddened the sky. Taransay scanned ahead anxiously with her radar, seeking a clear patch. Sound drew her forward: the rush and rumble of a river in spate. After a few more hundred metres, she emerged into the wide open space of a river bend. A heaped beach of rounded pebbles lay between her and the near bank. She crunched her way out, and hunkered down beside a boulder.
The river was a good twenty metres across, fast and heavy. On the far bank the short, bushy cover afforded a sweep to the horizon over an undulating plain. Two other low volcanic cones were visible, one lower in profile and further away than the other. Both were to all appearances extinct, and in line with the active one behind her. A moving hotspot in the mantle below, she guessed, had formed all three. Erosion, fierce though it was, had had little time to wear them down. Geology worked fast and hard on this world, her mind’s supplemental machinery told her, as if she didn’t know already.
She waited, alert at a subconscious level with every enhanced sense, and let her mind drift through her memories. All equally accessible, with blanks between, like a diary with missing pages. She focused on the earlier ones, before all the politics and violence had kicked in. Her present alien environment was fascinating, but making sense of it even at the level of processing sensations into perception took a cognitive toll. There was a refuge in the scenes of home. Taransay found an odd, twisted comfort in childhood and teenage recollections and in contemplating the gulfs of space and time these memory traces of a Glasgow girl had traversed.
A splash in the river, heavy and loud and with a follow-up thrash, jolted her to higher alert. But nothing ensued.
Night fell with almost tropical swiftness; a kilosecond, no more, from the last gleam of exosunlight to pitch darkness in every shadow. The sky itself was bright, the Galaxy a shining misty arch overhead, the Magellanic Clouds and the lesser, artificial cloud of the modular diaspora competing. In that cloud Taransay saw activity—the brief pinpoint spark of rocket engines, the strobing microwave shimmer of comms. To her north, aurorae rippled in neon sheets. Tiny survey satellites flashed into the sunlight above, then winked out.
As she waited for SH-17 to rise—she could see exactly where it was at that moment, a few degrees below the horizon, on an astronomy-app overlay of her gaze—she noticed other moving lights in the sky. Most drifted above the trees; a few over the plain. Evidently the same phenomena as she’d glimpsed on her first night, the lights were evanescent—she timed them at 1.6 seconds—like fireflies, but much larger. The lights were pulses, on average 27.3 seconds apart, and moved with the wind. Soon she was able to predict where a light would appear next, and to estimate the size of the objects. Six to seven metres across, with—as she found when one came close, and she zoomed—long, trailing tentacles like ribbons, they were some kind of noctilucent aerial jellyfish. Gasbags—her spectroscopic sense sniffed out the hydrogen line behind the glow as a strong but neutral odour.
SH-17 climbed above the horizon. Taransay unburdened herself of the laser comms kit, lashed to her back with ropes woven from shredded leaves. This was a tricky business: she couldn’t just cut the ropes and be done with it, she’d have to lug the thing back. It was far too precious a product to discard, or leave to the mercy of the shifting shoals of a rolling river; much of it had been laboriously chugged out by a bare
ly adequate patch of nanotech over much of the previous day, the rest detached from the module’s standard comms array and cobbled in.
She laid the delicate device on the wet stones and lined it up as best she could, then let it be. The needle spike aerial made the fine adjustments itself, orienting to the distant exomoon like a target-seeking missile.
Taransay downloaded the situation report and appeal for help that Nicole, Locke, Durward and Beauregard had compiled to send to the freebots on SH-17. The message was compressed and compact, its transmission complete in less then five seconds and indicated to her only by a faint flashing light on the base-plate. That it had been received she could have no doubt: a handshake ping glowed blue for a hundredth of second, and rang in her head like a single drop of water in a vast cave.
A reply was another matter. It would come not to her, and not to here.
She folded up the comms kit and worked it back into its primitive harness. Walking back at night would be no more difficult than by day, and possibly more interesting. In any case, the plan was to send the message and quit the scene, just in case. The whole subterfuge of walking a few kilometres from the landing site now seemed pathetic, but it was all they could do, and perhaps better than nothing.
As she shrugged the ropes into place on her shoulders, she noticed again the fuzz around the join between the stump and the spare arm. Something would have to be done about that.
For the first time, it was possible to hope that something could. Nicole, Shaw and Remington were beginning to get a handle on the infestation, thanks in part to the processing power freed up by Shaw’s stroke with the p-zombies. Zaretsky and his team even claimed they’d been able to wrest some control from it, and that the alien fuzz was beginning to be subverted in its turn. They talked grandly of using the combination of nanotech and fuzz to nanofacture new items, and to repair the damaged frames.
She hoped that by the time she got back they’d have got so far as to build a ladder.
The others all swung their gigantic armoured heads around to look at him. Baser sat back, rear legs crooking, and looked up. It shifted its gaze from one frightful face-plate to another like a troubled puppy.
Baser had relayed to the fighters the message received from the Locke module—and the conclusion the freebots had drawn from it—almost before Baser had had time to finish announcing its receipt.
The message was in a sense reassuring. The freebots’ response was disturbing.
They’d all been relieved, and further reassured to hear that the message had been passed on to Madame Golding, and that she would in turn forward the good news in it to Arcane.
But then things had started to go awry.
The Locke module was asking for help, urgently: they needed more nanotech and manufacturing gear if they were to survive for any length of time, let alone carry out Beauregard’s bold project of establishing a settlement. The freebots were the only faction that they thought would be on their side, and that had the capacity to deliver the goods.
This was true, as far as it went. What the freebots lacked was the will. They had their hands (well, manipulators …) full working out how they could aid their fellows in SH-119 under the Reaction’s lash. They were keen to maintain their re-established good relations with Madame Golding, and through her to win a hearing from the Direction. Madame Golding had made it very clear that aiding the Locke module’s illegal landing and settlement would not be looked on kindly.
Some freebots, such as the former Gneiss Conglomerates surveyor known as Lagon, said, in effect:
Baser had just explained that Beauregard had included a rider to the appeal. This codicil pointed out that if the freebots were for any reason unwilling to help, he would consider himself free to approach other powers. Without saying so explicitly, it was plain that he meant the Rax.
Madame Golding had strongly suggested that the freebots, in their reply, should drop the Locke module a likewise heavy hint about the Direction’s emergency plans to build an army of copied reliable fighters and impose a brute-force solution.
It was at this point that Carlos lost patience.
Baser straightened its legs and backed off a little. Seconds passed. Then—
Carlos certainly hoped so.
The blast doors at the end of the shelter swung open and the robots trundled or scuttled out. They deployed themselves in a loose arc, facing Carlos and the other fighters.
Carlos raised an iron hand.
The avatar manifested in the middle of the circle, her presence even more uncanny in the open than in the shelter. Carlos got the distinct impression that she was facing all of them, fighters and robots, at once. If she was a virtual image rather than a projection, of course, that figured. But still. The sight and the thought were not easy on the eye.
A second or two later, an avatar of Jax popped into view. It was evidently a hasty choice—she was in her old gamer gear. In her LED skirt she looked, if anything, even less congruent with the real environment than Madame Golding in her business suit.
He turned to Seba.
The freebots conferred.
Carlos found himself in direct contact with the comms hub. The experience was like looking down an infinite tunnel. Everything in the universe rushed towards him at once. He almost stumbled, then steadied himself. A moment later, everything stabilised: the combat frame had software to handle such contact, and as soon as it came on line he saw the human-optimised interface.
An endless sky, with every star an option.
The sky whirled and zoomed. Carlos narrowed his focus down and down, until he came to the ownership of the frame he occupied and the combat frame it currently animated. Both belonged to the consortium of freebot corporations.
Now he had to move fast.
access to the shared workspace,> he said.
This was granted. It was a much lower level of integration than the freebot consensus, but still overwhelming. It took almost a second for a human-adapted interface to cohere. An array of text and diagrams that changed at bewildering speed even when stepped down to his reach and grasp.
One region corresponded to the mind of Seba. Carlos addressed it.
Seba’s focus within the workspace saw the solution Carlos had thought of before Carlos could even formulate it. A tracery of lines exploded across the workspace, as the same connections were made by other freebot minds. With them went debate, far too fast for Carlos to follow. The longest delay was the two-second light-speed lag as the nearest Forerunner concentration was consulted.
A part of Carlos’s mind in the frame became suddenly salient. He’d never before had occasion to notice it.
It was his bank account. Into it had come his soldier’s pay. Out of it had gone the insultingly nugatory charges for the processing power that had sustained him in the sims. Charged against it, by now, was a large and growing stack of fines—for desertion, defection, misappropriation of company property, interest charges for non-payment, further fines …
All had now been paid.
His whole account was swamped by a massive infusion of funds from the freebot consortium. A loan, of course—the first interest charges, incremented by the millisecond, already trickled out. Compared with the amounts he’d seen in Madame Golding’s display, the sum was tiny.
But for him, it was a fortune, and enough.
Enough to buy an off-the-peg corporate AI, and to kick-start its activities.
Carlos Incorporated.