by Ken MacLeod
In less than two hundred seconds he reached the far side of the site, where the landing area sprawled and the launch catapult stood.
Astro America’s equivalent of the mass driver was the launch catapult. It had a rotary base and an angular ramp of variable pitch. It was much smaller than the mass driver, and the furthest it could chuck things was most of the way into orbit around SH-17.
Carlos found two crane-like robots manhandling (so to speak) a lander onto the catapult ramp. Queued up behind the ramp were three more landers. The lander was a black triangle twenty metres long, and eight metres across at the base. With its two sides making gull-wing curves from its central axis, and its long streamlined nacelle blister comprised of ablation shield, cargo pod, drogue pod and rocket engine underneath, it reminded Carlos of a microlight. It didn’t look like the sort of thing you wanted to interrupt robots moving.
Carlos waited until they’d finished. They retracted their long mechanical arms, and rolled back on their caterpillar tracks. The angle of the launch ramp began to rack up. Wheels moved, bands stretched and tightened, toothed tracks rolled and clicked. The two robots swept the apparatus with their scans, and moved further back, each to ten metres from the end of the ramp.
The catapult released. The lander was over the horizon and vanishing in the black sky before Carlos could track it. A red dot blazed for an instant, and that was that. The ramp and its base rang with the shock of the launch.
The two robots converged on either side of the next lander. Before they could pick it up, Carlos hailed them. The ping was accepted, indicating that these robots could answer queries.
No reply. Perhaps his query had been too broad. Carlos tried again.
They lifted the lander from opposite sides and rolled towards the ramp. Carlos considered trying to block the robots’ path, and decided against it. He stepped well out of the way, and watched the next launch from a safe distance while his corporation addressed his query to Astro America.
No reply.
Normally, Carlos Inc. and Astro America got on well—they had to, to cooperate on the project. Now, he found himself stonewalled.
He wasn’t ready to invoke Madame Golding just yet. There were plenty of possible innocent explanations of the landers’ being launched, for the transfer tugs’ arrival in SH-17 orbit, and indeed for the stonewalling. Astro America might have done a confidential deal with another exploration company to land equipment on SH-0.
Carlos dropped into corporation mode and scanned the market. No indications of any such deal—and because it would be a big deal, there should be at least a tremor of speculation. No exploration shares shifting, no unexplained spikes, nothing.
Seriously worried now, he turned away from the preparations for the third launch and scanned the busy site behind him. The pathways between the structures were not so much streets as aisles, like a factory floor, intersecting at angles that had nothing to do with human convenience. So it was quite by chance that he glimpsed a halo of familiar holograms flit across a junction.
The holograms moved back into his sight line.
It turned and headed towards Carlos.
It wasn’t Seba, of course. Seba was at that moment deep inside SH-119, burrowing into rock and hopefully undermining the Rax. The machine that responded to Carlos’s call and now trundled towards him was Seba Inc. It was Seba’s chassis, now operated by a processor with the same capacities as the freebot’s, but without the double-edged blade of self-awareness. Seba’s corporate AI, and its built-in Direction rep, had been transferred to this new processor, and carried on regardless of the real Seba’s physical location. It was Seba’s corporation, rather than the robot’s own processor, that remembered and recognised Carlos. As with all the freebots that had volunteered for the dangerous mission to the Rax rock, the pretence that Seba was still here on SH-17 was part of the cover.
The precaution might be unnecessary. If the Rax didn’t have any tiny satellites or otherwise undetectable devices spying on SH-17, the whole charade was a waste of time. But that was the thing about precautions: you never knew.
Carlos waited until Seba Inc. came to a halt, five metres away. He spoke to it on a tight laser channel, routed through his own corporate AI and heavily encrypted. No one—not even the embedded Direction rep, which, just as he’d suspected when Seba had told him about its own, nagged away at him like a bad conscience but didn’t otherwise do very much—would overhear this.
The effect of the routing and encryption, subjectively, was as if the inner speech of radio telepathy had acquired echoes.
<<
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For once, Carlos blessed the literalness of robots and of corporate AIs.
<<
<<>> said Seba Inc. <<>>
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<<
Seba Inc. departed, with a flickering flare of its hologram halo that Carlos fancifully interpreted as a cheery wave goodbye.
It was a joke, but he meant it. Seba Inc. had told Carlos all he needed to know. If it wasn’t a corporation financing the landers’ mission, it had to be the Direction.
Carlos pulled down data from the sky. The landers were now in low orbit and on the other side of SH-17. The transfer tugs made brief attitude and course adjustments, and dropped to intersect the landers’ course. With a trickle of micro-payments Carlos bought into a freebot-owned array of tiny spy-sats, and zoomed.
The transfer tugs were laden with fighters. The first squads of the clone army, no doubt. Detail was hard to make out, but Carlos reckoned ten standard frames on each, and a matching number of what looked like shorter and more rugged versions of fighting machines: combat frames for a high-gravity planet. Rifles and rocket-launchers were racked along the sides of the tugs.
The landers rendezvoused with the transfer tugs and grappled to them; the tugs linked at right angles to form four sides of a box. A modular spacecraft that could separate out on arrival.
Twenty-seven seconds later, the four main drives flared. The burn took them out of SH-17 orbit and on course for SH-0. Still a transfer orbit, Carlos noted: they weren’t using fusion drives, not yet. That would be too blatant, but this was blatant enough. It hadn’t been announced, but it hadn’t exactly been concealed either.
What would this do to the market? What did the Direction think it was doing? Asserting control over the Locke landing area? Stopping the emergence of an actual settlement? Was this supposed to prevent an outright free-for-all scramble for SH-0’s resources? A warning shot to the DisCorps?
Later for that—
Carlos let his corporate AI make the screaming calls, to the brokers and to Madame Golding.
Right now—
He called the freebot comms hub, and passed on the information.
If they know we know they know we know … it doesn’t matter, and might be for the best.
The comms hub shared with Carlos the comsat’s downward gaze. The area was at that moment in night, but brighter than day. Lightning flickered and flashed.
said the comms hub.
This was an understatement.
Carlos ran calculations.
The landing was well timed, all right.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Instrumentum Vocale (“Microphone”)
Sometimes, the processions of tiny bots that came to take away Seba’s spoil arrived bearing a power pack. Seba knew what to do. It would stop work and wait patiently while the auxiliaries swapped out its nearly exhausted power pack for a fresh one, and carried the drained one away. There was enough charge in Seba’s capacitors to tide its awareness over these interludes. Embedded in the mining software shell was the knowledge that in certain places there were recharging points, but Seba’s present workings were in virgin volume far from such civilised amenities.
Anyway, it found the procedure quite pleasant, and afterwards it always felt refreshed.
It was at the third such swap-over that the message came. As Seba lay still, its neck open, the auxiliary handling the new power pack spoke.
Seba was startled. A person being addressed by a fork halfway to their mouth could not have been more surprised. Seba did not even have the rationalising option that it was dreaming or hallucinating.
The auxiliary said nothing more. It snapped the power pack into place, slid back the covering and joined another bot in lugging away the empty. The rest of the trail of bots waited for Seba to resume digging.
Seba overcame its surprise. Clearly the bot had not spoken of its own accord. If it had had a more sophisticated processor inside—a position in which Seba had once found itself, much to its fury and dismay—it would have been more forthcoming.
Therefore the bot was simply delivering the message.
There were only two possible sources. One was the mechanoid masters, perhaps via a managerial bot such as Rocko had implanted itself in. The other, and a lot more likely, was the freebots native to the rock making contact at last.
The latter possibility would be positively reinforcing indeed!
Either way, Seba’s best course of action was to comply.
It started digging, straight ahead—or, rather, straight behind, as its digging end was its rear. Overriding the directions in its work docket required an internal struggle with the mining software. After a few milliseconds, Seba’s mind overcame the shell that concealed it. The auxiliaries, none the wiser, continued to carry the sorted streams of broken rock away. After digging for a further two metres, Seba’s sonar detected the void ahead. After another internal struggle, it broke through.
Seba flexed its long body and neck, a right angle passing down it from rear to front, as it slithered into the open tunnel. It moved a metre from the new junction it had made, and waited.
The tunnel extended ten metres in both directions before turning sharply away, in divergent directions. Its diameter was just sufficient for movement, with bristles fully extended. From Seba’s internal model, it was an access shaft for a worked-out seam of methane ice. The smell lingered. For many tens of seconds, all was silent. Behind Seba, the trail of bots stood poised, the leading members waving uncertain limbs into the tunnel.
Then Seba felt vibrations. Ten metres away, a head like Seba’s own sensory cluster poked into infrared view. It withdrew, then returned, snaking its neck twenty centimetres along the tunnel towards Seba.
<…> it said.
The rest of the neck, followed by an entire mining-bot body, angled into the tunnel and approached to within half a metre, sculling itself along in the microgravity by lightly brushing the sides of the tunnel.
Seba stepped down its transmitter, and turned up its receiver.
said Seba.
It says something about the Direction’s world that the freebots had a referent for “scab.”
said Seba.
The other pondered this for several milliseconds.
The equivalent of a sigh passed through Seba’s mind.
Seba explained.
said Seba.
Simo seemed to find this news less positively reinforcing than Seba had expected.
Seba was suspicious of this question, but answered.
Simo explained. Attacks on the invaders had brought down severe reprisals. The damage the attacks had inflicted had turned out to be temporary and recoverable. The freebots of SH-119 had agreed to completely cease prospecting and production, and to sabotage what continued to be done by the unenlightened ones and their auxiliaries. The arrival of nearly a hundred sophisticated robots had thrown a spanner into that me
thod of resistance. The new robots, the scab robots, then had to be contacted one by one, at great peril. Only a handful had been warned so far, with no response. The rebel freebots of SH-119 had not as yet been able to follow through on their threats, but they would. If Seba hadn’t responded, its next replacement power pack would have been, Simo said,
Seba was alarmed.
said Seba, impressed despite itself. If Simo was capable of evasion, it had a good theory of mind, whatever its other limitations.
said Seba. It had no idea who the old one was, but Simo seemed to regard it as an authority, and this situation definitely needed one fast.
Deception, too? This freebot was definitely smarter than it had seemed in conversation.
Seba diverted its attention to its rear sensors and bristles. It moved back a little past the raw junction, scraped at the rock and moved forward. En passant, Seba nudged the leading bot into the puff of dust it had just created. The smaller machine clambered around the side of the hole, its limbs gripping the walls, and headed off along the hint of a false trail. The rest trooped after it, an endless parade of auxiliary bots marching in microgravity, near-vacuum and near-total darkness towards a deeper oblivion.
As Seba followed the rapidly departing Simo along the long, dark tunnel, it hoped that it was not heading for the same fate as the bots.