by Ken MacLeod
Newton played with the map and the telescope’s current and archived views. Ah yes, there was the hole where the aerial had popped up, there was the camera that had spotted it, and there was the guard post from which the scooter had sped to respond.
Jax interrupted his admiration of the diagram.
Baser chipped in, as if springing to defend the honour of its kind.
The scratch-pad shared workspace dimmed as they all focused on the diagram. Newton became slightly more aware of his surroundings, as if in peripheral vision, and he was grateful that the frame’s software screened out claustrophobia.
Physically, the command team were distributed throughout the cargo, linked only by closed-circuit fibre-optic threads. His own frame was balled up like a hedgehog inside the control nodule at the mid-point of the metre-long cross-bar of the H-shaped machine in which he was embodied. A standard microgravity bulk handler, its parallel bars were made up of four fully articulated ball-jointed arms with powerful grippers. On either side of the control nodule two multi-directional rocket engines were mounted on the cross-bar. The control nodule itself was detachable, with a cluster of tiny jets and a handful of miniature grippers that would at a pinch let the nodule function independently of the main apparatus. The H-mechs were so readily adaptable to military use that Newton suspected it was a design feature.
On the way from the modular cloud to SH-119, all the fighters had been put through subjective months of combat training in a sim modelled (with increasing accuracy as they drew closer, and as covert surveys by other trading craft were incorporated) on the moonlet and the space around it. You could download to and upload from a training sim, but if your frame was destroyed in action it was your copy in your home agency’s sim that was revived. Newton didn’t know if this was a software requirement or just a rule of the Direction. In any case it made sense: like the minimal sims on transfer tugs, onboard training sims were almost as likely to be destroyed in action as the frames themselves. The agency modules—as the Locke one’s vicissitudes had shown—could be thrown at a planet and bounce.
R&R had been in a sim within the sim: a virtual space habitat with centrifugal pseudo-gravity and an environment like a campus in parkland that curved overhead. Returning to your starting point made for a good three-hour run; a bit longer if you took the opportunity to swim in one of the many small lakes. Its big psychological advantage was that it made the transitions to and from the equally virtual frames and fighting machines trivially easy to rationalise. A slight drawback was that the one virtual reality tended to bleed into the other. The quadrumanous reflexes and flexibility that came with embodiment in the H-mechs were oddly hard to shake off, but (as he and Bobbie Rillieux had discovered) they tended to make one more inventive in bed.
In reality, however, the machine he was in was like most of the others buried deep in the cargo of rocks. The bulk carrier was barely a spacecraft in its own right. It was an open frame with jets at front, rear and sides, a command complex with comms gear and a rudimentary AI up front, and a gigantic mesh of cables holding together its cargo of rocks and machines. Strategically planted between some of the rocks were the small explosive charges that, under certain variants of the plan, would separate the rocks and free all the fighting machines in one go. Weightless apart from the gentle acceleration and (at this moment) deceleration, the rocks remained reminiscent of fallen rubble and oppressive and daunting to think about.
So he didn’t. He concentrated on the 3-D map. He zoomed in closer on the most urgent aspect: the Rax deployment. To his pleased surprise, it was remarkably precise. The exact locations of individuals couldn’t be specified, but the names of the leading Rax cadre at both the major locations were. He was particularly interested to see that Whitten and Stroilova led a sixteen-strong team deep inside the area opposite the main access.
Whitten, he’d long suspected, was a weak link in Dunt’s clique, in that he was far too intelligent to be impressed by the mystical transhumanist gibberish that Dunt had assimilated from the recorded ravings of some forgotten twentieth-century American Nazi. And Stroilova, from what Blum had told him back on SH-17, had the opposite fault: she was too fervent in her hate to be entirely stable. Even the frame’s optimised reason remained a slave of the passions, more dangerous than any mere brains had ever come up with.
Scooters—the Rax had nearly sixty and the Arcane-led force had ten, which Newton regarded as pretty good odds. There was a reason why they hadn’t brought more, besides the difficulty of concealing the vehicles or disguising them as innocuous machinery. It was that, as the Rax breakout and the battle around the Locke module had shown, scooter-on-scooter dogfights were an all but complete waste of time, their outcome a wash. Scooters were good for attacking virtually defenceless targets like freebots, for area and volume denial, and for not much else. The Rax had deployed theirs quite thoughtfully: four in orbit, twelve around the rock as guard posts, six more around each major entrance, and the rest inside—in reserve, for escape, or as static artillery commanding the entrances. The kicker was that all those around the entrances carried fusion pods, almost certainly hacked to make them into kiloton fusion bombs. If this was the case, every one of those dozen scooters was a kamikaze cruise missile with a thermonuclear tip.
Another good reason for a stealth approach.
Newton hoped and intended to survive the coming battle, but he didn’t expect to. Other versions of him would continue, but he’d changed so much since his last copy had been taken in the Locke module that this was no comfort. Back then, he had still clung to a cleaned-up version of the Rax ideology, purified of its racist crudities and cruelties and having a place even for him. Experience had taught him otherwise. He no longer believed there was anything worth saving in his past beliefs. He had found something better to live for, in the prospect of living free as a machine. For him, almost as much as for the freebots, to be destroyed now would be to cease to exist. The thought was in a way bracing: he had faced death in his real life, a permanent death for all he’d known at the time, and it was good to know he hadn’t lost his courage in this unexpected afterlife.
It was good to know, too, that he was in this respect on the same footing as the freebots. Maybe he always had been. When you came down to it, people were as brave as robots, given the chance. Nobody really feared death, only the imagined or (for copied minds at least) real prospect of aversive stimuli afterwards. By now, he was so removed from the self stored in the Locke module down there on SH-0 that he could think of its future with equanimity. Whatever happened to that earlier instance of Harry Newton, the current version’s response would have been idle pity: sucks to be you, mate, but …
The feeling, he was sure, would be mutual.
The workspace snapped back into focus. Jax put the plan for the assault up on a central display. It had always been to get as close as possible before s
torming in. A legitimate docking would in a way be ideal, but it depended on the freebot uprising’s not having happened yet. That would bring its own problems, in that the Rax would not be distracted. On the other hand, if the freebot uprising was under way, the Rax would be on high alert if not full combat mode. All variants of the plan involved an attack on both major concentrations of the enemy. As soon as the expedition had thrown off subterfuge, a section would break away and head for the smaller entrance opposite, hitting guard posts as they went. Contingency plans for detection or for the freebot uprising’s being delayed or brought forward were sheafed behind the main plan.
The command group all brought their specialities to bear, to refine the plan in the light of the information the freebots had just sent.
This was a lie. He was seething, but he could see Jax’s point. Capture aside, the most that could happen to him was the death of his present self. He’d reboot in the Locke module, with no memory of Bobbie at all. The thought of that would be unbearable to her. If Bobbie Rillieux’s current instance was destroyed, however, the self that would emerge back in the Arcane sim would know nothing of their recent adventures and everything about why they had set off on them. She’d face the wrath of Jax into the bargain. The thought of that was unbearable to him.
So Jax had a hold over them both. Newton could understand why. With the others—Salter, Paulos, Voronov—she had personal loyalty cemented back in the Arcane sim, in the shared eating of p-zombie flesh. Jax had brought that perplexing ethical thought experiment to life as an initiation ceremony. He, Bobbie, Andre Blum and Carlos had refused to partake for reasons hard to articulate even to themselves. This early warning that Jax was intent on binding people to herself had been to Newton and his three friends a klaxon call to run for the exits.
Baser and Newton shared an equally private meeting of minds, like a secret smile. Pet spider, indeed! What Jax didn’t know was that Baser was going to keep an eye—or a lens—on her, and for much the same reason as she had for distrusting Newton. Neither the freebot nor he trusted her not to strike her own deal with the Rax, at the freebots’ expense.
The tactical updates were completed. Newton, with Amelie Salter as his second in command (and no doubt Jax’s eye on him), was assigned a platoon of thirty. He tabbed them all into a shared sim and patched the updated plan to their VR training, with a warning that they’d be going into action for real very soon. Soon was relative. ETA was now a kilosecond away. The sim was running at a thousand times clock speed, and a hundred times faster than frame minds. The platoon would have time to wargame their part in the assault so thoroughly that they’d probably hit the battlefield better prepared than he was.
The thought must have occurred to Salter, too.
About a week, subjective. Plenty of time.
The last reverberations from the missile strike, barely detectable even to mining-bot bristles, died away.
said Seba.