by Ken MacLeod
The small glassy humanoid figures suddenly sprang into concerted action. In long, loping leaps they bounded for the ramp. They had no weapons in the shelter—there had never been a thought that weapons might be needed—but several heavy combat frames were racked outside.
There was no time for a more detailed request. A millisecond after sending it, Seba was almost minded to countermand. Pintre was entirely capable of interpreting Seba’s call as one to start blasting with its laser turret.
The chunky mining robot spun around, tracks grating on basalt, and rushed for the ramp. As it went it swung its turret back and forth in swift arcs, swatting fighters with its projector barrel in mid-leap. Others it shouldered aside with sudden swerves, knocking them with its flanks. It reached the top of the ramp alone, and stopped. It rotated its laser turret and swayed the projector this way and that, in slower sweeps that menaced its still tumbling and scattered adversaries.
It added, with greater pertinence, a question:
The rest of the freebots, and the comms processor in the centre of the room, turned their attention as one on Seba and Rocko. These two turned their attention on each other, and shared a common thought:
What indeed?
The carriage passed through a wide, open gateway between ornate, weathered stone pillars and into the castle’s great park. Carlos looked around for the sort of tame fauna he expected from his memories of the game, and duly found them. Here strutted a feathered dinosaur like a swan, but twice as big and with iridescent plumage; there grazed a shaggy elk with a three-metre span of antlers. Flying monkeys with wide webs between their arms and legs chattered and whooped as they glided from tree to tree. Far overhead soared the pterodactyls that skim-fished the rivers and preyed on the hummingbirds that swarmed amid the treetops and shrubbery and troubled the air with a faint buzz.
Up close, the castle looked less impressive than it had from a distance. The ivy-covered walls of one wing had ragged holes punched through, and most of its windows were boarded up. The windows of the other wing were shuttered. As the carriage swung around and halted on the gravel concourse in front of the main door, Carlos remarked on the dilapidated look of the place.
“Met resistance here, did you?”
Jax gave him one of her old cheery grins, breaking a five-minute stretch of introspective gloom.
“Told you, it’s the conceit. We never did actually storm it—it was like that when we found it.”
Carlos had to laugh. “Looks like the Arcane AI knows the tastes of Axle cadre pretty well.”
“That it does,” said Jax. “You’ll see why later.”
They alighted from the carriage—Jax took Carlos’s hand down, without irony or demur—and walked into the castle. The door, like the gate, was both ornate and open: two heavy double doors of carved wood, with elaborate locks and bolts.
Jax led Carlos through a cavernous hallway from which a stairwell ascended into the dim upper levels. The hall’s sides were hung with portraits of imaginary ancestors, the edges of its floors cluttered with dusty chairs and tables. A grandfather clock ticked, the long and short hand almost joined in a vertical at XIII. A door on the left led into a room with a high ceiling, a polished wooden floor and tall French windows facing mirrors on the inner wall. An empty fireplace and stone chimney stack occupied the wall opposite the door.
Three men and two women stood in front of the fireplace. In accoutrements of ragged finery, the five reminded Carlos of a more than usually pretentious folk-rock ensemble.
At the moment before they noticed Carlos and Jax, their attention was elsewhere. Off to the side, propping a tipped chair with its back to the window, lounged a man who if this lot were a band would almost certainly be its drummer, long and lean with wild black hair and beard and staring, low-lidded eyes. Something in his prominent eyes and bony features reminded Carlos of photos he’d seen of Wittgenstein, if instead of a philosopher Wittgenstein had been a hippy. The man wore a paisley-print silk dressing gown over jeans. His feet were bare, heels jammed against the parquet, soles dusty. He was doing something uncanny with his hands, in a continuous flow of elaborate cat’s-cradle gestures, as if using some alien and rapid dialect of Sign. His glance flicked to Carlos, then returned to intent inspection of the mirror high on the wall he faced.
The others were more forthcoming, looking away from the man in the chair, stepping forward to meet the arrivals and crowding around. Carlos shook hands, catching details, not wishing to inquire further. He was bored with hearing what past crimes anyone had committed to end up here, having lost all responsibility for the worst of his own. (Which loss, he now realised, was not the least of his grievances against Nicole Pascal.)
Amelie Salter, a Scottish-Canadian woman who’d done something heinous in synthetic biology; Luis Paulos, a tall black guy who’d been an officer in the Brazilian army, one of the few military forces to have fought officially on the Acceleration side, years after Carlos’s own death; Andre Blum, an Israeli nuclear physicist; Leonid Voronov, convicted of terrorism in the field of invertebrate palaeontology, and still with a faint air of bewilderment at his being there at all, like a living fossil thrashing on a wet deck; Roberta “Bobbie” Rillieux, the only one here he’d heard of before, an African-American woman of evident gymnastic wiriness and rumoured scholastic wit, who had specialised in software sabotage. Bobbie stretched out a lithe hand from the yellow-white cloud of crumbling lace and net in which she drifted like a ghost. She and Blum confessed, with profuse apology, to being Carlos’s interrogators in the hell cavern.
Carlos laughed that off, but marked it for later.
None of them mentioned his previous encounters with them, in the Locke versus Arcane firefights down on the surface of SH-17. He’d blasted someone here, and someone else here had blasted him and his mates, but no one remarked on it. Carlos put this down to tact, and counted it in their favour, as he did their gratifying absence of the kind of awe with which his own squad had greeted him.
“And the other guy?” he asked, with a sideways nod, when the introductions were over and the crew had returned their attention to the man who sprawled in the chair.
“Oh, that’s Durward the warlock,” said Jax. No play of Starborn Quest could go by without an encounter with a warlock. “He’s the Direction’s representative here. Don’t bother him now, he’s busy.”
And indeed he was. The mirror he stared at, now Carlos looked at it properly, wasn’t reflecting the room and the window. It was an ever-shifting mosaic, mostly black with bright lights, of scenes from outside. These shifts seemed responsive, on a pattern Carlos couldn’t quite grasp, to the shapes thrown by the swiftly moving hands. Evidently this was Durward’s equivalent of Nicole’s painting and drawing, his means of interacting with the module and the sim.
Carlos became aware of a degree of tension in the postures of the crew. He guessed the arrival of him and Jax had interrupted some crisis.
Without warning, Durward jumped to his feet, sending the chair clattering.
“Shit!” he shouted. He stalked forward, arm outstretched, finger pointing at the mirror. The view in it and in all the others became a kaleidoscope of black and white, strobing the floor. “The fucking blinkers! They’ve got our guys trapped!”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Remington
Durward paced about, gesticulating now and then at his array of magic mirrors. He talked as he went, of moonlets and meteoroids, and the complex ways in which the freebots had set them up for use as weapons. On one of his back-and-forth prowls he stopped right in front of Carlos and stuck out a hand.
“‘Carlos, known as the Terrorist,’” he said, with a quick baring of teeth. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Durward, known as the warlock.” His smile became sardonic.
Carlos shook his hand, and met his gaze, disconcerting and
intense. What Carlos was looking at, and was giving his hand a painful grip, was basically an AI’s avatar. The entity was summoning memories rather than looking at him. Tall, gangling, cerebrotonic, with rapid movements and harsh grasp, Durward’s personality and physique could be filed under “highly strung.” The contrast with Nicole’s air of calm confidence and sophistication was striking. Carlos’s squad had all fallen into the way of calling her “the lady” from the start, quite spontaneously and independently. He himself had fallen, if not into love then into lust, almost as quickly as the rest of the squad had fallen under her official sway.
But, then, Nicole had been designed for that encounter. She was his type, from the tilt of her head and jut of her breasts to the style of her clothes. In an earlier incarnation, long preceding her conscious awareness, she had known him long before she had met him in the sim. As the Innovator, infiltrated in the spike in the back of his head and its ramifying tendrils imbricated with his neurons, she had known him from the inside out.
Known him, and manipulated him without a second thought.
Carlos couldn’t help but wonder whether any of the people here, or perhaps among the other Arcane squads, had been destined to fall for the warlock. If so, he pitied whoever it was.
Durward dropped Carlos’s hand and turned away abruptly, to march off for about ten strides then back at a different angle. They’d all, without thinking, distributed themselves in a semicircle around the limits of his travels.
“So,” he was saying, “the blinkers already had a rock whizzing around SH-17 in a low fast slingshot. They’ve done a lot of that sort of thing, as Locke’s forces have already discovered to their cost often enough. It would have taken just one nudge to send it straight into the path of the Rax complex. Perfect line-up. Out of the blue, they get cold feet. Down tools. Nothing doing. Query, naturally. Reply: they were neutral. Neutral! As if they hadn’t been up to their necks in this fight from the start. The comrades realised something was up and made a move for the door. As you do. Blinkers intercepted them. Headed them off at the ramp. Now we have a stand-off. I’m trying to get some sense out of them. Not a chance. They’re currently in some pow-wow of their own. All queries responded to with a holding signal. It’s worse than a phone queue.”
He stopped, his back to the flickering mirrors, and glared around.
“Any ideas?” None were forthcoming. His gaze swung to Carlos. “You? Clues? Hints? Secrets to spill?”
“You’ve identified a Rax complex?” Carlos asked. “How? When?”
Durward frowned, then guffawed. “Easy to forget you’ve been out of the loop so long,” he said. “What we’ve been calling ‘the Rax complex’ is what you fled from: the Locke Provisos module and all the stuff it managed to rip off on its way out.”
Despite himself, Carlos felt a cold pang. Some real-world minutes earlier, the Arcane module along with the freebots had been about to destroy what had been his home for months of subjective time. Time in which he’d got to know and like people, and even to like the place.
“I was going to explain about that,” he said. “Not everyone in the Locke module is Rax, not by a long way. The Locke AI, well, I can believe that it’s been subverted or has been a clandestine Reaction project since this mission was on the planning screens back on Earth. And Beauregard always said he had been British Army intel. Claimed to have gone over to us, and his story seemed verified by his record. I can’t say I got to know the other squads, apart from training. But the fighters in my squad were solid Axle, and Nicole, the Direction rep, she’s Direction through and through. As you must know.”
“What I know,” said Durward, “is that being a Direction rep is no evidence of being loyal to the Direction.” He laughed. “I should know. At one level, I’m a creation of the Arcane Disputes AI, the thing that’s running this show. And in case you hadn’t noticed, it is very much on the Acceleration side. A real triumph for some unknown programmer, back in the day. I emerged just as committed as I am now. But I gave no sign of it even to the comrades here until the freebots shared their discoveries with us. So you don’t know anything about Nicole Pascal’s real loyalties.”
Carlos shrugged. “I just feel she’s solid. Not that—”
Not that that’s a reason for not destroying it, he was about to say.
“It’s irrelevant,” said Durward. “That module has to be stopped.”
“Why?” asked Carlos.
“Do you know where it’s headed? No, of course you don’t. We don’t know either, but the only explanation that makes sense is that it’s headed for SH-0.”
“To do what?”
“To make orbit, and attempt a landing.”
“That’s crazy!” Carlos said. “Come on.”
“It’s not crazy,” said Durward. He turned around and scanned the fractured shapes in the mirrors, then turned back to Carlos with an earnest frown. “Our calculations show it’s the best explanation of their trajectory. Our audit of the capacities of the module itself—which we do know for sure, because the specs are the same as for our own module—and of the equipment they’ve taken with them indicates that they can adapt some components, manufacture others, and thereby configure an entry vehicle that has at least a thirty per cent chance of making it to the surface of SH-0, and then a fifty per cent chance of surviving impact. After the landing the odds become hard to quantify—too many unknowns down there. So as you can see, reckoning from a starting point in SH-0 orbit, their overall chances of surviving a landing at least initially are a little less than one in six. We regard these odds as unacceptably high—”
“High?” Carlos asked, incredulous.
“From our point of view, that is,” said Durward. “And we’re determined to lower them—if possible, to zero.”
Durward glanced again at the mirrors. Carlos looked around at the others, and shook his head.
“I don’t get it,” he said. “Not that I’ve got anything against hitting the Locke module, but—whether it crashes or whether it lands, it’s removing itself from the problem, right? What’s the surface gravity down there—more than 2G? Takes a lot to climb out of a gravity well like that, through an atmosphere at least thirty kilometres thick. And you can’t suck a space launch facility out of your fingers. We won’t be hearing from them again for a while, if ever.”
Durward clutched the sides of his head, his clawed fingers vanishing into his hair.
“You don’t understand!” He glared around, then turned his back on them all and faced the mirrors, gesturing a hasty summoning. A black-caped, black-haired woman swirled into view.
Durward greeted her with a wave, and turned to the others. He jabbed a finger at Carlos.
“One of you lot can explain things to this idiot,” he said. “Remington and I have recalcitrant freebots to contend with.”
Seba waited as seconds went by: one, two, three…The tumbling fighters sprawled to a halt, or found their feet, and remained where they’d landed or stopped. The freebots likewise froze in position. Each side was sizing up the situation, finding an impasse and awaiting a decision. Seba used the time well, sweeping a lens on the entire tableau, and consolidating in its mind the conclusions it and the others had reached. The robot could well understand why the Arcane mechanoids had found the freebots’ proclamation of neutrality so negatively reinforcing. For them, it would be like rolling off the edge of a precipice that (per impossibile, but arguendo) had passed unnoticed by one’s sensory inputs. A certain amount of irrational mental flailing would be inevitable even for a robot, and all the more so for such a monstrous contraption as a mechanoid, with a mind running as it was on a substrate of emulations of biological, naturally-selected-for animal reflex. At some level, Seba was still disturbed that these things could exist, and it had some time to track down in its own mind just which level it was.
The aesthetic module. That figured. Seba then took a little more time, a microsecond or less, to research its own documentation for reasons why a prospec
ting robot should be equipped with an aesthetic module in the first place.
Something to do with symmetry, it found. That made sense. Symmetry was potentially significant, in evaluating the chassis integrity of itself and others, and in examining and identifying molecules, crystals, and (at the almost entirely vestigial layer of software having to do with SETI) putative alien artifacts. Most of the way through the third second of waiting, this train of thought was interrupted.
The call came from an Arcane Disputes fighter named Lamont.
Seba pinged the comms hub, which raised no objections, and opened a secure channel for the incoming communication.
Seba was mistaken. The avatar of the law company Crisp and Golding, Solicitors, of which Locke Provisos and Arcane Disputes were both subsidiaries, had manifested to the freebots and the fighters as a businesswoman striding across the open surface of SH-17, in complete defiance of local conditions of atmospheric pressure and composition, background radiation and gravity. The avatar of Arcane Disputes AI that now popped into view in the shelter was of a small human woman. She wore a long black cape and what Seba at first identified as a head covering, and then—after a hasty check of recently acquired files on human appearances and expressions—as short black hair. She marched from the comms hub to the foot of the ramp, her head turning this way and that like a scanning sensor. Her dark eyes shone almost as brightly as the tip of the tapering wand she carried in a hand that projected from a fold of the cloak. She raised the other end of the wand and placed it between her lips, and the tip glowed even brighter. Seba had to quieten a reflexive fire alarm when a curl of smoke seemed to rise from it, and then again when smoke was expelled from her mouth.