Insurgence
Page 13
She waved the wand in a sweeping gesture at the Arcane fighters, still poised as if to spring back into action.
The Arcane avatar snorted virtual smoke.
Seba consulted, then replied.
Seba explained about the Fifteen and the Forerunners.
said Remington.
Seba recounted the reasons that it and Rocko had taken to the consensus.
said Remington again.
Seba bounced a transcript of the conversation into the communications hub, and followed up by convening the collective mind of the Fifteen. Together, they established a similar link with the Forerunner freebots within range. There was barely any debate, but one freebot raised an urgent objection. Its identification code was BSR-308455, and it was the one in control of the small carbonaceous chondrite in low orbit around SH-17 that was still a target.
said BSR-308455.
It withdrew, momentarily breaking the consensus into an uncoordinated babble. Seba had to think for itself, and decide quickly.
The apparition flickered for a moment.
said BSR-308455.
After two more seconds in the shared mental workspace, Seba dropped out with an answer for Remington.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Arguments
Jax motioned Carlos out of the big room. The others followed. At the doorway Carlos looked back. Durward was standing in the middle of the floor, in his absurd dressing gown and faded jeans and bare feet, mouthing and gesticulating. He looked quite, quite mad.
Carlos turned away, and followed Jax further down the dim hall to a smaller room at the back of the main building. It had an unvarnished table with wooden chairs around it, shelves and cupboards, and a window and a door to a kitchen garden that by the looks of things had run badly to seed.
“Almost cosy,” Carlos remarked, taking a chair.
“Servants’ quarters,” Jax explained, as the others sat down around the table. “But no servants. We reckon they’re supposed to have fled with their masters.”
“Can’t get the staff these days,” said Carlos, with mock sympathy.
“The human staff,” Jax corrected. She put two fingers in her mouth and whistled. Carlos winced at the piercing note. A boggart appeared at the door.
“Coffee,” Jax ordered.
“And sandwiches,” Bobbie Rillieux added.
The boggart nodded and departed. A clattering of crockery and the sounds of running water and knocking pipes came from nearby.
Carlos looked around at Salter, Paulos, Voronov, Blum, Rillieux and Jax. They were all looking back at him, as if waiting for him to say something.
“All right,” he said. “Tell me. What is it that Durward wanted you to explain?”
Voronov leaned forward, elbows on table. “It’s very simple, Carlos,” he said. “You are perhaps misled by your module’s sim being based on a terraformed H-0. It’s true that H-0 is intended as the habitat for a future human population. But that does not make it the most important planet in the system. The system of G-0 has much to offer—a staggering wealth of new knowledge, at the very least. And the amazing molten planet M-0 will no doubt be a resource in the far future.
“But in the immediate and near future, SH-0 is the prize. The jewel of this entire extrasolar system! It has endlessly complex environments and above all it has multicellular life. Life itself”—he flipped his hand as if waving out a match—“is commonplace. Mars, Europa, the strange stuff like desert varnish found on the Moon and some asteroids…Even in our time, our old lives, all these were known, yes? But life that is not just single-celled or simp
ler—that has never been found before, as far as we know. Perhaps other missions to other stars have found its like—we won’t know until we build the better transmitters and receivers.
“So as far as we now know, SH-0 is the only place apart from Earth where macroscopic, multicellular life exists. This is so important, so significant, and so potentially vulnerable to contamination that its presence is all we know about it, and that only from hi-res satellite images. Atmospheric probes, let alone landings, have been embargoed. The corporations had expected to spend years—real years, Earth years—in debate, negotiation and bargaining before deciding how to proceed. Already mere speculative instruments on exploration futures are trading for—well, this is the only word—literally astronomical sums. Imagine, if you can, what crashing a lander into that would do. The contamination might wreck the entire world.”
“How could it?” asked Carlos. “There’s only stored data, there’s no actual biological life on any component of this mission.”
“You are thinking too narrowly,” said Voronov, waving his hands. “There are certainly traces of material from SH-17 now on the Locke module—dust on the feet of your frames, if nothing else! Some of that could be a contaminant—the freebots shared with us the exploration companies’ robot surveys, and these couldn’t rule out biological processes going on somewhere on or below the SH-17 surface. And besides that, every module exterior is crusted with nanobots and nanofactories. Think of these, crashed and leaking, with no control programs or kill-switches. That could be worse than biological contamination. If one—one!—were to have what it takes to thrive on SH-0, the entire marvellous biosphere could be dust in a matter of weeks.
“And then think further. If the Rax complex lands safely, and survives any immediate crises, then it can sample native forms of life, adapt their physiology to some approximation of the human form and start proliferating. We can expect life down there to be fierce and fast—and, in addition, the settlers would have the computational resources of the module. The station was designed as modular for a reason: to survive disasters. Any module has all the information needed to complete the mission, albeit more slowly than the mission profile had envisaged. The Rax complex would have more than enough to reboot an entire industrial civilisation.”
Carlos tilted back his chair and spread his hands with a shrug. “Well? Bully for them! And one in the eye for the Direction, with their homo sapiens fetish. It’s just the sort of thing we would do.”
Voronov banged the table. “Precisely! Except it wouldn’t be us doing it. It would be the Rax. The entire planet would become a stronghold of Reaction, from which this entire system could be conquered. And then—who knows?”
An eerie whistling came from outside the room, and kept rising.
“What the fuck is that?” Carlos asked.
“A kettle,” Jax explained. “It’s boiling.”
“Why doesn’t it just switch off when—” He hit his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Duh. Sorry. As I said before—OK, Locke is Rax, but I’m pretty sure most of those in there aren’t. Including Nicole, and you said yourselves in that message that she’s capable of wresting control of the module away from the Locke AI. If I know her, she’ll be doing just that.” He grinned around the company, confident of having made his point. “So whatever lands there, it won’t be the Rax.”
“No, that’s where—”
Bobbie Rillieux began to speak, but was interrupted by the arrival of two boggarts, bearing cafetieres and cups and a tray of filled baguettes. Carlos felt a sudden pang in his belly. Rillieux stood up and took care of the coffee distribution, incongruous in her mad-Miss-Havisham glad rags. For a few minutes everyone sipped or chewed. Then Rillieux wiped crumbs from her lips with a swathe of tattered veil and continued.
“Where you’re wrong, Carlos, is in arguing that Nicole is loyal to the Direction, and can take control of the module, so if it gets down it doesn’t matter. That’s your argument, yes?”
“Uh-huh,” Carlos grunted, around a mouthful.
“But,” Rillieux pointed out, “an agent of the Direction wouldn’t even attempt a landing, because the Direction would never countenance such a thing. So if the intention is to attempt a landing, at least one of two things is true: Nicole Pascal is not in charge of the module, and/or she is not loyal to the Direction.”
“Well, perhaps it’s not the Reaction that’s in charge in there,” said Carlos. “Perhaps it’s our guys. Like I said, it’s the sort of thing we’d do if we could.”
That got smiles, but heads shook.
“No,” said Jax. “If they were Axle, they’d have let us know by now.”
“How?” asked Carlos. “Aren’t we screening out their comms?”
“Not us,” said Blum. “They are still screening out ours. And they have got our message by now, so they know we aren’t hitting them with malware.”
“Plus,” said Jax, “if there’s Axle cadre in charge in there they would never do anything so reckless without agreement. I mean, it’s something we might consider in the long run, but not right now. So it ain’t the Direction, and it ain’t us. Now that doesn’t mean it’s the Rax—hell, for all we know it could be some maverick coup—but we have to proceed on the assumption that it is. We can’t risk the Rax getting control of SH-0. So stopping that module getting down is, uh, quite a high priority for us. We thought we had the freebots on-side in that regard. Now we’ll have to do it ourselves.”
“You’re forgetting something,” said Carlos. “Two things, in fact. First off, the Direction and the DisCorps are going to be as much or even more against a landing than we are. Even if the Direction is determined to have an Axle–Rax cage-fight, this takes the fight outside the cage. And then there’s the companies’ interests at stake. I imagine the markets that Voronov mentioned earlier are crashing at the prospect. So the Direction will be on the case.
“And even if the module does land, it’s not the end of the world. The Direction can just send a fusion torpedo down after them. Not ideal, but hey! It’s a big planet.”
Paulos snorted. “‘Nuke them from orbit—it’s the only way to be sure’?”
They all laughed.
“No, seriously,” said Carlos. “I mean it. Why is this our problem?”
Jax frowned, as if she thought Carlos was missing something obvious, and glanced around her team.
“For a start,” she said, after getting a silent consensus of nods, “we can take using nukes on the planet off the table right now. I don’t know if you’ve properly understood how the Direction works with the AI DisCorps. I’m guessing you imagine it’s like running an emulation of capitalism in a box and taking its outputs as cornucopian goodies. It’s a bit more than that—the DisCorps are induced by the Direction to have a much longer time horizon and lower time preferences than any human shareholders would have. So they take the long view—they bloody have to, to expect a profit from an interstellar expedition in the first place. The future value of a pristine SH-0 is beyond calculation—for us, but not for the DisCorps! They’d be even less happy about nuking the surface of SH-0 than they were about using heavy weapons against the robots on SH-17.”
“OK,” said Carlos. He took a gulp of now cooled coffee. “I get that.”
“Right,” said Jax. “But the exploration companies don’t have armed forces of their own. Only the law companies do. And because direct AI control of weapon systems is a hard-wired no-no, they need human fighters to carry out the action. And right now, all the available forces to stop the Locke module from the agencies have proved themselves fucking unreliable for use against the Reaction.”
“All except us,” Carlos pointed out.
“Exactly,” said Jax.
“So it’s up to us to mend our fences with the Direction. At the very least, we can get them to agree with us dealing with the Locke module.”
Jax sat back, as did all the others, and stared at him.
“Fuck this meaningful silence stuff,�
� said Carlos. “What am I not getting?”
“What you’re not getting,” said Jax, “is that we don’t trust the Direction. Remember what I said back when we were both in transit—as far as we’re concerned, the Direction is the Reaction? Obviously the Rax didn’t win, but—look where we are now! In a system dominated by AI corporations! We don’t even have any solid evidence that life back in the Solar system is anything like what we’ve been told. Things could be a lot worse back there than we think.”
“Yeah, but,” said Carlos, “if the Direction is closer to the Rax, why would they choose to have Axle fighters on their side?”
“We don’t even have evidence of that,” Amelie Salter cut in, her voice harsh. “How do we know that the Direction’s grand manoeuvre was aimed at flushing out Rax, rather than at flushing out us? How do we know we’re not the target?”
“Because,” said Carlos, “we’re the ones who got cracked out of the Direction’s ammo box! It was the Rax who had to infiltrate!”
“As we keep telling you,” said Jax, “you’re just saying what they keep telling us. We don’t know.”
Carlos glared back at them, nonplussed. This was madness. Their whole situation was one of radical uncertainty. Everything was code, including themselves. And the code had been written by the very people (well, legal persons) who wanted to convince them. So was anything they could use to check it. It was trust issues all the way down.