Insurgence

by Ken MacLeod

  “So—not like us then?”

  “We choose, they don’t,” said Rillieux. “That’s the difference.”

  She wafted a hand at a boggart, which hastened to bring her a drink. The creature seemed to know which she wanted, perhaps from tracking her previous choices. Carlos watched as she sipped chilled white wine. She really was beautiful. Not even her masses of soft fabric could altogether hide her figure, slim with big breasts and hips, and her slender arms and fine features were on full view. Her mahogany skin tone was set off by the creamy colour of the clothes, and her springy hair by the pinned-on, ironic veil.

  “Speaking of choice,” said Carlos, “what’s the deal with boggarts? Do they have free will? Or are they p-zombies?”

  “P-zombies? Hell, no, they’re nothing like as sophisticated as that. They’re walking bits of scenery. Animated furniture. You can tell them what to do, but you can’t hold a conversation with them in any kind of depth.”

  “That’s a relief.” Carlos frowned. “What was the deal here, then? We were told being nice to p-zombies—apart from those we were told to shoot in a training exercise—was part of our rehab package. The only p-zombies I’ve seen here were the monsters. Do you have…I don’t know…villagers or what?”

  Rillieux shook her head, making her hair bounce and her veil quiver. “There are settlements, and there’s a small market town in the neighbourhood, just down the valley. We see the locals now and again, with deliveries and so forth. I don’t even know if they’re p-zombies or colonists—the former I assume, because there’s no advantage in having people beta-test a planet they’ll never live on for real. No, the deal with us was that after the conflict with the robots was over—which no one expected to take long—we could all get together and solve the game.”

  Carlos snorted. “Find the spaceship and fly away?”

  “Exactly.” She blew a contemplative ring or two, and watched them rise on the evening air. “To do that, we’d have to cooperate with each other and, yes, with p-zombies and maybe real people we met along the way.” She smiled wryly. “Assemble our companions, defeat evil forces, overcome obstacles, collect secret scrolls, recover lost spaceship parts from hidden temples guarded by savage cults, rebuild the ship—you know the tropes as well as I do. And by doing all this, we’d demonstrate to the Direction that we were fit to return to civilised society.”

  “Sounds legit,” said Carlos. “And where would the spaceship take you?”

  “Ah, that was the clever bit,” said Rillieux. “It would be like when we go through the portal to the hangar, except that it would take us to the future. We’d fly it to the terraformed terrestrial, H-0. Or to put it more literally, the space journey would function as a transition illusion to accommodate our return to storage and subsequent re-emergence downloaded to real bodies on a real planet in however many thousand years. Or to our next assignment, duh!”

  “Wow,” said Carlos. “Someone hold me back, as my old comrade Rizzi would say.”

  “You don’t find it enticing?”

  “Never have. You?”

  She shook her head again, setting off another fascinating vibration of hair and headpiece. “I’m Axle through and through. Like Andre and I told you in the dungeon”—she had the good grace to grimace and glance away—“I don’t care where the ideas came from, I still agree with them. Even if you don’t, any more.”

  Carlos took a sip of brandy—too much, and fierce in his throat.

  “Oh,” he said, “I don’t, you know, repudiate them. It’s just…you know, you can be so strongly convinced of something that you can live for years taking it for granted? So much that you never think about it day to day, and then one day—which, yeah, for me was today—you hear it all spelt out again, and suddenly”—he smiled pre-emptively at the pun he was about to commit—“the spell’s broken.”

  She propped her chin on her hand. “I’m sorry to hear that. But there’s nothing I can do to persuade you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I know how these things work.” She stubbed out her cigar. “It’s like love. You have it or you don’t.”

  Carlos followed this interesting line of conversation until he fell asleep over the table.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  You and Our Army

  Carlos woke, predictably, alone. It was still a surprise to him—his arm reached out, as it had most mornings for months past, for Nicole. Her absence hit him quite suddenly and sharply, in the first moments of consciousness reboot. He missed her physical presence, her athletic and tender sexuality, her skin. He endured the stabbing moment of anguish and loss, assimilated it, and let it pass like a remembered dream as he became fully awake.

  He was relieved to see he had at least taken his clothes off before falling onto the double bed, face down. As soon as he rolled over and moved to sit up, the hangover clubbed him in the back of the head. He closed his eyes for a moment, then resolutely got to his feet, padded across the bare wooden floor and opened the curtains. Wooden rings rattled on the wooden rod, making him wince at the racket. The long shadow of the house stretched out in front of him. He was on the second floor of the main building, looking down at a corner of the gravelled area in front of the door. Mist lay on the parkland and haunted the trees. The snow on the farthest peaks flared pink in the early sunlight. Bipedal herbivorous dinosaurs grazed the grass, their long tails comically uplifted. Carlos unlatched and opened the window, letting in cool air and birdsong and monkey yap.

  He turned back to the room. It was just big enough for the bed, a decoratively carved wardrobe and a chair. An extra door led to a cramped but adequate bathroom. As Carlos relieved himself, propping his free hand on a smudged patch of wall above the cistern, he thought for a moment that en-suite facilities were anachronistic for such a house, then laughed. The place was a goddamn fantasy RPG upgraded to unfeasible levels of resolution and verisimilitude to be an R&R environment for the ghosts of walking dead space warriors who went into battle by haunting the frames of small sturdy robots.

  He doused his face with cold water, dried off and stepped over his scattered leathers, which this morning looked like too much trouble to put on. In the wardrobe he found looser attire of shirt and trousers that more or less fitted. He put them on with his original costume’s belt and boots, and went downstairs. In the small room at the back he found Voronov, Rillieux and Salter, hands wrapped around coffee mugs. Voronov looked vaguely Byronic in big frilly shirt and tight trousers with hunting boots; the two women had apparently reached the Jane Austen layer of their wardrobes, but their hair was unkempt. Still going for the folk-band cover look.

  “Morning,” Carlos said. “You all look better than I feel.”

  Rillieux passed him a pair of fresh leaves from a small stack in the middle of the table.

  “Chew these and swallow,” she advised. “It’s the fantasy-land version of paracetamol.”

  Jax and Durward turned up, then Blum. Boggarts brought breakfast. Carlos ate warm croissants and sipped hot coffee. After a while Voronov and Salter ambled out into the garden for smokes. Nobody had said very much.

  The grandfather clock out in the hall chimed. Durward stood up.

  “Reconvene in the dancing parlour in fifteen minutes,” he said. “I reckon our diplomats will have a result by then.”

  Rillieux glanced at Carlos, smiled. “Walk out the front?”

  “Sure.”

  Their heels crunched on the gravel. The air was cool and damp. A pair of boggarts were tidying away the upturned tables and chairs, the empty bottles and the cigar and cigarette butts left by the party. Rillieux produced a cigarillo from her purse and lit up.

  “Ah,” she sighed. “About last night…”

  Carlos looked at her, then away. “What about last night?” His heart jolted in his chest. “Sorry, did I do something…?”

  “You? No, no.” She snorted out smoke. “You don’t remember? Just as well. I was a bit drunk—”

 
He laughed. “Weren’t we all?”

  “Well, I wasn’t as drunk as you. So I remember. Jeez. You really don’t?”

  “No,” said Carlos, wondering what dismay lurked. Rillieux walked on.

  “Long conversation, tearful confessions, angry accusations, smoochy slow dance, last drink, head going wallop on the table? None of that?”

  “Whose head?” Carlos asked, alarmed.

  “Yours, idiot. If it had been mine, you would know about it by now.”

  “That’s a relief.” He stopped halfway to the grass. “Sorry, anyway. Shouldn’t have got so drunk.”

  “Huh, it’s me that shouldn’t have. I’m afraid I came on strong to you a bit.”

  “You did?” To his surprise, Carlos found himself blushing. “Well, in that case I should apologise for being too drunk to take you up on it.”

  “Oh, God, no, no. After we’d talked about the Axle programme and the Direction project, it all got kind of personal. You started off by going on about Nicole, and then about Jax, and then you got on to giving me a hard time for the interrogation.”

  “Good grief.” Carlos was mortified. “Honestly, I don’t—”

  “So I jumped you, shut you up with a kiss, dragged you to your feet and got you dancing…”

  “And then I fell asleep on the table?” He looked at her. “That was impolite.”

  “I’m sure we’d both have been very embarrassed if…”

  “More than we are now?”

  They both laughed.

  “How about,” said Carlos, “we take it as wiped from our memories, and start over?”

  Rillieux took a thoughtful draw, standing there in her tremulous muslin shift. Her big dark eyes glimmered. She gave her hair a shake, and eased fingers through to tease it out.

  “OK,” she said.

  They turned to pace along the perimeter of the gravelled area.

  “After all that,” Carlos said, “it can hardly be less awkward to ask—who’s shacked up with whom, here?”

  “There’s Jax and Durward, obviously,” said Rillieux. “That’s…weird. Given that he’s not human, and all.”

  “I’m in no position to judge them,” said Carlos. “As you know.”

  “Well, yes.” She flicked him a sidelong smile. “When you say shacked up, well. It’s kind of like the old Axle days, you know? Nobody’s looking to settle down with a life partner or found the love of their life. So, like, for now…Leonid and Amelie, somewhat tempestuous but, yeah, they’re an item. Luis has a girlfriend, Claudia Singer, in one of the other squads. Andre goes down to the town sometimes, and comes back looking happy, but he doesn’t talk about it. I never played the original game myself but I understand it had whores in it.”

  “Yes, it did,” said Carlos. “Kept the wanker demographic happy.”

  Rillieux flapped a hand as if to clear away her smoke. “Mind your language. I’m supposed to be a lady here. Anyway…I think Andre is kind of excited by prostitutes, specifically. And he had ethical objections to it in real life, I know that. So this is, like, an opportunity to live that fantasy without consequence.”

  “He’s going to have a great time if we ever get round to the quest for the spaceship.”

  “Ha ha! Yes. ‘If ever,’ indeed. But he seems to be having a great time now.”

  “It’s not so strange,” Carlos mused. “Beauregard—you know, my sarge, the guy who it turns out was a spy—was quite open about preferring p-zombies to people. Shacked up with a local lass, they seemed to get on pretty well.” He sighed. “Wonder how they’re doing now.”

  They had circulated back to the open French windows of the dancing parlour. Rillieux stubbed out her cigarillo in the wet earth of a flowerpot, and straightened up, grinning.

  “There’s one person here you haven’t asked me about.”

  “Oh!” Carlos smote his forehead. Fortunately the magic anti-hangover leaves had already taken effect.

  “Free and single,” Rillieux dared him, and skipped as she stepped into the room.

  Someone had dragged eight chairs into a curved row in front of the mirrors. All but two were occupied. Carlos sat down, somewhat self-consciously, after and beside Rillieux. Durward was at the opposite end, after Paulos, Blum, Voronov, Salter and Jax. He reached out and snapped his fingers. The group’s reflection in the mirror directly in front of them was suddenly replaced by Madame Golding and Raya Remington, sitting behind a table looking out. The effect was so uncanny that Carlos looked over his shoulder.

  “We’ve come to an agreement,” said Madame Golding, with a tight smile. She shuffled some papers on the table. “And we’ve agreed a joint military plan, on behalf of the Direction—which I’m representing here, following the defection of the Direction’s representative in the Arcane agency sim.” A hard stare at Durward, who returned it impassively. “Representing in a legal sense and in a diplomatic sense. The details of the agreement are as follows…”

  Follow they did, with other mirrors flashing to black and white as diagrams of the disposition of forces came up. Carlos paid close attention, and gradually a mental picture took shape out of his initial vagueness and confusion.

  The Direction itself was intact, though its components were now physically dispersed. The fighting had been so confused, and so many casualties could be accounted for by accidents or friendly fire, that the fighters who had made a safe return or had been rebooted in the sims after being blown up in reality couldn’t all be counted on as loyal.

  Other than that, however, the situation had now become fairly clear. The bulk of the overt Reaction forces—fifty-seven fighters in all—had used up most of their remaining fuel to boost towards the exomoonlet SH-119, a rock about ten kilometres across whose orbit was outside that of SH-17 and of the now dispersed station. With freebot cooperation now withdrawn, and with few reliable forces from the law companies, there was no way of stopping them.

  Six had already landed on the little exomoon, and were digging in. To make matters worse, the moonlet was rich in metals and carbon compounds, whose prospecting and processing had for months now been carried out by robotic probes. Some of the more sophisticated of the robots concerned had been part of the freebot rebellion, but no resistance had been reported. Not that resistance would have been much use: the Reaction forces had more than enough ammunition to crush any.

  Bottom line: the Reaction now had a base, and one they could use to build new machinery and solar power plants with which to—literally and metaphorically—recharge their batteries. That done, they had enough robots, nanotech and resources to build whatever they wanted.

  Carlos considered dealing with that ever-increasing danger as a priority, but the Direction didn’t. Of far more pressing concern to it was the threat posed by the freebots. The Direction’s most immediate and urgent objective, however, was the threat posed by the Locke Provisos modular complex and its erratic but consistent course towards SH-0.

  The DisCorps were frantic about the prospect of the superhabitable planet’s being contaminated, let alone its being turned into a rogue colony. So…the first thing the Direction wanted the fighters of the runaway Arcane Disputes modular complex to do was to assault the Locke Provisos modular complex: to cripple its landing capabilities and strand it in SH-0 orbit, where it could be dealt with at leisure.

  “Why don’t we just blow it the fuck up?” Carlos asked.

  Rillieux nudged him and giggled. Madame Golding was sterner.

  “Two reasons,” she said. “First, the Direction remains as wary as it has always been of destroying an agency or a company by force. It sets a very bad precedent. Second—we’re already dealing with orbital debris. We have no intention of adding to them, particularly in SH-0 orbit. The danger of an ablation cascade is ever-present.”

  An ablation cascade was the ultimate nightmare of space exploration: collisional debris colliding to make more debris, and so on. Once it had started any attempt to deal with it ineluctably made it worse.

  “
So where does that leave us? They still have more spacecraft and fighters than we do.”

  “We have a plan for that,” said Raya Remington, with a dramatic flourish of her long cigarette holder. “We know exactly how many scooters actually returned and were able to rendezvous with the module: six. And, presumably, at least the same number of frames. They don’t have time to manufacture more. Most of Locke’s effort, fuel, reaction mass and power reserves must be dedicated to making landfall on SH-0.

  “We at Arcane, on the other hand, have ten scooters, and twenty-four frames—eighteen currently down on SH-17 along with half a dozen combat frames. We’ve persuaded the freebots who call themselves the Fourteen, down on SH-17, to allow our fighters to leave the base. They’re already on their way up by lifter to rendezvous with a transfer tug in orbit. We can arrange fuel and power supplies from the companies in the consortium, which in our plan can be rendezvoused with en route, along with spare scooters on transport tugs. The orbits and order of battle have all been calculated.”

  She waved her cigarette holder like a magic wand, bringing up diagrams in adjacent mirrors, and ran projections forward. In just over twenty-seven hours, the predicted course of the Locke modular complex would take it on a fast swing around the exomoon SH-38, a body in a lower orbit than SH-17 and much smaller. That slingshot, followed by one around SH-19, would give it the boost it needed to reach close orbit around SH-0.

  The manoeuvre was tricky, and would require precisely timed corrections. Any disruption to it would send the Locke complex into a long elliptical orbit around SH-0 rather than a close enough approach for a landing. If enough damage was done to the complex’s manufacturing, propulsion and guidance systems, even a later landing attempt would be impossible.

  The tactical plan was to attack the Locke complex just before it began the manoeuvre, at a point where they’d hesitate to send out defensive scooters, and in enough numbers to overwhelm any that were. A resupply tug for the Arcane module was already on its way from the Gneiss Conglomerates modules of the former station. Other surviving fighters might also be available.