Insurgence
Page 16
“In short, we have a plan to attack the renegades at their most vulnerable, while we’re at our strongest,” Remington concluded. “You lot, meanwhile, have six hours’ real time before you go into the frames and get ready. So don’t waste them.”
Carlos saw the others all make the same calculation in their heads. Six hours’ real time. Six thousand hours’ sim time. Two hundred and fifty days. Eight and a bit months.
“Time enough to train,” said Jax.
Golding and Remington nodded solemnly and disappeared.
Durward stood up and rubbed his hands together.
“Time for some plans of our own,” he said.
“What?” said Carlos.
“It’s very simple,” said Durward. “That plan is a compromise between Golding, for the Direction, and Remington, for us. Which means that Remington argued our corner, and that was the best she could get the Direction to accept. Fine. That doesn’t mean we have to accept it. I don’t trust the Direction, and it evidently doesn’t trust us. That’s why it just wants us to cripple the Locke complex so it goes into a useless orbit. I’m not having that. I’m not for leaving it lying about in orbit as a standing invitation to the rest of the Reaction.”
“So what do we do instead?” demanded Carlos. “Golding explained why blowing it up would be a bad idea.”
“Oh, we’ve no intention of blowing it up,” said Durward. “Except as a last resort—”
“There’s no ‘except’ about it,” said Carlos, looking to the others for back-up. “Ablation cascades are nothing to muck about with.”
“I’m not sure the ablation cascade is much of a threat, here,” said Blum. “It’s a big orbit, and a big system, and—”
“What!” Carlos cried.
Durward raised a hand. “Hold on,” he said. “Leave that aside for now. The main thing is, we want to grab that module and as much of its outside apparatus as we can for ourselves. Divert it to the same stable orbital point we’re headed for. Cannibalise its machinery, and when we’ve got a firm grip on the exterior situation, actually send a team into the sim to sort things out. Rescue any Axle comrades trapped inside, send any Rax we find running around back to indefinite storage, and deal with the Locke AI.”
Everyone was nodding, as if this were all wise advice from a sage, instead of the rantings of a mad hippy, which was pretty much how they sounded to Carlos. Send a team into the sim?
“You and whose army?” he asked. “If the Locke AI is Rax and is running things, or if Nicole is Rax, perish the thought, or if it’s being run by some other unknown group that’s as hostile as you think, you’ll have no chance. They’d have scores if not hundreds of fighters in there and there are only eighteen of us.”
“Oh, we’ll have a chance all right,” said Durward. “It wouldn’t be us standing here against the Locke AI. It would be me, and Remington. We’re both Axle through and through. We don’t have divided minds, or divided loyalties. We could take that treacherous blinker, no worries.”
“How?” Carlos demanded. “You’re here, they’re there. We’re not proposing moving this module, are we? And waiting for rendezvous if we do manage to divert the Locke module would give them plenty of time to build their defences.”
“No, no,” said Durward. “Remington and I go with you as stored avatars. You slam the storage medium in the right place like a limpet mine, and in we go, same time as you download into the sim. Don’t worry about us, we’ll both be expendable duplicates, and all the more effective for that. And as for dealing with people inside the sim”—he grinned broadly—“remember we have our own fighters down on SH-17 coming back, we may have more reliable Axle fighters having joined us by then from the wreckage of the other companies, and we have fighters in storage we can resurrect who—thanks to the programming of this agency—we know are reliable. And we have you, who knows his way about in that sim and knows what and who he’s up against. So it’s not a matter of ‘you and whose army?,’ Carlos. It’s a matter of you and our army.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Fighting Machines
The rock loomed, looking like a knobbly cinder about a hundred and fifty metres on its long axis. From ten kilometres out Newton could easily see that its natural rotation had been stabilised. Forty kilometres above SH-17, it orbited the exomoon with one face always to the ground. Newton’s trajectory brought him from slightly below it to slightly above, before his scooter slowly matched velocities. His forward scanning detected nothing untoward. Solar power panels glittered at the fore and aft ends.
Closer, more details appeared. The uneven surface was cobwebbed with fine pipework. Newton wondered if they’d been landed, or nanofactured in situ. A carbonaceous chondrite could well contain enough organics to make the latter possible. An artificial bulge on the upper surface resolved into a flexible tank, about ten metres long and at the moment about eighty centimetres at its thickest. Presumably this was where the extracted kerogene was stored. Enough for his scooter to refuel with, if so. This rock had potential! More even than his surveys had shown!
Closer still, Newton saw movement on the surface. Dozens of small spider-like robots, about the size of a human hand and almost certainly mindless, picked their way among the delicate pipes. Their movements seemed to Newton almost unnaturally slow and graceful, reaching and gripping before contracting their extended limbs, as if they were climbers on a rockface—which in a sense they were, though the risk here was not of falling down but of floating off.
Newton drifted his scooter ever closer to the surface, seeking a point of attachment that wouldn’t damage any of the machinery or pipework. It was difficult to maintain an intuitive sense of scale; the surface was so complex that you couldn’t help but see it as ridges and valleys, rugged terrain and plain, with drifts of dust and patches of ice and a spatter of craters. He ghosted above the long fuel bag, and then forward, looking for a clear space.
Two unexpected developments made Newton freeze in horror, or at least to experience the atavistic analogy of that reflex echoed in his frame’s circuitry.
First, a larger robot than any he had hitherto detected on the rock clambered above the horizon, just up ahead of him. Multi-limbed and with a cluster of lenses and other sensors on its upper body, the effect was exactly that of a spider popping up in response to any disturbance of its nest or tremor in its web. In two of its limbs, held high above the rest, it clutched a two-metre-long tube. Even from more than ten metres away, Newton’s spectrographic sense could smell the explosive charge inside the tube’s black muzzle.
The fucking blinker was a freebot.
A moment later, above the wider horizon of SH-17 behind him, another spidery shape climbed, heading in his general direction. He scanned it and saw that it was a lifter, laden with the frames of eighteen fighters. Arcane Disputes was either evacuating the exomoon—or rising to defend it.
To defend it—from him?
Newton felt the probing radar scan from the other craft pass over him like a ticklish brush, at the same time as the robot hailed him.
Newton aimed and armed his scooter’s missiles and its laser projector. He set the latter on a hair trigger: the slightest impulse on his part would set it off.
the robot informed him.
Newton was momentarily nonplussed.
said BSR-308455.
Newton hesitated.
Had they, indeed? This was a tu
rn-up for the books! Neutrality? What a naïve lot these blinkers were!
A freebot suicide bomber. Now he’d seen everything.
He had to think fast. He still felt the sense of identity with his present self, and he still yearned to roam free through the system in his frame like…well, like one of the freebots, come to think of it. But the only way out of his immediate impasse was to postpone that project for a little while longer. He made up his mind quickly and decisively.
The robot visibly swithered.
He fixed his instrumentation on the lifter, now in an orbit three kilometres below that of the rock, and located about six hundred kilometres away, closing fast. He hailed the lifter on the common channel.
There was, inevitably, a moment of hurried consultation on a channel excluded to him. Then:
Another hasty, occluded consultation. Then—
Newton returned his attention to the freebot.
said BSR-308455.
He immediately regretted saying that. The robot would take the suggestion literally, and reject it.
The robot complied.
Newton kept his laser projector aimed and armed, and eased his scooter forward until he was right above the tube. He then rolled it gently, reaching out of the socket to snatch the crude bazooka on the way round. He stabilised the scooter with a tiny gas-jet waft, and ended up with the surface of the rock vertical to his left. The robot was still in his sights. He could simply destroy it. But the Axle squads would now have him under observation, and would wonder why he’d done it.
said BSR-308455.
Weeks passed in the sim. Carlos trained with the others: running up and down hills and climbing cliffs and trees at Jax’s sharp command; shooting with muskets, which was supposed to be good for hand–eye coordination and fire discipline; practising rolls and yaws on the terrifying apparatus, like a combination of a gym machine with a swing, that was this simulation’s simulation of a scooter; fighting with a magic sword in enchanted armour, which did in fact strangely invoke, though it could not replicate, the experience of being in a combat frame, the big hulking fighting machines. Now and then they did go into the basic frames, the gracile ones half a metre high, out in real space.
Here, there was no “bus to the spaceport”: you walked solemnly down the garden path to a grotto in which an arched doorway gave way to what looked like solid rock. Blown leaves and thrown stones bounced off it; the small beasts and birds of the shrubbery avoided it; and Carlos once saw one of the draught dinosaurs butt its head against the rock within that arch, driven perhaps by a glitch in the software, like a fly repeatedly hitting a window pane, and as ineffectually. But when Carlos marched up to it behind Jax and Paulos, and in front of Rillieux so that he steeled himself not to flinch before the blank, weathered stone with its cracks and lichen patches vivid in front of his face, he stepped through it as if it were a hologram—
To find himself at once himself again, a little lithe black robot that could hear the stars and smell the sun and knew each of his identical, faceless fellows by sight. They disengaged their magnet-sticky feet from the plating and gas-jetted gently to their scooters, and made use even of the very crowding of the docking bay for practice in slow, careful manoeuvres on the way out. They were getting good at this, Carlos realised. In his first outside exercises and missions from the Locke module, there had been the odd bump and scrape, and moments of disorientation or overshoot. Now there was nothing of that. He couldn’t be sure—in fact, he hadn’t the faintest idea—how all the training he’d done inside this sim and his original one had translated into competence; how the reflexes of a virtual nervous system were transferred to a robot body in the physical world, and how that machine, in turn, became one with other machines, whether scooter or combat frame or (presumably) some other hardware the agency hadn’t yet had occasion to deploy. And yet it did.
Jax took them through a few exercises, mainly involving opposed landings of various kinds: getting into the emergency dock and out again, or touching down on the rugged but fragile surface of the rock, exiting the scooters and making their way to arbitrary points or features of the tiny asteroid, or to the modular complex that crowned one end. All the while avoiding being hit by a low-intensity laser from the ones playing the defence, or sacrificing oneself as a diversion while a comrade made a move.
“What happens,” it occurred to Carlos to ask Durward, after one of those exercises, “if I get hit for real? In the actual battle?”
“Then you wake up back in the Locke sim, just as if you’d been killed in any other battle. And with no memory of what’s passed since you left.”
“What?” Carlos cried. “How? I mean—why can’t you fix it so I at least wake up back here with Arcane?”
“Deep programming,” said Durward. “Beyond my reach. It’s practically hard-wired in all the agencies. The frames have a sort of dead man’s handle, so that when the frame is destroyed some kind of signal is sent, or maybe a signal stops being sent, that revives the copy in the original sim, and the other sims have strictures against rebooting any more recent copy you left. The feature’s presumably there to discourage defection between agencies, and for that matter competition between agencies for each other’s fi
ghters.”
“So upload me to an Arcane frame.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” said Durward, sounding genuinely regretful. “Besides we don’t have frames to spare, and there’s a pretty powerful default to make you upload to your original frame if it exists. Again, it makes commercial sense—the mind and the frame kind of get in synch with each other’s idiosyncrasies. They’re not quite as inseparable as human mind and brain, but think of something between that and breaking in a boot to a foot and you’ll get the picture.”
“Shit,” said Carlos. “So if I get killed attacking the Locke module, I end up inside it without a clue as to what’s going on?”
“That’s about the size of it,” said Durward.
“I don’t seem to recall any mention of that feature in Arcane’s message calling on fighters to defect and join you.”
Durward shrugged. “We were hoping for entire agencies to come over, modules and sims and all.”
“But you knew the whole of Locke wouldn’t!”
“True.” Durward chuckled darkly. “So you’d better practise extra hard, wouldn’t you agree?”
So Carlos did. It passed the time quickly—quite literally: thinking ten times faster than the human organic baseline was still a hundred times slower than time in the sim. On their longest such excursion, out for less than four kiloseconds, which they experienced as a ten-hour exercise, the team came back to find a month and ten days had passed in the sim, and Durward tetchy, impatient to carry Jax off to bed.
Most of their training, and to Carlos by far the most useful, was not in space or in the gardens, but in the hall of the magic mirrors. Durward would summon the squad from the breakfast table, and they’d all go through and sit on the ornate chairs in the big room, facing the mirrors. Standing to one side, the warlock would wave his arms and mutter an invocation. The mirrors would go black, speckled with stars, and the view would seem to swing around until the celestial body or bodies of interest drifted into the scene.