Insurgence

by Ken MacLeod

  Carlos took a sledgehammer blow on his slotted steel visor. He went down like a ninepin and rolled, then sprang to his feet. Paulos was still recovering from his swing. Carlos brought his hand-crossbow to bear. He’d used it already and missed—or, rather, Paulos had evaded the shot with a breathtaking leap. The cable took a couple of seconds of frantic winding to pull back, and Carlos ran as he did so, keeping to Paulos’s back as the big man staggered out of his spin. As he slotted the dart in place Carlos glimpsed the carriage come through the gate. The moment of distraction was enough for Paulos to steady himself and get a shot in first.

  Getting hit by a magic dart was a bit like being tasered. Carlos felt a blinding shock, then a convulsive involuntary movement of the long muscles that threw him up in the air and then laid him out flat on his back. He wasn’t hurt, or even winded, but the shock—which wasn’t an electric shock, and didn’t feel like one—sent a sort of painless overload through his nerves. He could do nothing but stare up at slatted bars of violet, and wait for the impact to fade. It was as if he’d heard a thunderclap, but his ears weren’t ringing, and seen sheet lightning, but his eyes didn’t hurt and there were no after-images. It was just pure shock, distilled. Magic.

  The grinning face of Paulos, visor up, filled the narrow bars of Carlos’s view.

  “Game over?” Paulos asked.

  “Huh-huh,” Carlos grunted.

  Paulos leaned out of view. Carlos felt a lurch as the dart was pulled out. The armour’s joints became flexible again. Carlos flipped back his visor and got to his feet. The carriage came up the driveway. Jax was in front, driving; Rillieux and Newton in the back, laughing. The carriage rolled to a halt in front of the house. Boggarts came running, to deal with the trappings and the dinosaur. The two men shook metal-gloved hands and walked over.

  “Well, that was impressive,” said Rillieux, alighting.

  “Always happy to put on a show,” said Carlos. He encircled her with an awkward iron hug.

  The man behind her stepped down and stuck out a hand. “Hi, Carlos. Good to see you again.”

  Carlos tugged off his glove and shook. “You, too, Harry. Welcome aboard.”

  Newton’s costume was a blood-stained doublet, slashed puff breeches, laddered hose and buckled shoes; he looked like a pirate who’d been in a fight—and, going by his cheerful expression, a fight he’d won.

  “I hope they didn’t give you too hard a time,” Carlos added.

  Newton’s smile faded for a moment, then came back brighter. “Nah, nah. Just boring and tense, like a long exam, know what I mean?”

  “Tell me about it,” said Carlos. “The lady here can bore for England.”

  “Oi!” Rillieux threw him a punch that stopped a centimetre short of his breastplate, like a karate-practice jab.

  “None of this physical violence, then?” Carlos asked. “No ghosts and monsters?”

  Newton looked puzzled. “No, no, course not.”

  “Glad to hear it,” said Carlos. He was momentarily perplexed by Newton’s having had better treatment than he’d had, and then it made sense. As a defector from Locke Provisos Newton had to be screened, but unlike Carlos he hadn’t brought with him the added baggage of being under suspicion of having been an agent inside the movement.

  But he wasn’t quite prepared for what happened next. Rillieux twirled to Newton, slipped her arm in his and said, “Well, let’s go inside and meet the gang.”

  And off they tripped, arm in arm.

  Carlos turned to Jax, and raised his eyebrows.

  “He’s quite a charmer,” she said.

  “So I see,” Carlos grouched.

  Jax shot Carlos a glance of amused schadenfreude, and laughed abruptly. “You told us we’d like him.”

  “Where’s Andre, by the way?” By way of changing the subject, he meant.

  “Andre went straight to the village,” said Jax. “I guess he had some frustrations he wanted to work off.”

  So much for changing the subject. Carlos watched, with an idle speculative thought in mind, the carriage being led away, then shook his head at himself and followed Jax inside.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  We Happy Few

  Andre Blum, as it turned out, didn’t come back. Asked of his whereabouts, Jax and Durward shrugged. If he wanted to skip the training sessions, that was his privilege. He was smart, a good fighter, and in any case they had no power to order him back. There was plenty to get on with, anyway, integrating the three squads that had been down on the surface of SH-17 with the one that had spent the past few subjective months in the sim.

  One morning, a fortnight after Newton’s arrival, there was enough commotion outside to distract everyone from the simulations Durward was running in the mirrors. Chairs tilted back, heads turned. The warlock sighed in exasperation and snapped his fingers to turn the mirrors off.

  “Go and gawp,” he said, in the tone of a teacher indulging unruly children. “Call it a break. Back in ten.”

  “Fifteen,” said Rillieux, who knew the burn-time of a cigarillo to the second.

  Carlos remembered fondly those quarter-hours, of her lying back against the pillow puffing smoke rings at the ceiling and talking in a lazy, dozy contented post-coital rambling way about this and that. He gave her a wry smile as he stood up with the others to head for the lawn. He was being outwardly very civilised about her and Newton. For sure he didn’t have a leg to stand on in terms of fidelity. None had been promised, or even implied. He recalled how she’d told him, in their first hungover conversation the day after he’d arrived, that relationships among the Arcane crowd were loose and casual, just as they’d been in the Acceleration subculture and later underground of his memory. Nobody was looking for long-term commitment, because the long term was unimaginable. And in the simulations, even the realistic ones like the Locke Provisos sim let alone this fantasy game-world, pregnancy and STDs weren’t even theoretical risks. There was no downside to promiscuity, and no rational basis for sexual jealousy. None of which stopped him feeling, every so often, like he wanted to batter Newton’s head in.

  Apart from that Carlos still liked the guy, and because he never let the fury show its teeth, he and Newton got on well. Newton was the only person here who showed more than minimal concern for the wellbeing of the prisoner, Baser—perhaps because he himself was responsible for its capture. He made a point, every day, of visiting the spider in the cellar, inquiring after the availability of dripping water and scurrying rats, and spending some time in conversation with it. The robot’s avatar was, he reported, quite content with its situation, and Newton sometimes spun tales of bizarre things it had said, which always raised at least a polite laugh.

  The Londoner was indeed a charmer, as Jax had said. He had a superficial persona of Cockney wit and swagger, and a serious, educated, patient demeanour when the banter stopped. Carlos’s snap diagnosis was of a bright kid who’d been bullied at school and stood up to it with jokes and sudden violence—if you can’t make them laugh, make them fear—while grinding on with his studies. Boxing lessons and midnight oil and the Church of England, that was what Carlos could see in the set of Newton’s proud shoulders and behind his bright, watchful eyes.

  Out across the gravel and the grass, on the rolled-out carpet of greensward that fell away from the house’s frontage in leisurely terraces to the wall of the estate, boggarts were busy, erecting pavilions and marquees and bivouacs and unloading supplies from the procession of dino-drawn carts that rolled up the drive from the gate to the concourse. Carlos did his bit of gawping, at the local townsfolk and peasantry, whose clothes were meaner, faces older, and manners coarser than any he’d seen in a long time. They unloaded barrels and carcasses, bales and boxes in swift, smooth swinging motions. They chewed tobacco and spat as they worked, or smoked long clay pipes (and spat) as they rested or supervised. Their teeth were abominable, their breath rank. Yet they showed no resentment of the two dozen ladies and gentlemen who stood around, some of th
em sipping coffee and smoking, in anachronistic finery gazing at their brisk toil and not offering to help. If the workers caught anyone’s eye they doffed their headgear, looked down and away and hurried on.

  “Jesus,” Salter muttered to Carlos. “Did you see that? Chap there actually tugged his forelock to me.”

  Carlos had seen the gesture, but not understood its significance.

  “Is that something from history?” he asked.

  Salter gave him an embarrassed sidelong look. “Regency romances, actually.”

  Which didn’t enlighten Carlos much, but he didn’t pursue the matter. Instead, he loudly asked what was going on, and Jax answered.

  “Didn’t you know? The reinforcements are arriving tomorrow.”

  “Missed the memo,” said Carlos.

  “Memo?” Now it was Durward’s voice, from behind. “Memo? The resupply tug has been on the mirrors for days! You’re supposed to keep track.”

  The warlock was right, of course.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Carlos said. “Sorry, must have got caught up in the tactics and didn’t see the big picture.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Jax said.

  Which remark stung, but was less embarrassing than the actual truth: that he’d been distracted by obsessing over his love life like some teenager. Time he started not just acting but thinking like a grown-up about the matter. He took a deep breath, which brought with it a sidestream waft of cigarillo smoke and didn’t help in that respect at all. He’d got to the point where a passing whiff of the smell made him randy.

  “Back to the virtual front,” declaimed the warlock.

  Carlos dashed the dregs of his coffee to the ground and turned away.

  The reinforcements arrived the following day: a dozen fighters scraped together from different companies trooped out of the grotto wall and looked about with some bewilderment at the scene they’d walked into, to say nothing of the garb they found themselves in. There was much tripping over skirts and ripping open of too-tight ruffs and collars. Still, as Rillieux commented later, the results went with the ragged, raided look. Carlos thought a dozen was too small a number to justify the feast that had been laid on to greet them and the encampment that had been built to accommodate them. He kept his mouth shut about that, but he was right.

  Over the next couple of hours another two dozen fighters turned up, in cart after cart from the town. They were all waving bottles and muskets and singing old Accelerationist songs. Blum was in the lead cart, standing at the front, looking to the back, arms waving and voice lifting and carrying, leading the singing. Fortunately he was sober at this point, but to Carlos, looking on appalled, this was only further evidence of how cynical the exercise was.

  He caught up with Blum, who seemed to be taking inordinate relish in eating rolls stuffed with pulled pork from one of several pigs roasting on boggart-turned spits, under a flapping marquee about mid-afternoon.

  “This is all kosher, you know,” Blum said, and swigged some cider. He had a half-smoked cigar behind his ear.

  “It’s not fucking kosher at all,” said Carlos.

  “Of course it is,” mumbled Blum, around a mouthful. “It’s all electricity.” He waved a hand. “We’re all electricity.”

  “But they’re our people,” said Carlos.

  “What?” Blum looked baffled.

  “The fighters. They’re just out of the box, isn’t that right?”

  “About two weeks,” said Blum, and took another complacent bite.

  “Is that what you’ve been doing all this time?”

  “Of course it is. I’ve been with them since they walked out of a portal on the far side of the town. They’ve had basic orientation, indoctrination and training.” He waved his roll. “Cliffs and ravines and shit. Proper combat training. Time off in taverns.”

  “What do you mean, proper combat?”

  “Raids on settlements, against locals shooting back.”

  “Holy fuck! Who authorised that?”

  “Durward and Jax, of course. The warlock pinpointed a village down the valley that he’s absolutely certain is all p-zombies.” Blum’s gaze wandered, then snapped back to focus. “I don’t think there are any real settlers in this sim anyway. What would be the point? Unless the Direction has planted some to keep an eye on us, so no loss anyway, right?”

  Carlos couldn’t see a way around the logic of that. He didn’t like it, though, and he had other objections.

  “What about frames? We don’t have enough for them and all the rest of us.”

  “Yes, we do,” said Blum. “The resupply tug brought even more than we need. The companies have plenty of frames, they just don’t have reliable fighters to fill them. We do. See? It’s all sorted.”

  “We won’t have time to train them properly for working in the frames and the scooters. How long is it before we go? A month, our time? You can use that up in one serious real-world session.”

  “They’ll be fine,” said Blum. “Good bunch of lads and lasses. They’ll pick up the basics just as fast as we did. Anyway, they don’t need scooters, just surface and free-fall training. They’re not here for space combat. We’ve got them assigned to invading the Locke sim.” He grinned. “Be good to them, Carlos. They’re gonna be your army.”

  “So why the fuck wasn’t I assigned to train them?”

  “Two reasons,” said Blum. “One, I know my way around the scenery, and you don’t. Yes, yes, I know you’ve been training here, running up and down cliffs and shit, but not in that neck of the woods. Which I happen to know damn well.” He glanced around, as if to check he wasn’t being overheard, and lowered his voice. “Second—and this is just my guess I should say—Jax wants to leave a bit of distance between you and them. So they don’t get too personally attached to you, in case after all you, ah, still have some lingering loyalties to anyone in the Locke sim, and you don’t get too fond of the troops, in case they have to be sacrificed. Hence, a bit of distance.”

  “Jesus fucking wept,” Carlos said, a blasphemy somewhat wasted on its recipient. “This is what I mean about not kosher. It’s not kosher to take people out of storage and throw them into combat without fucking months and months of preparation. Especially not our people.”

  Blum laughed. “I thought you were talking about pork.”

  “Pork? What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Oh boy.” Blum stared at him. “Have you got a lot to learn.”

  There was something in the way Blum said it that Carlos didn’t like. It sounded more of a challenge than a jest.

  “What do you mean?”

  The physicist looked away, then back. “You’ll find out.”

  Just how much he had to learn, Carlos found out six hours later. The sun was three-quarters of the way down the sky. High clouds flew like long purple streamers. The buzz of humming-birds was frantic as they sought the last nectar of the day. The flying monkeys sailed in silence between the treetops. Draught dinosaurs cropped in a paddock, railed off for the occasion to keep the rest of the ground clear. Carlos walked on trampled grass, eating and drinking, talking now and then with the new arrivals. The ones from the companies had varying accounts of the Reaction breakout battle. Some had no memory of it at all, their active version having been destroyed in action. The new lot, those who’d been through Blum’s intensive training and recreational carousing, were somewhat in awe of the combat veterans. Carlos tried to disillusion them. The combat hadn’t amounted to much. It was nothing like real battle with real injury and death. Everyone here had been through much worse, and shown more courage, in real life.

  Gradually he became aware of word being passed around, which he didn’t catch, and a drift towards the far end of the area of the grounds on which the varied tents had been pitched. Bottle in hand, he joined in the flow, falling in beside Rillieux and Newton. Blum was somewhere nearby.

  “What’s going on?” Carlos asked.

  “Jax wants to say something,” Newton told him.
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  They gathered on the grass beyond the tents. Away from the encampment, with its fires and tables and tents and hurrying boggarts, and the great sweep of parkland down to the wall before them, what had seemed a big and loud crowd was revealed to be a small and quiet one, just over fifty people altogether, chatting and laughing but no longer heard as an uproarious din. Jax and Durward were standing on a bench behind a trestle table on which lay a couple of ashets, a carving knife and fork and a stack of small plates and cutlery. Nearby was a pit of coals over which a boggart turned a joint on a spit. An appetising smell and the sizzle and smoke from dripping fat drifted from the roast. Everyone had already eaten their fill. It seemed gratuitous.

  Jax had her party frock on, the long green robe in which she had greeted Carlos. Her hair was up and caught in a net of fine wire and sparkles. Durward was in black trousers, white shirt and long black coat. Under the violet sky and with the blush of firelight from below and to one side the pair looked disturbingly hieratic. Jax raised her arms, the flared sleeves making a dramatic sweep. Silence fell.

  “Thank you, all, for coming together here,” Jax said. “I want to especially welcome the new arrivals, both those who have joined us from other companies and those who have just recently become part of ours. Soon we’ll all be going together into the most important fight we’ve had to date, and maybe the most important fight we’ll ever have. All of us in Arcane Disputes, and those who joined us individually—Harry Newton and Carlos here—have shown their commitment to the principles that inspired us—long ago in real time, not so long in our precious memories—to take up arms for the Acceleration. For a better future for humanity. These principles are more important than the thinkers who first put them forward. They outlive all betrayals.”