Insurgence

by Ken MacLeod

  “At that exercise or another one, we arrange matters so that only we…we happy few are outside the sim at the same moment. We then hijack the transfer tug, fire up the fusion engine and high-tail it to SH-17. Grab Baser’s precious rock, along the way, as a token of our regard. Baser confirms our bona fides with the freebots down there, we land and join the revolution.”

  He looked around, grinning. “Easy-peasy.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Exit Strategy

  The side corridor off the main hallway was dark, the steps darker. Newton carried a lit candle in a wax-crusted saucer as he descended. Going downstairs with a candle to a cellar in which a giant spider lurked—if on top of all that he were a woman in a nightie the soundtrack would be throbbing with portent. The time was mid-evening, and the sun had almost set. Carlos, Blum, Salter and Rillieux were out on an exercise in space, from which they were due to return with the four newly drafted squads in two hours—or eight seconds, to them, albeit seconds stretched tenfold in their experience. The rest of the agency were in the big front room, finishing their dinner. Newton had left, pleading tiredness, just as the brandy began to circulate.

  When he left the banqueting room the massive mahogany grandfather clock in the main hallway stood at eight minutes to nine, or, rather, VIII minutes before IX. Neither hours nor minutes in this sim’s twenty-six-hour day, and the game it was derived from, were quite identical with those in more familiar worlds, even subjectively. But there were no watches here, so the clock would have to do. Timing was critical.

  At the foot of the stairs Newton turned left, into a narrow passageway towards the cellar under the west wing. The boggarts, wary of the spider, avoided the area. No one else had occasion to come here. Timbers creaked as the house cooled. Small scuttling noises came from behind the panelling. Newton walked briskly to the cellar, took the key down from its peg and unlocked and opened the door. A draught from the darkness within made the candle flicker, and dust particles flare in its flame. Newton shielded the candle and cocked an ear. Water dripped in the distance. There was a smell of damp plaster and old sacks.

  “Baser!” Newton whispered.

  From around the side of a pillar a few metres into the cellar, the spider extended a leg and waved it about. Then, having checked the air vibrations, Baser leaped into full view. Its cluster of eyes reflected eight dancing flames. Despite his friendly relationship with it, and the many conversations he’d had with it, the sight of the gigantic arachnid still gave Newton a chill down the back of his neck.

  “Hello again, Harry Newton,” said Baser. “I am ready.”

  The plan had been hatched weeks earlier, and the relevant parts shared with Baser shortly afterwards. There had been no good reason to let it know the exact day the plan would be implemented. Newton had made his usual daily prison visit already, just after breakfast, and told the spider that the time for action had arrived. Every move had been worked out. There would be no need for instructions from now on.

  “Let’s go,” Newton said. He backed out of the doorway and let the spider walk past him, then closed and locked the door and replaced the key, careful not to make any unnecessary noise.

  Baser walked ahead of him down the passageway and up the stairs. At the top it waited. Newton walked ahead down the side corridor, lighting the way with his candle—not that the spider needed it, but he did. At the end he blew out the candle and placed it on the floor. Then he stepped boldly into the hallway and turned to face the house doors—open as usual, and about twenty metres away. The sounds of loud conversation and the clink of glass came from the banqueting room, along with a spill of yellow light that cut across the late glimmer from the violet sunset sky that came from the doorway. Then for the more important check, towards the back of the house: boggart country.

  All clear. Newton turned and nodded to Baser, who was already exploring the air with the tip of a leg.

  The spider crept around the corner and made its way along by the skirting board, two of its legs upraised and testing the hallway wall. After a moment it found what it was looking for, and with quite alarming alacrity it shot up the wall and onto the ceiling, where it paced along upside down. Newton had known this was possible—Baser had demonstrated it in the cellar—but out here in the open and at that height the effect was almost sickeningly unreal. The adhesive qualities of its foot-tips must be wildly out of proportion. Newton guessed that a physics bodge was the ancestor of the ability: the role of giant spiders in the game was such that they had to be able to do all the things a real spider could, but scaled up, and never mind what would have been impossible for a spider of that size. Newton strolled down the hallway towards the door, not looking up or creeping—if he were discovered, he had his excuse ready, that he’d decided to go out for a breath of fresh air before turning in.

  Just before Newton reached the door of the banqueting room, a boggart came out carrying an armful of empty bottles. The clock chimed nine, making Newton jump. At the same moment, a piece of plaster from the ceiling gave way under the pull of one of the spider’s feet. The chunk dropped on the hallway floor. It didn’t make much of a thud, above all the noise coming from the room, but the sound or the glimpsed fall just after the chime was enough for the boggart to notice—and, quite naturally, to look up.

  The boggart did its infuriatingly predictable and stereotyped thing. It flung up its arms and let out an unearthly shriek. The empty bottles crashed to the floor. Some of them shattered. Broken glass skidded across the tiles. The boggart fled—unfortunately, out of the front doorway. The loud conversation inside stopped, followed by a chorus of queries. Chairs scraped, footsteps sounded.

  Newton stood stock still. He made frantic waving motions at Baser. The spider scuttled faster along the hall ceiling, and then began the perilous descent to the door lintel.

  “What the fuck!” Newton shouted. Jax appeared at the doorway a metre in front of him, about to step through. Others—Lamont, Singer and, most worryingly, Durward—crowded just behind her.

  “Careful!” Newton said, raising a warning hand. “There’s broken glass all over the place.”

  Jax raised a hem and took a tiptoeing step or two into the hall, looking down, then lowered her soles carefully and turned to Newton.

  “What’s happened? I thought you’d gone to bed.”

  Newton kept his gaze firmly on Jax, and not on Baser’s painfully slow progress. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the spider suspended below the lintel, three legs still attached on the inside wall and the others probing and groping outside, its black shape clearly silhouetted against the evening sky.

  “Fuck knows,” said Newton. “I was on my way to bed, and then decided to have a quick stroll and catch the sunset. But I’d already loosened my boots, and I stopped to tighten the laces. The boggart must have seen me in the half-light down on one knee and its spider reflex kicked in. Bloody thing gave me a start.” He pointed at the scattered shards. “Can you whistle up some more of the buggers and get them to sweep up the mess? It’s not safe to walk out here.”

  Jax looked along the hallway floor. Her gaze snagged on the fallen plaster. Just as automatically as the boggart had, she looked up at the ceiling and saw the ragged hole.

  “Something fell,” she said. “That’s odd.” She gave Newton a sharp look. “Didn’t you notice?”

  Newton shook his head.

  “Must have fallen while I was upstairs, or while I had my head down,” he said, risking a glance over Jax’s shoulder.

  He suppressed a sigh of relief as Baser’s last leg vanished from the top of the doorway. All the spider had to do now was scuttle unseen up the wall and lurk behind a chimney or battlement until just before the troops were due to emerge from the grotto. Then it could proceed under cover of darkness to the bushes near the arch, wait until all twenty-eight had marched out of the wall, and then nip smartly through before the portal closed. It should then find itself in its robot body in the docking bay. Hopefully
, Carlos would have by then slackened the bonds in which it had been stowed, and Baser could escape and set about stashing itself inconspicuously on the transfer tug. That vehicle was a spindly and spidery apparatus in its own right, with plenty of containers and attachments for bulk transport. A stowaway robot had a good chance of passing unnoticed, or even—if it folded itself cleverly enough—being mistaken for some random gubbins that everyone assumed someone else knew about. The robot had sensors to warn it of surveillance sweeps, which in and around the docking bay were almost certainly infrequent and intermittent.

  Just as he was about to crack some comment about the clock’s chimes having loosened the patch of plaster, a piercing shriek came from outside. A second later, other boggarts joined in, making an unholy cacophony.

  “Fucking hell, what’s all that about?” Jax asked, staring out along the hallway. Other heads craned around the room door.

  The answer came almost before she’d finished asking. The boggarts’ panicked screams became articulate yells, which were taken up and amplified by those in the dining room. Even with their strange, strained voices and the distortion of the hall’s echoes, the burden of their protest was all too clear:

  “Spider! Spider!”

  “Holy shit!” Jax gave Newton a dark suspicious look, and a snapped order: “Go and see if your pet has escaped.” She whipped around to those still inside the room. “Everyone else—out of the French windows, now!”

  She stepped back into the hall, with a parting glare at Newton, and shooed a surge of the squad across the floor and past the table. Newton raced back the way he had come, thundered to the foot of the stairs in total darkness, then struck a match and found the candle on the shelf. It was still warm. He hastily lit it again, raised it and gave a perfunctory glance down the passageway to the cellar door—still locked and the key still on its hook, not surprisingly but worth checking just in case of some freakish event—and carried the candle in its saucer up the stairs. He wet his fingertips, pinched the candle out and left it against the wall on the top step.

  He strode into the dining hall, where a huddle of boggarts crowded against the fireplace.

  “Clear up the broken glass in the hall,” he ordered.

  The boggarts rushed past him. They were barely through the door when thuds and curses came the other way. Newton caught a glimpse of Durward hurdling the boggarts as he hurtled past, then heard the thunder of the warlock’s feet going upstairs. Newton went around the deserted dining tables and out onto the gravel. A knot of fighters had gathered around Jax and were gazing at the roof. Others, some bearing muskets, were spreading out to form a loose cordon on the first lawn, between the house and the tents. Newton hastened to Jax.

  “Cellar’s locked,” he said. “And there’s no other way out.”

  Jax pointed at the roof. “You mean there’s another spider on the loose?”

  Newton peered upward. It was hard to make anything out in the low light. Then he spotted a shadow move, and saw Baser scramble up the sloping tiles. For a moment its great body was skylined. Then it disappeared over the apex.

  “Shit!” someone shouted. “Round the back!”

  The cordon rushed off in both directions, around the sides of the house. Durward appeared at the front door, clutching his blunderbuss.

  “It’s gone over to the back!” Jax called. Durward sped off to the right, gravel flying from under his feet as he rounded the corner.

  Dinosaurs jogged back and forth in their paddock, sniffing the air and uttering high-pitched, resonant nasal sounds. Here and there an isolated boggart had another fit of the vapours. Jax turned to those around her: Lamont, Singer, Paulos, Voronov, others.

  “Go and grab some muskets! It might come back to this side.”

  “Hey, wait,” said Newton. “If that’s Baser, I don’t want it shot!”

  “And I don’t want it getting away,” said Jax. “Fuck knows what it could get up to out in the wild.”

  Newton was immensely relieved she was thinking along those lines, but thought it best to show scepticism. “Like what—raise an army of spiders?”

  “Like I say—fuck knows!”

  Jax motioned to the others impatiently. They ran off.

  “And even if it is just an in-game spider, and Baser’s still locked up and happily eating rats downstairs, it could still be a huge nuisance.”

  “As we’ve seen,” said Newton. “Yes, indeed, we can’t have one of these blighters running around scaring the livestock.”

  Yells came faintly from the back of the house. There was another rush, this time the other way, Durward at the head. He sprinted away from the corner he’d vanished around and stopped at the edge of the gravel and turned, aiming his gun high.

  Baser reappeared, teetering between chimney stacks, and slid down a roof ridge to a dormer. It vanished for a moment and then popped up from behind a parapet a few metres to the side. From there it leapt into the air, sailing on a downward parabola. Durward swung his gun as if shooting at a clay pigeon, and fired. The blast was horrendous, the flash dazzling, the recoil almost knocking the warlock back. Upper windows crashed. The tinkles and echoes and after-images were still on the air as Newton peered anxiously for the result. A black lump had hit the gravel a few metres behind Durward.

  Durward whirled, reversed his grip on the blunderbuss and raised it high. The black lump suddenly rose on what seemed like fewer legs than the full complement and darted for the shrubbery. Durward ran after it, but it evaded him and scurried into darkness and undergrowth. Durward stopped, and lowered the blunderbuss to his shoulder.

  Then he smote his forehead and shouted across to Jax: “It’s going for the grotto! The portal’s open!”

  “What?” Jax had a moment of bewilderment, then light dawned. “Then close it!” she called back. Durward spun around and dashed for the French windows. In a moment he’d be casting invocations in his magic mirrors.

  “I’ll try to catch it!” Newton yelled, over his shoulder at Jax—one last throw of misdirection—as he sprinted for the grove that contained the grotto.

  He barged through the gateway and ran down the narrow, slippery path. Low light, long shadows. The grotto’s rocks glowed rosy in the last sunlight. Ahead of him, something scuttled. Baser, two or more legs blasted away, was racing gamely to the stone arch.

  “Wait! Stop!” Newton shouted.

  Then he thought—why? He’d been thinking in terms of the spider’s still being in with a chance to carry out the plan—to hide out until the returning fighters had come through the portal, and then nip through before it closed. This was now out of the question.

  Baser must have concluded the same, by its faster robot or cunning arachnid reasoning. It ran straight for the stone arch and vanished into the rock.

  Newton paused for a moment, drawing breath. He could still wing it. He could still bluff his way out of this. Carlos could deny all knowledge of the robot’s slackened bonds. There were several false trails he could send Jax down. They’d have to give up on taking Baser, but that could be finessed. Having the robot with them would have been very useful, but it wasn’t essential. Between them, he and Carlos and Rillieux and Blum could cook up a variant of their long-term plan, and still carry it out.

  No. Not while under suspicion, they couldn’t. Everything about that plan had hinged on surprise.

  Newton put his head down and charged straight for the solid rock.

  Carlos drifted, with the practised ease of an astronaut on an early space station, down the awkward, cluttered space of the docking bay. Six frames, moving less expertly, made a ragged queue that began a few metres behind him. The squad from the new levy of Arcane Disputes fighters, the ones who’d had their initial training from Blum, had just completed their first space exercise, on the surface of the chunk of rubble attached to the module and its cluster.

  A couple of tethered scooters left Carlos barely enough room to dart between them. He swung his view to see straight behind him. The
nearest fighter was blundering so much he wasn’t even in Carlos’s line of sight. Carlos turned his view ahead. Dozens of vacant frames were crowded at the back of the bay, magnetic feet passively holding them to the bulkhead, racked like ninepins. Carlos emerged from between the scooters and shoved sideways. There it was: the captive robot, shoved against the bulkhead and held in place by a light magnetic clamp. Twice as long as his frame, the robot looked like a cross between a closed umbrella and a mechanical octopus trussed in spun monofilament cable. Impossible to cut with anything short of a laser, and he didn’t have a laser to hand. Carlos scrabbled to undo the knots, mentally adding “Boy Scouts” to his roster of Newton’s likely background influences. Through the lashed legs he could feel the faint vibration of the fighter behind him struggling through the narrow gap and bumping into one chassis then another. He untied the complex knot with tenths of a second to spare. The cable remained wrapped around the robot’s limbs, giving nothing away to casual inspection, but the coils could now be worked free, and the magnetic clamp would come away at a good push.

  Carlos shoved away from the side of the docking bay and gripped a nearby duct. From there he reached out and caught the arm of the fighter just emerging from the gap between the scooters, and guided the frame with a deft push to the area where they usually downloaded and where the currently vacant frames stood.

 

  The fighter attempted a roll to get their feet in position, came out of the somersault at the wrong moment, starfished, flailed and managed to grab hold of a line. Not exactly procedure, nor good practice. Carlos checked on his internal display that the line wasn’t loose and was insulated. Good.