by Ken MacLeod
He reached out to catch anything to stabilise himself, and inadvertently grabbed a loop of the cable now wrapped loosely around the robot. To his dismay, the loops below it unravelled. Carlos caught the free end and stuffed it in between two of the robot’s manipulators. At the same moment, a tiny monitor light came on, red and beady like a lab rat’s eye.
Baser had uploaded.
Shit! This wasn’t supposed to happen! The spider was supposed to wait until all the squads had returned to the sim. It must have misjudged matters somehow. Carlos moved to shield the tell-tale light, and reached to rotate it out of view. Baser’s limbs twitched and flexed. Manipulative mechanisms at their ends tugged at the coil.
Carlos tried hailing the machine on the common channel, in the hope that no one else was on there at the moment—they shouldn’t be, they were all on Arcane’s internal channel.
Another message clashed across his transmission.
As ever in the frame, he knew the source of the message without quite knowing how. It was like recognising a voice, though there was no voice.
As if by way of reply, a frame sprang, suddenly animated, from the close-packed huddle on the rear bulkhead. Another fighter was coming through from between the scooters. Newton skimmed past that fighter and grabbed hold of a scooter’s landing runner. With the other hand he grasped hands with the next one to come through, and sent them spinning and caroming.
Newton launched himself into the gap.
Carlos braced himself, tugged the still bound robot free from the magnetic clamp, and sent it like a bulky javelin towards the gap. He followed, shoving the robot’s feet and guiding it through the gap while fending himself off the sides. The other squads were coming in from outside, shepherded by Rillieux, Salter and Blum. Newton sharked between tumbling, colliding fighters.
The Arcane Disputes AI, Raya Remington, broke in on the agency channel. The message irresistibly conveyed an impression of that now-familiar avatar’s dry, feminine voice.
Consternation rang in the comms circuits: Salter’s surprise genuine, Bobbie Rillieux’s and Andre Blum’s fake. The trainees were too busy trying to orientate themselves to do more than utter inarticulate and unhelpful variants of
And yet—
Any further hesitation was precluded by a convulsive surge of trainee fighters. They made a heroic effort to find their space legs, and out of the resulting chaotic collisions five of them managed to grab Newton and two snatched at Baser. One of the latter managed to catch hold of the now trailing end of the cable, and pulled.
Just the opportunity the robot needed—it spun around like a whirling top, and escaped the coils in less than a second. Still spinning, it struck against the side of a scooter and instantly grabbed hold of a weapons rack. Stabilised now, it hunkered down and then straightened all its limbs at once, shooting diagonally forward through the fray like a jetting octopus.
Newton struggled, but having one opponent for each limb and another with an arm clamped around his head made his efforts futile.
Not after naming us, you’re not, Carlos thought. None of us are.
Somebody drifting by made a grab for Carlos. Carlos surprised them with a gas-jet-powered roll and a kick that sent the fighter head over heels. Carlos thrust forward, catching hold en passant of the cable that Baser had extricated itself from, still turning and turning in lazy loops in the near-vacuum and microgravity. He slammed into the clot of fighters around Newton, reversed orientation, braced his feet on someone’s back and looped the cable around someone else’s head and hauled. In a human body it would have been a garrotting. In the frame, it was a sudden backward wrench. Carlos ducked under the thrown fighter, who sailed away behind him. Then he prised another’s arm from Newton’s head and shoved. The fighter lost their grip and drifted, flailing. Carlos knew he had only moments before the fighter thought to use their gas-jets. He tried to make the most of his time, and kicked and shoved at the others still clinging to Newton, who was now putting up a better fight of his own. It was hopeless. As soon as one hand had been dislodged, another clamped on somewhere else, or the trainee fighter concerned got a better control of their gas-jets, broke free and plunged in again. The net effect was that the whole mass of struggling frames spun faster and faster, further disorienting all involved.
Then a dozen small maintenance bots shot in from the sides of the docking bay and crashed into the swirling ball of flailing limbs. Carlos saw one right in front of him, and was about to brush it away when he saw that it was pushing an attacker’s hand away from Newton’s ankle. The others were similarly engaged, and in a second or two Carlos and Newton broke free.
Carlos stabilised himself and jetted forward, with Newton close behind. Baser, now clinging to a scooter up ahead, waved a beckoning limb. Maintenance bots swarmed towards it, some scuttling crabwise with magnetic feet on the sides of the docking bay, others jetting or hurling themselves in free space. Carlos had a moment of alarm until he saw the first to reach Baser deploy themselves defensively around the freebot. Evidently Baser’s signals had overridden whatever control, if any, was coming from Arcane’s own machinery. In effect the bots were, at least for now, Baser’s remote limbs.
Over his shoulder, Carlos saw the trainee fighters begin to regroup. In the open space behind Baser’s stand at the scooter, Blum and Rillieux were jetting for the exit. Salter had taken up a position on another scooter, opposite to Baser and closer to the exit. Carlos tried to hail her, and was rebuffed by a firewall through which he caught a glimpse of a flood of encrypted orders. He guessed these were responsible for the trainees’ improved coordination. Salter was taking control of the situation and the trainees, almost as closely as Baser was running its bots.
And Salter’s direction wasn’t just aiding those behind him, Carlos saw. Two laggard trainees near the exit were poised to jump at Rillieux and Blum, cutting off their escape route.
By now, Carlos and Newton had joined Baser inside the ring of bots around and on the side of the scooter. They grabbed flanges and edges and hunkered down. Towards the rear of the bay, the trainees formed up and began to advance. At almost the same moment, the trainees up in front suddenly threw aside their hitherto
assailing bots. The bots that had bristled to protect Baser turned around and marched or jetted towards the escapees instead.
Carlos lashed at the bots with his fists and shot an indignant query at Baser.
No shit, genius. And easier said than done. The bots were already swarming all over him.
Newton pointed. Salter and her two adjacent trainees had jetted to the sides and spaced out, forming a rough triangle of threatened interception against anyone going for the exit. Between them, if they jetted off now, Carlos and Newton and Baser could rush it, but they wouldn’t all get through.
Newton kicked at the side of the scooter to crush a crab-like bot that had latched onto his foot, then reached up to the missile slung just above him and hooked his elbow around it. With a convulsive heave he wrenched his other foot free of another bot and wrapped his arms and legs around the missile.
The laconic statement was followed by a burst of machine code. Newton was taking control of the missile. Surely he didn’t plan to escape on it?
Too late.
Everything went white. It took a full two seconds for Carlos’s overloaded senses to recover. A straight red trail—possibly an after-image, or a machine analogue thereof—projected out of the docking bay and into space. The shards of Salter’s frame eddied among those of her two trainees, buffeted this way and that by random discharges of compressed gas from shattered components. Towards the back, the other trainees were blowing about like leaves, some of their frames half melted, others merely scorched, all uncoordinated. Just beyond the docking bay, the foremost part of the spindly structure of the transfer tug hove slowly into view, and with it Rillieux’s and Blum’s radio presence.
Rillieux’s anguished call rang in Carlos’s sensorium like a scream:
As if in answer, the missile exploded, a sudden white-hot expanding sphere ten kilometres away.
Carlos could guess what Newton had done, if not yet quite why. If Newton had been the one who didn’t get past Salter and the other two guardians of the exit, or if the Arcane Disputes AI threw the four dodgy characters into sleep mode and the trainees or the bots rolled them to the back of the bay, or he was otherwise recaptured, he’d be downloaded back to the sim from which he’d just escaped. But Newton was in his own frame, the one he’d arrived in from Locke Provisos. By destroying that frame, he ensured that it was the back-up of himself in the Locke Provisos sim that revived. The version of Newton that—instants from now—woke up on the bus from the spaceport would, of course, have no memory of anything since Newton had set forth on the great offensive with the rest—but Newton evidently reckoned that losing a few subjective weeks of his life, and with them the loss of the future he’d planned with his three co-conspirators, was a lower cost than whatever awaited him back in the sim.
It occurred to Carlos that he too was now in his own frame. The same exit strategy was available to him, if only he could get himself destroyed before he was toggled into sleep mode. But in his case, the thought of being back in the Locke Provisos sim was intolerable. Even leaving aside losing the memories of the recent past and the hopes for the immediate future, which he wasn’t as ready to discount as Newton apparently was, Carlos wasn’t about to bet his soul on the goodness of Nicole Pascal. On the other hand, he could find himself at any moment now experiencing the full wrath and curiosity of a doubtless furious and perplexed Jax Digby.
Decisions, decisions…
But for now at least, the way ahead was clear. One good spring would take him and Baser out of the docking bay and onto the transfer tug. He rallied the robot, and together they crouched to leap.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Torching
Newton felt as much as saw the explosion about one kilometre away from him. The expanding shockwave spheres of gas rang on his frame. Debris the size of sand grains and faster than bullets peppered and stung him on one side. The shockwave passed. Numerous pits glowed and smoked on his black shell like tiny craters. He’d expended almost all the gas in his jets in frantic deceleration from the moment he’d hurled himself clear of the missile. With some of the little he had left, and with his gyros, he’d spun himself into a feet-first position to minimise impacts. He now drifted forward to the waning glow of the explosion, as if sliding helplessly downhill. His sideways momentum would carry him on a diagonal through its outer region, but that still carried a risk of random debris.
Nevertheless, he felt triumphant. He’d just pulled off the riskiest exploit of his existence to date. (Except, presumably, the one that had killed him.) And he’d done it shoulder to shoulder with three fighters and one robot who’d never have gone along with him if they’d known his true aims. The others wanted to be part of the freebot revolt. Newton wanted to be a robot, to live that postmortal life to the fullest, and the fate of the rest of the robots depended entirely on how they contributed to his purpose.
He looked up, back along his trajectory. The Arcane modular complex docking bay was a fiery frenzy of activity inside, which he couldn’t make out distinctly. His unorthodox exit had left a very gratifying chaos in its wake. The transfer tug, floating just outside, already had two fighters on it. Even at this distance, the software of Newton’s frame recognised them as Rillieux and Blum. A moment later, Carlos—clutching a bundle which Newton assumed was Baser—sailed out of the docking bay and was hauled aboard.
Newton hailed them at once.
Newton felt almost hurt. What did they take him for?
The tug swung around and jetted towards him; fired retros, and matched velocities. An inelegant object, like a collision of scaffolding and stepladders, with a great lump of chondrite rubble lashed on and leaving little room for the three fighters already clinging to whatever they could. Baser was wrapped angularly around a stanchion like a dried-up spider on a pin. A cable shot forth, precisely aimed. Newton grabbed it and was reeled in. He caught one of the bars of the tug’s open framework, and braced himself against another.
There was no time for explanations or greetings. A scooter emerged from the docking bay, fired up and headed straight for them.
Acceleration was instant and brutal. Even braced against spars and holding on with a locking grip, Newton felt jarred from heel to head as if he’d been dropped from a great height. Seconds later, all their radar senses rang warning.
The fusion torch cut out, and a lateral chemical jet flared from just under Newton’s foot. He found himself almost wrenched inward. Then that acceleration too cut out, and they were in free fall. The missile missed them by five kilometres.
Blum took them through an intricate dance of reorientation, their view a whirl of spinning stars.
This time, the acceleration was less intense. Behind them the Arcane modular complex dwindled. Nothing more came from it. No wonder, Newton thought. They’d have enough on their plate dealing with the mess in the docking bay, and salvaging from it what they could.
By late afternoon the day after Taransay and Shaw had come down from the mountain, Nicole Pascal’s f
ront room, the one she used as her studio, was a tip. Taransay had watched the entropic process since she’d returned from lunch with Beauregard the previous day, and mucked in in her own way by running errands and keeping the coffee flowing. The paintings and drawings through which Nicole interacted with the hardware and software of the modular complex were stacked against the wall, or heaped in corners, in no order anyone but Nicole could discern. Torn-off sheets of flipchart paper littered the floor, leaving little space for the crumpled grease-proof kebab wrappings, crushed drinks cans and overflowing ashtrays that supplied a Sisyphean labour to the cleaning robot, by now a twitching, haggard reminder of its former precise and pernickety self. The room stank of sweat, male and female, and of stale and fresh cigarette smoke. That was the worst. Nicole chain-smoked; Maryam Karzan, who stomped in every so often and poked around and asked questions as if she were Beauregard’s representative on Earth (so to speak), did the same whenever she was nervous, which was all the time.
Meanwhile the screens all around the walls yammered away. Knowing that the presenters weren’t real—even in the virtual sense that everything and everyone else here was—made their quirks and preening all the more irritating. The system had to have avatars, Taransay could accept that, but why the hell did they have to model them on airhead blow-dry newscast blowhards? She sometimes wondered if she could ask Nicole to ask Locke to modify the representation, and then she’d hold back because Nicole was so frantically busy flying the ship (by now, thanks to these very presenters, Taransay couldn’t think of it any other way) that the request seemed too petty to bother the lady with.
The near-collisions with various rocks had stopped. The return of the Arcane fighters from the SH-17 surface, their capture of Newton en route, and the arrival of a resupply tug from a grouping of company modules among the scattered components of the space station had all been analysed to death. Now the newscasters were getting worked up about something going on around the Arcane Disputes modular complex, which was still making its stately way to a stable orbital position around SH-0, one that gave it a commanding strategic location vis-à-vis the freebot stronghold on the exomoon SH-17.