by Ken MacLeod
“Reports are coming in,” a helmeted and Kevlar-jacketed young woman on the virtual bridge of a virtual military spacecraft announced breathlessly, “of an explosion just ten kilometres away from the Arcane Disputes module. We now bring you live coverage from the scene. Over to Kevin for analysis.”
Kevin O’Toole, perched in a pillar chair on the other side of the deck, brought up pictures of a fading glow, with the lumpy machine-crusted rock of the Arcane complex in the background. Where these images came from Taransay couldn’t tell. It was clear from their low resolution that they had been gathered from some considerable distance, perhaps thousands of kilometres, and certainly not “from the scene.” Although the Locke module’s outgoing communications were still being rebuffed by firewalls, and no one was attempting to hail it, it was still perfectly capable of pulling down information from the innumerable small observation satellites and probes that the space station had liberally sown around the SH-0 system.
“Track-back indicates,” O’Toole declaimed, pointing to or drawing a straight line inward from the expanding sphere of gas and debris, “that the missile in question came from inside the module’s docking bay. No target is in the vicinity, so we must assume a test firing or—wait, what’s that? Over to you, Rosie, for the latest pictures.”
Rosie Tyler, she of the helmet and body armour, conjured a closer look. A blurry spark brightened near the source of the missile, identified as the Arcane module’s docking bay, which on this resolution was five black pixels. The spark was more sharply defined, and was followed by a flicker of other sparks as the object manoeuvred. Then came a brighter spark that quickly became a flare. It shot away, diminishing to a white dot.
“Let’s see if we can get a closer view,” said Tyler.
An image from another angle, and indeed closer, cut in. This showed an open structure in front of the flare. Swift software enhancement revealed it to be a transfer tug. Other than an indistinct chunk of material between the tug and the flare, no finer detail could be made out.
“Spectral analysis coming in!” Tyler chirped. “That’s a fusion engine flare, not the tug’s standard chemical rocket. Reaction mass appears to be loose chondrite material. Plotting the course, the tug appears to be making a beeline for SH-17 orbit. So, what do you make of this, Kevin?”
O’Toole frowned earnestly at yet more fuzzy pictures, which showed an almost Brownian motion around the docking bay’s black mouth.
“It seems to me,” he mused aloud, “that this may indicate some dissension or unauthorised activity in the Arcane Disputes camp.”
By now, everyone in the room—Taransay, Nicole, Karzan and Shaw—were looking at the screens agog.
“Wow!” Taransay shouted. “This is big!”
Nicole gave her a look, as if to say she didn’t need to be told the obvious.
“Uh…” Taransay went on, somewhat abashed, “could this have something to do with Carlos and Newton?”
The two former Locke squad leaders had already featured on the news, a few hours apart. Carlos, having defected on a stolen combat scooter during the earlier joint mobilisation that had broken up into a free-for-all, had docked at the Arcane module first. Newton, apparently grimly ploughing on with his original mission, had arrived at the small rock that was his objective and been almost immediately captured by the Arcane Disputes fighters who’d just evacuated their outpost down on SH-17. He’d then been delivered to the Arcane module in that outfit’s transfer tug. At least, that was the interpretation the blow-dries had put on the grainy evidence that had come their way.
“Too early to say,” said Nicole. “But definitely interesting. I mean, we know Carlos and Newton are solid Axle, so they should have had a warm welcome from the Arcane crowd, but who knows? To them it’s been months in there, so…” She shrugged.
“Seems to be some scooter activity going on?” Tyler nudged at O’Toole, who was still trying to get enhancements out of low-res moving images.
“Possibly,” he replied. “Going by the bulk of the objects, that seems likely, but if they’re going after the tug they have no chance of catching up—oh!”
Another spark, smaller and faster than the one before, flared and shot away.
“Looks like a missile!” O’Toole crowed. The view pulled back, showing two bright dots converging. Then the larger dot, the reaction flare of the tug, jinked to one side and brightened noticeably. The missile exploded kilometres away from it.
“Well!” said Tyler. “Now that definitely indicates some internal conflict!”
No more missiles were fired. Over the next few minutes, the objects outside the module disappeared within it, to the accompaniment of excited commentary and empty speculation from the newscasters. Nicole waved the sound down and turned to the others.
“Now that’s interesting,” she said. “Maybe our defectors have re-defected.”
She sounded hopeful.
“Should we try hailing them?” Taransay asked.
“Worth a shot,” said Nicole, scribbling.
The outline animated face of Locke—a phenomenon that Taransay, for all the weird events she’d lived through and the general bizarre character of her situation, still found deeply uncanny—manifested on Nicole’s flipchart. Writing flowed along the foot of the page.
“Already done,” Nicole relayed. “Hit the usual firewalls.”
“Doesn’t look like they’ve any intention of defecting back to us,” said Karzan.
“Of course not,” said Nicole. “Everyone out there thinks we’re Rax. Except the fucking Rax, apparently.”
They’d already seen coverage of the exodus of Rax renegades from all the agencies, a procession of combat scooters extricating themselves from the breakout battle and using—presumably—all but their last reserves of fuel to boost into an orbit that intersected that of the exomoonlet SH-119. Minute though it was on an astronomical scale, a thousand trillion tons of raw material were in that small rock. The Reaction could build their own wee world from it if they wanted. Taransay had briefly entertained the thought that this might be all they wanted: to be left alone to build their own dark utopia, some exosolar simulacrum of the Palace of Versailles, or of an antebellum plantation with robots for slaves, or an endless Valhalla. But she knew the Reaction too well to spare the thought more than a moment and a grim smile. More likely by far, they intended to build a fortress and a military base from which they could sortie at will.
She couldn’t help feeling intensely frustrated that she, and so many of her comrades who still remembered what they’d died for, and knew without any guilt or shame how they’d died, were now hurtling away from any chance of taking part in the inevitable future assault on that dire and dangerous domain. If she’d had the chance, she now thought, if only she’d known of the Arcane appeal before she was trapped in the sim, she might well have, followed Carlos’s example and done a runner for the rebel fighters’ runaway redoubt. Instead, here she was: conscripted to Beauregard’s reckless personal death-or-glory project, press-ganged aboard Beauregard’s pirate vessel, and hurtling helplessly towards, at best, a new and alien life on SH-0; at worst (and more likely) sudden fiery death in a matter of days. The Arcane Disputes modular complex, and whatever forces the Direction could muster, would have to tackle the Reaction threat without any help from her.
But hot on the heels of that thought came a surge of fury at the Direction, for its callous manipulation of the whole situation: using the robot revolt as a pretext to draw the Reaction sleepers from their lair. She could well understand the impulse that had driven Beauregard to his own revolt, and the rhetoric with which—going by the talk down the Touch—he’d a couple of nights earlier rallied the likes of Karzan and Chun and Zeroual and so many other reliable comrades to his course. The fighters had been brought back from the dead to be offered a deal: fight the rebel robots, be civilised, be nice even to p-zombies, and they’d have a place in—literally—the world to come, the future terraformed terrestrial planet
H-0. Die for the company, live for the pay—and the ultimate pay-off had been enticing enough for her, as for most of the fighters.
Now that deal was off, or at the very least unlikely to be fulfilled. Beauregard’s offer of a whole new world to conquer and colonise, and the prospect of doing and becoming something different and above all new, not just a replication of whatever humanity had achieved back in the Solar system, held better odds however slender, and a pay-off that didn’t just entice, it excited.
Yes, she could well see why folks had gone for it.
Home at last!
Baser disengaged from the stanchion and gazed fondly on its very own long-lost carbonaceous chondrite as the tug decelerated gently to connect with its surface. On this scale, you could hardly speak of a landing. The past few tens of seconds of acceleration and deceleration as they caught up with, overtook and then slowed down to match velocities with the rock had been—to Baser as much as to the humans—an impressive demonstration of what you could do in space when you had a fusion drive and a good supply of reaction mass. Everything in Baser’s factory-installed understanding of astronautics, other than the basic laws of motion and relativity, seemed quaint in the face of such lavish expenditure of delta-vee.
Baser launched itself from the tug with a somersault that brought it into contact with the surface feet-first. Already, the freebot was in contact and in synch with its auxiliaries and peripherals. The feeling was like getting limbs and senses back: indeed a whole extension of the body, which in Baser’s case enmeshed the entire rock with its local area network. The freebot now enjoyed an embrace far wider and more intimate than its frantic full-body clench around the stanchion had been. It had missed this, as much or more than it had missed communication with other freebots.
Now it was time to reopen that connection, too. In the long kiloseconds of their speedy traverse, and even in the final deciseconds of swift jolting and jinking towards contact with the rock, Baser hadn’t dared presume it was safe to do so. The only human here it trusted was Newton, though it felt a small glow of regard for Carlos for that human’s bold actions in releasing and rescuing Baser from the docking bay.
The surface of SH-17 was further below the rock’s orbit than Baser remembered. Some ablation of the chondrite’s mass—forced outgassing of subsurface volatiles, mainly—had taken place as it had been boosted and nudged to a higher orbit. From which, eventually, it would be further boosted to escape the larger exomoon’s gravity and join up with the Arcane modular complex at its intended destination, a stable position in orbit around the primary of them all, the large rocky and watery world SH-0.
Baser linked its local net with that of the Fifteen far below.
The reply, delayed a millisecond or two by the higher orbit, was otherwise immediate—and delighted.
said Baser.
At this point the conversation was interrupted by a simultaneous and incoherent cry from the humans, so discordant and intense that it was experienced by the freebots as interference.
To Carlos, it had been obvious all along that their plan of escape and defection would put a severe crimp on the carefully laid, endlessly rehearsed and drilled-for plan of the Arcane agency to (officially) divert and (unofficially) capture the runaway Locke module. That implication had been, by unspoken agreement, unspoken. If the escape had been carried out flawlessly, some emergency variant—a lash-up of scooters, a fusion drive and the agency’s original, smaller transfer tug—would no doubt have been improvised. Remington, Durward and Jax were between them plenty smart enough to work something out.
The damage left by the premature exit meant any such variant would have to be scratched. There was now every chance that the Locke module would reach SH-0 unperturbed. Carlos was still trying to come to terms with what this meant and what to do about it when Newton, Rillieux and Blum simultaneously said:
It came through as a shout, like the brayed commands with which he’d sometimes heard the Locke AI cut across babble.
Rillieux patched him a line-of-sight view.
The Arcane module and some surrounding clutter was accelerating away from the main bulk of rock to which it had been attached. Carlos’s first thought was that the module was heading their way. He drew lines across his vision to show the projected course, and realised it was going to intersect that of the Locke module.
They were all still clinging to struts and spars of the transfer tug. There was no point in going anywhere else, for the moment—their frames felt no discomfort in holding any position for however long, and no good would be served by blundering about on Baser’s rock when the freebot was busy checking things over and communicating with the freebots down on SH-17.
said Newton.
The sarge was one of the few fighters with conventional military experience, and therefore capable no doubt of pulling off some kind of coup, but Carlos was puzzled.
said Newton.
Carlos was still watching the accelerating Arcane module.
Carlos swung his viewpoint around. The spidery freebot was indeed pacing back along its rock. Then it delicately stepped across onto the tug. It continued to move, in a sudden rapid microgravity scuttle that reminded Carlos of the fights he’d been in down on SH-17, and gave him a twinge of alarm. He shared that alarm as a flashed warning, and swung his torso and arm around to match his viewpoint, and tried to lever himself to a posture where he could grab at the robot if necessary. Neither he nor the others had time to react further. The robot stopped at the transfer tug’s control area, just beside Blum, and reached—