by Ken MacLeod
Oblivion fell on Carlos like a net.
Oblivion fell on Newton too, along with all the rest, but that couldn’t be helped: sleep mode was an indiscriminating feature of the tug. Now Baser found itself with nothing but the tiny dim minds of its bot swarm for company. It had cut off its contact with Seba. The time for debate was over. The time for decision had come.
Baser and Seba, keeping track of the clunky conversation of the mechanoids with small fractions of their own swifter and sharper minds, had themselves been unable to agree. Seba’s concern was with the plight of the freebots on SH-119 under the Reaction—together with, on its part, the danger of breaking neutrality. Baser had been unable to win Seba over to its—and Newton’s—case, and had instead acted unilaterally.
The hasty, urgent argument over, Baser could more objectively consider Seba’s point. If freebots were indeed being mistreated by the Reaction, aiding what might be a Reaction project was treason to the freebot cause. On the other hand, Newton had doubted that the Locke module was Rax at all. Baser weighed the probabilities, and decided to go with Newton’s judgement. That mechanoid was, after all, the only one that had ever given the freebot any reason to trust it, or to take it at its word.
The decision gave Baser pause, and a resonant negative cycle of low-level negative reinforcement that it knew would only grow as time went on. But a decision it was.
Its mind firmly made up, its die cast, Baser set its bot swarm to work on the rock, and on the plan to save the Locke module that Newton had just outlined, and that Baser and Newton had long since furtively agreed in the quiet and dark of the cellar. Meanwhile, and for the foreseeable future, Baser kept all comms off.
Explanations and justifications could come later.
Taransay’s lover, Den, shook her awake while it was still dark. She had a headache and she needed a pee. That had been some night in the Touch. The general tension, her exhaustion with working at Nicole’s place and the wild speculation about what was going on with Arcane, were her only excuses. Den, as always grave beyond his apparent years, had kept her out of mischief and was now standing at the bedside with a steaming mug of coffee.
“Wha—?”
“Lady called for you,” Den said.
Taransay sat bolt upright. “When?”
“Fifteen minutes ago.”
“Shit! Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“This is me waking you up,” Den chided. “Don’t worry, the lady knows where you’ve been.”
Taransay mumbled something, went to the bathroom, washed her hands and splashed her face, and returned to sit on the side of the bed and sip coffee. Den had sensibly slid back under the duvet, and gone straight to sleep. Dead supportive. Mind you, it wasn’t that she needed an escort to Nicole’s place. Say what you like about the resort, the streets were safe at night.
As if any of that mattered to ghosts. Oh well.
Taransay climbed into her clothes, kissed Den’s oblivious forehead and set out. Starlight and ringlight, and the black sigh of the sea on the beach. Ten minutes’ brisk walk cleared her head and brought her to Nicole’s bungalow. The door was open, the lights were on and the television walls shouting.
Beauregard was there, haggard but not hungover, probably still drunk. Nicole paced, smoking. She had room to walk about, Taransay guessed, because with only Shaw and Nicole here earlier the tidying-robot had seen its chance and taken it. Shaw sat on an armchair, red-eyed but alert. He obviously hadn’t had any sleep and as obviously didn’t mind. Bastard could no doubt meditate his way around the need for REM sleep for as long as it took.
“What’s up?” Taransay asked.
“Arcane module.” Nicole pointed at a screenful of looming but low-res—and therefore still distant—menace. “It’s torching.”
“Torching?” Taransay peered at the screen.
“As in, ignited its fusion drive,” Beauregard explained. “And it’s coming straight for us.”
“Or, rather,” said Nicole, stubbing her cigarette savagely, “for where we’re going to be in about five hours.”
“How can they do that?” Taransay asked.
“They have reaction mass to burn, literally,” said Nicole. “They’ve bitten off a chunk of the chondrite or whatever it is the freebots kindly sent their way, and they’re extracting hydrogen from it for fuel and using the rest as reaction mass to drive the entire module straight across.”
“Pretty reckless if you ask me,” said Shaw.
“Nobody’s asking you,” Nicole snapped.
“Reckless but understandable if you’re in a hurry,” said Beauregard. “Brute-force solution.”
“The Direction won’t like that,” said Taransay. “Don’t they kind of frown on profligate use of unstudied rock?”
“The Direction can frown all they fucking like,” said Beauregard. “Without troops they can’t stop it, and they—or at least the remaining agencies in the space station remnants—seem to have sent all their spare troops to Arcane.”
“Which strongly suggests to me,” said Nicole, “that Arcane Disputes has the Direction’s approval for what it’s doing. Presumably the original plan would have been to bring fighters and scooters to intercept us during one of our slingshots. But what’s thrown that plan out the window is that someone has made off with their transfer tug, and the extra fusion engine with it. Right now they’ve landed on some piddly little rock in high orbit around SH-17. They could land on SH-17 at any time, of course, so it’s not at all clear what they’re up to. But, in the meantime, Arcane has come up with a plan B. They’re using the module’s own fusion engine to drive the entire module—well, the module minus the stuff they’ve left behind on the remaining chunk of rock.”
“But with that kind of manoeuvrability,” Taransay said, appalled, “they can run rings round us. And they’re bringing everything they’ve got—far more frames and scooters than we have. They could break us up, board us—”
“More likely,” said Shaw, “they intend to clip our wings. Literally, almost. Make it impossible for us to land on the superhabitable. Probably force us into an orbit where we can be safely left to rot.”
“Indeed,” said Nicole. She lit another cigarette. “So now we have to decide.”
“Decide what?” Beauregard asked. “There’s no decision to make.”
“There always is,” said Nicole, mildly. “Think about it. If Arcane is now back in the Direction’s good books, even if only for the moment, we can assume that however inept we may think the Direction’s strategy is, it is at least the Direction’s. It has not been suborned by the Reaction. An Accelerationist stronghold is willing to work with it, which is further evidence on that score. They’re evidently about to attack us under the conviction that we are a stronghold of the Reaction. Another point in their favour, funnily enough! So we do have a decision to make. We can fight, or we can surrender. And one thing I think it is safe to say: we can safely surrender.”
“How?” Beauregard demanded. “How the hell can we surrender if the Direction is screening out all our messages as Reaction disinformation or malware attacks?”
“We could manufacture and display a very large white flag,” said Shaw sarcastically. “That usually does the trick.”
“Bullshit!” Beauregard snapped. “They’d still see that as a ploy. And we’d still have to negotiate, and to do that we’d have to communicate.”
“There may be a way,” said Nicole, looking mysterious.
“What?” asked Beauregard. “You’ve had a backdoor—all this time?”
Nicole shook her head. “No, but if I and the Locke AI were to throw…all that we have into the task, we could perhaps create one in time.”
“Which would mean,” said Beauregard, “that you’d have no resources to spare for anything else. Such as, for example, defence.”
“This is true,” said Nicole. “That is why the decision has to be
made now.”
Taransay looked from Nicole to Beauregard. The lady seemed resigned, the sarge resolute. But their gazes were locked, as if they were elbow-wrestling on some invisible plane. Eventually, something between them gave way.
“Well, it’s made,” said Beauregard. “We’re not going back to all that. We fight, and we land. As soon as possible, and whatever it takes.”
“Even if that means burning our bridges?” Nicole’s cheek quirked. “In an almost literal sense.”
“Like I said.” Beauregard’s voice was harsh and firm. “Whatever it takes.”
Nicole’s expression seemed to lighten, now that the die was cast.
“All right,” she said. She turned to Taransay. “Get ready to go topside.”
“To do what?” Taransay cried. “We have, what, ten frames? And six scooters. We can’t fight Arcane with that!”
“Fight Arcane? Yes, in the last resort. But our main objective is to flee. You must get ready to go outside and strip away everything we don’t need to make a landing and a viable start. All but these essentials, we jettison or feed into the drive.”
Taransay stared. “What? But we were going to build landing craft in orbit! That was the plan, wasn’t it?”
“We have no time now for that,” said Nicole. “No time for that or anything else. No design time, no manufacturing time. No time for fuel-saving, fusion-frugal transfer orbits and slingshot trajectories. All we can do is throw everything into getting to SH-0 orbit as fast as possible, and then to get down to the surface with as much as possible.” She smiled thinly. “I and Locke can optimise that and instruct you as to what to do. Beauregard I need here, to be the human in the loop of any combat decisions I have to take.”
“You’ve had Shaw to do that up to now,” Taransay objected. “I’m just a grunt, I’ve never given an order. And I don’t want to go out there and face any fighting without the sarge.”
Beauregard acknowledged her confidence in him with an ironic smile and nod.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll find you can lead a squad all right. And I’ll still be there. A voice in your head, in real time. When has it ever been anything else?”
Taransay thought about this. It still wasn’t the same as him having her back, but…
“OK,” she said. “I still don’t see why Shaw can’t be the one who stays here.”
Shaw spoke up. “I can tell you. One, any military skills of mine have rusted in the past thousand years, whether these years were real or not. I wouldn’t really be making decisions, the lady would. In effect she would be in command. And Locke wouldn’t stand for that. It has the inhibition against letting AIs and robots command fighters pretty much hard-wired. And in any case, I’m not sure it or the lady regard me as human any more within the meaning of the act.”
Taransay ignored the bleakness that had come over Shaw’s face as he said that.
“All right,” she said. “So what do I do?”
“Choose nine fighters you know are reliable. Start with what remains of your own squad. Then any you know and trust from the others, or ones they can vouch for. Tell us now.”
“Off the top of my head,” said Taransay, “I want Karzan, Chun, Zeroual. Then Myles, Sholokhova, al-Khalid, and—ah, I don’t know! We didn’t have enough time together to be sure.”
Nicole looked abstracted for a moment. “Would Powys, St-Louis and Wolfe be acceptable?”
“I don’t know them, but if you say so—”
“That’ll do,” said Nicole. “Fine. Now run for the bus. There’s not another moment to lose.”
“But what about the others?”
Nicole reached for her phone. “I’ll rouse them all now. Simultaneously.” She paused, the device halfway to her mouth. “You may not wish to watch.”
Taransay took the hint and ran. She pelted down the grassy slope from Nicole’s house to the main drag, and then along to Ichthyoid Square. The bus was already starting up, at the far end of the street. Taransay waited, staring out at the ringlit sea and jumping up and down with impatience and the chill. The others arrived in ones and twos, some still in sleepwear, all with sleep in their eyes. After ten minutes everyone was aboard. The bus set off, up into the familiar hills. They’d all got a briefing from Nicole—the same briefing, at the same time. Taransay talked it over, and assured everyone that the details would be obvious once they’d uploaded to the frames. Silence fell as they all mulled over the tasks ahead.
After a while Taransay looked over her shoulder at the fighters. Half of them had gone back to sleep. She smiled and settled down herself. There was no point in trying to stay awake. The bus, as ever, would make sure of that. The blackness took her within minutes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Arcane Attacks
For the first time, Taransay felt disoriented when she found herself awake—and more than awake—in the frame. She wasn’t standing in the familiar hangar with the others, neatly lined up like a row of pawns. Instead, she was slowly revolving, facing the sky with an odd pre-Copernican conviction that it was revolving around her. She looked towards her feet, and saw that a light carbon-fibre rope was tied around her waist. No way was this how the frame had been kept in place over the past couple of days—the modular complex’s sharp accelerations as it dodged incoming would long since have battered the frame to bits.
Nevertheless, here she was, spinning on the end of a tether like an olden-days space-walker. The others, whose presence she sensed without seeing and without knowing quite how, were in the same situation. Four on one side of her, five on the other. She could actually tell that their heads were going around and around, and whose heads were whose. She had a mental image of birthday-cake candles on paper boats, swirling around a vortex. Where had that come from?
If she’d had eyes, she’d have closed them and shaken her head. As it was, she used her compressed-gas-jets to stop the spin.
They all did.
She accomplished this with a careful combination of using the gas-jets and grasping the rope. The modular complex was about twenty metres away, shockingly small compared to the space station of which it had been a part, looming large like a rock-face in the view of the half-metre-tall frames that hung in space before it. The various components of it would have been confusing to her human eyes, impossible to take in at a glance. In the frame, it was all as easy to comprehend as a well-labelled diagram.
First was the module itself, the hard core of the agency’s physical presence and the substrate on which its virtual world and business activities ran. This was a rocky fist of carbon crystal—you couldn’t quite call it diamond—veined and tendoned with fullerene pipework and cables, and fuzzy with nanofacturing surfaces. Subtle irregularities in these surfaces threw, from certain angles, a hologram of the company logo. Taransay glared balefully for a moment at the stylised face of John Locke. She still didn’t trust the Locke AI, and she had a dark suspicion that the predicament the good folk of this system found themselves in stemmed from some deep flaw in the thinking of Locke’s original and namesake.
As if in response to her thought—and she could never be sure it wasn’t—the silky voice analogue of the Locke AI spoke in her head.
Hand over hand, jet-burst by burst, they complied, spreading out across the face of the modular complex. Taransay used the approach to complete her mental grasp of the structure.
That central module was about four metres across, and roughly—very roughly—spherical, and equipped with tentacle-like grapples. Clustered around it, and partly obscuring her view of it, were fuel tanks, nanofacture units, armaments stores, missile clusters (much depleted), laser cannon and fusion pods. Some
of these were integral to the module’s design, others had been grabbed on the run and were held in place by the grapples. Altogether, this mass of equipment brought the size of the whole conglomeration now grandly known as the Locke Provisos complex to a maximum axis of about ten metres and a minimum of five. In among the components were assorted brackets, bays and cradles, within which the six available scooters were secured, and from one of which—now empty—the lines holding the fighters’ frames snaked out. Through the whole complicated structure small bots crawled like nits in hair, gripping whatever patch of mesh or length of cable was to hand, or foot. Some of these bots, evidently, had attached the cables to the frames and pushed them out of the cavity in which they’d been stashed during the recent violent manoeuvres. This cavity, Taransay saw from her schematic, was the upload and download port for the module: the place whence their minds had come, and to which their frames would with luck return at the end of this sortie. Far more likely, of course, was that they’d get destroyed in action and their minds would reboot in virtual bodies on the bus.
One very definitely integral part of the module, around the back from Taransay’s point of view but clearly visible on the hairline diagrams that overlay her sight, was the drive. It was connected to a fusion pod larger than the others around the complex, and to a reaction-mass intake that accepted solid material as easily as it did liquids. The drive’s central thrust nozzle was surrounded by smaller directional nozzles, sprouting radially from its shaft like bell petals. With these, Taransay saw, the entire complex could be flipped right around in flight, turning acceleration into deceleration in less than a second. The sick-making lurches, sways and yaws she’d seen on the screens were now easy to understand.
Not that she had much time to go over that. She found herself deployed in a narrow canyon a metre deep, looking at a fixing plate for a fuel tank designed for supplying the scooters. Her task was to unscrew the bolts and guide the tank to the vicinity of the drive, where its contents would be fractionated to hydrogen for fuel and everything else for reaction mass.