by Ken MacLeod
The Arcane module’s drive cut. In a moment of free fall, the module flipped around and then the drive started up again, lateral jets flaring from its sides like a fistful of white-hot needles. The distance began to close. Moments later, the Locke complex’s acceleration stopped. Even with the frame’s speedy reflexes, Taransay’s upper body lurched forward in reaction.
The sky whirled as the complex rolled. There was a lurch as it stabilised. Now Taransay saw the Arcane module just above her ludicrously close horizon, heading more or less straight for her. The contact was barely in visual, but her other senses and plain logic told her she was looking at the module itself, rather than as before at its block of ice and rock through which the fusion drive burned, and which fed its ravening energy.
Almost certainly, Taransay thought, he was confirming an order already given. A missile from one of the fixed scooters shot away, followed by a focused, convergent stab of five anti-meteor lasers. Their beams were invisible in vacuum, but Taransay’s display scribed their path. Five bright hairline tracks met at the Arcane module. A point of light flared and faded, an actinic spark. Then came a far bigger flash, as the missile slammed into the oncoming and still accelerating module.
The Locke complex rolled again, turned tail and torched.
As they accelerated away, this time at a less taxing 10 G, Taransay guessed what had happened. The lasers had blinded Arcane’s defences just long enough for the missile to get through. The combined velocities of the collision had added impact to explosive energy. Some damage had been done, for sure.
But they weren’t to get away that easily—not that she expected it. The Arcane module had reaction mass to burn—Locke’s side didn’t, and Arcane knew it. The Arcane module overhauled them within ten seconds. Locke instantly cut the drive, which left the complex in free fall and Arcane far ahead, overshooting the mark. It didn’t take more than another second for the Arcane module to flip over and ipso facto start decelerating, closing the distance rapidly as the Locke complex free-fell towards its foe. Ahead SH-0 loomed; despite knowing the dynamics as intuitively as counting, Taransay still had a part of her mind that was surprised how close they were to it.
No time for wonder, even at the most spectacular and complex unexplored object humanity in any form had yet gazed upon.
And no time or mass left for evasive action, if the Locke crew were ever to do more than look at that astonishing world. The fight was going to be hand-to-hand from here on in. The Arcane module was now well within visual range, five kilometres away, and stationary relative to the Locke complex—and of course free-falling with it straight towards SH-0.
The transfer tug that had earlier fled the Arcane complex was still accelerating towards both modules, so directly that the drive flare was right behind it and thus obscured from Taransay’s location. It had substantially more mass than had been apparent earlier, and was now only about a hundred seconds away.
A whole squadron of scooters sprang from the Arcane module. Taransay counted twenty at a glance. Her radar sense rang with warnings.
This wasn’t simple. The five remaining scooters had had to be securely held during the evasive actions and accelerations, and it took all of two seconds for the bots to scramble to unlock their shackles. The fighters all lived these two seconds as twenty, stretched further by anxiety as the enemy approached. At last they jetted clear and torched away.
Space combat is nothing like aerial warfare. Course corrections are possible—sideways thrusts—but in vacuum there is no air to enable screaming turns, and little call for dogfight skills. It’s largely a matter of who gets their shot in first. The only fine calculation is how much time that leaves for the target to see the incoming, dodge and fire back. With lasers, of course, there isn’t even that. Nothing dodges faster than light.
Locke, Taransay guessed, clutching her oversized weapon like a toddler brandishing a parent’s shotgun, must have its own fine calculation to make: how much laser power they could afford to spend here, balanced against how much they’d need for active meteor and space-junk defence the rest of the way. Arcane’s AI had more to play with by far.
Sholokhova got one shot in, taking out an Arcane scooter. Then hers vanished in a lash of laser fire from the module. Locke’s laser hit two of the attackers. Then the four remaining fighters in their scooters launched missiles. One missed, three found their targets. After that it was a straight exchange, one for one. Nothing left but a cloud of debris.
I’ll tell them in the Touch they died bravely. Assuming it isn’t Beauregard telling us all…
The remaining ten Arcane scooters converged on the Locke complex, decelerating to a stop metres away on all sides, most of them well below Taransay’s line of sight, one of them right in front of her, hovering like a malign hornet. Taransay swivelled her weapon, took aim just to one side of the scooter and held her fire. No point wasting so much as a shot on the craft itself: Taransay knew the scooter’s shell would be impervious, particularly its nacelle.
If these fuckers get to our drive and tanks there’ll be no fucking landing. But she didn’t say it.
Two, no, three fighters—one from the socket, two from the skids—pushed out from the scooter and jetted immediately toward the module’s surface. Taransay squeezed off one shot. It hit the target in the head and sent the fighter tumbling backwards into space. A lot of good that did. The bastard righted and sped straight back, in a bravura dance of gas-jets. Taransay met that counter-move with a burst. This time the impacts sent the attacker back, spinning away. Meanwhile, the other two had flattened to the surface and skimmed out of her line of fire.
Ten scooters. Say three fighters on each? Maybe not. Surely not. But even twenty boarders would be enough to overwhelm four, defenders’ advantage and all. And the scooters, crewed or not, could still fire at the defenders. It looked like any lessons of the present skirmish were going to be learned by reconstructing events afterwards, not from the memories of any on her side.
From the display that instantly overlaid all the other overlays in her already enhanced and augmented vision, Taransay saw the entire situation as if on a magnified scale. The Locke complex loomed in her view like a rugged minor planet, with enormous cylinders stuck to it at various angles, and over whose surface a couple of dozen gigantic space robots clambered, almost bumping into each other. Around it the scooters hovered like invading alien starships. Six attackers were converging on the drive and fuel tank, to whose defence Beauregard had allocated Karzan, Zeroual and St-Louis.
The rest were swarming towards the upload-download area. Why the fuck was that a target?
One of the ropes that had held the fighters when they’d first come out came snaking into her trench. She grabbed the cable with one hand, and held onto her awkward weapon with the other. The rope retracted and she pushed herself upward and let it haul her along. Just two metres away was the huddle of boarders around the uploading cavity. It was more than a huddle—it was as organised as a scrum, and in the centre of it was the player with the ball: a fighter holding something in both hands. Those around that fighter were shielding him or her and had managed to grab onto the short lengths of cable that still protruded from the cavity,
holding themselves in place.
Taransay flicked the image to Locke. The AI’s response was almost panicky.
Taransay opened up with her sub-machine gun, hosing the intruders until her clip ran out. At this range she was able to do more than just knock two of them away and into space—she did real damage to three that managed to hang on, blasting right into even the rugged little frames and putting them out of action. It wasn’t enough. She was out of ammo and there were still six of the enemy, including the one holding the object, something that on its scale was about the size and shape of a briefcase.
She clubbed the gun and with one haul on the rope hurled herself head first into their midst. As she fought her way through a chaos of limbs, several things happened at once.
A full-on lateral flare shot from the Arcane module, moving it hundreds of metres sideways in a tenth of a second. Flashes flared on its flank nevertheless.
The whole sky tumbled to Taransay’s left, then stopped with an equally brutal jolt, throwing her from side to side in a hundredth of a second, almost dislodging her grip.
Something incredibly fast and incredibly bright flashed past between the Arcane module and the Locke complex. At the same moment a blizzard of impacts rained on the complex and the scooters that surrounded it.
Taransay saw an explosion somewhere to one side, and a hailstorm of pinprick, high-energy flashes all around her. One took away her gun arm, another the fighter in front of her. With her remaining arm and her legs she shoved forward, and over the lip of the cavity. The fighter holding the object was already in there, the object itself planted firmly at the bottom. Three of the other intruders—all that now remained—had their heads and shoulders over the lip. Shit! They might already have downloaded into the sim!
Taransay hooked her one arm over the edge of the cavity and her head in as far as she could. Almost at once, it was as if she were hanging off a cliff. As she felt herself beginning to slip, she saw the Arcane module flash past, left behind by the accelerating Locke complex. SH-0 was straight ahead, its image almost filling her view, growing by the second. The acceleration ramped up from 1 G to 2 then higher. Taransay clung desperately.
The blackness took her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Hard Landings
“What the fuck was that?” said Beauregard.
The view on the screens was, for the moment, stable. After the burst of acceleration, they were now free-falling. Up ahead and twenty minutes away was the globe of SH-0, expanding rapidly. Its image was so bright that the screen showing it made a spectral reflection in the pre-dawn dark outside the window, a phantom planet above the ringlit sea. Behind them, far in their wake of debris, was the Arcane module, battered, its chunk of attached ice venting hot dirty steam so fiercely in all directions that the whole thing was rolling around at random. It seemed in no position to give chase, or to have any weapons systems left after the destruction of all, or almost all, of its scooter fleet. It could still use lasers, but it would have to stabilise first, and by the look of it that would take some doing. The renegade transfer tug had altered course, decelerated sharply and then cut its drive, and was now in a long, looping orbit that would on present projections take it around SH-0 and back to the vicinity of SH-17.
Nicole pointed at its speeding, blurred image on one of the mercifully silent news screens.
“It was that,” she said. “The transfer tug.”
“I bloody know that,” said Beauregard. “What I mean is, what was it doing, and what was the bombardment?”
“Whoever was flying that thing,” said Shaw gleefully, “was playing chicken with the Arcane module. Aimed straight for it at thousands of kilometres an hour. The kinetic energy alone would have blown both objects into hot gas if Arcane hadn’t hopped sharpish out of its way—and ours.” He cackled and rubbed his hands. “And along the way it laid some eggs.”
“What d’you mean?” Beauregard asked.
“Fired off a cloud of small bits of ice at the last millisecond, travelling at the same speed as itself, of course, which slammed into everything around its path. I think it was smart enough to spread the bigger bits Arcane’s way, and the smaller ones ours.”
“Jeez,” said Beauregard. “That’s some fucking smart targeting.”
“And some steady nerves,” said Nicole. “Nerves of steel, you might almost say.”
Beauregard gave her a sharp look. “You think a robot was flying it?”
Nicole shrugged. “Whoever it was came out from Arcane—and I think we can now safely say they were in rebellion against the agency—they were almost certainly solid Axle cadre, and they all still think we’re Rax. Why should they help us?”
“And the freebots would?” Beauregard was incredulous.
“Well, maybe they’re—”
She was interrupted by a lurch of the view on the screens, and the appearance of Locke on her flip-pad, mouthing frantically. She stooped to read the scrolling text. Shaw jumped to her side.
“Shit!” he yelled. “The Arcane AI’s fighting Locke for the controls!”
Beauregard shouldered in. Locke was in profile, face to face with a glaring, black-haired, grim-faced woman. They really did look as if they were elbow-wrestling.
“Who the fuck is that meant to be?” said Beauregard. “Ayn fucking Rand?”
“Raya Remington,” Nicole read off.
Shaw snorted, as if he’d got some obscure joke, snapped his fingers and reached for Nicole’s pen. She gave it to him. He scribbled frantically, in big, shaky, unpractised handwriting:
We’re not Rax. Locke was, but we’ve got him onside.
Small print scrolled again. “How can I verify this?”
Ask on the buses.
Remington vanished. The screens righted. More text scrolled, this time from Locke.
“She’s still in the system,” said Nicole. “This is just a temporary respite.”
“At least it shows she can be reasoned with,” Shaw said.
“What was that about the buses?” Beauregard asked.
“Call Rizzi,” said Shaw. “She’ll be on the bus, along with any of the boarding party who broke in or got caught up in the download.”
“Good idea,” said Beauregard, reaching for his phone. “Let’s hope she hasn’t already done them some serious damage.”
Taransay woke on the bus as if from a nightmare of her brain freezing in long, jagged fractal spikes from the cerebellum outward, with the diminishing remainder of her mind trapped timelessly in the event horizon of a growing black hole. As always, the nightmare faded to ungraspable wisps, a bad taste in the back of the mind, shadows.
Her phone was ringing. Still groggy, she pulled it from her back pocket. Beauregard. She accepted the call.
“Rizzi! Are you alone on the bus?”
She turned in her seat to look around. She wasn’t alone, but it was no familiar or friendly faces that looked back. Of course, all the others would be on an earlier or a later bus…
“No, there’s three fighters up the back I don’t recognise and one old hippy, looks like a local.”
“He might not be, so be careful. The Arcane AI got in—”
“Could that be him?”
“No, the AI’s a she. But regard them all as intruders, try not to get into a fight and try to convince them we’re not Rax.”
“OK, sarge.”
She’d got back into calling him that, she realised, as she rang off.
The four at the back were glowering at her. She smiled tentatively back and made to rise.
The bearded, scruffy one glanced at the guy beside him and snapped: “Get the fascist!”
The young guy jumped from his seat and stepped forward. Instantly Taransay was on her feet, hands on the seat backs. She
swung up her legs and slammed the soles of her feet into the guy’s upper chest. Down he went. She kicked him hard in the ribs as she stepped past him, and met the second bloke rising to meet her with a Glasgow kiss—her forehead butted hard to the bridge of his nose. He yelled and staggered, hands to his face, and fell sideways onto a seat. The last fighter stayed in his place behind the older guy, as if waiting for an order. Good move, sunshine.
The older guy peered up at Taransay. “Who are you?” he asked.
“I’m Taransay Rizzi,” she said. “Who the fuck are you?”
“I’m an avatar of Durward, the Direction representative in the Arcane sim.”
“You are, are you? So what the fuck are you doing in ours?”
“Helping to take it back from the Rax.”
Taransay laughed in his face. “Then you’re not doing a good job. First, we’ve already taken it back, and second—”
She heard from behind her the sounds of the first guy she’d hit climbing back to his feet, and the other shifting, too.
“Guys,” she said, “don’t make me turn around. You’re not in your home sim. If I maim you, and I will if you take another step, you stay maimed for the rest of your life. If I kill you, and I will if I have to, you stay dead. Capiche?” Apart from her intent, this was bullshit—she had no idea if the sim rules worked that way—but the guys might not know that. She nodded to Durward. “Now, are you going to call them off, or am I going to have to turn around?”
Durward took the hint, and motioned the two to sit down. Taransay’s phone rang again.
“Rizzi,” Beauregard asked urgently, “is everything all right?”
“Reckon so,” she said. “All peaceful and friendly here.”