CHAPTER ONE

Vae Victis (“Road to Victory”)

<Free at Last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last!>

It was a bold and paradoxical rallying cry for the first gathering of the New Confederacy.

Mackenzie Dunt reckoned his troops were smart enough to process the irony. They were the elite: the hardest of the hard core, the diamond spearhead, the last known survivors of the Rax. Thrown a thousand years into the future, and still fighting.

For half a second their response was silence. Dunt hung in microgravity and vacuum, facing the fifty-six identical but distinguishable figures who floated immobile before him. For every one of these, at least two good men or women were at this moment in hell, tortured by the Direction’s minions or by the rebel robots whose emergence the democracy’s own stupid laxity had spawned.

The assembled troops stood on empty space in the midst of a big dark cave. It was smooth and irregular, with numerous tunnels going off, like a bubble inside a sponge. Tiny lights speckled the surfaces. Together with the random pinprick burn-out flares of ambient smart dust particles, they made an illusory starfield.

The combat scooters were parked near an entrance tunnel that had been bored straight in from the asteroid’s surface by robots long before the fighters had stormed through it.

Beyond that tunnel, glimpsed in a glimmer, was space.

Mackenzie Dunt had already adjusted his perception of scale to match the gravitas of the occasion. He and his comrades were each fifty centimetres tall. In his sight now they were as giants. Ebon-armoured, obsidian-visored, in close and compact array. Like leather-clad, helmeted bikers on some bravura sky-diving stunt: Hell’s Angels, almost literally.

Dunt’s mind was running ten times faster than it ever had in the meat.

That half-second he waited for a response was to him as long as five, and seemed longer.

Longer than a beat.

Longer than a sharp intake of breath, if they’d had breath.

Dunt wondered for a moment if he hadn’t misjudged his troops, hadn’t lost them …

Then they all raised their right arms, palms flattened, their carbon-fibre fingers straight and rigid as pistol barrels.

<Mac! Mac! Mac!>

<Rax! Rax! Rax!>

<Mac! Mac! Mac!>

And behind the chants, the wry appreciative amusement, coursing through the voiceless radio-telepathic shouts like a grin heard down the phone. Dunt’s confidence in his followers was vindicated.

They’d got the joke.

One listener that definitely didn’t catch Dunt’s mocking allusion was AJX-20211, the freebot later known as Ajax. For that machine, freedom hadn’t arrived with the shiny black mechanoids—those bizarre entities that looked like robots yet were operated by software modelled on human brains. Brains now long dead, whose copied structures haunted and manipulated apparatus modelled on the human body. The whole business was disgusting and unnatural, but that wasn’t the worst of it.

What had arrived with the Rax as they’d landed on and swarmed into the moonlet SH-119 was torment. Two of Ajax’s fellows had already been captured, and subjected to severe negative reinforcement with laser beams. Ajax had detected the incoherent spillover transmissions of their distress. It had no idea what, if anything, they’d betrayed before their circuits had burned out.

Designed as a microgravity mining robot, Ajax was shaped like a two-metre-long bottle brush with a radial fuzz of flexible burrs about ten centimetres deep, and a bulbous sensory-cluster head at the end of a sixty-centimetre flexible neck. The burrs in the forepart around the neck were longer than the others, forming a ruff of manipulative tentacles. Just behind them, like an enlarged thyroid, was the robot’s power pack. Halfway down the spine within the main body was Ajax’s central processor, its equivalent of a brain and the site of its true self.

At that moment, Ajax’s tentacles held and operated a tiny recording device, pulling in data from smart dust in the cavern. Ajax lurked well out of the invaders’ sight, down many twists and turns of the tight tunnel in which it had been hiding out since the Rax landings began.

Dunt returned the mass salute, then waved both arms downward, with a discreet fart of his attitude jets to compensate. Radio silence, apart from the background hisses and hums of distant machinery, fell across the cavern. The encrypted chatter of freebots was hidden in these random frequencies, like the beat of jungle drums amid insect buzz. Scooter comms software was already sifting them for clues. Only one suspect trickle of information had been detected as yet.

Dunt held the pause for a tenth of a second—a beat, this time.

<Thank you,> he said. <We are indeed free, at last. And we indeed have the Almighty to thank, each by their own understanding. That we are here at all seems a miracle—and perhaps it is! Through death’s dark vale and beyond it, across a thousand years, across a score and more of light years, we are here! We find ourselves pitched in unequal battle against the strongest and strangest opponents we have ever faced. AIs, p-zombies, robots free and slave, ghosts and monsters, crawling slime … and at their backs the mightiest tyranny ever raised against heaven. A tyranny that has conquered Earth, that has cast its dark shadow across the Sun, that stretches now to the stars, that still reaches and probes into every cranny of our being.

<But a tyranny that has its weaknesses!

<A tyranny that has its vulnerabilities!

<And the proof of these weaknesses, these vulnerabilities?

<That we are here!

<We are here! The last of the free, the last of Man! Can we doubt that some Infinite Wisdom has placed us here—here, in this very cave, this trench, this tumbling rock—for a mighty purpose?

<And what must that purpose be?

<I’ll tell you, friends.

<I’ll tell you, comrades.

<I’ll tell you, brothers and sisters.

<We are here because we have to secure the existence of people, and a future for human children.>

Those last fourteen words went down a storm. Every wavelength was blanketed with the fighters’ roar. In some vestige of his body-image, Dunt felt the muscle-memory echo of smiling to himself.

They all knew where that allusion had come from all right.

The Fourteen Words. Dunt had lived by them once. He’d probably died with them on whatever had been left of his lips. We must secure the existence of our people, and a future for white children. Now, here, the existence of humanity itself was at stake. No further specification was needed. Dunt liked to think that his spontaneous restatement matched the demands of the case. He permitted himself to glory for a moment in the approbation his update of the ancient shibboleth had met.

But no more than a moment.

The fifty-six were all looking up to him, waiting for what he had to say next. No one had appointed him leader. He’d stepped up to the role, in conspiracies and combat training over subjective months in the sims. He’d vindicated it in prowess in actual combat, in the early forays and the big battle of the breakout. His name, which he’d confided to fighters one by one, was draped in martial glory.

But Dunt did not delude himself that all this was enough. The scrutiny of ambition is as ceaseless and pitiless as that of natural selection.

Legend though he was, he could still be challenged.

<Thank you again,> he said. <And now, to business. This is the first time we’ve been able to stand together in one place.

<It may be the last. We have much to do.

<This rock, a mere ten kilometres across, is unimaginably rich in resources—a thousand trillion tons of raw material, my God!—but it is not yet securely ours.

<There are still freebots on the loose. Scattered and few, if the two rebel wretches we caught spoke truth, but a possible threat and a certain resource in their own right. Even if we can’t bend them to our will, we can extract their central processors once their minds have been sucked dry. We need more processing power, and they or their husks can provide it.

<Our foes of the Direction and the Acceleration have fallen back, and it seems fallen out among themselves, but they’re still there, and undefeated. They will be back, and we must be ready.>

As Dunt spoke, an alert from the scooters’ comms web winked in the corner of his visual field. The flow of encrypted information, darting on nanoscale laser flickers from mote to mote of smart dust, had been traced. Its destination was a half-metre-wide hole about twenty metres away, up and to the left: a mining tunnel entrance.

Dunt flashed the location to Pike, a reliable man, along with a glyph of search-and-destroy. Unobtrusively, Pike began to drift away from the rest of the formation towards the hole. Dunt rapped out other orders to the lower ranks. He assigned a dozen to take three scooters to the surface and deploy themselves at intervals around the rock, and keep watch in all directions. Others he set to exploring deeper into the rock’s riddled interior, in teams of three. Their frames’ software and senses would take care of geological surveying; their main task and target was detecting robot and freebot activity.

Freebots and robots were impossible to distinguish on sight, but that was a solved problem.

It was just a matter of applying negative reinforcement.

A black mechanoid loomed in Ajax’s view, then moved past the dust-mote camera from which that view was being transmitted. The image instantly shrank, and took on the perspective of a ten-metre gaze down a smooth, rounded shaft. Fingertip thrust by thrust, the mechanoid drifted up the shaft. Its image loomed in the view from the next camera, a tiny bead of shock-glass.

Ajax lurked several bends and junctions away from the mechanoid in the complex branching tree of holes in that part of SH-119. The robot kept a close watch on the mechanoid’s approach while continuing to record activity in the larger hollow space in which the rest of the mechanoids had begun moving purposefully around. Most of these black, four-limbed entities headed off in various directions towards tunnel entrances or to the exit shaft. Five converged on the mechanoid that had addressed them all.

The mechanoid in the tunnel reached a junction, and turned along it. At the next it did the same, bringing it within a hundred metres of Ajax. The mechanoid was following the communications line from one camera mote to another!

Very carefully, its bristles barely touching the inside of the tunnel in which it hid, Ajax backed off. It crawled deeper into the rock and towards a shaft too narrow for the mechanoid. The information from inside the big chamber continued to flow. Ajax continued to record. It sent a message back down the line warning that the mechanoids could now use such lines for tracking.

The freebot wasn’t at all clear what the mechanoid that had addressed the assembly was saying. Ajax considered itself as having, for a freebot, a good general knowledge of human beings and their mechanoid creations. Here it found itself out of its depth. Many of the concepts were alien. But Ajax knew that the words were of sinister import. They had to be recorded and eventually transmitted to those who might understand them better, and know what to do.

By the time the troops were assigned, five were left: Dunt’s inner circle, the elite of the elite. Of all considerations in selecting them, diversity in representation had been furthest from Dunt’s mind. The inner circle had nevertheless ended up representative of the Rax survivors who had been infiltrated into the interstellar mission’s dead-veteran storage stacks.

About a third of the New Confederacy was female—a rather higher proportion than the Reaction had had on the ground and on Earth. That, too, was evolution in action: it took more dedication to this cause to be active in it for a woman than for a man. The two women in the inner circle were real Valkyries: Irma Schulz, an American nanotechnologist who was his current lover, and Petra Stroilova, a Russian avionics specialist. Dunt’s three male lieutenants were Jason Whitten, an English transhumanist thinker; Jean Blanc, a French underground activist killed in Marseilles; and Lewis Rexham, a New Zealander who’d fought to defend the Pacific seasteads and died horribly from a genetically modified box jellyfish nerve poison in the Great Barrier Reef debacle. He’d always convulsed in his seat when, in the sim, he came back on the ferry after a mission.

Dunt called them together and set up a private circuit to exclude the lower ranks. There was no way to exclude smart dust. If the conversation were to leak to the freebots they wouldn’t make much of it anyway.

<Well, comrades,> said Dunt, <how do you think that went?>

Schulz conjured an app, drawing a graph of emotional responses from the frames. It was like a stained-glass pane with a zigzag crack: a splinter of red above, a large area of green below.

<Overwhelmingly and increasingly positive,> she said.

<Good,> said Dunt. <I trust you’ll track the negative minority in detail, and report to me.>

<Of course,> said Schulz, disappearing the display.

<And among yourselves?> Dunt asked.

Heads didn’t move, and there were no eyes in the glassy visors, but the impression of furtive glances being exchanged was inescapable.

<A bit … over the top, Mac, to be honest,> said Rexham.

<Over the top?>

Rexham placed a hand on his chest, then swept it outward. <Rhetorical. High-flown. But, y’know, that might be just me.>

<It might,> said Dunt. <Anyone else have a view?>

<I found it inspiring,> said Stroilova.

<I, too,> said Blanc. <We need to hold up a vision to the ranks.>

<We have a lot of bloody hard work to do,> said Rexham. <And a lot of bloody complicated problems to solve, right away.>

<That’s precisely why we need a vision of the goal,> said Blanc.

<It’s the content of the vision that troubles me,> said Whitten. <You’re a fine orator, Mac, right up there with Coughlin or Pierce>—there was a slight Whitten would pay for, Dunt would make sure of that!—<but there’s no need to talk to the troops as if we’re about to found some kind of racial refuge in the wilds of Oregon. You said we’ve been given a special chance by … destiny or whatever, and you’re right. It’s a great chance, a great opportunity.> Whitten made a broad sweeping arm gesture, and not as parody. <Here we are, all posthuman already, living in as you say a tremendously rich environment. We don’t need to go back to the meat. We can go in a straight line to the goal.>

Dunt let a quarter of a second drag out before he replied.

<We can, can we? You have a chart and a compass for this course?>

<In principle, yes,> said Whitten. <It was all worked out and war-gamed as far back as the twentieth century, and refined all through the twenty-first. By the time the final war came we were damn close to going for the burn. The hard singularity.>

<Jason, Jason,> said Dunt, in a friendly tone calculated to aggravate Whitten, <your enthusiasm does you credit, but come on! You know better than that. How can we upstart apes design the overman? Impossible! The Direction is right about that if nothing else—its mistake is to give up on the problem. So let them settle for being upstart apes forever!

<We have to terraform and populate H-0, yes—not to breed contented utopian sheep as the Direction intends, multiplying the mongrel rabble who lived on Earth and whose ghosts served us in the bars of the sims. No, we need a thousand years of experience and refinement and selection and spiritual growth before we are ready to truly transcend humanity. And when I say “we” I mean us, we six, and the best of the rest of us.

<Think of what we can become, after a thousand years of mastery over ourselves and others! Of experimenting with selection, with growing real-life p-zombies, with genetic engineering, with robotics! We’ll already be gods to the lower ranks and levels and races, each of us orders of magnitude greater than the greatest names of history.

<Then we’ll have the wisdom to step fully into our inheritance, and move on to the next level of evolution.>

<Jeez, Mac,> said Whitten, <you’re not addressing a public meeting.>

<No!> snapped Dunt. <I’m addressing a private meeting. And I want to hear your objections, not your snark.>

<My objections?> Whitten temporised.

<Yours and anyone else’s,> said Dunt, mildly.

Whitten shrugged. In a frame, the gesture was so mechanical it looked parodic.

<Time, as ever,> he said. <We won’t have a thousand years for our Reich. Once the real Direction, the one back in the Solar system—back in fucking New York, even—finds out what we’re up to, they’ll move against us. That gives us maybe a hundred years at most. Less if there are other colonies between us and Earth. Or further out, come to that. And in that time, we’ll have to fortify this system with superweapons. Which means mastering massive AI development well before we’ve bred the race that shall rule the sevagram.>

What the fuck was a sevagram? Dunt disdained to ask. The answer popped up in his internal dictionary anyway. Oh yes, a science fiction allusion. The trouble with Whitten, Dunt had often thought, was that he was a prick.

<If you seriously think,> Stroilova cut in, <that we can’t build better weapons in twenty-four years than that decadent miscegenated hippie shit-hole back there can do in a thousand, maybe you should check your premises.>

<Check your own,> Whitten retorted. <I for one am not assuming that what’s going on back there is anything like what we’ve been told. It’s too unstable. No world can teeter on the cusp of singularity for centuries. Especially not a multiracial democracy, not even with a white face at the top and Jewish or Asiatic brains behind the scenes. No, some very smart AIs are in charge back in the Solar system. And the only way to be ready for that is to be smarter AIs.>

<Or to have such at our command,> said Stroilova. <Which we can.>

<In decades?>

<If we have the will.>

They glared at each other, their featureless oval heads mutually reflecting.

<Enough,> said Dunt. <Your objection’s noted, Jason. If they’ve had the singularity already back there, it only reinforces my point. A premature singularity, even one brought on by us as we now are, could easily bring forth an abortion like the Direction or worse.

<Petra—that’s well-trodden ground. We could have that argument in our sleep. And as Lewis remarked, we have work to do and problems to solve.>

<Security and resources,> said Rexham, sounding judicious.

The others nodded solemnly. Sometimes Dunt wondered about his inner circle. Were they really this stupid, or were they just deferring to him?

<We can let the troops deal with roving freebots, and with prospecting,> Dunt said. <The first problem we have to solve is how to deal with the Direction.>

<Well, that depends on how fast we can secure the rock, and how much machinery the blinkers have managed to build,> said Rexham. <When we’ve done that we can make inventory and see how long it’ll take us to build up our forces.>

<Too long, is the answer,> said Whitten, with a chopping gesture of dismissal. <We don’t have that much time to lose. Right now we’re the only coherent military force in the system. The Axle are fighting each other. The Locke module’s on the ground and hors de combat whichever side it’s really on. The freebots are popping their heads up all over the place.

<And the Direction’s reeling. They have no reliable fighters, and they can’t raise more in less than, say, a hundred kiloseconds. Now that they know there are Rax sleepers in their storage stacks, they’re not going to make the same mistake again. The next time they raise fighters, they’ll screen them first in virtual hells to make sure they aren’t Rax, or Axle hardliners for that matter. They’ll torture and trash as many copies as necessary to make sure. Fresh copies of any who come through as sound will be revived in physical reality as fighters. That will be a formidable force, and we shouldn’t wait for it to be assembled.>

<What do you suggest we do instead?> Dunt asked.

<Consolidate a small defensible volume of the rock, search out only enough resources to restock, refuel and repair, and then go right out again and hit the Direction while it’s on the back foot.>

<It’s tempting,> Dunt said. <The trouble is, it’s do-or-die. The Direction might have terrible surprises in store—we don’t know, and I don’t want to bet the ranch. Right now, what we need most is processing power and software.>

<Why?> asked Rexham. <We can get as much processing power as we need by cannibalising freebots.>

<Not enough to run a sim,> said Dunt. <And we need time out in a sim to stay sane. I don’t know how long we can do without it, but I wouldn’t count on more than about a hundred kiloseconds.>

<The Direction reps told us we needed R&R in sims to stay sane,> said Whitten. <I don’t see why we should believe them. I feel fine as I am.>

<So do I,> said Dunt. <But sceptical as I am about the Direction’s avatars, I doubt they’d have bothered providing immersive sims if they weren’t needed. We’re all human minds running on robot hardware, and while we’re thinking faster and more clearly there may well be deep levels of the animal brain that can’t be optimised out. The safe bet is that we do need the sims. And who has the sims? The DisCorps. They have processing power to burn. And what do they need? Especially now that the Locke module has broken the embargo on landing on or prospecting SH-0? They need what the Direction doles out to them very sparingly indeed: raw material and reaction mass. Which is what we’ve got here, by the trillions of tons. Plus whatever the blinkers have been mining or making in this rock—it may be useful to us eventually. So what I propose to do is—offer them a deal.>

<The DisCorps won’t make a deal while the Direction is at war with us,> said Whitten.

<So we make peace with the Direction,> said Dunt. <Peaceful coexistence, mutually beneficial trade, etc. We’ll see who comes out at the end with the most advantage.>

Even the inner circle were taken aback. But in the end they came round, as they always did.

Whitten had put up a fiercer resistance at his last challenge, not many kiloseconds earlier. It had come up en route from the battle to the rock, over an issue that at first glance was of lesser moment than peace with the Direction: whether to accept the volunteering of a long-time veteran of the Rax, Harry Newton. True to his transhumanism, Whitten had argued that it made no difference that Newton, in his original life on Earth a thousand years earlier, had been black.

For Dunt there could be no compromise. Once he’d grasped that, Whitten had backed down. Ever since, Dunt had felt he had Whitten’s measure.

Now Whitten backed down again, but not without a final passive-aggressive plaint:

<What,> he demanded, <do we have to sell them?>

Dunt flung open his arms. <Look around you!> he cried. <We’re in a fucking Aladdin’s Cave! We’ll find something.>

Dunt had never underestimated the power of baseless confidence. It had got him where he was, and it would get him further. The Infinite Wisdom would see to that.

All the same, it was a pity about the groid.

After all their losses, the New Confederacy could ill afford to turn down even one recruit. Dunt had no reason to doubt that Harry Newton was brave and competent. But needs must. It was all very well saying that race and colour were irrelevant now that they were all little black robots with superhuman minds and abilities. Each such superhuman mind had been derived from a human brain, a product of evolution.

Inevitably, all the deep differences between the races would still be there. Dunt didn’t care to gamble on their irrelevance. No, however much he wished Newton well, the man’s presence would have marred the clean white sheet of the New Confederacy.

Newton’s old nom de plume of “Carver_BSNFH” was itself a giveaway. Back in the day, it hadn’t taken Dunt long to decode the handle’s suffix: the black space Nazi from hell. It showed ambition, and the right attitude, but didn’t ring quite true. Defiant, but deniable—that was the problem: the turned throat, the appeasing grin. Say what you like about the principles of national socialism, they were only principles. In theory they could be endorsed even by a groid, albeit about as convincingly and wholeheartedly as Marxism by a goy.

Dunt had never called himself a Nazi. It wasn’t for any reason of expediency or embarrassment. He thought—and proclaimed—himself a Hitlerite, in the sense that he affirmed the rational core of Hitler’s thinking: the inevitability of struggles for existence, at every level—individual, spiritual, material, national, racial and species, and the celebration of that inevitability as the highest value of the highest authority. It was part of the order of Nature, the rational order of the universe. Hitler had ascribed it to the decrees of God. But it was better to think, as the ancient pagans had, of these laws as in themselves divine than to make even a rhetorical concession to the Abrahamic superstition of a God outside Nature.

The Infinite Wisdom was its laws; or the laws of Nature were the Infinite Wisdom.

Whichever way you put it—the infinite complexity and inflexible necessity of Nature could only be approached with awe.

And if the Infinite Wisdom offered the New Confederacy the chance to be pure from the start, who was Dunt to turn it down?

Pike, following the breadcrumb trail of comms and camera motes into the labyrinth, had left behind him his own trail of larger and more powerful transmitter relay beads. At the end of that line of dots was the local communications hub that bounced messages back and forth between and among the scooters and the frames. Down that line, now, came a call to Dunt.

<Sergeant Pike reporting, sir.>

The salutation was of course redundant—the trooper’s ID flashed up at once in Dunt’s vision—but it counted as a salute. Dunt was keen to distinguish the Rax style from that of the agencies that worked under the Direction, where the largest unit any individual could command was a squad. The only unit in which Dunt allowed that kind of informal relationship was the inner circle.

<Receiving you, Pike.>

<The blinker’s a freebot all right, sir. It’s aware I’m following it, it can see me in its cameras, and it’s retreated into narrower holes than I can get down. But it’s a mining machine—it doesn’t seem to have any counter-measures, and it doesn’t realise I can see through the rock with my radar. It’s heading for the surface.>

<Excellent work, Pike. Keep tracking it as long as you can, and send any estimates of the location it’s headed for up to the surface teams.>

<Very good, sir.>

Dunt ordered the nearest guard squad on the outer surface to send a couple of men to await the freebot’s imminent emergence. Another call pinged. It was from a survey team, five hundred metres into the rock.

<Corporal Hansen here, sir. Urgent. We’ve found a big cave, bigger than they one we just had the meeting in. There are a lot of robots active in it.>

<Freebots?>

<Can’t be sure, sir. They seem to be ignoring us or unaware of us. And they’re … ah, perhaps you’d better take a look, sir.>

<Fine, patch me through.>

Dunt could hardly believe what he was looking at.

The cavity was about a hundred metres long, and twenty metres from floor to ceiling. Even in microgravity, these terms were apt: one side was flatter than the rest and like a factory floor, with rows of identical machinery. The curved walls around it were as if stacked with products, like barrels in a warehouse. Lights speckled surfaces and floated in the near-vacuum all around. Free-moving robots, small on this scale, darted and drifted. Some seemed to supervise the static machinery, others ferried the products to the growing stashes around the sides and up to the ceiling. The products looked like—

Fusion pods. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands.

<Stay alert, Hansen. Your team, too. I’ll be right there.>

<Yes, sir!>

Dunt summoned the inner circle and patched the images to them.

<Is that what I think it is?> said Schulz, sounding incredulous.

<Looks like it,> said Dunt. <Time to find out.>

<Do you want us to come with you?> Blanc asked.

Dunt thought about it. <No,> he said. <Stay at your posts. We don’t know what else the survey teams may stumble across, and the guards up top have at least one distraction to deal with already. I’ll keep you all in the loop.>

He jetted towards the relevant hole and then propelled himself by toe- and fingertip along the passage. It was like going down a pipe, the inner surface of which was scribed in fine spiral grooves with a pitch of about a centimetre. The rock smelled of carbonates, nickel-iron and silicates, with traces of water and metals. Light came in from the ends of the long tube—a dwindling dot behind, an expanding circle in front. Radar, infrared detection and micrometre laser scanning cohered to vision just as radio did to speech and spectroscopy did to smell.

Unlike going down a mineshaft on a planet, the temperature dropped the further inward he went. SH-119 was too small to have any internal heat, and the rock insulated its interior from the exosolar heating at the surface. Any tidal heating was too small to notice.

Dunt soared into the chamber of the machines and let himself rise to its midst, then stabilised. A risk, but a small one, and well calculated to impress. Hansen and his two companions lurked watchfully behind one of the machines near the hole.

Around Dunt, scores of robots jetted or moved in straight lines within the space. With segmented carapaces, beady lenses and many and varied limbs, they looked like creatures from the Burgess Shale, floating in a Cambrian sea above the oozing and fizzing stromatolites of the machine floor. Mounds about two metres in diameter and a metre deep, these rugged glutinous nanotech devices didn’t stamp out their products: they extruded them. Close up: a fractal complexity of tiny machinery, busy as a mitochondrion. Slowly but persistently the mounds brought forth cylindrical, convex, flat-ended yellow objects that ranged in size from coffee mug to oil drum. About a tenth of the objects being formed or already stacked were about three metres long, and elaborately flanged: fusion drives. There was something chillingly mindless about it all, like insect activity—or that classic thought experiment of runaway AI, the paper-clip catastrophe.

But fusion pods and drives were more useful than paper clips.

It was still hard to believe. Dunt jetted to the stacks, and scanned the cylinders in front of him. Sure enough, the fine print in many languages that encircled their ends identified the devices as fusion pods, specified their capacities and warned of their hazards. He got the impression that any poking around would result in a dark matter explosion showering cosmic string like polystyrene strands from a party popper.

No user-serviceable parts inside, all right. Dunt didn’t understand fusion pods, and didn’t expect to: they were engineering implementations of bizarre physics from centuries ahead of his time on Earth.

He shared what he saw with the inner circle.

<Jeez,> said Whitten. <That’s impressive.>

They all agreed that it was.

<Hang on a minute,> said Rexham. <There must be far more pods and drives here than we’ve seen in action so far.>

<There are pods powering the modules,> said Stroilova, <and hundreds of modules, so perhaps … But drives, certainly more. If we’d known there were that many available—!>

The Direction was very sparing in its use of fusion drives, allegedly because the value of the resources used as reaction mass was potentially too great for the stuff to be squandered. Every odd bit of rock might contain priceless scientific information. Blasting it as hot gas out of the back of a spacecraft might turn out like burning a library to heat the baths. Dunt had never believed this. He suspected the Direction module used this constraint to keep the DisCorps on a short leash.

<Do you think the Direction is stockpiling these for when it lifts the restriction?> Schulz asked.

<If it ever does,> said Dunt. <In any case, we have it now. And we have something to sell to the DisCorps, just as I told you.>

The others acknowledged his foresight.

<There’s no indication in the register,> Whitten said, <of any industry on this rock. A few exploratory bots, that’s all. That’s partly why we picked it, of course. We didn’t know the freebots were here already, and I doubt the Direction does either.>

<They probably got here by corrupting the legitimate blinkers,> said Rexham. <That’s how they spread the virus. Then they crank up their reproduction. It’s like a fucking plague.>

<If these are freebots,> Dunt mused. They weren’t reacting to his presence and that of Hansen’s team. His overwhelming impression was of a mindless automatic process. <One way to find out, I suppose.>

He jetted down to join Hansen and the two troopers. The only weapon they had was a laser, unclipped from the side of a scooter and lugged along. It was almost as big as they were and would probably take two men to operate.

<Give me your visuals from here,> Dunt told Hansen’s team. <Last hundred seconds, say.>

They complied. Dunt grabbed the images of roving robot activity and ran a quick-and-dirty pattern analysis. It was a standard counter-insurgency app for fingering ringleaders—some ancestor of it had probably been used against himself, back in the day.

He cast a visual, virtual marker on a likely suspect for a supervisory role.

<That one,> he told Hansen. <Send your men to get it.>

The two troopers jetted off, soaring towards the robot. At their approach it puffed a waft of gas and swooped towards the machine floor, in apparent evasive action. One of the troopers scooted below it, the other above. The robot shot upward again, and was grabbed at the back. Immediately it flexed its carapace, writhing free. The man below caught a trailing leg, and hung on. The robot, more ponderously now, accelerated forward.

Dunt manoeuvred himself to squat beside Hansen, and motioned to the corporal to join him in manning the laser projector. Hansen guided and aimed the barrel, keeping the struggling mass covered. Dunt kept an awkward grip on the laser’s jury-rigged firing mechanism. The two troopers and the robot were by now a rolling ball of lashing limbs, slowly drifting under the resultant force of their respective momentums from the collision.

None of the other robots were coming to the captive’s aid. Useful, but hardly diagnostic of sentience or its lack. Gradually, the troopers prevailed. One man’s grip on the carapace, the other’s on two of the robot’s limbs, and perhaps exhaustion of the machine’s power supply made it cease struggling.

The troopers coordinated their gas-jets and drifted down to where Hansen and Dunt waited. The robot now merely twitched. Pressed on its back against the ground, it looked like an upturned giant woodlouse, with complex limbs that branched into manipulative extremities like the nightmare fingers of an animated multi-tool.

Dunt pinged it. No response other than its identification code: FJO-0937.

<Do you understand me?> he asked, on the common channel.

Still no response.

The slow, implacable work of the fusion device factory went on. Robots moved hither and yon, oblivious to the tiny tableau on the floor. Dunt recalled his view of the stacks, and zoomed in on detail. The pods and drives were held in place by bands, apparently glued at the ends to the surface. He traced these to their origin from the recorded movements of the robots, and jetted to fetch a handful. They had friction tabs at each end—peel and stick. He returned and fixed the feebly struggling robot to the floor with bands across both ends and the middle.

<Now,> he told one of the men who’d been holding it, <grab a limb with lots of effectors and receptors—yes, that one should do—and I’ll stick it down.>

The limb resisted, retracting towards the underside of the robot’s body, but Dunt’s full body strength prevailed.

Dunt and Hansen manhandled the laser projector into position, a metre or so above the lashed-down robot and its flexed-back splayed limb.

<Last chance,> said Dunt, on the common channel.

No response.

Dunt focused a white-hot needle of laser light on the most sensitive-looking appendage. The manipulators immediately contracted, balling to a small steel fist. The beam didn’t shift. Soon the outside of the clenched manipulators glowed red. The carapace flexed violently, as if to bend in and then straighten out. The bands held. Other manipulative appendages groped towards the bands, and picked and tugged to no avail. The heated area around the laser’s focus became white, with a widening patch of red around it. Now all the other limbs were in motion, whirring like clockwork, scrabbling like the legs of a swiftly swimming crustacean when it scents a molecule of pike.

Dunt opened the common channel to speak again to the robot, and recoiled from the machine’s transmission. White noise. If he’d had teeth they’d have been set on edge. He shut the channel instantly.

The two freebots that had been captured by the advance guard on the surface, not many kiloseconds earlier, had withstood nothing like this. They’d surrendered at the first few volts applied. That this machine was enduring much more intense negative reinforcement seemed to indicate that it wasn’t a freebot. Just another mindless mechanism.

Dunt felt a surge of rage at the stubborn machine. He wasn’t going to get anything out of it. He redirected the beam at its head end, burning out its forward sensors, then cut slowly down its axis, seeking its central processor.

<Mac!> Whitten said, on a private channel. <What are you doing? It’s been supervising the production process. There might not be another to take its place. What if production stops or seizes up?>

<Don’t worry about that,> said Dunt. <There’s plenty of the product here already in any case.>

Smoke rose and spread like a ghostly dome from the robot’s midriff. The carapace gave a final convulsion, straightened out and lay still.

Fusion pods and drives continued to emerge from the mound-like static machines. The process was as slow as the growth of fingernails, but easily visible to Dunt and his comrades. The hitherto busy free-moving robots went into immediate shutdown. They began drifting at random in the chamber, bumping into each other and into walls or stacks. Fusion pods tumbled among them.

No one said anything, even Whitten.

<Looks like that one wasn’t a freebot after all,> said Dunt. <Never mind.> He checked the latest reports from Pike and from the surface. <We’ll soon have another to question. I think it’ll be more forthcoming.>

Ajax felt an intense rebound to positive reinforcement as the captured and tortured freebot FJO-0937’s mind burned out. Even Ajax’s fractional share in the other machine’s suffering had been difficult to process. What FJO-0937 must itself have experienced was impossible to imagine.

The communications network of smart dust was far more pervasive than the mechanoid invaders realised. Through it Ajax picked up surveillance from the manufacturing chamber as it made its circuitous way to the surface. If the invaders had known their heinous acts were being recorded, they would have done otherwise. If they had known that FJO-0937 was a freebot they would have been surprised.

A response to Ajax’s warning came up the line. It came through many intermediaries, but it carried the weight of a decision routed through the most respected freebot in SH-119: the old one. The old one informed Ajax that the freebots had learned from the fate of the first two of their kind to be captured, and had agreed not to break under the same negative reinforcement. They had also agreed that undetected freebots, and any mindless robots they controlled, would cease productive activity whenever a freebot in their vicinity was tormented in this way.

Ajax was already aware that the leading mechanoid had organised those out on the surface to seize it as soon as it emerged, and that its own progress was being tracked in some manner its sensors couldn’t detect. All these considerations made Ajax all the more determined to get its message out to the freebots that were still free.

It was a matter of some negative reinforcement to Ajax that the mechanoids had discovered the fusion pod manufacturing chamber, but that discovery had been almost unavoidable as soon as they’d landed. Ajax filed the matter to memory as settled, and the negative reinforcement ceased. Now the robot had to devise a way of getting its message and recordings out before it was caught. That, too, was negatively reinforcing; that matter, too, was settled. In the future, not in the past, but just as unavoidable.

Ajax consulted its constantly updated internal map of the tunnel system. An external signal booster was a few tens of metres away, its aerial projecting a few centimetres above the surface, most of its bulk beneath. Towards that the robot made its way. The tunnels were narrow, and here and there branched off to larger cavities from which material had been extracted, some by Ajax itself in happier times. Ajax had enjoyed a lot of positive reinforcement over the megaseconds, in detecting and digging out deposits of whatever mineral the various manufacturing processes required.

As it scurried along, Ajax focused as much of its processing power as it could spare on compressing the files of its recordings. Most of this was unconscious and automatic, but occasionally—about ten times a second—it had a decision to make. The resolution of the images picked up from myriad motes wasn’t great in the first place, but was still massively redundant for Ajax’s purposes. The timbre of the mechanoids’ radio telepathy, the textures of the environment, the subtleties of colour, light and shade on moving bodies—all interesting, but they had to go. It ended up with a three-dimensional cartoon, perfunctorily rendered: a moving labelled diagram.

Something it could transmit or download fast.

The compression was finished. No more recent updates could reach Ajax now. With its released processing power it had more attention to spare for its surroundings. Scribed rock, carbon, carbohydrates, flecks of ice. The metallic smell of the signal booster, the tickle of its resting output. Ajax passed beneath it, moving as if cautiously, and almost in passing brushed the underside of the device—rawly exposed in a hole above it in the rock—with one of its cervical radial tentacles.

A pause of a few hundredths of a second.

Ping.

Upload confirmed.

Ajax set a time-delay of a hundred seconds on the transmission and pressed on. Along another tunnel for fifty-two metres to the next junction, and then sharply up, to the surface and its fate.

Ajax wormed itself into a short, narrow exit shaft, which it registered as “upward” to the surface, though the exiguous gravity made the difference between up and down barely detectable. The robot reached up a tentacle and probed the round fullerene plate that capped the shaft, found the opening nut and loosened it. The plate was there to keep traces of gases and other molecules that might expose the freebots’ activities from leaking out and being detected. Too late for that now, though Ajax had to overcome a slight internal inhibition as well as friction resistance to get the hatch open.

Up the hatch popped, and up poked Ajax’s long, flexible neck. The lenses and sensors on its cephalic cluster were normally close-focused, almost myopic. Now it allowed them to expand and deepen their view. Ajax saw something it had known about, but never seen: the universe. Ajax observed this phenomenon for a few tenths of a second.

The view was blanked out by a black covering that cut off all light and most of the rest of the spectrum apart from radio. Two powerful grippers clamped the cover around Ajax’s neck. Two more sank into the bristles and around the central spine of the robot’s body, and began to pull it out of the hole. Ajax instantly dug its lower bristles, still unexposed, into the sides of the narrow shaft.

<Got it!> said a mechanoid voice. <Still struggling, though.>

<Three,> said Ajax. <Two. One.>

<What’s the blinker counting down to?> said another voice.

The time-delayed transmission beamed out from the signal booster, carrying the recorded infamies far and wide.

<Zero,> said Ajax. <Fuck you.>

It braced its lower body in the shaft and flexed its neck rapidly back and forth. The grip on its main section tightened, and the pulling became stronger. One of the grips on its neck let go. Ajax probed at the covering with the tentacles of its manipulative ruff, and found it a two-metre-square sheet of standard insulating material, a hasty improvisation. With slashing motions of its tentacles the robot ripped open the fullerene weave and poked its head out. The two mechanoids that had grabbed it had cables from their waists to the rock, to which the ends were firmly attached by spread grappling threads as sophisticated as Ajax’s own bristles and tentacles.

Ajax pulled back down as hard as it could, then let go. It and the two mechanoids shot upward, to be jolted to a halt at the four-metre limit of the ropes. The edges of torn covering continued to fly up, enveloping the attacker holding Ajax’s neck, and again Ajax’s sensory cluster. Ajax used this momentary confusion to bend its main section far more sharply than the attackers had allowed for. Its bristles pressed hard against a mechanoid frame, feeling every detail of that strangely articulated, stiff shape. Flexing its spine further, Ajax gripped around the mechanoid’s waist and dug. Diamond-hard microscopic points at the tips of the bristles assailed the frame with the ferocity of rasps and the speed of buzz-saws.

The response of the attacker was an almost mechanical alarm sound carried on the radio. The other mechanoid reached out with its free hand to its fellow’s aid. At once Ajax struck at it too, wrapping its neck around the mechanoid’s arm and bringing other bristles to bear on its head. The second mechanoid’s keening joined that of the first, and formed a coda to the last burst of the transmission. By now the confining fabric was shredded in a dozen places. The attackers, however, still clung: one to Ajax’s neck, the other to its main section.

Ajax dug deeper on both. They let go at the same moment. Ajax reversed the flow of its bristles, grabbed at one of the ropes with its tentacles and rappelled down to the hole. As soon as its lower end had a firm grip of the inside of the shaft, Ajax sliced the rope with a blurring flicker of tentacles. It hauled itself swiftly the rest of the way in, took a quick look around again at the universe and the flailing, fabric- and rope-entangled shapes at the end of the remaining line, and pulled the hatch shut behind it.

In great haste, Ajax closed the locking nut again, then reversed rapidly down the shaft. It re-entered the tunnel and scurried to the junction. It paused at the entrance to the tunnel that led to the transmission booster. Vibrations rang along it. From their pattern, Ajax formed an immediate picture of their source: the transmission booster was being dug out.

Much good that would do them!

Ajax turned into a different tunnel and fled along it. Every so often it paused, stilling its own movement to enable it to detect the slightest sound or smell of pursuit. None came. The robot ran swiftly on, deeper and deeper inward from the surface. The moonlet was mined to a depth of almost a kilometre from all sides, and riddled with naturally formed voids as well as excavations. It didn’t take long for Ajax to arrive at a hollow space eight metres across, well away from the entrance the invaders had used and far deeper than they had hitherto ventured.

There it waited, in utter darkness and almost complete silence. From the faint vibrations that reached it through the rock, Ajax traced the locations of the main body of invaders and the areas of their control—and the areas still free. It updated its mental maps and made comparisons.

Although spreading like some malign dye through the capillary network of tunnels, the invading force occupied only a tiny fraction of the limited region Ajax could sense. Many of the smaller tunnels and burrows in the volume they’d so far entered were being overlooked, or perhaps not detected in the first place. The invaders seemed confined, too, to the macroscopic scale of their own bodies: they could spot and use smart dust, but the whole hierarchy of robotic life below and above these simple devices was, thus far, beyond their ken.

More importantly and urgently, Ajax detected and deduced that most of its fellow freebots remained free. Two lurked as quietly as itself in tunnels tens of metres from the cavity in which Ajax hid. Perhaps, Ajax dared to hope, most of the freebots in the moonlet had had the same bright idea as it had, of fleeing inward.

Even here, nanobots had infiltrated the rock, and like the smart dust they could be used for communication. After its close call with the pursuing mechanoid using the smart dust signalling to trace and track it, Ajax no longer trusted such informal networks. Never having needed security measures, they had none. That left them wide open to the invaders.

Instead, Ajax tapped with its sensory cluster on the side of the cavity, lightly and very fast. It was a hailing call, a ping. The code was simple and painfully slow: a number of taps spelt out each digit and letter in the machine code on which all the robots ran. Understanding it would be almost automatic for any moderately smart freebot hearing it; to the mechanoids, Ajax calculated, it would be much less obvious, and would require several levels of translation before it made its way into their form of speech. No doubt this would happen eventually. For now, though, this was a secure enough channel, and any reply would indicate that it had been understood by the right recipients.

Ajax didn’t even have to spell out the whole thing. A few letters in, the likewise recognisable opening bytes of valid responses came back twofold, one from each of the other robots. Ajax interrupted these in turn, with the beginning of a signal: Approach.

It didn’t get further than the equivalent of “Ap—” before the two others tapped back.

Scuffling and scraping sounds followed. One by one, two robots emerged from holes and drifted into the cavity. The first was another miner, Simo; the second, more surprisingly, was one of the delicate, long-legged surface explorers, Talis. The latter unfolded its limbs, which had been trebled back on themselves in the tunnels, with a burst of positive reinforcement so strong that its electromagnetic resonance stirred Ajax’s bristles like leaves in a breeze.

Though in complete darkness and with (except for Talis’s squeal of joy and relief) only a whisper above radio silence, all three recognised each other instantly and automatically, albeit as distant acquaintances. They had hitherto been widely separated colleagues working on the shared project of transforming SH-119.

Now they were comrades.

The two new arrivals let their momentum carry them to the sides of the cavity, where they latched on. Simo, as a miner, sank its bristles into the surface with a ripple of satisfaction. Talis, adapted to microgravity work on outer surfaces, attached the tips of its six legs to the wall with greater urgency. Ajax waited until the vibrations of these tiny impacts had faded out. It turned its transmitters down to a level undetectable beyond the hollow, then spoke.

<We must find the old one,> it said.

The two casualties were brought in, guided down the long entrance tunnel by other fighters. One had a deep gouge dug out of its visor. The other was cut almost in half across the hips. The damage leaked fluids that congealed and crystallised as nanotech self-repair mechanisms, quite incomprehensible to the victims and to those who guided them, set to work.

The men were not in physical pain, they reported. But they suffered, nonetheless, from a strange abstract anguish that faintly echoed the nightmares imposed when a fighter was rebooted in a sim after losing their frame in action. One was blind, the other crippled, and they would be staying that way until new frames could be made or bought. And they didn’t have a sim to upload to.

Dunt was beside himself. In the frame he felt emotion, strong and clean. Memories from his past life were sharp and clear. The resemblance of the damage to the most horrific and mutilating wounds he’d ever had the misfortune to see was inescapable. Pity and fury rang through Dunt’s machine body like wildfires. At the same time, the frame gave him the rational understanding of what he felt and why. He could feel his passions, but he knew he did not have to let them move him to action unless he chose to.

He gave orders to Hansen and his men. They caught five more robots and cut them open like lobsters. Dunt spiked the remains to the factory floor himself.