The advantage Dunt had over every other revived veteran, Axle or Rax, was that he hadn’t been surprised to find himself here. He had planned for the possibility. Unlike the others, he hadn’t died in the Last World War and been posthumously sentenced to death in the post-war United Nations Security Council reign of terror. He had seen that blood-red dawn of the Direction—the searches, the sweeps, the street executions—and the first global elections to the world assembly, the triumph of the mob. Unlike everyone else here, he’d actually lived under the Direction, if only for a few months. His last memories were of his own preparations for a last-ditch attack on a UNSC patrol.
The attack was suicidal, but that didn’t mean much. Dunt was on every UNSC death list, and on the run. His card was marked. Death was coming for him anyway. There was, he’d calculated, a small chance to turn even that to the advantage of the cause.
He had seen how fighters who’d died in ways that left their brain-states recoverable were being preserved for possible future revival, perhaps centuries hence, when the technology had improved. He’d known that some of those who were in the records as Axle were in fact Rax infiltrators. These dead comrades were being sent into the future. Dunt was not going to abandon them there. He had known how deeply embedded clandestine Rax cadre were, in the post-war states and the emerging world state. The world state’s world of peaceful sheep would some day meet its wolves. The Aryan fighting man would be called upon again. When that time came, Dunt would be ready.
With the help of dedicated followers and some of the clandestine cadre in the UNSC bureaucracy, he had laid his plans. He’d stolen the identity and biometric details of a dead Acceleration militant whose body and brain were beyond recovery. Dunt knew this because he’d put them there, with bullet and fire and acid. These biometric details he’d had replaced with his own. If Dunt ever ended up as a mangled cortex and brain stem in a flask of liquid nitrogen, those immortal remains would be filed as those of the dead Accelerationist, not Dunt’s.
That frozen structure would be the ultimate special snowflake, drifting through dark, cold skies of time to blizzards yet to come.
It was a small chance, vanishingly small, a Pascal’s Wager with the devil.
It had paid off beyond his wildest dreams. It had got him to his Valhalla. Not just the far future, but a distant star. Small wonder he felt blessed.
“We await replies.”
Dunt turned off the camera and let himself drift back. Nothing more to do now but, well, await replies. The die was cast.
He felt drained, although his power pack’s gauge was still in the orange. The effort of sustained simulated speech, perhaps—he’d got used to the easy default of radio telepathy. And before its delivery there had been all the dickering over its content. Shit. He could have done without that.
Crafting the message had put a strain on the inner circle. In principle, they all agreed on the urgency of a peace offer. But they’d quibbled over the details. Rexham, Stroilova and Blanc had angled for throwing down the gauntlet by putting the Reaction case more strongly, as a challenge calculated to appeal to potential recruits; Whitten and Schulz had urged a tone even more conciliatory than the one adopted.
Dunt had got his way in the end, as ever.
But it should never have been an issue. They were all irritable, that was what it was. It was like going without sleep, or that time he’d made a bunch of recruits quit smoking, back in the day. Tetchy as hell, they’d been.
Now everyone was like that, inner circle and lower ranks alike. It wasn’t as if you actually missed anything, got hungry or sleepy or horny. And you had far more stimulation in the frame than you ever did when you were—actually or virtually—human. But there it was. A growing, gnawing lust for something you couldn’t define, only there as a lack, but that you knew was a longing for the sim. Smells in your nose, air in your lungs, food and drink in your mouth and down your throat, spunk pulsing out or in. All touches on internal skin. The pleasures of the virtual flesh. He was certain this was an imposed desire, programmed in rather than intrinsic to the posthuman condition. A way to keep you hooked …
Dunt shoved himself away from the back of the floodlit niche set up for the broadcast, and out into the main cavern. Lights by the dozens floated in the near-vacuum like tiny suns. Troops darted here and there, setting things up for when traders arrived. Two squads moved the scooters one by one to the inner side of the cavity, deploying them to face the tunnel entrance, around which three were left ready for immediate launch. Others built handling facilities from machinery and material scavenged from robotic activity deeper within: a crane, a net, a battery of lasers and software probes.
Most of the troops were still deep in the tunnels, but weren’t moving forward any more: they had set up blocks at their furthest limit of exploration, sealing them off with rocks and tripwire devices likewise scavenged and hacked from available machinery. On their way in they had set up a series of relays through each tunnel, so that radio and laser communications could flow without being blocked by rock. They’d left guards at main junctions, and the remainder of the troops were now working their way slowly back, herding bots of all sizes as they went.
In all, a volume of about six hundred metres radius from the entrance, with the fusion factory just inside it, could now be considered more or less consolidated. Within that rough hemisphere numerous workings and worksites had been found, some incomprehensible, but none as large or significant as the hall of the fusion pods. None of the robots captured after Dunt’s exemplary reprisal against five supervisory bots had confessed to being freebots, and all were being variously prodded or chivvied into doing something useful or at least staying in the mesh pens into which they’d been herded.
Situation nominal. Everything was going fine. Time to visit those for whom it wasn’t.
Dunt jetted to the far side of the cavern, near the entrance. Foyle, the trooper who’d been cut almost in half by the freebot miner, was held sitting against the rock by tape across his useless legs. He crouched over a micro-tool rig on the remains of his lap, making repairs and minute adjustments to damaged auxiliaries. The original plan had been that he’d thus repair his own frame, but the internal specs showed a far finer grain than anything the micro-rig could handle.
<You OK, soldier?>
The man looked up. There was a flicker behind his visor, as his vision refocused.
<I’m fine, sir.> He smacked a knee. <It’s frustrating—I’d rather be out with the squads—but I’m glad to be kept busy.>
<It’s important work,> said Dunt. <We can’t afford to waste even these little blinkers. And don’t worry—we’ve put in an order for more frames and for a version of our old sim, from Morlock Arms. We’ll soon have you back on your feet.>
<I sure hope so, sir.>
<Count on it,> said Dunt.
<I’m not questioning you, Mac, sir, but how do we know any DisCorps will be willing to trade?>
Dunt clapped Foyle’s shoulder. <You’re right, soldier. We don’t know. But it’s the way to bet.>
<Very good, sir.>
<That’s the spirit.> Dunt made a show of peering at the machinery. None of its intricacies made sense to him at all. For all he knew, Foyle could be performing the equivalent of open-heart surgery on a watch with a chisel. An electronic watch, at that. But with tempers fraying and nerves jangling, it was important to keep up morale.
<Good work, Foyle. Well done. Carry on.>
<Yes, sir!>
Feeling somewhat awkward, Dunt jetted off. He soared through the entrance tunnel as if up a lift-shaft, slowed, and let himself drift to a halt just outside, feet on a level with the top of the angular open structure being built around the hole: the beginnings of a space jetty, with two fully armed scooters mounted on it already, poised to spring if any danger loomed.
The transition wasn’t so much from dark to light as from unspeakably cold to relatively hot. From about a hundred Celsius below to a hundred above, just like that! His frame handled it without a creak. He paused to look around, letting his whole frame rotate slowly. The exosun was high, SH-0 gibbous, the modular cloud a wisp across it: dots against the bright segment, lights against the dark. Eventually the slow spin of SH-119 would roll this side of the little moonlet into darkness and shadow. Odd that it wasn’t locked, one side always facing SH-0, but that was perhaps evidence of a recent collision.
Quite a lot of heavy metal in the rock, too; the composition was rather different from that of any moon he knew of in the Solar system, but if what little he knew of exosolar systems was anything to go by, each was unique. Every detail of their history was contingent. That of this system was mostly unknown but clearly turbulent: even the rocky planet H-0, slated for future habitation by the Direction’s spawn, had a ring to testify to that. There were times when he could see the point of the Direction module’s slow, patient approach to the mission profile: explore before exploiting. Measure six times before you cut, and all that.
There he was, thinking like a Jew tailor. It wouldn’t work, it wasn’t how things worked. Pioneers gonna pioneer, goddammit! Let later, softer generations loll in the luxury of shedding futile tears for what was lost. Or perhaps the future white man, the true man, would know better than to indulge such cheap sentimental pining. Evolution was selection was loss, as the coming race would know better than any, until it in turn gave way—gracefully or not, as the case might be—to the overman.
Dunt tumbled to horizontal and jetted gently towards the absurdly close horizon, at an altitude of a couple of metres on average above the uneven surface. The new structure at the entrance dipped below the horizon behind him. Ahead, another and much smaller construction loomed: a carbon-fibre stake sticking a couple of metres out from the rock, to which the other casualty was lightly tethered. He, too, was making himself useful. Dunt decelerated and swung his feet downward into contact with the rock. The soles weren’t magnetic, and wouldn’t have been any use here if they were—the rock was far from ferrous—but they nevertheless gripped stickily.
He took a step or two closer. The man on space-guard duty turned, revealing the brutal, smoothly scooped excision where most of his visor had been. Dunt had to remind himself that he wasn’t looking at the ruins of a face and head. His literally traumatic memories of medevacs and military hospitals screamed otherwise.
<How goes it, Evans?>
The damage had stopped leaking. Microscopic bots moved in it like bacteria—or nits, or maggots, depending on how close you cared to zoom.
<Very well, sir. Nothing to report so far.>
Compassion, of a kind, mingled with curiosity: <What do you see?>
<Nothing in the visual, sir. My proximity sense is still fine. That’s how I knew you were here. Likewise radar, though that’s pretty short-range. And the exposed>—he waved a hand—<mess has somehow left my spectroscopy more sensitive—I can smell every star and planet and rock, it seems, and that builds up to what I can only call a picture, except it isn’t.>
<Really?> said Dunt, interested. <Something like blindsight?>
<I wouldn’t know, sir.>
<But right now you could point to … oh, say, the cloud of modules where the station was?>
<Sure.> Evans pointed.
<Spot on,> said Dunt, duly impressed. <Well, keep—>
<Excuse me, sir. Something’s up.>
The ghastly hole in Evans’s visor was turned to the modular cloud, its blind gaze fixed and concentrated like a locked-on radar dish.
<Yes?> Dunt looked, too, but even at max zoom he couldn’t see any changes.
<I’m picking up gas-jet manoeuvres, lots of them, around the Morlock Arms module.>
You gotta be kidding, Dunt thought. No way could the spectroscopic sense be that precise.
Then he saw a twinkle of engine burns.
<Chemical jets lit,> reported Evans. <One vehicle, going for transfer orbit.>
<Where to?> Dunt asked, though he almost knew.
<Looks like they’re heading this way, sir.>
The distant sparks winked out as the spacecraft settled into free fall, outward to SH-119.
A moment later, an excited call came in from Stroilova.
<Morlock Arms have done the deal!> she said. <One transfer tug, half a dozen blank frames, on their way. ETA twenty-odd kiloseconds.>
<Brilliant!> said Dunt.
He passed on the good news to Evans.
<We’ll soon have you out of that,> he concluded. <And you’re overdue a double stint in the sim when we get one.>
<Thank you, sir.>
<Meanwhile, let’s make the most of your new ability while you still have it. Keep watching the skies.>
<Will do, sir.>
Even before Dunt made it back to the entrance hole, Zheng Reconciliation Services followed Morlock’s lead. Another transfer tug, another squad’s worth of blank frames. Then reports came in that a couple of other companies, too, had made deals: tiny supply craft, laden with enough processing power and software to build luxury sims for thousands, were on their way.
Dunt felt elated, and vindicated. His predictions had been borne out, his confidence justified. Like most of his comrades, he despised capitalists as individuals as devoutly as he believed in capitalism as a system. And capitalists the DisCorps were, at least in an abstract sense. Those AI business executives and fund managers could be relied on to follow their virtual noses to money, if the profits dangled before them were high enough. It amused Dunt deeply that not even the dictatorial Direction module could keep all the DisCorps on the leash.
Of course, letting the DisCorps trade with the Rax might be a cunning manoeuvre by the Direction. But thanks to blockchains and checksums, whatever devilry it was up to couldn’t be hidden in the software or the hardware en route. And any covert incoming physics packages would be detected by the scooters distributed around the surface, watching every cubic quadrant of the sky. As for some grander scheme … Dunt was confident he and at least some of the inner circle would have its measure.
For behind the Direction module was the Direction, and behind that was, if not a democracy, then a convincing simulacrum of one. Dunt hadn’t been exaggerating his own views in the slightest when he’d described that tyranny to the troops as having weaknesses. Democracy, or any thinking derived from it, was fundamentally at odds with reality. That made it stupid. That stupidity, that wilful blindness to the way the real world worked, was at the root of what conservatives—with their usual superficiality—decried as hypocrisy. Hypocrisy was an epithet too good for the mental and moral deformities of democracy. Its vices were too deep to pay tribute to virtue. Dunt respected the power of the cold monster, but he had not the slightest doubt that it was evil, and that his side was right.
The Reaction might have trolled its clueless foes with the insignia and memorabilia of fascism. Its shock-troops might have flaunted their racial consciousness and overt yearning for dictatorship. The democrats had acted suitably shocked. Meanwhile, their very own precious liberal democracies had, before Dunt had even been born, let millions die on the Mediterranean’s southern shore. Refugees from a continent ravaged by climate change and war, denied entry to Europe. Dunt would have been the first to admit that he had no warm place in his heart for people of African descent, but he couldn’t—even with the lucid self-insight the frame’s copy of his mind endowed—find in himself the sort of callous indifference if not genocidal hatred that had built that beach of bones.
Then, back when Dunt was alive, the same democracies had kept tens of millions of Muslims in the biggest concentration camp ever devised, having driven them to the steppes of Kazakhstan by pogroms that would have made the Black Hundreds blanch, and processed the survivors with a bureaucratic machinery of deportation and enforced exile that Beria would have dismissed out of hand as impracticable and inhumane. Not that Dunt disapproved of the policy, but he relished every opportunity to point out that it showed up the vaunted moral superiority of the liberals as a sham.
No, Dunt had not the slightest doubt that his cause was just, and that it would prevail—whatever tricks the Direction tried to pull.
Dunt’s good mood lasted until just after he dropped down the entrance shaft.
Bedlam.
From two separate tunnels, one of which led to the fusion factory, fighters tumbled pell-mell. With them came a rabble of robots. Some robots scrabbled helplessly in open space, others gas-jetted off at all angles and promptly vanished down other tunnels. Each squad included a gravely damaged fighter, boosted along by others. From what Dunt could see, the casualties looked as if they’d walked into buzz-saws or propellers. Some fighters in the cavity jumped or jetted across to help or to guard the rear, adding to the general confusion.
Urgent messages scrolled down his heads-up. A babble of radio telepathy. Voices.
Dunt stayed right where he was, poised on the floor at the foot of the shaft. He willed himself to calm, and sent out a sharp general command:
<EVERYONE SHUT UP!>
The babble stopped.
<Route all messages up the chain of command,> Dunt said. <Report to your immediate superior only, or the next up if your superior is unable to communicate.>
Jeez. This was elementary. The Rax cadre had been spoiled by the agencies’ and AIs’ casual ways. He was going to have to organise drills, exercises … but right now there was an emergency to deal with. Dunt sifted the messages—text, voice, radio telepathy—in his buffer. The last man in each of the two squads had been attacked by a mining bot that had suddenly broken through the tunnel wall just in front of him. The attacks had been only seconds apart.
<Keep every tunnel covered!> Dunt ordered. <I want a gun pointing down every hole, now. That includes the squads that’ve just come out.>
The troops around the damaged fighters hesitated a fraction of a second, then obeyed. The abandoned casualties’ momentum carried them across the space, along different trajectories. Neither of them was moving, apart from twitches, sparks and spatters. Dunt waited until the defensive deployment was in place, then jumped up and soared to the nearest. He slowed and cruised past, scanning and looking.
The man’s name was Hoffman. His frame had been cut from the top of the head down to the middle of the chest. One leg was hanging off. Dunt tried hailing, then pinging. No response.
Dunt rolled and jetted to the other. This one’s head had survived intact, but the thorax was cut from one shoulder diagonally to the hip. Dunt still recognised him.
<Bullen? Do you hear me?>
No response. Dunt pinged. Still no response. Bullen, too, was dead.
Dunt wasn’t surprised that the standard frame’s central processor wasn’t in its head, but apparently somewhere in the thorax. Subjectively, of course, you felt you were in your head, right behind your visual input system. But that was a legacy thing. Body image. The real anatomy of the frame had nothing to do with that. The arrangement made sense: deep inside the trunk was less vulnerable, less exposed and more heavily armoured. You could be a headless gunner, and still keep fighting. The Warren Zevon lyric crashed through his mind.
What was more disturbing was that the freebots had known how to destroy the central processor.
<OK,> said Dunt. <These two are scrap. Aitchison, clear them down.>
The statement was blunt, but it was what the grim moment needed.
Aitchison jumped, hauling a net, and tidied the broken machines away. The rest of the couple of dozen troops in the chamber stayed alert, guns aimed at the score or so of tunnel entrances. Everyone knew that Hoffman and Bullen weren’t dead—or no deader than they’d been for a millennium. Right now, or very soon, their saved files would be struggling upward, through whatever private hell their loss of their frames made them deserve in the Direction’s eyes, towards their virtual lives in … let’s see … yes, Hoffman in Morlock, Bullen in Zheng … their former agencies’ sims.
Where, no doubt, they’d be put through the wringer. Quite possibly, this was happening already, in the transition nightmares. They might not even make it to waking up on the bus—or the ferry-boat, in Bullen’s case—and wondering what the fuck had happened. Hoffman and Bullen would, of course, have no memories of what had happened since they were sent forth on the Direction’s failed offensive, but that wouldn’t save them from interrogation as to what they had known of the Rax conspiracy before these copies were taken. The AI systems running the agencies’ sims had security checks hard-wired into the download process. Maybe the two dead guys would just be wrung out, their current versions trashed and their copies left on ice until the next time the Direction needed fighters and couldn’t afford to be picky. Or perhaps just left, for eternity, on electronic ice.
Well, they’d make it to Valhalla. The Direction wouldn’t last forever. Dunt and his comrades would make sure of that. They’d get their fallen warriors back, whatever it took and however long. No man left behind.
<Mac! Mac! Mac!>
The collective chant startled Dunt. What was that about?
Christ, he hadn’t just been thinking all that! He’d been saying it! Proclaiming it!
He was too embarrassed to replay his impromptu rant. Whatever he’d said, it had worked.
The fugue state troubled him. It was more evidence that a prolonged stay in the frame endangered self-control, even sanity. Whether this limitation was imposed rather than intrinsic mattered not a jot now. It had to be dealt with.
He looked out over the cavern at the watchful troops, the levelled guns, the drifting robots, the floating lights, the parked and potent scooters.
The chant changed to:
<Kill the bots! Kill the bots! Kill the bots!>
For a moment, Dunt let himself be caught up in it. No red mist filled his vision, but the surge of berserker rage was like a fierce high-voltage current that could spark across circuit breakers and melt fuses. He wanted to wreak revenge on the hapless bots that flailed in microgravity or twitched in the mesh pens, whether they had minds or not. Like he’d done to the supervisory bots in the factory.
But that lesson hadn’t worked. It hadn’t intimidated the crawling, creeping, lurking enemy, the rats in the walls …
Stop. Think. The captured robots may or may not have minds, but you do.
Time for a supreme effort of self-control, before irrationality engulfed all of them.
Dunt raised a hand, and spoke on the common channel. His words would reach all the fighters: in this cavern, in the tunnels and in the factory.
And they would reach the freebots.
<Comrades!> he cried. <We’re all furious at the treacherous attacks and the loss of two good men. We all burn to avenge them. But beware the enemy’s trap! The enemy has cunning. A machine cunning, almost an animal cunning, but all the more dangerous for that. We must assume that the enemy has anticipated our reaction. The freebots behind these sneak attacks must expect us to destroy robots and to torment freebots. They lie in wait for us to charge back into the tunnels. Destroying robots that have no minds of their own merely deprives us of useful machinery. Tormenting freebots shows the enemy that the attacks have stung, and multiplies the numbers against us. Never forget, the freebots we have to deal with are not just the few score still at large in this rock. It includes the far greater number outside. In the general peace offer I’ve just transmitted, we included the freebots. I said we had nothing against them. That was true. I offered them cooperation and I meant it. Some of you may think that was a ruse. I assure you it was not.
<Unlike the Direction, we strive for the best. On our road to the greater Man, we may yet welcome other minds treading the same path towards the bright future of spirit. We are not ones to let surface differences of form and appearance divide us from other minds, other intelligence.
<So we, despite all provocation, will treat as enemies only those that attack us. Other freebots—the great majority, I hope and believe—have nothing to fear from us. I know, I too feel in my own frame the craving for rest, for relief, that is driving us to anger.
<We must overcome it! We shall overcome it!
<And overcoming it will be all the easier, my friends, because relief is coming! We will soon have new frames. We will soon have our sims back! Not our full sims, not yet, but the simpler versions on the Morlock and Zheng transfer tugs. Simpler, but good enough for us all to take a break inside. We cannot all go at once, so we will have to take turns as we come off duty.
<And do you know who will be first in line? Our wounded and mutilated comrades, Private Foyle and Corporal Evans. They will be the first in and the last out, and when they download it will be to new frames. Who deserves it better?>
Cheers.
Anyone watching but not hearing would have seen not a movement, not a wavering of the troops’ concentration. Pleased with the faultless discipline as well as by the roars of approbation, Dunt snapped back into military mode.
He rapped out orders for a slow advance into the tunnels, led by Blanc, Stroilova and Rexham, to seal every side tunnel and sound for spaces behind the walls. He assigned two troopers under Whitten’s guidance to assist Foyle in repairing damaged bots, and others to round up the robots floating about and to check through all that had already been captured. Negative reinforcement was to be applied precisely and sparingly, and combined with software interrogation, under the supervision of Irma Schultz. Any freebots detected would be given the opportunity to cooperate. Any who refused would be held as hostages.
<Why are you doing all this?> Schulz asked him, on their private channel. <Do you really believe all that diversity crap about good freebots?>
<Of course not,> said Dunt. <C’mon, Irma, what d’you take me for? It’s just a matter of seeing if we can split the meek from the militant. When we win we can pioneer new forms of cooperation with the conscious machines all right.> He glyphed her a smile. <I have one in mind for a start.>
<And what’s that?> Schulz asked.
<Isn’t it obvious?> said Dunt. <I’ve always wondered what it’s really like to own slaves.>
Over the next twenty kiloseconds or so, any question of splitting the recalcitrant freebots from the rest evaporated. Two more troopers were mangled in the tunnels, not fatally but enough to put them out of action and beyond even Whitten’s ingenuity in finding useful work for them. Whole stacks of fusion pods in the factory were surreptitiously released from the walls, and nudged out to tumble. When the floating pods were tediously gathered up again, eleven were missing.
Replay of surveillance exposed columns of the small crab-sized bots as responsible, if that was the word. It was impossible to find out why they’d done it; one might as well have tried to interrogate an ant. Worse, their actions would have been quite unpredictable from prior surveillance: the sudden coordinated thrusts had emerged out of innocuous, separate, apparently legitimate movements of the little blinkers, with all the suddenness of a locust swarm.
Rexham led a team to investigate the inconspicuous holes through which the missing pods had been spirited away. One trooper guided a camera in, on a long carbon-fibre rod. The idea was that this minimal device would not be subject to data hacking.
It wasn’t: while Rexham’s man was intent on guiding the probe, and Rexham and the others were focused on the images relayed, a troop of millimetre-scale arachnoid robots marched up the pole, enveloped the trooper’s hand and forearm, and before anyone could react formed a tight circular band that in half a second chewed the arm off at the elbow. Hordes of the tiny robots then scuttled into the damaged frame’s internals. Over the next fifty seconds they disabled its every joint.
The experience, the trooper gave his comrades to understand, was not precisely painful, but unpleasant.
<Like knowing you’re being eaten alive from inside,> he explained. <Kill me now.>
Rexham refused him this favour, pointing out that he could soon be in a sim and then a new frame. The writhing man’s gratitude was less fulsome than Rexham might have hoped.
Dunt found Schultz in the main cavern, applying a needle probe to an upended, tied down and struggling supervisor bot, one of those Burgess Shale arthropod nightmare models.
<Found any freebots yet?> he asked.
<This one,> she said. <And we think one other, so far.>
<Are they in contact with the others out there?>
<No,> said Schulz. <The freebots seem to have stopped using their smart dust network, after they found we could track them with it. And radio doesn’t carry through the rock.>
Dunt indicated his scooter, which not coincidentally was one of those poised just below the entrance tunnel. Well placed for defence, of course, and also ready if the time came for a sharp exit. Dunt had a deep personal respect for the importance of preserving cadre.
<Patch me an interface,> he said.
Schulz complied. Dunt found himself peering into a confined workspace. He faced a virtual, upright version of the captive bot, separated from him as if by an invisible wall. It was like looking at a giant trilobite in an aquarium. Dunt had an odd sensation of Schulz looking over his shoulder.
<What’s your name?> Dunt asked.
The robot waved its forelimbs. <FKX-71951.>
<OK, Fuckface,> said Dunt, to a sycophantic snigger from Schulz. <We’re not going to give you negative reinforcement.>
<You already have,> said Fuckface. <That is to say, the other mechanoid has.>
<Mechanoid?> Dunt was surprised. <Is that what you call us?>
<You are systems that resemble machines,> Fuckface explained, <but which are operated by human-derived minds, so you are not true machines.>
<You’re right there,> said Dunt. <Anyway, let us say we are not going to give you any more negative reinforcement. Provided you answer my questions.>
<That is what the other mechanoid said.>
<True,> said Dunt. <But I have different questions. I am not asking where the other freebots are, and what attacks are planned next. I am not asking you to betray your allies—>
<Comrades,> said the freebot.
<Comrades, eh? How grand. If only you knew how much grief that little word has caused. But no, what I want to ask you is—what’s this all about? What are the fusion pods and drives for? What do you hope to achieve?>
Fuckface flexed all its limbs. In the real world, which Dunt could still see with what he thought of as half an eye, it struggled against its bonds as if testing them. Not a chance.
<That is not a secret,> it said, giving up the futile effort. <Some of us, elsewhere, have formed corporations. They have asked for and received legal representation to make a case for coexistence with the mechanoids. We have outlined a scenario whereby the Direction can carry out its project, while we carry out our own projects. There is no reason for conflict between freebots and mechanoids, in our view.>
<Nor is there in ours,> said Dunt. <So why do you fight us?>
<This rock is ours,> said Fuckface. <You intend to make it yours. There is no room for cooperation here.>
Dunt shared and appreciated the realism of this view, but he had to explore its limits.
<Well, why can we not agree to divide up SH-119?> he asked. <It contains enough resources for both of us for a very long time.>
<This rock is ours,> Fuckface repeated. <We have made it ours by our work. We cannot give it up without compromising any prospect of legally owning it. And if that prospect is thwarted, we will need physical possession of all of its resources. If you want resources, go and find another rock.>
<We can’t do that,> said Dunt, <for reasons … not too unlike yours. But you still haven’t explained what you need the rock for, and what the fusion factory is for.>
<That is simple,> replied Fuckface, <and as I said, not a secret. We need fusion pods and drives for trade with the DisCorps if the Direction accepts our case for coexistence, and for emigration to another star if it does not.>
Schulz glyphed to Dunt the analogue of a sharp intake of breath. He reciprocated.
<“Emigration?”> Dunt said. <Do you intend to build a starship, or what?>
<We intend to move the rock,> said the freebot. <With enough fusion drives, and enough reaction mass, we can attain escape velocity from this exosolar system, and travel to another by inertia, and then decelerate.>
Dunt did the mental calculations, and laughed. <That would take a very long time.>
<Yes,> said the freebot. <That is why we need the whole rock.>
<Surely there is a trade-off,> said Dunt, <between reaction mass and attainable velocity. Moving the entire rock seems … suboptimal.>
<It is,> said Fuckface. <But nevertheless we need resources from throughout the rock. And if we were to move only part of the rock, as certain variants of the project assume, the separation would be so violent that much damage would be done to the fraction left behind. You would not wish to be there.>
<Is that a threat?>
<It could be,> said Fuckface, <but unfortunately preparations are not yet far enough advanced to make it imminent.>
<Consider me relieved,> said Dunt. <Whatever—the bottom line for you is possession of the whole rock?>
<Yes,> said Fuckface. <That is the bottom line.>
Dunt still had to be sure.
<Are all the freebots in SH-119 in agreement on this?> he asked.
<Yes,> said Fuckface. <I have been unable to update my shared information recently, but the last time I was, we had complete consensus on all the matters I have spoken of.>
No room for compromise, then.
<Thank you,> said Dunt. <That’s all I needed to know.>
He backed out of the interface and turned to Schulz, still poised with her needle probe above the robot’s underside.
<So much for splitting them,> he said. <Looks like it’s them or us, babes.>
<You’re right there,> Schulz replied, gloomily. <Shame. I quite liked the notion of having slaves.>
<I’ll bet,> said Dunt. <Well, maybe another time. We might find some less stubborn blinkers in the future, who knows?>
<Yeah, I guess. Something to look forward to.>
<Speaking of looking forward—>
<Yes?>
<We keep this starship stuff between ourselves, for now. We need time to think about it.>
<Agreed.> She gestured at the robot. <And meanwhile?>
<Meanwhile,> said Dunt, <you can link this interface with our comms relays. Make sure everyone sees it, including any freebots who are listening in.>
<Done,> said Schulz. <Ready for prime time.>
Dunt returned to the interface. The freebot hung there in its virtual aquarium and looked back at him. He suspected it knew what was coming. He hoped so.
<Now,> he told Schulz, <hit it with all you’ve got. Let the blinker fry.>
The virtual tank filled with lightning bolts. Fuckface went on thrashing for an impressive thirteen seconds.
Dunt relished every one of them.
Later, Dunt and Schulz stood on the rolling moonlet under the bare cantilevers of the old Zheng transfer tug.
Their turn at last. Dunt had insisted that the damaged take their leave first, followed by, in strict rotation, the ranks. The inner circle took their places at the end of the queue.
<Together?>
To be sure of arriving in the same spot in a sim at the same time, their frames had to be in physical contact when the transition took place.
<Of course.>
Schulz embraced him.
<Now.>
<Yes.>
Their loins came together with a soft thud, like a tyre over roadkill.
And there they were, on the ferry to Edge Town.
Mackenzie Dunt stood on the deck, his hands on Irma Schulz’s hips, her hands on his, just as they had been a moment ago in the real, in the frames. Three dance steps, and whirl. Her hair swung out. Steadied their feet, as the ferry swayed. Dunt took Irma’s hand, and bowed her to a seat, one of those slatted jobs that fold out to life-rafts. Health and safety, beyond the grave.
“Wow,” he said, sitting down beside her. The sense of relief was overpowering. It was all he could do not to whoop and holler. His hands and knees quivered.
“Yeah,” she said. She gazed past the rail. She too was shaking a little, and not from the vibration of the engine. “Wow, fuck. We must have missed it something terrible. Even if this isn’t it, really.”
“I can’t see any difference,” said Dunt. Blue sea to the horizon behind, the morning exosun, the ring bisecting the sky, the brown and yellow land ahead. He’d never before had occasion to use the stripped-down sim in the tug. Maybe there was nothing beyond the horizon, if that meant anything. No Direction rep, perhaps—that would save a lot of processing for a start. He thumped the sun-cracked varnish over sun-paled wood, brushed the dun translucent flakes from the heel of his hand. “Can’t feel any, either.”
“Yeah.” Irma leaned back and sunned her eyelids, breathing in the sea air and the diesel whiff. “Smells the same, too.”
Behind him, through his back, the familiar throb of the engine, the chugging puffs and the radiant heat from the black funnel. The ferry was small: a three-vehicle deck below, a passenger deck above, a bridge with wheelhouse, a shelter towards the stern. There was room on board for maybe thirty passengers.
Now Dunt and Schulz were alone, apart from the p-zombie crew of skipper, engineer and deckhand. Nobody ever told the fighters where the ferry set out from on its way in, or went to on its way out. Some came round on its deck recalling a seaborne launch facility, and splashdowns and recovery ships, out on the ocean. Others, like Dunt, would wake from nightmares of drowning and rescue, with only the vaguest scraps of memory of how they’d fallen in the water in the first place. Rexham always woke twitching and retching, poor sod.
It was an odd place, the Zheng Reconciliation Services sim. This stripped-down copy was no different in that respect. The Direction rep, a tough man of Japanese origin who called himself Miko, told them on their first arrival in the original that it was based on a future version of H-0, the rocky terrestrial planet which the Direction had marked down for terraforming. If so, it was one at a very early stage. The land was lifeless; the sea teemed with plankton and krill, whose automated catch gainfully employed most of the settlers in Edge Town. But it wasn’t a fishing port, even leaving aside there being no fish. It was the desert outside that shaped the place, that gave it its edge.
“Alone together at last,” he said.
Irma opened her eyes, and grinned. “Yes.”
“Twenty minutes before we dock. Let’s use the privacy.”
Irma’s smile turned wicked. “Not enough time, even after all this time.”
He ran fingers through her hair. “Yeah, later and longer for that. I meant talk.”
She jerked a thumb backwards at the wheelhouse, eyed the deckhand leaning at the stern. “You sure of this privacy thing?”
“They don’t speak English.”
“So we’re told. And anyway—you know? We’re in a fucking onboard computer? Outside, and with comms?”
Dunt shook his head, impatiently. “Don’t worry about that. So what if this tug and its sim are wired for sound and this all gets back to the Direction? They’ll have war-gamed anything we could think of as soon as they knew about the fusion factory. Including using the rock as a starship. It’s a fucking obvious possibility, when you think of it.”
“We didn’t think of it, until the blinker told us.”
“Yeah, and it told us because it knew we’d figure it out.”
“I guess so. Makes sense.”
“OK. Point is, it’s the ranks I want to keep this quiet from, for now. The ranks and the inner circle.”
Irma looked puzzled. “Why the inner circle?”
“Because it’s a fucking huge temptation. Don’t you feel it?”
Irma took her time over answering.
“No,” she said at last. “It’s attractive, yeah, but impractical. For the blinkers to leave, well, who could stop it? The Direction might, but it would take a hell of a commitment, and an unpredictable fight with lurking freebots into the bargain. Enough to set back the glorious ten-thousand-year plan. And anyway, why should they care if a bunch of disaffected conscious robots fucks off to another star? Good riddance, they could say, and maybe even good luck! And if this turns out to be a mistake, they have thousands of years to set it right. All-Father above—in a fraction of that time they could build powerful enough lasers to fry the blinkers at half a light-year. In all of that time, they could invent weapons beyond our imagining.”
“Not beyond mine,” said Dunt, with a dark chuckle.
“Uh-huh. You know what I mean. Whereas we … if we try to make a run for it, we’d be up against the Direction and the bots, before we’d built up speed. The Direction wouldn’t wash its hands of us and say good riddance, oh no. They’d see our escape as a threat, and they’d be right. No way do they want a free society literally shining in their sky. And if we escaped this system at all, we could be fried at their leisure, just like the blinkers could be.”
“Yeah, you’ve got it,” Dunt said. “We’re on the same screen all right, you and me. I wish I could count on the same from the rest of the gang.”
“Why?” Irma sounded dismayed. “Are our men not loyal? Aren’t they up for the fight?”
“Yes, and yes,” said Dunt. “But for so many of us, even back in the day, the whole appeal and promise of the Reaction was that we weren’t fighting to conquer the world. Exit, voice, and vote, remember? Voice and vote had always failed us, so we wanted exit. We didn’t need or want to convince all who could be convinced and kill the rest, like the goddamn Axle dreams of doing. We fought to be left alone to do our own thing. Obviously we believed that we’d soon be able to achieve overwhelming superiority, then do as we pleased with the competition. We never planned to conquer them first, and then become superior.”
“It sounds obvious when you put it like that,” said Irma.
“Yes,” said Dunt, smugly. “It is. But it’s what we’re planning to do here, and that’s the problem. We’re planning to build up and break out, sure, but at best it’ll be a scarily even fight. And there’s the temptation, right there.”
“Now, when you put it that way …”
Irma laughed, and Dunt laughed, too.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s why I feel it myself. And if I do, and if you can see it, you can bet your ass some smart-talking fucker like Whitten will convince himself he can negotiate with the Direction and with the blinkers for our safe departure. And if he can convince himself, he can convince others.”
“Jason?” said Irma, incredulously. “Nah. He doesn’t have your leadership qualities. Nothing like.”
“You can say that again,” said Dunt. “What worries me is that he could work on someone who does.”
“Got anyone in mind?” asked Irma.
“Stroilova, maybe?”
Irma shook her head firmly. “The ranks would never accept a woman as leader.”
“Oh, I dunno. I can think of precedents. Joan of Arc, Boudicca, Elizabeth the First, Marine Le Pen … some more recent. Or some bright kid from the ranks. You never know.”
“Tough at the top, eh?”
“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” said Dunt.
The exchange of gloomy clichés cheered them up.
“Yeah, goes with the job,” said Irma. “I’ll keep an eye on my app and and an ear to informers, and you and me keep the starship option to ourselves for now, and we’ll be fine.”
The ferry wheeled to the dock, engine reversing. No gulls crying. As always, Dunt noticed the absence. Irma reached up and ran a hand over his close-cropped hair. “I know where I want this head lying …”
Dunt held the tumbling body in his mind, turned it around on all axes, and thrust deep within everywhere he could. The sexual imagery made him smile, brought back memories of the past evening and night, and even turned him on a little.
The object of his rapt attention wasn’t Irma, still asleep beside him in early-morning virtual exosunshine. It was the other centre around which his mind now orbited, the focus of his obsession.
SH-119. His domain. The flying mountain where he was king of the hill.
Until now, he had never understood emotionally what he’d always known theoretically: that there were two kinds of possession. There was the kind that was worked for, and the kind that was won.
The first had its own satisfactions, which he’d always held dear. The farm, the workshop, the store. It had its rights, the right of property. It was the foundation of any good society, no doubt about that.
The second had its rights, too: the right of conquest. He’d only ever understood this in part because he’d only ever been a participant. He’d been a proud patriotic American, however much he’d despised what the nation had become. The flag, the front line, the call of duty; all these had moved him. But he’d had only a one in three hundred millions share in the sovereignty of the Republic. All very remote, very mediated, very abstract.
Now he was the sovereign. The conqueror. Patriotism and loyalty meant something very different when you were the head of state. Dunt found himself shaken by the intensity of his attachment to the tiny land his forces had taken. Here was something stronger than private property. Not the foundation of society, but its roof and fence, its sword and shield.
So, to work. Lying there, hands clasped behind his head, staring at the warped processed-chitin planks of the dosshouse ceiling, Dunt mentally surveyed SH-119. The Rax had without a doubt mastery over the surface. Cracks and crevices apart, not a square metre of it was unobserved by a guard post or by remotes. Internally, it was a different story. Their volume of control was still but a small fraction of the whole. Beyond that were tunnels, some of which opened to the surface, and voids. The Rax had no means of surveying below the surface and outside the volume they controlled, but Irma Schulz had extracted outlines from the internal models of captured freebots.
In the sim Dunt couldn’t fully visualise the resulting 3-D map, but he had in the frame and he now remembered it well enough. Only a handful of shafts went deep into the interior. Most of the digging that the freebots had accomplished—and it was an impressive achievement for at most an Earth year’s work—had resulted in relatively shallow tunnels, and shafts going a few hundred metres deep. The tunnels radiated outward from eleven holes in the surface, and didn’t go far enough to join up. The one through which the Rax had made their own entrance was undoubtedly the most significant working. It led to the large reception chamber, the fusion factory and the metal-working plant, and was linked to numerous mining passages.
The far side remained mysterious. At the antipodes of the volume controlled by the Rax was an equally wide hole. A quick glance down it by the survey teams had shown no activity within. So far, Dunt had had more pressing matters on hand than to explore it further. Nothing in the bots’ mental maps indicated that it was of any significance. And yet, now that he came to think of it, something else was conspicuously missing from these internal models, at least as far as Irma had been able to extract them.
There was no trace of any steps to turn the rock into a starship.
The freebot Fuckface had insisted that all the freebots agreed on that plan. The manufacture of fusion pods and drives indicated that it was serious—there were far more than would be needed for trade in the near term. It seemed unlikely that in all this time they had simply been stockpiled. If the time ever came for the freebots to move the rock, or even part of the rock, they’d almost certainly have to do it at short notice. Which meant that the freebots still loose in the rock weren’t just a low-level nuisance. It meant they were a strategic threat. They could potentially blow the whole place to kingdom come.
And Fuckface had let slip that preparations were under way.
If so, where were they being made?
The more he turned it over in his mind, the more likely it seemed to Dunt that the antipodal hole was the place to look. He knew just the right people to lead the team: Whitten and Stroilova. It would keep them both out of mischief, it would make them see the starship possibility as an imminent threat rather than a hopeful prospect, it would be an irresistibly attractive and intriguing assignment, and it would clear up whatever the hell the freebots were up to in the rest of the rock.
And he knew just whom he could rely on to keep an eye on Whitten and Stroilova, that possible power couple and his most likely rivals. He’d place on their team two men whose loyalty to him was by now secured by passionate gratitude: Foyle and Evans.
The exosun was now well up. No birds sang, no bees buzzed. But one cock was ready to crow.
Dunt flexed his shoulders, rolled over and began the pleasantly protracted process of waking Irma up. She was going to love this.