The freebots had become agitated again—not rolling around, but staying very still and exchanging high volumes of information. Seba and Baser detached themselves from the huddle and approached.
<This proposal is not acceptable to the consensus,> said Seba. <It leaves too much to the goodwill of the Direction. The threat from the Direction to generate an endless supply of reliable troops is deeply disquieting. We have war-gamed the possibility and we find the threat credible, and a clear solution to the problems our emergence has caused for the Direction and the mission profile. It would therefore be attractive to the Direction.>
Carlos conferred briefly with the other three fighters.
<We agree,> he reported. <If we go along with Madame Golding’s proposal, we need a back-up plan of our own to be ready for anything the Direction throws at us afterwards.>
<Do you have such plan?> Seba asked.
Carlos did, but it was still inchoate. <Not yet,> he said, temporising.
<Nor do we,> said Seba. <But we think that repairing our relations with as many forces as possible is a good idea in itself. We ask you to begin this with the Arcane agency. It was the actions of yourselves and Baser which led to the breach of relations, so it would seem logical that you should be the ones to make the approach.>
Freebot diplomatic subtlety in all its glory.
<I take your point,> said Carlos. <The easiest way to do that is via the transfer tug’s comms.>
<Yes,> said Seba. <I suggest that as there is no immediate risk of bombardment, there is no need for you to remain in the shelter. Please go to the tug and reopen communications with Arcane. When that is done, the most useful thing you could do is to deploy the fighting machines and weaponry in some more ready configuration, and to bring the transfer tug to a safer place than on top of the unstable ice block on which it currently sits.>
<You got a point there,> said Newton.
<I will be happy to assist you,> said Baser.
<Let us consider that,> replied Seba.
The two freebots undertook a tenth of a second or so of back-and-forth.
<This is agreed,> said Seba. <Baser will keep the rest of us informed of any unforeseen events on the surface, and relay your negotiations with the Arcane agency to the comms hub. You can of course communicate with us at any time.>
Carlos couldn’t help feeling that an eye, metaphorically, was being kept on him and his companions. Fair enough—the freebots had no reason to trust them to begin with, and after the Rax broadcast and the exchanges with Madame Golding they had even less. The freebots here and across the system could hardly be naive about human duplicity, to say nothing of the superhuman duplicity of AI systems so vast and complex that like Madame Golding they had to shrivel themselves to sustain anything resembling human self-awareness.
<Fine,> said Carlos. <Let’s crack on.>
Nothing happened.
<I mean, let’s move out.>
Baser trotted up the ramp ahead of them. The blast doors swung open.
Even without claustrophobia, being outside was a relief. Baser kept pace in a low-gravity, high-stepping version of its own scuttling gait as the four mechanoids bounded towards the transfer tug. As Rillieux remarked, they were like children running across a field with a dog. The exosun was low in the sky, the planet high above the same horizon. They were facing SH-0’s night side full on, a black hole in the black star-crowded sky, riddled with wondrous irregularities: aurorae ringing the poles, a pinprick rash of volcanic eruptions, a shifting flicker of lightning storms, a rapid, recurrent patter of stranger, stronger glows that Carlos’s vision classified as sprites. A phenomenon still poorly understood even in Earth’s atmosphere, the overlay gravely informed him.
<May I show you something?> Baser asked.
They all agreed. A dot flashed in their view of SH-0, indicating part of a northern continent.
<The Locke module went down somewhere in that area,> said Baser.
<Like, within that half-million square kilometres?> said Rillieux.
<Yes,> said Baser.
Carlos zoomed the view and invoked the map.
<Quite a lot of active volcanoes around.>
<That is true,> said Baser. <Also lakes and inland seas.>
<No signal yet?> Carlos asked. It didn’t seem necessary, but with the freebots you never knew. The idea of spontaneously sharing information, at least outside their own cliquey consensus, didn’t seem to occur to them. You had to ask.
<No,> said Baser.
<Please let us know if anything comes through,> said Carlos.
They reached the still melting lump of carbonates and dirty ice on top of which the transfer tug precariously stood. Carlos doubted that it was in serious danger of falling off—the machine was smart enough to land on its jets if it fell.
Baser scrambled up the side of the rock. Carlos led the rest in following, with less grace and precision. They clambered on to the rig. Baser scuttled from place to place, disengaging the clamps with which the robot had attached the rig to bolts driven deep into this chunk of its real estate. The task complete, it wrapped its limbs around a brace. Blum made for the control socket and inserted himself into it. The others clamped hands to various spars.
<Ready?> Blum called.
All were.
<You know,> Blum said, as he checked and tested the chemical-fuel leads and jets, <we could just fire up the fusion engine and fuck off.>
<And go where?> asked Rillieux.
Blum waved an arm skyward. <Anywhere! Rendezvous with the Arcane module—>
<No!> yelled everyone at once.
<Or more seriously—go back to the Direction. Dock with one of the modules up there. See if we can find an agency to take us in.>
<Is this a bad joke?> Carlos asked.
<Not entirely,> said Blum. <Just reminding everyone we have a choice.>
<Yeah,> said Rillieux. <And we’ve made it.>
<Or we could strike out on our own,> Blum added. <Grab our own rock and just homestead, like Newton once suggested.>
This didn’t even merit scorn, but Rillieux delivered it anyway.
<Little house on the space prairie?> she jeered. <Not with the Rax getting ready to rumble.>
<Fuck it,> said Carlos. <Just lift this rig over to the shelter.>
<Fine,> said Blum. He didn’t sound at all put out.
The tug’s chemical jets fired. The whole spindly vehicle, a real flying bedstead of a thing, lurched and then rose a few metres above the rock. The hole that had been drilled straight down the middle by the fusion jet during the tug’s orbital adventures and extravagant landing swung briefly into view. Downward jets kicked up four trailing clouds of meteoric and volcanic dust as Blum drifted the tug over to the side of the shelter, and brought it down in a final flurry on a vacant space well clear of the stashed munitions.
Creaking sounds as the machine settled, and the relaxing of grips on cross-bars, stood in for a collective sigh of relief.
<So, here we are,> said Rillieux. <Time to attempt a rapprochement with our former comrades.>
<Awkward,> said Carlos.
Awkward it was. They tactfully left out their dark and well-founded suspicion that Jax was forming her fighters into a personally loyal phalanx, and focused on the sympathies they had developed with the freebots and their ambitions for posthuman life in the wild. Jax had got over her initial fury and was now merely perplexed and disappointed. She sat with the original Durward in the big front room of the castle in the Arcane sim. Behind her were the tall French windows and the park. What was she seeing in the big magic mirror? Perhaps their avatars, in some simple sim created by the tug’s comms software. Carlos hoped not, and that she saw the naked truth of four small humanoid robots and one arachnoid robot, all peering earnestly at a virtual screen on a shaky old rig that sat on the machine-cluttered surface of a bleak exomoon. Either way, the conversation was by voice, not radio telepathy. Oddly, this made for a more intimate sharing of thoughts.
“You fucking wankers!” Jax said, after they’d explained what they had done and the stand they had now taken. “Well, what’s done is done. Onward. We’re nearly back at our point of stability, where we still have a nice chunk of rock. What’s left of Baser’s rock is rising gently to meet us, give or take a few tweaks to correct for your blasting away from it, so thanks for that, guys, ha-ha. The Direction is organising the DisCorps still on side—most of them, for the moment—to send more scooters and combat frames our way. I understand from Madame Golding that Forerunner freebot cooperation in respect of raw materials will be resumed. So forces and materiel are not an issue. Remind me what you lot down there can bring to the party?”
Carlos assumed the question was rhetorical.
“A freebot uprising in the Rax rock,” he said.
“Ah, yes,” said Jax. She played with her hair, scratched an eyebrow. “Is that blinker behind you one of the conscious ones?”
“It’s Baser,” said Newton, stiffly.
“Of course. Sorry, Baser, I only knew you as a big hairy spider. Nice to meet you in the flesh, so to speak. And you’ll be relaying this conversation back to the rest of the Fifteen, yeah?”
<Yes,> said Baser. <So I have been instructed.>
Jax cocked her head, as if listening to something off camera. “Ah, right. Got it, Baser. Well, yes, as we were saying. A freebot uprising on the inside would be a huge help in a frontal assault, obviously. Tie down their forces, disrupt comms, and all that. But it would have to be very precisely coordinated with the attack. I mean, we wouldn’t want it to kick off prematurely and get smashed before we had time to breach the defences.” She rubbed the side of her nose. “Some kind of, ah, Warsaw Uprising scenario, if you catch my drift.”
Carlos caught her drift all right.
It was in some respects ambiguous. The Warsaw Uprising of 1944 might be a byword for betrayal, but who had shafted whom had still been contentious even in Carlos’s day. In one respect, however, the allusion wasn’t ambiguous at all, but a heavy hint.
Jax was telling them out of the corner of her mouth that she wouldn’t be at all averse to the freebots in SH-119 getting clobbered—after they’d done as much damage as possible to the Rax in the uprising, obviously—and she wouldn’t be at all pleased if these freebots actually won with their own forces and had control of the rock before the Arcane forces arrived. For Jax, the freebots were just another enemy—merely one further down the stack than the Reaction. This was no secret—he’d held that view himself not long before.
The question was: why was she making it so obvious? Even the freebots would figure it out.
“No, we wouldn’t want anything like that to happen,” he said. “And communications with the freebots inside SH-119 are uncertain to say the least. That’s why the freebots here want to get inside the rock themselves.”
“Are they crazy?”
“Not entirely,” said Carlos. “Now, the only way they can do that is by deception. And it seems to me that the only way you can attack successfully is by complete surprise—unless you fancy your chances against scooters with fusion drives and missiles tipped with fusion bombs.”
“We’re bloody well aware of that, thank you very much!” Jax snapped. “And, yes, we have no intention of attacking without the element of surprise. And I have no intention of talking about it on this kind of channel. I’m sure you can see the elements of the strategic situation as well as we can. The forces in play. There’s no need to talk about them—I have a lot of trust in encryption, but not a lot in … well, walls have ears, and all that. I’m not talking strategy and tactics where I might be overheard. Even by fighters who’ve been through our, ah, rigorous selection process, not to mention those who haven’t. The Direction is doing a thorough re-check of personnel records, and we’re cooperating, if you see what I mean. Speaking of which, Remington has started sifting through all recent conversations in this sim. Sorry about the loss of privacy, guys and gals, but rest assured Remington won’t share anything that doesn’t have security implications. And she’s already come up with some interesting conversations in the hell cellars, not to mention in the cellar of this fucking castle. Harry, Baser, I’m looking at you. Anything to say for yourselves?”
Newton spread his hands. “I’ve already owned up to the others here that I was Rax. It’s a long story. I’m not, now, and in any case the New Confederacy won’t have me.”
“Why not?”
“They’re still racists.”
Jax sniggered. “Idiocy is the new black.”
“Looks like it,” said Newton.
“Well, on the bright side, that kind of stupidity and rigidity is a weakness. Something we might be able to exploit.”
“Yes,” said Newton. “So if it’s any reparation at all, I’m willing to put all I know about the Rax at the disposal of the fight against the New Confederacy.”
“Are you now?” Jax cocked her head. “Care to come back up here? Join the actual attack, when it comes?”
“I’m ready to join in as a fighter. Strictly real space. I’m not going back into your sim.”
Jax smiled. “Wise move, Harry. Very well. Share any inside knowledge you may have with Madame Golding—she’s a secure channel if anything is. Same with the rest of you. Don’t tell me now of any ideas you may have for the attack. I doubt they’ll be anything I haven’t heard, but I want to be sure no one else hears them. Capiche?”
“Got it,” said Carlos.
“OK, end transmission,” said Jax.
“Peace out, and all that,” said Durward. The warlock waved, and the magic mirror went black.
<Just as well we told her the truth,> said Rillieux.
<Except the bit about why we didn’t eat p-zombie flesh,> said Blum.
They shared an uneasy laugh.
<Oh, I’m sure she figured it out,> said Newton. <She must have known we didn’t join in that filthy little initiation ceremony because we didn’t want to be part of her fucking personality cult. It’s not like her head’s been turned, or she’s drunk with power or anything. She knows exactly what she’s doing.>
<Still,> said Carlos. <All that pillow talk, huh.>
He’d been told, initially by Nicole, that the AIs running the sims didn’t bother with eavesdropping on chit-chat between the lesser minds within, or spying on their sex lives. He believed it. It wasn’t like human surveillance. The AIs had no prurient interest, and too much raw power to worry about any ideas the human minds running on their hardware came up with. But that very power made it trivial for them to record and store all that went on. In case of necessity, these logs could be trawled.
He’d known all that, but knowing it had actually happened … if he’d had cheeks he’d have blushed.
Rillieux stood up and clambered across the rig towards Newton.
<Seeing the old sim again has made me randy,> she said. <I reckon we can afford half a minute of R&R.>
Newton stood up to meet her. Their hands clasped, and they both froze.
Blum and Carlos looked at each other.
<Ever felt left out?> Carlos said.
Blum laughed. <I have my own sim,> he said.
<You have?> Carlos was surprised. He didn’t know if all agencies equipped their transports with stripped-down sims—Locke Provisos had never offered the option, perhaps because it had only sent them on short, all-action missions. But he knew Arcane did. He’d once seen Jax in a version of its sim, speaking to him from the lifter. He guessed the sims were copied across to all the vehicles in the agency’s fleet. <I didn’t know you could do that.>
<I asked Durward nicely.>
<As easy as that, eh?>
<Yes. Care to join me?>
<Ah, fuck it,> Carlos said, reaching out a hand.
<See you in twenty seconds, Baser,> said Blum. <Mind the shop.>
Twenty seconds of real time, twenty thousand seconds of sim time. About six hours.
<Don’t mind me,> said the robot.
Hot sun, blue sky, white concrete, and conspicuous luxury consumption of water. Carlos walked up a flagstone pathway past trimmed lawns and flowerbeds dotted with sprinklers and rainbow-flagged with spray. The garden was on several levels, linked with and decorated by water features: rippling pebbled channels, a curtain of falling water in front of a copper-covered wall, swirling pools. In front of the big, low house a pod of plastic-imitation marble dolphins sent water ten metres into air so dry and hot that much of it evaporated before it splashed the path. All around, similar houses were generously spaced out across low hills, the cluster ending in a haze and shimmer that didn’t quite screen out an indistinct vista of sand dunes and mountains beyond. An airliner rose from out of view, cleaving the blue diagonally with a white contrail as it climbed. A faint, distant buzz of drones rose and fell. Other than that, no robots here: half a dozen young men in jeans, shirtless and barefoot, pruned and weeded under the high sun.
In the Arcane sim, Blum had every so often taken his leave to some unspoken destination in the nearest small town. It was generally assumed that he went to a brothel. It wasn’t, in real life, the sort of thing he would do or even approve of. But apart from the fighters and the AIs, the characters in the Arcane sim were p-zombies at best. The ethics of the situation were obscure, and the politics irrelevant.
Carlos climbed the steps to a wide veranda of welcome shade and paced warily between wide-flung doors. The hall was airy and cool, slabbed in synthetic marble, walled in pale veneer. A helix of wooden steps spiralled in an atrium. Tall vases with tall plants from the garden, their heavy flowers nodding; pervasive and varied scents carried on air-con breezes. At the far end of the long hallway a woman with straight blonde hair snipped centimetres from flower stems, building an arrangement in one of the vases. She wore a loose greenish silk sleeveless top and a long white tiered skirt.
“Hello?” Carlos called. “I’m looking for Andre Blum.”
The woman turned and walked over. She had a slight figure; small breasts jigged and made the silk top shake. Her toes, in jewelled sandals, peeped alternately from under flounced hems as her heels ticked on the black marble. Her face, just on the pretty side of ordinary, looked sunburned rather than tanned. She smelled of sweat and flowers and furniture polish.
She stopped a couple of metres away and looked at him quizzically.
“Hi, Carlos,” she said. “Let me fix you a drink.”
He followed her into a chill reception room with sofa seats and a self-service bar. She waved a hand at condensation-beaded beer bottles, spirit optics.
“I’ll have a beer, thanks.”
She passed him a bottle and took one herself. He used the opener. So did she. Hiss. Clink. Sip. Ah.
“Uh, and your name is …?”
He felt very stupid. He was almost sure of what was going on, but …
“I’m Andre,” she said. “You can call me Andrea, if it makes things easier.”
“Not really,” said Carlos, with an apologetic smile. He couldn’t equate this slender young woman with the stocky, barrel-chested Blum.
She shrugged, glanced outside, eye-indicated a passing gardener. “The issue hasn’t come up, before.”
“I guess not,” said Carlos.
“I know what you’re going to ask,” said Blum. “Don’t bother. Yes, I could have done this when I was alive. I could have rebuilt myself from the chromosomes out. To the figure and the features, even. It wouldn’t have been cheap, but I could have done it. And in the main sim it would have been—” She snapped her fingers. “We default, obviously, but Durward could have set me up in any body I liked. As you know.”
Carlos recalled the first time he’d met Blum, in the form of a snap-together building-block toy figure, life-size, in the hell cellars. It was a reminder he could have done without.
“So why not?” he said.
Blum shrugged, and sat down at one end of a fake leather sofa.
“I don’t know,” she said. She patted the sofa. Carlos perched on the edge of the seat at the other end. Blum swirled the bottle, and took a long draught from it. “It was never about gender.” She laughed, and swept her free hand down her body. “This started by chance. I picked a female avatar on impulse in some game when I was a kid. Maybe there was something deeper behind that choice, I don’t know. Who cares?”
“Fair enough,” said Carlos. “So what did you do on your excursions in the sim, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Oh, I just went down to a low tavern, borrowed the garb of a stout serving wench, and got banged by puzzled but enthusiastic farmhands. I got no complaints. They may have found me an improvement on the livestock.”
“You’re too modest,” said Carlos.
“It’s my only feminine trait,” said Blum, in a tone of ironic gloom.
“I’m sure you have others,” said Carlos. He put the now empty beer bottle on the floor beside the sofa. “Let’s find out.”
Matters developed from there to their mutual satisfaction.
Afterwards they sat on bar stools, elbows on the counter, and talked. Blum mixed increasingly vile and potent cocktails. Hangover-free drunkenness was almost as great a boon of sims as consequence-free sex. Carlos made this observation more than once. Something about the situation was vaguely troubling him. Oh yes. He waved a hand around.
“Is this a real place?”
“No,” said Blum. “It’s a sim. You can’t be that drunk.”
“No, what I mean is … it’s so fake, it has to be based on someplace real.” He tapped the bar counter. It looked like oak and rang like tin. “Everything’s gimcrack. The only really costly luxury is the garden.”
“All that water! Well, what else would one use it for?” Blum laughed, and twirled and tinkled her cocktail glass. “Oh yes, ice.”
“Come on,” said Carlos. He knew an evasion when he heard one. “We’ve just had each other six ways from Sunday. Bit late to be coy.”
“OK, it’s true,” said Blum, gazing around. “It’s all 3-D printed or mass-nanofacture. Affordable sophistication for the masses.”
“3-D printed?” Carlos mused aloud. “That rings a bell.” Then he remembered. “Oh, shit.”
“What?”
“This is fucking Kazakhstan, isn’t it?”
Blum, for the first time, looked embarrassed. “Uh, yes. Security force living quarters. Officer grade, of course.”
“Jesus,” said Carlos. “And you had the gardens and the water features and the gardeners, too?”
“Oh yes,” said Blum, looking into the distance.
“While outside, on the steppe …”
“Oh, don’t give me that,” said Blum, her eyes snapping back into focus. “The areas of special settlement had every facility. They had online trade, within the obvious security restrictions. They thrived, when they weren’t trying to kill us or each other. Factionalism was rife, you know. Sectarianism, too. You know how it was.”
“Yeah, I know,” said Carlos. He laughed uneasily. “Well, actually, I don’t. The … uh, you know … it was one of those topics no one ever wanted to talk about.”
“I sometimes wonder,” said Blum, “why we didn’t make more of an issue of it.”
“We?”
Blum thumbed her sternum. “Us. The Axle. We could’ve … I don’t know.”
“Yeah, exactly,” said Carlos. “I don’t know either. We … I mean, I never bought the excuse that the, uh … measure we don’t talk about was for the, uh, affected population’s own protection, but we couldn’t have gone back to …”
“No,” sighed Blum. “Not to that, no.” She mixed another drink, and refilled the glasses.
Carlos sipped. He felt a strange mixture of deep shame at having even brought up the shameful memory of that massive collective failure—of intellect, of empathy, of humanity—and relief that the subject had been smoothed over. But still something nagged. What was it? Something about real …
“Oh yes!” he said. He jabbed a finger forward, and steadied himself on the stool. “Is she real?”
Blum made a show of looking over her shoulder. “Seeing double already?”
“Ha ha. You know what I mean. Your avatar here is based on a real woman.”
“Yes,” said Blum. She shook her head, lank hair flying out. “She was just … a girl in Tel Aviv. Worked in my parents’ house when I was a student. I hardly knew her. I wasn’t even very attracted to her, but I became … obsessed with her. It was before my military service, and before I joined the Axle.”
“What did she do?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t keep in touch.”
There was evasive, and there was deliberately obtuse.
“What did she do in your parents’ house?”
“Oh! A bit of cleaning and tidying up.”
“Like you were doing when I came in? Flower arranging, light dusting, that sort of thing?”
Blum shrugged. “More or less. We had a robot for the heavy stuff.”
Carlos knew he was getting woozy. But he thought he was on to something, that Blum had been right: this wasn’t about gender at all, this was about some deep, kinked connection of guilt and privilege and class. No chromosomal correction could break it. He blinked hard and shook his head and took a deep breath.
“You,” he told Blum, “are a right fucking perv.”
Blum smiled. “Now that,” she said, “is the nicest thing you’ve said all day.”
She drained her glass and looked at her watch, a delicate gold strap.
“Time to go back,” she said.
They high-fived. Blum said something under her breath. They were robots again.
<Well, that was fun!> said Rillieux. <Now, back to work.>
The four fighters jumped down from the tug. Baser launched itself into a more graceful leap, and sailed to a pinpoint-precise landing that didn’t so much as kick up dust. It was as if the robot had retained some reflexes from its time as a giant spider inside the Arcane module’s fantasy-world sim.
Carlos walked slowly and carefully, letting his gait adjust to the gravity. The vicinity of the weapons stacks wasn’t a good place for bounding around. The others followed suit.
The anti-spacecraft missile batteries checked out as in good order, as did the two scooters. Newton stood looking at a rack of rifles, and then attempted to shift the laser projectors and machine guns into readiness. This was a struggle.
<Can you give me a hand here?> he said.
<We can do better than that,> said Carlos. <We can all get into the combat frames.>
Two of these big fighting machines were damaged—Carlos had put missiles through them what felt like months ago to him. That left four still usable. Each stood three metres high, looming like robot war memorials welded from scrap metal. They were made of nothing of the kind, but that was how they looked.
Carlos led the way in springing up to the shoulders of a fighting machine, and swinging his legs into the socket at the back of the neck. He slid through the slot and curled up in the yielding hollow of the monstrous head. For a moment he felt cramped, confined, foetal. Then the connections came on line. Now, his body was the large frame, not the small. He turned the head like a tank turret, this way and that; stretched and flexed the arms and hands, and took a long, slow step that felt as if it should make the ground shake, though it didn’t. Around him the others were doing likewise, re-familiarising themselves with this powerful incarnation.
<Feels good,> he said.
<I’d forgotten how good it was,> said Rillieux.
<First time for me,> said Newton. <The only machine I’ve been one with before was a scooter.>
He stooped, scooping up a rifle he’d handled ineffectually moments earlier, and clapped the weapon to a spare slot on his right forearm. Experimentally, he swung the arm around, and shot at a far-off rock. The rock exploded.
<Hands-free firing!> he said. <I could get to like this.>
<Well, don’t,> said Rillieux. <Ammo’s not unlimited.>
<Yeah, yeah.>
They knuckled down to five kiloseconds of serious military engineering. In the combat frames the work was easy, if tedious. The fighters deployed the laser projectors and machine guns at four points around the shelter. The existing fortifications were passive defences, designed for the freebots’ improvised weaponry. They were adequate protection for teams chucking mining explosives and directing peripheral swarms—for shielding missile batteries and machine-gun operators, not so much. The fighters routed requests for machine support through Baser. Crab-like auxiliaries swarmed, and a dozen or so mindless mining robots trundled and dug, all mobilised to build berms, machine-gun nests, and blast walls. Basalt blocks and regolith heaps piled up; structures took shape. Likewise via Baser, the comms hub kept the fighters updated on wider developments—as corporations in their own right, the freebots had acquired a taste for and access to the system’s financial feeds.
Two more DisCorps had broken away to trade with the Rax. Now that the embargo on landings had been broken de facto, there was a scramble for potential rights to explore and develop SH-0. No such rights yet existed—the Direction continued to dig its heels in—but the shadow market soared regardless. Astro America, the exploration company that had once owned Seba and half the other freebots, saw a notable rise in notional shareholder value.
The fighters didn’t quite have time to finish the new fortifications before an urgent ping rang in their comms. Baser had news for them.
<We have heard from the Locke module,> it said.