Two more times Taransay made successful return trips to the river bank for supplies. More fusion pods, more nanotech tubes, the remaining rifles and ammo came back with her each time. On her second return, progress was visible. The damaged frames were now intact, thanks to the additional nanotech tubes. They lay beside the module like repaired dolls.
The ground shook, making her stumble as she stepped into the clearing. A moment later, a rumble came from the volcano, carried through the thick and heavy air almost as fast as the quake through the ground. Infrared brightened through the angular leaves, from where the crater mouth glowed ruddy like a floating crown of fire.
The vibration stopped. Ash would fall soon. Lava might flow again.
Taransay tramped around the module, unloaded and stashed the gear under Locke’s instructions and went over to look at the frames. The regenerated parts—limbs here, a head there—were, like the rest, glassy and black. But between them and the original torsos, and in faint traceries like cracks across them, were fine lines of blue.
Her own blue glow had spread from the join of salvaged arm and stump to shoulder, elbow and wrist, via just such a fine tracery. When she’d noticed a cobweb-thin blue line down her arm, on her previous return trip, she’d picked at it like a child at a scab. Not even her fingertips’ tiny, diamondoid bevelled edges—the frame’s analogue of fingernails—had made a blind bit of difference to it. The tendril thread was harder and more stubbornly stuck than it looked.
Disturbingly, its growth reminded her of mould or fungi. She imagined tendrils moving inside her, through her chest and up her neck.
As she moodily inspected the frames, they all sat up.
She jumped back.
<What?> she said. <Who’s downloaded?>
Zaretsky’s laughter in her head was like a remembered joke at her expense.
<Just trying out the remote operation,> he said.
The three vacant frames clambered to their feet. One of them raised an arm, as if in greeting. Then they all turned about. Taransay expected them to lurch, to move jerkily like puppets. They didn’t. They marched to the ladder, climbed up one by one and vanished into the download slot.
Taransay looked after them longingly. She missed the sim, she missed her friends, she missed Den. She’d tried to get back in on each return. It hadn’t worked. She was beginning to feel stranded in reality.
<What are you going to do with them?> she asked. <Who would download, and risk not being able to get back?>
This time it was Beauregard who replied. <I would. So would Den, he tells me.>
<Sweet,> said Taransay. <Tell him I do appreciate it, but I don’t want him out here in a frame, I want him in there in my arms. Anyhow, he’s never been in a frame. We need people who have. Fighters. Spacers.>
<Zaretsky would,> said Beauregard. <Maybe others. However, the matter doesn’t arise at the moment. What we’re using these hybrid frames for is research on the interface problem. We want to get you back in, Rizzi.>
<OK, got it, thanks.>
<Do you want to give it another go?> said Zaretsky. <We’ve made progress.>
She almost hadn’t the heart, but she climbed up the ladder and into the slot anyway. The three frames lay side by side like sleeping children.
<Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight,> she said.
<Very funny,> said Zaretsky. <OK, stand by.>
Taransay imagined him as applying shock pads to a chest. She resisted the impulse to shout <Clear!>
<Standing by,> she said.
<Trying again.>
Nothing happened.
Oh well—no surprise. Barely even disappointing.
She slid out and climbed down. While she recharged, Zaretsky told her what was going on out in the modular cloud and among the many moons. These updates had become a welcome feature of her returns. The receiver aerial was still operating, and had become something of a fixture in the vicinity. Small mats slid up to and over it, and gathered around as if curious, but made no attempt to interfere with or interface with it. Then again, it was a pretty inert piece of kit, just a wire coated in plastic machinery that was merely microscopic, and didn’t give anything like the opportunity to mesh with genetic and molecular machinery that nanotech did.
There was no news as such—she was glad she didn’t have to listen to the yammer of airhead virtual personalities. What she did get was Zaretsky’s summary of Locke’s digest of the module’s trawl of what chatter leaked down or got sent their way.
Trade with the Rax was booming, and the Direction wasn’t doing anything to stop it. None of the DisCorps had as yet dared zip around with the fancy fusion drives the Rax were apparently selling for dirt and gewgaws, but that would come, you could be sure. Whether Carlos Inc. was involved in this traffic wasn’t clear—nor was it likely to be—but with the AIs and the others Taransay strongly suspected the man and the company to be in it up to the elbows. Carlos was up to something devious. Had to be. She hoped that at least a fusion drive would come out of his deals and come their way.
The ground quivered again. An aftershock. The sooner she got the rest of the stuff, the sooner they could do more to build and rebuild. Frames, machinery, scaling up.
<And finally,> said Zaretsky, after finishing his situation report, <here is the weather forecast. A powerful electrical storm is expected overnight, accompanied by heavy downpours. Travellers are advised to proceed with caution.>
<I always do,> said Taransay.
<Are you sure you want to go out?> Locke put in.
<Yes,> said Taransay. <If there’s rain on the way, that means flooding. The area between the river and the trees is floodplain, one look at it told me that. All the more reason to shift the last of the gear.>
<I am inclined to agree,> said Locke. <Out of the way of any rising floodwaters, at least.>
The recharging was complete. The evening was young.
<Time to move it out,> she said, strapping up.
<We know,> said Beauregard. <Hasten ye back.>
<Aye, aye,> she said. <Speaking of haste—>
<Yes?>
<If I use the robot mules, I can shift the remaining gear in one go.>
<Over to Locke,> said Beauregard.
<On careful consideration,> said Locke, <I and the other AIs have concluded that if the Direction wished to trace our precise location, it could have done so by now. So there is really no further security advantage in not using the transport robots.>
Careful consideration my arse, Taransay thought. She could just imagine Shaw or Durward saying, “Ah, fuck it, let’s just go for it, what’s there to lose?” and Locke and Nicole and Remington solemnly nodding along.
<Good,> she said. <See you sooner, in that case. And let’s hope you’re right.>
The storm, when it arrived in the middle of the night, was fiercer than Zaretsky’s flippant forecast had suggested. The rain was heavy in every sense—a monsoon rain at twofold weight, each drop a water bomb at close range. Image correction still left the view blurry. Radar went flaky, lashed by a blizzard of false images. Sonar and spectroscopy you could more or less forget. Lightning flashes strobed the clouds. Thunder was a rolling cannonade that never ceased. The gale stripped and shredded leaves and whirled them away.
Taransay crouched in the middle of the most open space she could find in a hundred frantic seconds of search. Barely five metres separated her feet from the nearest trunk. Under her feet, the half-living mulch of volcanic ash, fallen leaves and sliding mats became an instant bog that moved of itself, like a heaving deck covered in a catch of flounders.
As she hunkered down, the blue lines on her arm and around her joints flickered brighter. At first she thought it a reflection of the lightning. Ten seconds of scrutiny put that notion to rest. The variations in the light didn’t correlate with the flashes. The glow pulsed to its own irregular beat. Almost bored with misery, she tried reading it for patterns. Morse code? Letter shapes? Alien alphabets? In the frame her pattern recognition was more sensitive than even in the animal brain—hunter and hunted—she’d inherited, and also more self-critical. It delivered no messages from the crawling lines of light.
She looked up and ahead. Lightning made a jagged rip in the dark, fifty metres in front of her. Everything flared into clarity and colour. A tree was outlined in black, then infrared as fire took its heart. Thunder boomed through her. The tree toppled, crashing through others.
And then she saw her way, clear ahead. It wasn’t the path she’d six times trodden, marked out on her pulsar GPS, transiently blazed by plants she’d slashed. It zigzagged like the lightning itself, and it avoided the lightning and all the other hazards. She didn’t know how she knew this. Just as inexplicably, she knew she had to go now. Her crouch was her starting poise, and the tree’s crash was her starting gun.
Without conscious decision, she was up and off. For the first time on this world, she ran. Not that she was fleet of foot, exactly—it was more like running with a heavy pack, like Beauregard had made them all do in the mountains when they trained in the Locke sim.
But she was footsure. She didn’t slip or trip.
This was the Zen she had sought the first time this new faculty had kicked in. She didn’t know why or how she was doing this, but she could think about it as long as she kept it abstract. No mystical nonsense for her. She had no evidence of another conscious mind in her frame. The voice in the head could be just a translation of impulse, and impulse was now guiding her directly.
Leap this torrent, wade that. In over her head. Good job she didn’t have to breathe. Out, up the bank, grab a clump—heave, haul, dodge sideways, run on.
Was the frame, through the blue glow that had been part of the mat that engulfed the module, communicating with the environment? The frame had comms to the eyeballs; coming out of its ears; sensitivity in all spectra, sonar like a bat’s synaesthesia of sound and vision.
She thought of stressed rock and grains of quartz popping their surplus electrons; of other piezoelectric effects, of geomagnetism, of bio-electrical currents. But no. Any such subtle spark-gap signal would show on her heads-up display and resound in her hearing.
The closest she came, and it was just a guess, a hypothesis that she’d have to formulate very carefully to give Locke and Zaretsky a breakable idea to test, was gene expression. Genes expressed through a radically different phenotype from anything they had encountered in billions of years before.
Think of it this way, she told herself, as she ran and tried to not think about running.
Genes are molecular machines. Natural nanotech. The hard parts of the frame, some of the structural members, were—like bones, teeth and hair—material churned out by molecular machinery. The power supply, the instruments, the processor on which her mind ran—were products of cruder technologies: 3-D printing and electrical and mechanical engineering. But most of the rest was molecular machinery, down at the messy, fuzzy interface where nanotechnology became hard to distinguish from synthetic biology.
It was at that scale, she reckoned, that the genes of the organism that had infected the frame found something to latch on to. An opening, a way to transmute their own expression. And, from there, the transformations had proliferated, to affect the workings of the frame and the impulses it transmitted to her mind. In itself it was as mindless as the parasitic worms that reshape the behaviour of their insect hosts. Her newly acquired tacit knowledge and ability, this route and this running, were something like instinct.
So far, it had served her well. Whether the alien genes were now committed to their new vessel and shared its interests was an open question.
As was whether they had completed their work, or whether she faced transformations yet to come.
She didn’t let that troubling thought slow her down. It was only a guess, only a hypothesis. Her route was tortuous, yet always straight in front of her. A glance around after a stop or turn always revealed a sight line down what almost seemed an avenue, low and narrow as it might be but adequate, a coincidental clear run between the random growth of the tall trunks. Rain poured continually down her body, but she could now see through it well enough. Lightning scored the ground and trees crashed in the gales, but behind her, or ahead of her, or off to one side, and always where she wasn’t.
After a while the rain stopped, but it made so little difference to her pace that she hardly noticed.
This providential ease and preternatural agility ended at the edge of the forest, and with the break of day. Less than a kilometre from the river bank Taransay saw an unexpected glimmer on the ground ahead and slowed to a wary walk. As she drew closer she saw the gleam was the light of the rising exosun reflected off a sheet of water that extended well in among the trees.
Dismayed but not surprised, she walked then waded towards the site of the shelter and the stash of goods it covered, just in from where the trees ended. The water was to her hips, turbid and fast-moving. What had been low vegetation giving way to shingle shoals and the river was now an unbroken lake to the trees on the far bank, and probably beyond. The bend in the river was flooded out of view. Fallen trees, their branches sticking up with absurd angularity like broken window-frames, floated downstream. From the relative speeds of the debris, she saw that the flow got faster towards the middle.
She found one of the lander wings upended against a tree, tens of metres from where she’d left it propped against the other, of which there was no sign at all. One of the empty cargo pods was beached a little further away. She waded on, against the resistance of the current and the drag of plants around her feet, searching and scanning for the supplies. Denser than the wings, they might still be on the bottom nearby. No such luck.
Shit.
Salvage, if possible at all, would have to wait until the waters subsided. She had no idea how long that would take, but from the strength of the spate it would not be soon. Tuning her scans, she detected a faint output from the instrument packs and waded over. Like the plants, they still flourished under the flood: deep-rooted, and turned to the sky. Through water the signal was probably too weak to carry through the atmosphere, but they were still in place and would be back in action when the water level went down.
Unlike her supplies. She wished she had thought of staking stuff down, or even of tethering the loads to the sturdy instrument packages. Bugger.
She looked downriver, pondering whether it was worth searching there. Probably not. She turned around. Five flying jellyfish were rising, upstream from her. They soared aloft and then scudded along in the stiff breeze. She watched them pass overhead, still rising, and then her gaze was caught by a movement among the trees to her left. She whirled, crouched to neck-deep in the rushing water and zoomed. The rifle, like the empty rucksack, was still on her back. She struggled to keep her footing—it was harder when she zoomed because she didn’t have the visual feedback.
Closer the shape came. She tried to unsling the rifle from her shoulder. Shooting under water was not advised, but the weapon and ammo were waterproof and should be fine.
Pattern recognition, don’t fail me now … whatever moved under the trees was bulky, and its gait quadrupedal, not at all like the slinky slither of the giant millipede things. Closer still.
Fuck. It was one of the bearer bots.
She stood up straight, retracted her zoom and waded forward. The robot stood at the edge of the flood, way back under the trees. In a few strides she was splashing, ankle-deep, along a shoal. Down to her right the current swirled in harsh eddies, grinding and shifting stones. Fresh rags of plants marked the deeper water, bobbing and shifting. She took care to keep to the other side of them.
Waist-deep again, through faster water and over softer ground. She stopped ankle-deep, a few metres from the robot. It stood at the water’s edge like a nervous sheep.
<Come,> it said, and turned about. She followed it deeper into the trees. It led her to a low rise where she found the other three robots facing outward like guard dogs around a stack of nanotech tubes, the scientific instrument box and the folded-up laser comms device.
It looked like they’d saved everything. She looked at them with new respect.
<Well done,> she said, for all the unlikelihood of their appreciating the thanks.
<Water attempted entry,> one of the robots told her.
So much for initiative. At least being literal had worked.
She ordered the robots to load up. They were just deploying their manipulative arms—the effect was ludicrously centaur-like—when she noticed the laser comms device flashing. It wouldn’t have had much opportunity for transmitting and receiving, not in the shelter or in the storm, even if it were capable of acting autonomously, which she doubted. Puzzled, she picked it up, laid it on the soggy ground, and opened it.
Of course. Duh. It had a radio receiver as well as a two-way laser communicator.
And the radio receiver had a message on loop, for her and for the Locke module.
<Forty Direction troops on the way, ten per lander, heavily armed. ETA …>
She read off the numbers.
About now, actually.
The content of the message caught up with her, almost a second after she’d read it.
Direction troops? WTF?
No time to figure that out. Taransay slammed the kit shut and passed it back to the robots.
<Finish loading up and wait here,> she told them. <If I’m not back in one kilosecond, proceed at once to this location.> She glyphed them the coordinates of the Locke module. <If I do come back, follow me.>
Forget security now. The landers must be almost here. Presumably the Locke module had received the message hours ago—but of course, they had no way of communicating it to her. They would now be making what preparations they could. Possibly they had mastered downloading to the frames. If so, they had weapons—one machine gun almost out of ammo, and three kiddy-sized rifles. Not much of an arsenal against forty heavily armed attackers. But with defender’s advantage and guerrilla tactics—albeit against troops trained and practised in exactly those tactics, in this life and the last—who could tell?
Her own rifle at the ready, Taransay skirmished from tree trunk to tree trunk back to the edge of the forest, and peered into the glare of the now higher but still low exosun.
And there they were. Two pairs of black dots, above the horizon and sinking fast.
Then, a flash. Another flash. And then there were two black dots, still coming her way. Two trails of black smoke drifted down behind them.
Taransay remembered what had happened to the cargo lander a long day and night ago, and the flying jellyfish she’d seen rising this very dawn.
Three times is enemy action.
The planet, or the landscape, or some unknown thing within them was defending itself.
Or defending the module, and her.
She looked at the flickering blue glow on her right arm.
Now it was around her waist, too, and both ankles.
<Ya beauty,> she told it.
She watched the descent for a moment longer. Now the black triangles were clear, and converging. They would land on the water. That would slow them down, but not by much.
She shouldered her rifle and sprinted between the trees, fleet as a deer. The laden bearer bots bounded after her like hounds.
The real chase began before she’d gone two kilometres. She’d turned her radar off—it was too blatant a beacon—so the first she knew of the pursuit was a flash overhead, just above the canopy. Her reaction was snappy enough to get a good sniff of the light from the small explosion and a swift scoping of the debris. Fullerenes, biomarkers, methane and oxygen; falling rotor gears and scorched tatters of polycarbonate ribbon and chitin. Quick deduction: a small, fast surveillance drone had collided with one of the floating jellyfish or the buzzing little rotary mats, with a bang.
That wouldn’t easily happen twice, she guessed. Flight software updates were no doubt being applied this second. And grateful as she was to her blind guardian angel of the forest, her probable location was now very likely pinpointed.
She stopped. The four bearer bots lolloped up and halted, almost but not quite tumbling over each other and their own legs. No time for sentimentality: the mindlessly loyal machines were now more useful as decoys than for portage. She sent them off in four different directions, on randomly circuitous routes that would eventually, if they were lucky, converge on the module. The instructions didn’t include the location of the module; they just guaranteed that they would blunder into its range, where they would be electronically lassoed by default. It was the best she could do.
Off they went, in every direction but backwards. She ran on. The blue glow was bright now, in the dark beneath the efficient leaf cover, and its tracery spreading. She spared her glances at its progress across her frame to once every hundred seconds, and in those intervals it grew visibly. It was as if she were being slowly covered by blue hairline cracks.
Not a good look, Rizzi.
Would the glow make her more conspicuous? Hard to tell. Looked at objectively, the light it gave off was very faint, certainly fainter than the inevitable heat signature of the frame. For all she knew, its pattern might even work as camouflage, breaking up her outline amid the dapple.
And all such considerations were outweighed by its advantage in telling her where to go. Again, she didn’t know how she knew, or how it knew what she wanted to do. But she let its artificial instinct, if that was what it was, guide her steps.
At a basalt outcrop that jutted three metres above the forest floor, and was itself thick with plant growth, her impulse told her to ascend and hide. This she did, and ended up prone on the tiny rugged summit, peering through stalks and fronds that she’d pulled around and over her. Rifle at her shoulder, covering the way she’d come. She was still ahead of the pursuit. For how long? Minutes, she guessed. Hectoseconds.
Time to think, when you can think ten times faster than you could in the flesh.
She had no idea what she was up against. Hadn’t the Direction, Carlos, the freebots and the crazy Axle crowd in Arcane done a deal to fight together against the Rax? Why would the Direction send forty troops, evidently committed enough to go into action after half their number had been blown out of the sky? What were the troops here to do? What did they intend to do with her? Destroy her? Capture her? Destroy or capture the module? Carlos must be as baffled as she was, or there would have been some explanation in his message.
The frame was not a combat frame, but it had—as she’d found in the bizarre fight around the module back when it was hurtling through space towards SH-17—plenty of combat-capable features. If it came to a fight she had the rifle, a dozen clips of standard ammunition and a glass knife. Not much, but better than nothing. And whatever help the glow could give. So long as she wasn’t deluding herself—or it was deluding her—about what it could do.
Using radar, sonar, or lidar could betray her location. But passive reception—sight across a broad spectrum, hearing, the spectroscopic sense of smell, gravimetry and radio waveband scanning—she could safely use, and did.
Encrypted chatter at five hundred metres. Sweeping her focus from side to side, she triangulated the hotspots. Twenty, spread out a kilometre to either side of her and moving forward at a rapid clip. Some were ahead, some behind, in a shallow W formation, those at the extreme flanks furthest forward. None were haring off after her decoy bots.
Fuck, they were good. This was a skirmish line well adapted to the terrain. They moved only a little more slowly than her enhanced running. Now the five at the mid-point of the line were only three hundred metres away. She wanted to slip down the far side of the rock and outrun them, but the inexplicable impulses that urged her actions told her firmly to stay put.
The flanks passed her on either side, well out of sight. If they closed around her she’d be surrounded. They pressed on. All she’d seen of the fighters so far was dots on her overlays.
Seconds later, she saw them for real. One came out of a clump of trees fifty metres away, heading straight for her. She glimpsed another a hundred metres to that one’s right.
With short legs, broad torsos, long arms and a shallow dome for a head, they bounded along like chimps. Upright, they’d be about one and a half metres tall. The frames were sleek and black, with laser cupolas like bulging shoulder muscles and machine guns on their forearms. Her firmware had the type catalogued as 2GCM: fighting machines for a two-gravity planet.
Vulnerabilities? None to a rifle slug.
Taransay flattened against the rock as the fighting machine hurtled towards it. She had about as much chance against this thing as a vervet against a baboon. Just as it seemed about to charge straight into the outcrop like a headless rugby tackler it rose to its full height, arms up, and jumped. The hands came down on either side of her, the feet swung by above her. Down it crashed on the other side and onward it rushed.
In the hundred seconds during which she lay still and watched the zigzag line of fighters pass by her entirely, Taransay had plenty of time to study the 2GCM’s specs. Its senses were as formidable as its weaponry. No way, no fucking way would it have missed a frame and a rifle right in front of it and then right under its iron arse. Its gravimeter by itself would have spotted the anomaly as it swung over her.
She rolled over and sat up. The tracery of blue lines was now all over her frame. As far as she knew, invisibility cloaking was still impossible. What was just about possible, she tried to convince herself, was hacking of one frame’s processing by another.
It was also possible that the Direction troops weren’t interested in her at all, and she had simply been ignored.
Neither was a possibility she intended to count on.
She projected the path taken by the pursuit, if pursuit it had been. It would take them straight to the Locke module. There was no point in breaking her radio silence. The module’s occupants would have received the warning before she had. They might have by now succeeded in downloading to the three repaired frames—which, if hers was anything to go by, would have some unexpected features. They had three rifles with ammunition, and the machine gun, with almost none.
Not enough.
She visualised a route that would flank the skirmish line by about a kilometre on its left, and held that visualisation for a couple of seconds longer than necessary. Then she climbed down from the outcrop and set off at a run. The terrain here was rougher than she was used to, the tree cover more broken. The outcrop she’d lain on was one of many. They were thoroughly weathered, the hard rock split and splintered, the breccia mingled with millennia of ash falls to form soil that sustained small plants and buzzing swarms of tiny flying mats. Underfoot, the mulch often gave way to fresh growth of low plants analogous to grass but quite unlike it in shape, more shield than blade, and to bare patches of basalt worn level.
On and on she ran, diagonally upward on a gentle slope. The gradient was barely noticeable. She had no plan beyond getting ahead of the advance without being detected and taking what opportunity she could to slow them down. A notion of setting a boulder rolling and crashing faded: the slope wasn’t steep enough, and precariously balanced erratics had been so far conspicuous by their absence from the landscape. And why should she expect them? Maybe she was just used to areas that had undergone recent glaciation. If ice had been here in the past million years or so, the surface effects had long been erased by the shorter cycles of vulcanism.
Now and then the lie of the land took her line of sight above the treetops, and she saw the volcano summit, its smoke rising in morning exosunlight. The past night’s small eruption, simmering. It called to mind the first surprise after the module’s landing, or impact: the mat that had engulfed it and rolled it bodily out of the path of an advancing flow of lava. At first the action had seemed intelligent and purposeful, even friendly; later a mindless urge to investigate new molecular machinery, the blind groping of an organism randy for novelty; but now the manifestly useful effects of the glow, and the collisions of flying jellyfish with incoming landers, drew Taransay to revisit the first speculation.
She drew level with the furthest advance on the left flank of the skirmish line about ten kilometres from the module. They were still heading straight for it, maintaining their formation, the shallow W now a scrawled wave.
The dot that flagged the nearest bounding fighter stopped moving. After a few seconds, the others stopped, too. A babble of encrypted exchanges followed. Then the remaining nineteen began to move again. The central advance party moved ahead, the rest fell in to form two diagonal lines behind, turning the shaky W into a tight inverted V.
Taransay waited. The stationary dot continued transmitting, in diminishing intensity and length and at increasing intervals. The effect was like fading cries for help. Taransay dismissed this impression but decided to investigate.
Something had made the fighter stop. It behoved her to find out what.
The trees were closer together down the slope, the canopy filtering out most of the exosunlight. Taransay’s visual acuity seamlessly cranked up to compensate. She found the 2GCM in a rare clear patch, as if spotlighted. Only the shoulders and dome of the frame were visible. The long knuckle-walking arms, the short sturdy legs and most of the torso were engulfed by a two-metre-wide mat. Mat and frame together rolled on the ground, but never got far, like a steel ball trapped by a magnet. The mat had two ragged scorched holes in it, and the ground and nearby tree trunks and branches were scored and scarred by machine-gun and laser fire.
Taransay took cover behind a tree. From there she could just about see the trapped 2GCM by radar and sonar. She hailed the fighter.
<What?> it replied. <Who’s there?>
<Taransay Rizzi, formerly of Locke Provisos,> she said.
<Fuck off, fascist. I don’t need your help.>
<I’m not a fascist,> said Taransay, mildly she thought in the circumstances. <And you don’t seem to be doing very well on your own.>
<You have a point there.> The futile rolling stopped. <This thing’s eating me alive. So to speak.>
<Who are you?>
<None of your goddamn business. I’m a soldier of the Direction, that’s all you need to know.>
<Why have your comrades abandoned you?>
<Comrades? Ha! You have a lot to learn, sister.>
<No doubt,> said Taransay. <But why did no one turn aside to help?>
<We’re on a mission. That takes priority.>
<Can’t be good for morale,> she said. <No one left behind, and all that.>
The self-styled soldier glyphed her a laugh.
<No one is. They’re all me. Bastard.>
<Ah!> Light dawned. <You’re one of the Direction’s clone army. You all are. All twenty of you?>
<All forty,> replied the soldier. <As was. How the fuck did you do that, by the way?>
<We didn’t do that,> said Taransay. <There’s a variant of life here, it’s like a natural gas balloon. Well, dirigible, I guess, because it can steer.>
<Evidently. Steered right into us.>
<Couldn’t the landers have avoided it? Even gliding?>
<Didn’t show up on the radar.>
Interesting. <Why are you here?> Taransay asked.
<Jesus.> The mat/frame entanglement lurched again, and ended up with the dome upright and facing her way. She felt the radar brush across her face. Lidar licked the tree. <Don’t you know?>
<I’m guessing,> said Taransay, <that the Direction wants to assert control over our settlement, before the breach in the embargo leads to a gold rush. And it’s giving this clone army idea a bit of a live test before the main event.>
<You’re about a quarter right,> said the soldier. <Like, it would’ve done something about your little gang of fascist claim-jumpers anyway, for that sort of reason. But why we’re here and in such a fucking hurry we can leave one of us to be devoured by a living doormat is because of shit like this.>
<Shit like what?>
<Shit like the shit I’m in! The shit you’re in too, come to that.>
<I’m not in any kind of shit,> said Taransay. <And I don’t think you are, either.>
<You don’t, eh? Come out and let me see you properly.>
<I’m not falling for that,> said Taransay.
<Come off it,> said the soldier. <I’ve still got more than enough ammo to chew up that beanstalk and you with it.>
<Point,> said Taransay, feeling a bit foolish. She stepped out from behind the tree.
<Jesus!>
<What?> Taransay took a step forward.
<KEEP AWAY FROM ME!>
She stood and looked at a nickel-iron and carbon-composite metamaterial dome and a pair of mighty shoulders protruding above the surface of a hairy blue-green ball that shot out bulges in odd places, as if knees and elbows were punching at it from the inside. A haunted killer robot trapped in an alien organism.
And it was scared of her?
Scared, and armed. She stepped back.
<Calm the fuck down,> she said. <Tell me about the shit. What does the Direction think is going on down here and what makes it think that?>
<It doesn’t think—it knows from the transmissions from the two instrument packages back there that the life down here just fucking assimilates everything it can get its molecular teeth into. Like this thing is doing to me, and like some other thing has done to you. It’s too late for you lot, but least we can destroy the module and anyone outside it before it assimilates all the knowledge in there and the nanotech capacity and all that and swarms into space.>
<That seems a bit unlikely,> said Taransay. <I mean, our scientists have been analysing this thing from up close and personal, and they think it’s just mindless.>
<Your scientists? Some fucking nerds in a sim who used to be techies in the twenty-first century? Don’t make me laugh. The Direction module has like a thousand-year start on them, and AIs that could deduce Earth’s history from a blade of grass. If they think life here’s capable of taking off, they’re most likely right.>
<If it thought that it could just nuke us.>
<Too risky for now,> the soldier told her. <The DisCorps wouldn’t stand for the contamination unless the alternative was worse and unarguably imminent. Which it isn’t yet. So they’re trying us first. We have quite enough explosives with us to destroy the module.>
<Why didn’t you destroy me when you had the chance?>
<What chance?>
<One of you jumped right over me.>
<Never saw you.>
Well, that was that explained.
<Can you see me now?>
<Yes,> said the soldier. <Wish to God I couldn’t, but I can.>
<You sure know the way to a lady’s heart,> said Taransay. <So why don’t you just destroy me?>
<I would if I could,> the soldier said. <But I fucking can’t. This thing has my arms twisted right back, and it’s got my lasers wrecked, fuck knows how.>
Taransay could think of one way the fighter could destroy her. She recalled the exact locations of the sudden bumps and bulges and edged around so the gun-bearing forearms were pointed away from her.
<STOP MOVING ABOUT!>
<Am I making you nervous?>
This was not at all the right thing to say. The ball of mat and machine convulsed again, and rolled. Then it stopped, as if giving up. The soldier said something inarticulate.
<Don’t worry too much,> said Taransay. <If what’s happening to you is anything like what’s happened to me, it’s benign.>
<Benign?> the soldier said. <You have no fucking idea.>
There didn’t seem much to say to that. Perhaps he, or she, really was suffering in ways she couldn’t imagine. Taransay took the opportunity of the hiatus to check the location of the other dots. Four more had stopped moving. The rest were converging again, and tighter. Their arrow-shaped formation was still headed straight for the module.
<Still on course,> said the soldier, evidently seeing some version of the same display.
<We’ll stop them, you know,> said Taransay, suddenly confident.
<Too bad for you if you do,> said the soldier. <If we fail it’s no more mister nice guy.>
<What?>
<Airstrikes. If these fail, a full-on nuke. And hunter-killer drones you’ll never see coming.>
<But will they see us?> said Taransay.
Then, as she watched, the dot at the front stopped. The two behind moved towards it, and merged. Then they disappeared. There was a flash far off, bright enough to shine a pinprick glare through the trees. A couple of seconds later, a heavy crump.
<What was that?> she asked.
But she didn’t need to. She could smell the light.
<High-explosive charge,> said the soldier. <It was for the module, but orders were to use it if we got caught or repelled. Signal to the rest of me to call it a day ASAP.>
<Suicide mission?>
<If you can call this suicide,> said the soldier. <There’s plenty of me back in the cloud. Not that I wouldn’t do it anyway. I’m not waiting around for this fucking rug to eat my mind.>
<But that’s not what it’s—>
She was answered by the roar of machine guns. She threw herself flat as the balled-up mat and its captive rolled around spraying bullets like some deadly Catherine wheel. It stopped when the magazines ran out. In the distance the same sound was repeated like an echo, in seemingly endless salute. It wasn’t an echo. One by one the dots vanished. The soldier she’d been talking to returned no pings.
Warily, when all was silent, she walked over. The mat had new holes in it, but seemed otherwise unaffected. It continued to encroach on what was left of the frame. Taransay scanned it and saw the arms bent inward to the chest, which was riddled with the criss-cross fire from the two muzzles. The processor, deeply buried in the torso, had been quite thoroughly destroyed.
Funny how one never felt that inside your chest was where you were. You were still in your head, where you’d always been.
There seemed little further point in maintaining radio silence. She called Beauregard.
<Did you see all that? Do you know what happened?>
<Kind of,> said Beauregard. <I know they were Direction troops and I know they were stopped. I don’t know what stopped them. Sure wasn’t us, the three of us who’ve downloaded were clutching rifles and crewing the machine gun. So what did?>
<Mats or other local life,> she said. <When the one with the bomb got caught, they blew themselves up and the rest suicided with whatever they had.
<Any more explanation of what’s going on coming through?>
<Nah,> said Beauregard. <You?>
She told him what the soldier had said.
<Shit,> said Beauregard. <Did you save the supplies?>
Taransay checked the locations of her four bearer bots.
<Yes,> she reported. <They’re heading your way. Should be there within four kiloseconds.>
<Great. Well, come on in yourself.>
She was already running. <I’m on my way,> she said. <But what do we do?>
<The supplies should give us enough capacity to build frames. Then we can start moving people out before the airstrikes.>
<We won’t have enough time.>
<We’ll have time for some,> said Beauregard. <Better than nothing.>
<Tell you what, sarge,> she said. <You’ve not lost your capacity to inspire.>
Beauregard was unloading the third of the bearer bots to arrive when he heard a warning from Chun, who was sitting on top of the module with the machine gun and keeping watch.
<Something coming in, sarge,> he said. <Two degrees north of west.>
Beauregard checked his memories.
<That’ll be Rizzi,> he said. <That’s the route she always left by.>
<It’s fast, sarge. And it’s not responding. Might not be Rizzi after all.>
<OK, Chun, keep it covered. Zaretsky, take the other side.>
Beauregard and Zaretsky flattened to the trampled, mat-crawled, slippery ground on either side of the module, under its overhang, their toy-like new rifles trained on the unseen advance. A rumble from the volcano made the ground quiver under their frames. Beauregard eyed a circular slithering thing a centimetre from his visor with distaste. The movements of its cilia irritated him like those of an insect fluttering at a windowpane. The colours and forms around him were still making him feel as if nauseous. He had no guts to be nauseated with. Yet the feeling remained, a distaste of the mind. It must be metaphysical, like with that guy in Sartre’s novel looking at a tree root. The otherness of things, the thingness of things. Christ, he’d have given anything to see a tree root, gnarled and ancient, crusted with lichen, crawling with tiny red spiders. A worm. A maggot. A moth butting at a light.
Something blue, bipedal and about half a metre high stepped from between the tall plants beyond the crater. It wasn’t a frame, but it was a humanoid shape. Beauregard zoomed his vision. It was like a naked woman, utterly unselfconscious of her nakedness. But this was no lissome Eve. It was squat, every feature compressed as if squashed down by a heavy hand from above. Like an image of a naked woman in a distorting mirror.
Beauregard had the presence of mind to stretch the image vertically. It became a blue full-length portrait of Rizzi, smiling, looking puzzled. He let the distortion go, and her image snapped back like an elastic band to a misshapen dwarf.
Her lips moved. Her voice boomed, distorted by the dense atmosphere. At the same time, but ten times faster, the radio-telepathic words sounded in his mind:
<Belfort? Guys? Where are you?>
<Don’t shoot!> Beauregard snapped urgently to Zaretsky and Chun. He stood up and walked forward. The last of her spoken words was still disturbing the heavy air as he came up to her.
<Welcome back, Rizzi,> he said. He held out a hand and shook hers, not looking at his own.
He’d already seen how far its blue lines were spreading.