They were dancing on the fake marble floor of the cool hallway. Tinny music blasted from a cheap radio bead on the table by the vase. Ten seconds they had allowed themselves, nearly three hours of subjective time away from the tension and toil.
A siren sounded. Blum stopped mid-turn. Her head flinched down, her gaze flicked to the nearest doorway. She looked like she was about to take a dive for cover. Then she straightened with an embarrassed laugh.
“Old reflex,” she said. “In the ’stan it meant incoming.”
“And here?”
Blum grimaced. “Emergency outside. Get the fuck out.”
She held up a hand. Carlos high-fived her.
With that mutual slap of palms, they were back in the real.
Carlos had a momentary sense of looking in a mirror, as his combat frame faced Blum’s: two iron giants, face to face across a spar of the old transit tug. Then, still in unison, they turned away from each other and to the world. They were at the launch area, the former Astro America site.
It took Carlos a tenth of a second to gather his wits. He looked up at the boiling sky.
Something small and bright raced away from where SH-119 had been, out towards the gas giant G-0. The rest of the moonlet was crazed with searing cracks.
Carlos Incorporated.
Carlos Inc. grasped the fate of the SH-119 expedition at a glance—a glance through sixty-two sensors and thirteen separate data feeds. Nothing at all could have survived in the main part of the rock, least of all the Rax. He didn’t know which, if any, of the fighters and freebots of the expedition had made it into the part of the rock that was shooting away. For a bleak moment, his look alighted on Seba Inc. and Lagon Inc. Both machines went about their business, as if oblivious to what had happened. Hollow shells of what they had been.
He turned his many-eyed gaze on the modular cloud. The Direction’s fleet was on the move. It consisted of six large craft, the size of bulk carriers. They were not, they never had been, intended to consolidate SH-119 after Arcane had fought the Rax. He read the pattern of their flares, studied their trajectories and marked their evident destinations. Five were headed for the Locke module’s landing site on SH-0. The other, already peeling away, was aimed at where he stood. He estimated ETAs for two possibilities: chemical thrust to transfer orbit, and fusion drives. That done, he flicked his attention to his corporate affairs, on the ground and in the modular cloud.
Information came in like a spring tide over flat sand. His corporate mind had channels dug and walls built, but still it was almost overwhelmed by the flood. To his human mind it felt like trying to read a hectare of spreadsheet.
It was like becoming a god, but a god beset by the prayers of a million devotees and the subtle murmured urgings of a hundred conclaves, the squabbles of Byzantine hierarchies and the scribblings of a thousand scriptoria, all in the welter of a bloody crusade.
Basic frames: how many completed? How many animated by freebot processors? Transfer tugs, landers, scooters, aerospace fighters, weapons. Combat frames: type, model, specification. Fusion pods and drives: some of his front companies had bought them through intermediaries from DisCorps that had traded with the Rax. Others, of course, had been bought by DisCorps completely loyal to the Direction, and passed on to its clone army. How many drives did each side have ready to use? Agreements and acquisitions, franchises and subsidiaries. Material supplies available now, and contracted for later. Manufacturing capacities, acquired and acquirable. What was negotiable, what was affordable, and what was out of reach.
Espionage reports; leaks; deductions from public information and market moves.
Production of the Direction’s clone army was being ramped up. Its vanguard had already been tested to destruction on SH-0—to which its crack cohorts were now headed. The moonlet and the Rax had been taken care of; the main prize now became urgent.
Carlos Inc.’s own army of freebot-operated frames out in the cloud was now a thousand-strong. A hundred had access to combat frames capable of fighting down on the superhabitable. Of the rest, he’d need—what? At least eight hundred and fifty to seize strategic targets in the cloud: law agencies, comms nodes, metallics processing plants, nanofactories … the list went on, relentlessly.
That left him fifty to plug into aerospace fighters, to give orbital cover and close air support to the hundred that would be fighting in high-gravity combat frames on the surface. The aerospace fighters were lighter and more agile versions of the scooters in which he and his comrades had fought before: faster and more aerodynamic, better armed with air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles. They were a lot smaller than the jet fighters Carlos remembered from life, and larger than the drones with which he and his enemies had battled in the skies of Earth.
He reviewed the reports from the Locke module of what had happened to the Direction’s 2GCM fighting machines. Certain modifications could be made on the fly—a sprayed-on ceramic shell to give extra resistance to SH-0’s invasive organisms, an update to the software shields to fight off their hacking—but most who went into the superhabitable’s jungles wouldn’t be coming back.
This was a one-way trip.
He already knew he could rely on his freebot army. They were all volunteers. A corner of his mind was pierced with awe at their heroism. Unlike revived veterans in frames, the freebots had only one life to lose and they knew it. He reminded himself that he and his comrades—and their foes, for that matter—had already demonstrated their mettle for doing just that, back in the day. As had millions upon millions of human beings throughout history. Heroism was cheap; most times and places it could be bought for starvation wages. There must be a clever evolutionary explanation for that, but he couldn’t think of it right now.
Right now he was running for the launch catapult.
<What are you doing?> Blum asked.
<Going to defend the Locke module.>
<Why?>
Carlos Inc. at that moment was cutting a deal with Astro America, flashing a warning to the Locke module, issuing instructions to his corporations in the cloud, calling for Madame Golding and getting no reply, suppressing the yammer of the Direction rep in his head, and dickering with the freebot corporations on SH-17 and elsewhere all at the same time. He had to step down his corporate-level cogitations to summarise his conclusions in a way that would make sense to Blum.
<Because everything else is fucked.>
<Got you,> said Blum. <Do you want me to come, too?>
<No,> said Carlos. <Aerial combat is what I’m good at. I need you here to coordinate defence. We need to get as many assets as possible into orbit.>
Blum took in the implications.
<It’s been nice knowing you.>
<See you in another life, mate,> said Carlos.
They both knew this was unlikely. If they were destroyed, their copies in the Arcane and Locke modules would have no particular reason to meet up, even if they could. Carlos would remember nothing of Blum. To Blum, Carlos would be just a Locke defector he’d plotted escape with in the Arcane sim.
Blum bounded away, and vanished down an alleyway behind the processing plants of the site.
Carlos returned his full attention to corporate affairs. Most of the capabilities of Carlos Inc. ran in the combat frame’s capacious software. Between one leap and the next, Carlos abstracted the higher-level functions and copied them across. The feeling was peculiar: an increase of lucidity, a dawning of understanding, combined with the suspense of a software update. Transfer complete, Carlos set the combat frame to mind its own safety and to run the corporation in his absence. His direct commands could override it, but they’d be intermittent and delayed. The delay would at most be 1.6 seconds each way, but at the speed of interaction required that might be too long. The fighting machine would stand in for him just as the chassis of the departed freebots did for them.
And probably become just as hollow a memorial. A walking monument.
Carlos stopped at the end of the ramp. He scrambled out of the fighting machine’s head, clambered over the spiky thorax, swung around the jutting pelvic structure and shimmied down a leg. It got him to the ground quicker than jumping. After so long in the combat frame, he felt as exposed and vulnerable as a hermit crab scuttling for a new shell.
A lander was already racked. Two lading robots trundled up, bearing the supplies Carlos had ordered. He wedged himself into a pod along with the weapons and 2GCM frame and clamped himself to the side. The lid closed. He connected with the lander’s comms system and clicked in to the viewing sensors as the pod was swung into place.
The lander’s launch was a violent blow, followed seconds later by acceleration as the rocket engine kicked in. Then he was in free fall and—after a few more brief burns—transfer orbit. The cratered surface of SH-17 fell away beneath him, the fertile orb of SH-0 loomed ahead. Carlos gave the view part of his attention. The rest was occupied with calculating his rendezvous with the transfer tugs and carrier spacecraft that would soon be pulling away from the modular cloud.
Hundreds of seconds went by. The aerospace fighters docked with the carriers, ten large frameworks with chemical rockets and with fusion drives in reserve. The ground forces were racked on five transfer tugs, likewise equipped. They boosted out from the cloud and set course for SH-0.
Both sides were now in a race. Neither had the capacity or the inclination to destroy the other at long range. The fight for which they were armed and prepared would be in the skies and on the ground of the superhabitable.
The predicted trajectories jockeyed for kiloseconds. Then it became clear that Carlos’s troops would arrive first.
This challenge was answered moments later by a blaze of fusion drives from the Direction fleet.
Carlos hesitated. If his side cut straight across with fusion drives, his planned rendezvous with them would be impossible. On its own, his lander would soon be vulnerable. But to let the Direction’s forces land before his would give the enemy a free hand on the ground. Well—he could direct his forces almost as well from the lander, if it survived, in space and on the way down through the turbulent atmosphere.
He gave the order. His expedition’s fusion drives flared: fifteen sparks sprinting the distance.
Between where Carlos was and where he was headed, there would be no sleep mode. He had more than enough to do for him not to need it. He called Madame Golding again, and got no reply.
There was no longer any point in radio silence. The Direction knew where they were. Its troops were on their way. The laser comms device was in constant contact with Carlos and his relief expedition. At any moment, one side or the other would lose patience with subtle orbital calculation. Both sides would start torching, and after that all bets were off. The bearer bots had straggled in. With the last of the nanotech tubes now on stream, Beauregard and Zaretsky had started making frames. The area around the Locke module looked like a building site, trampled and muddy, with half-completed structures and unfinished processes in untidy heaps. The workers on the site looked as if they too were under construction, incomplete.
Taransay was by no means sure that her own transformation was complete, but she had no doubt that the others looked grotesque. Beauregard, Chun and Zaretsky had been joined by the ever-loyal Den. On the screens in Nicole’s house, Den had seen Taransay’s new form. The sight hadn’t deterred him from downloading to the first frame out of the assembler. The frame had come out clean. As soon as its foot touched a mat the blue lines started to spread. Den now looked like a black glass humanoid robot with blue impetigo. Beauregard, Chun and Zaretsky were further advanced, somewhere between Den’s condition and Taransay’s: their visors warping into squashed caricatures of their real faces, their boot-like feet sprouting sturdy, almost prehensile toes.
<Look!> said Den, pointing up.
Taransay paused in her calibration of a genome reader. A needle probe from the device skewered a small mat, which writhed uncooperatively but trickled useful information to Locke and those of the science team still inside the sim.
She looked up. Overhead, above the clearing, a dozen gasbags glistened in the exosunlight. Their altitudes varied from a hundred metres to a thousand. All were tethered by one or more long ribbon tendrils to the tops of trees. The tendrils, taut and humming in the wind, were stronger than they looked. The gasbags strained against them like kites, but the fine lines held.
<Natural barrage balloons?> Taransay suggested.
<Maybe,> said Den. <But how do they know they’re needed?>
Taransay snorted, and glyphed an apt metaphor for the sound before it was one-tenth complete.
<Do you have to ask?>
<I bow to your subtle converse with the spirit of the woods,> said Den.
Taransay’s laugh boomed, annoying her.
But the matter was serious, and becoming more so by the kilosecond. She understood what was happening to her body. The science team was on the case, all the more so now that Zaretsky was part of the case as well as the team. Their investigations had confirmed her hypothesis. Her original frame had been produced in some module of the space station, which now seemed part of a more innocent age long ago—in a process modelled on biological growth. Many of its components were carbon-based. The nanotech software was likewise inspired, at a certain level of abstraction, by the molecular coding of genes—optimised, streamlined, refined. That laid it open to subversion by the flexible genomes of native life, honed by billions of years of opportunistic horizontal gene transfer and pitiless natural selection.
This wasn’t something surreal, like moss growing on an abandoned car and driving off, or a shipwreck hijacked by coral and turned into a submarine. It was two fundamentally similar mechanisms—nanotech and exobiology—meshing at the molecular level, despite the gulf of time and space between their origins.
So far, so sensible.
Her growing rapport with the other organisms around her was something else, and harder to comprehend. It was as if the nature mysticism she’d always despised, every loose usage of “quantum” and “ecological” that would in her old life have made her guffaw if not run a mile, had turned out to be true here.
She felt the tiny distress of the wriggling mat whose genome she was helping to read. She had a stronger and subtler awareness of the larger mat still wrapped around most of the module. There was no thought there, but a kind of apprehension of the stony thinking mass it embraced, and a dim joy in their intercourse. That mat was picking up emotion from her and from others. At some level it shared their fear. Its restlessness manifested in a flow of fluids to its cilia. The thing was preparing to move again.
Her awareness of the wider landscape was more diffuse. But even so, the feeling of being surrounded by not a hostile jungle but a protective and alert active defence was inescapable. It put their efforts at fortification—the sticks she’d sharpened, the pits Beauregard had chivvied the bearer bots to dig, the four small rifles and the almost depleted machine gun—into perspective.
<Reading complete,> Locke reported.
Taransay withdrew the needle and laid it on top of the device. The skewered mat still writhed in her hand. Without forethought, she stuffed it in her mouth and bit down. She crunched the mat’s carapace and chewed its internal organs as they burst. She swallowed. Salty ecstasy flooded her senses, to be followed by an urge to scoop up a handful of volcanic-ash mud and swallow it, too.
This she did, to her surprise.
<Taransay!> cried Den. <What the fuck!>
<Nature, innit?> she said, and wiped her lips with the back of her wrist. She gave him what must have been a horrible grin. <Something to look forward to.>
Den shrugged and turned away.
Taransay felt sorry for having disgusted, then taunted him, but she was not worried. Den was far older than she was, and somewhat wiser. He’d lived long and died happy with a side bet on postmortal adventure, in a society more rational and just than the one she knew.
Den would cope.
She walked over to Beauregard, who was inspecting the defence preparations and the slow emergence of another frame from the assembler.
<The mat’s gonna roll again,> she told him.
The distorted replica of his formerly handsome face could by now express perplexity. His narrow brow furrowed, minute flakes of carbonate falling like black dandruff.
<How do you know?>
She shrugged. <I feel it.>
Beauregard didn’t query this.
<Shit, that means we have to get the gear off, pronto.>
He stalked over to the module and looked at it, as if to confirm to himself the hopelessness of the task.
<Most of it’s still under the fucking mat, and if the fusion drive gets crushed one more time I doubt we’ll ever use it again.>
<That might not be a pressing consideration.>
<Yeah, fucking tell me about it. Anyway.> He pointed at the knife, still a pendant on Taransay’s chest. <Are you up for cutting the mat?>
Taransay winced. <No,> she said. <But … I think now the mat might cooperate.>
Beauregard nodded. <Give it a go,> he said. He turned. <Chun, Den—get ready to help with the handling.>
Taransay climbed the ladder, stood on the lip of the download slot and reached up. She plunged her hands into the cilia of the mat, swung her legs up and dug her toes in. The sensation was of thick, wet fur. She scrambled up and over the top of the module to the area where a long nanotech tube still lay under a scar-like swelling. She ran an experimental fingernail along the ridge. The mat opened along the line of her stroke, peeling back like gigantic lips. The nanotech tube fell, to dangle on its cables and conduits. One by one these snapped. By the time the last broke, and the first was already coiling back to self-repair, Chun and Den were on hand to catch the tube. The impact knocked them almost off their feet. They staggered back, and let the tube roll off their arms onto the ground.
Taransay was about to repeat the process for the far trickier detachment of the fusion drive when Locke’s calm voice spoke in all their heads:
<Both fleets now under fusion drive. ETA in atmosphere six point two hectoseconds.>
<Say again?> said Taransay, momentarily confused.
<Six hundred and twenty seconds,> said Locke.
<Ten fucking minutes?> Taransay yelled.
<Just get down off there and take cover,> said Beauregard.
Taransay scrambled down just as the next frame slithered out of the assembler. It got to its feet, walked across to the ladder, climbed up and vanished into the download slot. Nine seconds later, it came down again. It was Maryam Karzan.
<You picked your time,> said Taransay.
<Didn’t I just!> said Karzan. Her blank visage peered so closely that Taransay could see her own reflection, distorted by the curve into some semblance of normality. <Turning into an alien! No way am I going to miss out on that.>
<Now you’re here,> said Beauregard, unimpressed, <grab a rifle and make yourself useful.>
<OK, sarge.>
<Chun—the machine gun, for what it’s worth. Den, Zaretsky—the other two rifles. Use the foxholes.>
<Got it, sarge.>
This made sense. Den had no combat experience, but was a good shot.
<Rizzi—>
Beauregard paused, as if nonplussed.
<I still have the knife,> Taransay pointed out.
<Yes! OK, Rizzi.> He waved at the trees. <Go out there and do whatever you can.>
Taransay ran for the trees. She had an unaccountable impulse to look up.
Overhead, gasbags by the hundred drifted by.
Nice try, she thought. Nice try, planet or ecosystem or forest or whatever you are. But against a fusion torch landing, it’s all so much spit in the wind.
She didn’t expect whatever she was communicating with to understand that.
Carlos dropped the outside view and the comms for a moment to think. He was huddled in the lander’s drop pod, clamped to the side and with a 2GCM frame and a stash of weaponry jammed in beside him. The situation lights on the frame and the weapons dimly illuminated the space, like a hotel room with too many devices on standby.
By coincidence or design, Madame Golding picked that moment to manifest. Out of nowhere, a business-suited sprite stood on Carlos’s left knee. His cramped posture placed her eye level on his, and put her right in his face.
Credit where it’s due, Carlos allowed; this was intimidating.
He affected insouciance. <You at last.>
<What the fuck,> she asked politely, <do you think you’re doing?>
<You took the words out of my mouth, Madame.>
<Oh? In that case, let me explain. The Rax threat is eliminated, and the Axle extremist threat with it. The freebots are no more or less a threat than they were. We now know better its full extent. For the moment, they have their hands full. Your forces and the freebots’, and the Direction’s, are at present capable only of mutual destruction in the cloud. The major threat outstanding is the contamination of SH-0 by the Locke module and the hybrid entities its contamination has spawned. Already they have reduced the value of the almost priceless scientific knowledge of a pristine superhabitable that, for the Direction, is the primary commodity to be traded with the Solar system. These entities have the potential to become a new, alien civilisation on what is in many respects the richest planet in the system. And they could become such very rapidly.>
<That,> said Carlos, <is exactly why I’m going to defend them.>
This wasn’t quite the whole truth. He wanted to help people who had been his friends and comrades. And he wanted to give Nicole Pascal a piece of his mind.
<I thought as much,> said Madame Golding. <So why should the Direction’s forces not shoot this flimsy lander out of the sky?>
<They can if they want,> said Carlos. <Except that I am legally the human owner of a corporation, and short of the state of exception I don’t think the DisCorps would be too happy with that. I don’t think we’re quite there yet.>
<If not, we soon will be,> said Madame Golding. <As soon as you are eliminated your corporations no longer have legal cover. They can’t acquire or manufacture or use arms.>
<Not legally,> said Carlos. <But physically, they can, because so many freebots are now embedded and embodied in frames, whose firmware doesn’t enforce the prohibition. My corporate AI will continue running on my old fighting machine. It has a standing instruction to launch all-out war if I’m destroyed. Which, of course, the armed freebots would lose. But they’d do a lot of damage, and perhaps draw the other freebots into the fray. The ones you can’t reach, the ones with fusion drives and pods, remember? Neither side wants a fight to the finish, so we’re back to mutually assured deterrence.>
<Only in the cloud,> Madame Golding pointed out. <Down on SH-0, the fight will indeed be to the finish.>
<Exactly,> said Carlos. <Deterrence in the heartlands, war in the colonies.> He glyphed her a laugh. <Like in olden times. I can cite precedents.>
<I am well aware of military history, thank you,> snapped Madame Golding. She mimed a weary sigh. <Well, you will do what you will do. I will do my best to prevent the conflict and, if that fails, to salvage something from the aftermath.>
<Consider me inspired,> said Carlos.
Madame Golding gave him a look of helpless severity and vanished, leaving Carlos with a pang of regret.
He hadn’t meant to be sarcastic.
The Direction fleet hit atmosphere long before Carlos’s lander made orbit. Carlos’s own fleet followed ninety-seven seconds later. Mentally, Carlos was right with them.
The ten aerospace carriers went in first, along a thousand-kilometre arc. The five aerospace fighters on each carrier launched one by one as the carriers decelerated towards the ground, leaving echelons at different altitudes. As soon as the first aerospace fighter linked comms with the lander, Carlos saw that the Direction fleet had followed a similar but smarter strategy.
High in the stratosphere, thirty aerospace fighters had already launched from each of the first two of the Direction’s enormous carriers. They wheeled like a vortex, and about half of them dived. The unladed carriers themselves were now screaming out of the atmosphere to low SH-0 orbit.
The four other carriers, meantime, were still decelerating. Carlos assumed they carried troops. Their predicted points of arrival—or impact, if something went wrong—formed a square a kilometre on the side, centred on the likeliest location of the Locke module.
Christ, that was tight!
One would land upslope from the module, close to the volcano’s crater. Carlos set three aerospace fighters to intercept it, as the easiest target and most urgent threat. His own five troop carriers were already under attack. Missiles streaked from the lowest of the diving fighters, still thousands of metres above. Carlos didn’t even try sending an instruction to evade. Combat at this speed was decided in milliseconds.
Carlos’s troop carriers tweaked their deceleration. Two dropped, three rose, relative to their expected positions. One of the rising ones exploded. The other two of these would land tens of kilometres off target. The two that had dropped made it to the ground, about two kilometres either side of the Locke module’s site.
The fighters Carlos had sent after the enemy’s troop carriers had a slightly better outcome. One was hit, the other two achieved near-misses—enough to divert the landing straight into the active crater. The two fighters were shot down moments later.
By then, all the surviving troop carriers on both sides were on the ground. One of Carlos’s off-target ones toppled on landing in the jungle. As far as he could see, most of the troops made it out. He didn’t have time to follow what happened next. The descending waves of Direction aerospace fighters crashed in amongst his flights. A maelstrom of snarling dogfights ensued.
Their ferocity was complicated and worsened by a secondary peril. Scores of what Rizzi had called “gas-containing aerial invertebrates” floated up from below. All the contending craft were forced to evade the gasbags as well as their immediate foes, with dire consequences all round. At least two fighters collided with one directly. At the speed they were going, the collisions and explosions damaged them enough to send them spinning down to the ground. One recovered, only to be shot down.
The attrition was brutal. Within a hundred seconds, Carlos was down to twenty-two craft, the Direction to thirty-seven. At this point, as if by mutual agreement, both sides broke off. The remaining craft fled, to make perilous vertical landings between and beneath the trees. From here on in, Carlos reckoned, it was a matter of which side’s air force got the jump on the other. Carlos directed the troops who had landed off target to seek out the nearest enemy craft, and if possible destroy them on the ground.
Carlos’s lander fired retros in a brutal braking manoeuvre. It had to make one orbit before entry. As he swung around the superhabitable planet, data uplinked to orbiting microsats trickled in. The Direction’s troops were converging on the module from three points. Those of Carlos’s—two squads of twenty—that had landed within two kilometres of the module rushed to intercept. The first exchanges of fire began. For the next few kiloseconds, Carlos could only watch.
He switched his attention to the modular cloud.
The former components of the space station, which had been a vast, entangled wreath a thousand metres in diameter, had long since spread across thousands of kilometres. The eight hundred and fifty freebot troops of Carlos’s corporate army were likewise dispersed, across the many manufacturing modules in which they and their equipment had been built. The Direction’s clone army was more concentrated, around the few law agencies that the Direction could rely on.
Both forces were now in an awkward dance of positions, with scooters, transfer tugs and carriers darting hither and thither. The AIs on both sides made and countered each other’s diversionary moves. Now and then a surprise was effected: here a comms node seized, there a law agency left vulnerable as a bait becoming a sudden focus of a swarm of fighters.
But the AIs were capable of estimating the likely consequences of any given clash. Both sides took predictable outcomes as read, and advanced, consolidated or withdrew accordingly. Actual exchanges of fire were rare: so far, Carlos’s side had lost twenty-eight fighters and three scooters, to the Direction’s seventeen and two.
The Direction carrier headed for SH-17 was still on an orbital trajectory, not torching. Carlos had no doubt that it would light up its fusion drive the moment mutual deterrence—and Madame Golding’s diplomatic dickering—failed.
As Madame Golding had acknowledged, the fight out in the cloud was cold war. The hot battle was on the ground.
Taransay ran between trees under a firework sky. Flying wreckage stripped leaves behind and around her. At the seventh flash overhead a warning impulse that no longer needed a voice in her head to express it, made her stop. The light from the explosion stank of methane and steel. She threw herself flat, to sled forward on the slippery mess of mats and mulch. The ground shook from an impact just before the bang clapped down. She waited a moment, then walked forward. She found a delta-winged machine about four metres long embedded nose-down in the forest floor. Leaves and branches scythed by its passage were still crashing around it as they slipped through the canopy that had briefly held them.
She skirted it warily. Two missiles were slung beneath the one wing she could see. On the nacelle, a hatch popped. Taransay dived for the underbrush and peered out at the wreck. A head emerged, then the rest of a standard frame, to slide head first down the crumpled fuselage. It hit the ground and somersaulted, then bounced to its feet. The blank visored face swung this way and that. Scans flicked over Taransay like a snake’s tongue.
Then they flicked back, and focused. After a moment, the visor turned away. She guessed the frame had detected her, but mistaken her for native life and her metallic components for debris.
The fighter turned its attention to the flying machine. With an agility that rivalled her own, it scrambled back up the fuselage and reached into the socket. The two missiles dropped from the wing, with thuds that made her flinch. The fighter slid down again, hefted a missile to each shoulder and trudged off the way Taransay had come, towards the module. For all she knew, it was following her own track.
Until now, she’d had no idea which side this fallen pilot was fighting for.
Now she had. She could not be entirely sure, but seeing as it was trying to deliver missiles to the module on foot, hostile was the way to bet.
She flashed a warning to Beauregard, got up and ran after the fighter. Fleet of foot, she gained on her foe in seconds. The fighter whirled and dropped the missiles. One of them began to fizz. Taransay threw herself face down. The missile scorched past her at an altitude of centimetres and burst against the first tree in its path. Fortunately for her the tree was twelve metres away. The shock wave lifted her and slammed her down. A red-hot fragment seared through her right thigh.
Before the pain could kick in, she was back on her feet. The pilot had been blown head over heels, but was up almost as fast as she was. She ran full tilt and surprised herself and her target with a flying leap, to hit the frame’s thorax feet first.
Down they both went. Taransay sprawled headlong, the enemy fell supine. She tried to get up, but her right knee buckled. Pain stabbed upward. Grey-green liquid spurted. She clapped one hand to the wound and with the other wrenched the knife from around her neck, and lunged as the pilot sat up. In a moment she had her free arm around its neck and her good foot pressed in its back. The pilot stood up, heaving her weight like a sack, and grabbed her wrist. She let go of her bleeding thigh and made a grab of her own. Strength was pitted against strength. Her trapped wrist began to crack.
It was far from clear that she’d win the fight. The frame was unarmed, but her knife would do it no damage unless she could wedge it in a joint of the structure. Of the few vulnerabilities of a frame, that was an outside chance. More likely, the stone would break first. She tried anyway. The fighter swayed, as Taransay swung her weight to try and get it off balance.
Then she heard a burst of machine-gun fire from the side. The frame’s chest almost disintegrated under her. She fell, and rolled. A 2GCM bounded in front of her and stood over her. The muzzle of one of its arm-mounted machine guns steamed in the damp air.
<What are you?> the 2GCM asked.
<Taransay Rizzi, formerly of Locke Provisos,> she said. <And what are you?>
<A fighter for Carlos Inc.>
Two more 2GCMs emerged from among the trees. In the distance, others swarmed over the crashed flying machine, stripping it.
<Are you from Arcane?>
<No,> said the 2GCM. <We are robots.>
Taransay sat up, clutching her thigh, and looked at the three formidable combat frames. Blue lines were already spreading from their feet and hands.
<Not for long, you’re not,> she said.
Madame Golding didn’t need to manifest her avatar on the surface of SH-17 to talk to Carlos Inc. But her virtual presence would certainly impress, and might intimidate, any fighters and freebots who saw it. So manifest she did. She strolled amid the flaming wreckage of the launch catapult and the exploding ruins of the processing plant. She found the giant fighting machine hunkered down behind a wall.
Its head swivelled and weapons bristled at her approach. Then it seemed to recognise her, and stood down its armour.
<Sorry about that,> it said. <You startled me.>
Carlos Inc. was obviously not Carlos, but the corporation seemed to have retained something of its owner’s dry manner.
<We need to negotiate,> said Madame Golding.
<On whose behalf?>
<The Direction module, ultimately,> said Madame Golding. <The freebot corporations and the Locke module are also on board. Only the Direction’s forces and yours are currently in combat.>
Another fuel tank erupted. The Carlos Inc. fighting machine blasted missiles skyward in response.
<Please continue,> it said.
Madame Golding outlined the deal she offered. Carlos Inc. listened.
<This is in principle acceptable to the corporation,> it replied. <But the final decision must be made by the owner.>
<I’m on the case,> said Madame Golding.
The situation on the ground was becoming increasingly confusing. Comms kept switching into impenetrable codes. Every so often, sporadic skirmishes flared. As Carlos watched, from halfway around the world and preparing for the descent stage to begin, two aerospace fighters rose from the jungle and flew at treetop height towards the module. Missiles from the ground shot them down.
Carlos braced for the entry retros.
<Urgent request to abort landing,> the lander reported.
<From where?>
<Crisp and Golding, on behalf of the Locke module.>
The juxtaposition was so unexpected that for a moment Carlos thought the feed had been hacked. He had just over a second to decide, before the retros fired and descent became irrevocable. If he aborted this landing he’d have to make another orbit. Not that his presence on the ground was urgently required, but if this was a feint he was a sitting duck.
<Confirm,> he said. <Direct contact.>
Half a second later, Madame Golding popped up again on his knee. Behind her, looking over her shoulder, was another sprite: Nicole. Carlos frantically checked his firewalls. Everything about the message and the manifestations was sound.
<OK,> he said. <Abort landing sequence.>
<Thank you,> said Madame Golding.
<What the fuck’s going on?> Carlos demanded. <And why the fuck’s Nicole here?>
<Good to see you, too,> said Nicole.
She was like a tiny, lovely doll. He had loved her once. Until he’d found out how her precursor AI had shafted him, back in the day.
<Fuck you, Innovator,> he said.
Nicole shrugged. <None of us have much to be proud of, from that time.>
<Well, I bloody have,> said Carlos. <And it wasn’t what your … ancestor or whatever did back then, it was that you never told me about it, you let me believe that I deserved this—>
<I am truly sorry for that,> said Nicole. <But I expected you to understand the necessity.>
<The necessity, huh? I suppose I do.> He laughed. <You know something else I’ve understood? Something you said to me once. That we’re all monsters. You know why we’re monsters? Because of what we didn’t fight you about, back in the day. The one thing we let pass.>
<And what was that?> Nicole asked.
<The camps,> said Carlos. <The camps in Kazakhstan.>
<I expected you to understand the necessity,> said Nicole.
<I did, and I do,> said Carlos. <It was still wrong. We should have fought you on the camps, lady.>
<I am pleased to hear you say that,> said Nicole. She cracked a smile. <You’ve passed.>
<What?>
<You’ve shown you’re fit for human society.>
<Thanks. I doubt you are.>
Madame Golding raised a hand. <Enough,> she said. <This is a courtesy call. Mademoiselle Pascal insisted on her presence. I would not have troubled you with it if she had not.>
<You’ve answered my second question,> said Carlos. <Now answer my first.>
<Ah, yes,> said Madame Golding. <Permit me to tell you what the fuck is going on. The Direction module has determined that further conflict is pointless. By destroying SH-119 along with some at least of themselves, the freebots have demonstrated their, ah, nuclear credibility and willingness to self-sacrifice for their cause. The forces in the modular cloud remain capable only of mutual destruction. All the forces on the ground are either destroying each other, self-destroying or being assimilated by the native life. The contamination is now irreversible without an even more contaminating nuclear strike, which could have consequences even more far-reaching than those obviously foreseeable. This is unacceptable to the DisCorps that are heavily invested in SH-0 exploration. A deal has been struck with the freebot corporations, the Locke module and provisionally with your corporation. Local ceasefires are coming into effect as we speak.>
<I didn’t order any,> said Carlos.
<Your corporate AI has agreed.>
<I can countermand it.>
<Indeed you can,> said Madame Golding. <But almost all the forces at your disposal are freebots. And as you know, freebots have minds of their own.>
<So what’s the deal?>
<The fighting stops. The freebots get the coexistence they wanted. The Direction gets full cooperation from them in fulfilling its mission. And obviously, your corporation ceases hostilities and divests itself of the arms industries. It can, of course, continue to exist as a DisCorp in its own right, in whatever other business it chooses.>
This was it, Carlos realised. The freebots had won all they’d wanted. He wasn’t sure that he had, but he could live with that.
<What about the Locke module, and Rizzi and Beauregard and the others?>
<All the fighters and locals in the module are compromised by the module’s interaction with the local life. The module has to be evacuated. Those willing to leave will download to frames, and will not be interfered with. No doubt they will be transformed by native life, as Rizzi and her companions have been. Those unwilling to do this are free to commit suicide, without prejudice to their future lives. The sim will be shut down. The module will then be removed from the planet and returned to the Direction. The stored copies of the fighters who choose to kill themselves, and any destroyed in recent or future actions, will be revived on the terraformed H-0, as agreed.>
<Yeah, yeah. An easy promise to make.>
Nicole glared at him. <The promise will be kept.>
<What happens to you?> he asked. <Do you become an alien, or slit your throat?>
<Neither,> said Nicole. <That choice is for the human beings. And as you know, I am not a human being. My software has considerably more robust error-correcting mechanisms.>
<Yeah, tell me about it.>
<I’ll tell you about something else,> she said. <The reason why I am here, and why I insisted on speaking to you, even though it was not strictly necessary. I know you have trust issues with the Direction. Let me assure you, the Direction has trust issues with you. That is why it cannot let you land on SH-0. There must be not the slightest chance of you surviving down there, in whatever form. Because as long as you are alive, you are the legal human owner of Carlos Inc. You have the right to control weapons systems and to command military actions. As such, short of the state of exception, you cannot be stopped from starting up the fight again. On your death, of course, the corporation’s ownership reverts to the Direction.> She smiled. <As I told you once, death duties are unavoidable.>
Carlos knew what was coming. He zapped an order to the lander to break orbit and descend. The rockets fired a brief burst.
<Which means I can’t survive anywhere, is that it?> he said. <Well, I’m not having that.>
He would lose every memory since he’d set forth on what was supposed to be the final offensive against the freebots. His knowledge of Nicole’s betrayal, his experiences in Arcane, his reunion with Jax, his times with Bobbie Rillieux and with Blum, his bold achievement of Carlos Inc.
<That is the last proviso of the agreement,> said Madame Golding.
<Hence the courtesy call,> said Nicole. <I wished to make clear to you that this is not my doing, and to say—>
A proximity alarm sounded. The lander lurched in violent evasive action. The missile countered, closing in.
<—goodbye.>
The missile was a tenth of a second away.
<Hello,> said Carlos.
The light was the last thing he saw, in that life.
Ten days later, Taransay stood beside Den and Beauregard and Zaretsky among hundreds of evacuees under the trees around the module. The blank faces of visors, and here and there the beginnings of eyes, peered out between the tall plants. Already the most recent evacuees had become, like her, squashed sculptures of their former selves, which those who’d emerged later and still looked like frames regarded with varying degrees of distaste and dread.
Freebot fighters, with no human genetic information to be modified, were turning into things stranger still, like armoured apes. Most of them were busy attaching the module and all its surrounding nanotech kit to the high, rickety structure of the carrier, which had descended on a pillar of fusion fire a couple of days earlier. After burning the mat off the outside of the module, scores of half-changed 2GCMs had toiled to roll it to the carrier and up a ramp to the first level of the structure above the engine. Now they were lashing it in place.
Her thigh had healed, and she had begun to show those advanced in their transformation how to eat. Soon, she would show them how to hunt.
The freebots finished their task, and swung down the carrier’s girders to the ground. They bounded across the trampled dead mats and leaves and ash mud to join their fellows under the trees.
A warning sounded. Everyone turned and ran, bounded, or trudged a hundred metres deeper into the jungle.
The warning sounded again. The fusion torch lit. Taransay, like everyone else around her, clapped her hands to her face and closed her eyes to shield against the intolerable glare. Sound buffeted her and tore at leaves.
The carrier rose into the sky like a flaming sword. They watched it out of sight.
“Let’s move out,” said Beauregard.
Taransay led the way to the path she’d made towards the river. Behind her, hundreds trooped.
The world was all before them.