Moon Sostenti hadn’t lied about being under a shadow.
No matter what she did or where she was rotated to, she continued to draw all the shittiest assignments in all the worst theatres. She didn’t guess that Baxemides was the source of her misfortunes, but she knew the knife was in all the way to the hilt and being twisted. Her COs didn’t even go to the trouble of lying about it. “Got another garbage detail for you, Moon.” “Another day, Sostenti, another sewer.”
They might have been more sympathetic if Moon’s bad luck hadn’t spilled over onto them too. The 724th got twice as many front-line assignments as any other unit. Three times they went up against the machines and three times they met the gleaner’s blade. The casualties were so huge that after the third time Moon became a stranger in her own unit. All her old friends, all her old commanders were dead. The faces that met her gaze when she came to the mess table were rookies she had never met. They looked like children to her.
But Coordinator Baxemides managed at last to express her displeasure in a way that would leave actual scars. Three weeks into her fourth rotation Moon was informed by her captain that she had been chosen for an experimental programme that would involve undercover operations in Ansurrection space.
It was well known by this time that the Ansurrection had agents that could pass for organic selves but were actually machines. Now the Cielo was attempting to turn the tables with something called Operation Silver. A Pandominion scientist had engineered a cerebral splice that would allow Cielo soldiers to remotely operate robotic bodies. The bodies would be perfect copies of Ansurrection units captured or destroyed in previous engagements. Both the robots and their handlers would Step onto one of the Ansurrection worlds near to a pre-selected concentration of machines. The operators would hang back in a Step-enabled vehicle, ready to retreat at the first sign of counter-attack. The robots would advance under the control of their Cielo operators. Embedding themselves seamlessly, they would immediately begin to harvest data from their surroundings. The bulk of the data would take the form of real-time CoIL recordings from the operator’s sensorium, but the operators would also attempt to access Ansurrection comms channels and local databases.
“Fuck do I know about hacking?” Moon had asked incredulously. “Fuck do I know about infiltration for that matter? I’m a soldier, not a spy.”
“You’re whatever they tell you to be, Sostenti,” her captain told her laconically. “Same as me. Same as everyone.”
Moon held his gaze until he finally had the decency to look away. “Same as everyone,” she said. “Sure.” Pretty funny then that she was the only soldier in the regiment to be chosen for this bullshit detail; the only one shipped out from the barracks on Bivouac 11, which had been her home for the last seven months, to a redoubt moon circling a planet that most likely didn’t even have a name.
It took three days to habituate her body to the interface. Suspended in a gimballed frame with her entire body covered in neuro-feedback mesh, she learned how to manipulate the infiltration robot at a distance. It was a painful process: every time the robot overbalanced or bumped into an object, Moon felt the damage as though someone had taken a whack at her. She even broke out in bruises, which the technicians assured her were merely stress artefacts.
“Why the fuck does this thing need a pain response anyway?” Moon snarled at them. “Constructs don’t even have a nervous system!”
“Constructs don’t need one,” some skinny little streak of piss explained to her. “Their proprioception is handled by gyroscopic arrays and passive sonar. Well, that’s how our constructs do it. In the Ansurrection they’ve also got a kind of electro-magnetic grid that every machine contributes to. You orient yourself by reference to every other machine that’s close enough to see or sense you.”
Which begged the question of why the brass didn’t just send actual robots in to do this filthy job. But Moon knew the answer to that one. The brass and the Omnipresent Council both were scared shitless that the Pandominion’s own AIs, if they were ever exposed to Ansurrection space, might catch autonomy like a disease. If a helpmeet or even a military drudge Stepped onto an Ansurrection world, its handlers wouldn’t be able trust any of the data it brought back or anything the machine did or said afterwards. There would be no way to ascertain for certain that it hadn’t been subverted, become an agent of the enemy, which would render the entire exercise not just futile but actually disastrous.
So they were reduced to this clumsy workaround. Send something that looks like a robot but is actually a puppet operated by neuro-synching instead of strings. Let a human collect and collate the data, then bring it home and sieve it afterwards.
And what data were they looking for, exactly?
Anything, the CO said. He was a burly canid from Janefebre with a blotch of black like an eyepatch on the white fur of his face. He had no ears, but nobody was sure whether this was a battle injury or a condition he was born with. Moon had never met anyone from Janefebre before: maybe none of the fuckers had any ears.
“The machines exchange data all the time,” the CO told the unit. “The general idea is that you just hang around and take whatever they give you. The eggheads are all hot and hard for something they’re calling the trans-continuum communications conduit. They think the Ansurrection can phone home from other universes, which we can’t. So that would be the million-star prize. But even just knowing how their handshakes work would be good. Unit strengths and configurations would be better. Personally, I’m hoping you get sight of anything resembling an actual command centre. Give us something to aim for instead of these random fly-swats we keep doing.”
By way of a mission statement it wasn’t long on detail, but it sounded straightforward enough. What the CO forgot to mention was that they hadn’t found a way of doing the neuro-synching that allowed incoming signals to be blocked or muted. Once the operators were locked into the machines their whole sensorium was engaged by default.
On Moon’s first outing she – or rather her machine surrogate – Stepped onto a mining platform in the middle of a vast ice field. The platform seemed to be harvesting minerals from under the ice, but Moon wasn’t able to tell much about what exactly was being dug up. She was an anonymous fetch-and-carry unit, one among thousands. She sought out the robots who looked like the closest match to her own design and did what they did, and for the best part of ten minutes nobody so much as looked at her.
Then something big and predatory-looking with mechanical tentacles of many different thicknesses swooped down from a sky station over her head and plucked her away almost before she knew it was there. Moon’s robot was dissected and examined in mid-air, while Moon in her rocking gimbals flailed and shrieked, feeling every incision. It took more than twenty seconds for the neuro-synch to shut down. For most of that time, Moon felt as though her body was being hacked into smaller and smaller pieces but had somehow missed the mission briefing and refused to die. The drugs in her system prevented her from even passing out.
The second and third times were just the same. Different locations, different shells for her robot alter ego to strut in, but similar outcomes. Moon Stepped, she found her cohort, she took her place. She did her best to blend in but was quickly identified; and once identified, dealt with summarily and efficiently.
The fallout from being dismembered and then waking up again was severe. In addition to the psychic trauma, Moon suffered muscular tremors, convulsions and occasional blackouts, her overworked nervous system taking days to recover each time. She requested a transfer and was refused. She was given a counsellor instead.
The counsellor was a talpid, hairless and pale as milk, wearing dark glasses even in the soothing dimness of the therapy suite. Like all army headshrinkers he was brimful of bullshit and eager to share. “You’ve got to build yourself an imaginary body,” he told Moon earnestly.
“You said what?”
“An imaginary body.” He sketched it in the air, in case Moon’s problem was a lack of visual imagination. “You’re used to the signals from your nerves telling you where you are, what position you’re in, what you’re touching. It’s a sort of built-in radar that begins and ends at your skin.
“When you’re in the rig, that radar input is drowned out by the much stronger signals coming through the neural link from the robot. So naturally your brain tells you those signals have replaced the existing signals. That the robot’s body is your body.”
“You are literally describing how the neuro-link fucking works,” Moon pointed out.
The counsellor ignored the profanity. In fact, he ignored the whole statement. “But, but, but,” he went on, “the original signals, the ones that come from your actual skin and your actual nerves, they’re still there. They haven’t gone away.”
“Yeah? So?”
The counsellor smiled. “So you need to listen to them. You have to learn to separate them from the overlaid inputs you’re receiving through the rig. Feel the two sets of sensations in two different places – your real body and your imagined, pretend body. That way, when the construct suffers harm, you can withdraw from the painful signals coming through the link into what your own nerves are telling you. Use the truth to insulate yourself from the simulation.”
“And how did that work when you tried it?” Moon didn’t trouble to hide the sarcasm.
The counsellor fluttered his hands, his face twisting into a mirthless, embarrassed smirk. “Well, I’ve never actually been in a neuro-link. I don’t have the clearance. The tech is limited to the personnel who are actually—”
“Then how about you build yourself an imaginary body so I can kick the shit out of the one that’s in front of me.”
She took some pleasure and consolation from the look of naked terror that crossed the man’s face. But he got the last laugh when he reported her A-one fit for duty. Back she went into the rig. In the space of a week she died three times, on three different worlds.
When Moon met with the rest of the team in the mess hall or the rec space, they all looked as ragged as she did. Their fur was lank and flattened, their eyes dull. They limped from psychosomatic injuries.
A gallows humour sprang up between them. They were all privates or NCOs, with a single battery sergeant as the highest rank present, so they invented their own ranks based on the number of neuro-linked deaths they’d suffered. Four made you a quarant officer, ten made you a decay sergeant and so on. The ceremonies when someone made rank were drunken and raucous. On such occasions any technical staff in the room tended to retreat pretty quickly, sensing an undercurrent of savage resentment aimed pretty steadily in their direction.
They weren’t wrong. There were incidents. Some technicians were rotated out with unspecified injuries. At least one died in an accident involving an awkward fall down a flight of stairs. Three soldiers were questioned, but seven others all vouched for the three being elsewhere at the time and they stuck to their story. No charges were brought.
The brass called a general muster to address the worsening morale. A ferret-faced colonel named Tenner Hossul told the infiltration team that their efforts had already yielded up hugely valuable insights into how Ansurrection society was organised. “The maxim is that you have to know your enemy if you’re going to have any hope of defeating him,” he said, standing in front of a collage of aerial reconnaissance photos that had nothing to do with anything. “Well now, thanks to you, we know them a lot better than we did. We didn’t get up on their battlefield comms tech yet, but what we are doing is we’re building up a picture. And the picture is going to help us to win this war. I’m recommending you all for commendations. And the neural mesh is being refined for even greater fidelity of sensation. It will feel like your own flesh and blood. If you’ll pardon the analogy, it’s going to be like throwing away your condoms and riding bareback for the first time.”
The colonel waited for a laugh that didn’t come. Reading the room, he wrapped up quickly. He took no questions and spoke to nobody. He hadn’t even noticed that more than half the mission team were women, which made his condom joke fall that much flatter. As soon as he stepped down off the podium he was out of there, taking off in his own transport. The CO dismissed the squad, clearly aware that the idiot colonel had left him nothing to build on.
The neural mesh didn’t change at all, as far as Moon could discern, but the intervals did. The tinheads got onto her more quickly each time, and deployed their counter-measures more efficiently. The last few times she Stepped she wasn’t sliced into pieces, she was disintegrated almost as soon as she arrived in-world. It seemed the Ansurrection had developed a way of identifying infiltrators the moment they touched the grid. Disintegration wasn’t bad at all, in Moon’s opinion. It went straight to the top of her favourite-ways-to-die chart. You got a single sharp jolt of agony as the neural mesh overloaded, but then you were back in your own skin with nothing worse than pins and needles.
Not long after that the programme was terminated and the interface rigs mothballed. The CO thanked the team for their efforts and released them back to their units. Before they left, though, each of them got three more sessions with the clueless counsellor. Moon told him she was harbouring thoughts of self-harm, but only because he could already read the simmering violence inside her through the telltales in her array.
The counsellor suggested she take up a hobby.
“That’s a great idea,” Moon agreed with a grim deadpan. “I think I’ll do that.”