They were given a better send-off this time, though they were in no condition to appreciate the crowd and the cheers. Carlos fell asleep on the bus as soon as it left the resort, as did most of the others.
He woke in the small frame, at the moment the minimal rig for ascent and descent docked with the transfer tug. Evidently they’d all been put in sleep mode and loaded up like so much cargo in the hangar. With the others he clambered over and clung on as the tug dropped to the surface of SH-17. As before on their ascent, the rig flew itself. Atmospheric buffeting was less severe than the aerodynamic approach in the shuttles had been, but more than made up for by shaking from the engine and the brutal deceleration thrusts at the end.
This part of the exomoon had turned further to night since their first arrival; the exosun was almost set and the bright three-quarter face of SH-0 dominated the sky. The fighters clambered off the module one by one, Carlos first. He watched with approval as the others formed up in a neat row like skittles. Five blank faceplates—which, just as before, were as individually recognisable as faces—looked back at him, then looked around to get their bearings.
Locke’s voice spoke in their heads: <Follow the arrows.>
As before, a direction was laid out for them as virtual images on the ground. They were guided to a curved-over entrance to a circular stairwell, down which they all trooped. The steps were suited to their size and went down a long way, to emerge ten metres below the surface in a featureless dark corridor of concrete that smelled of pulverised regolith. Here there was only one way to go: towards a heavy metal blast door. Carlos marched up to it and worked the mechanical handle, then bowed the others in. Inside was a circular room with a piece of apparatus in the centre and a dozen small lights dotted around the circumference under the ceiling. As soon as they stepped in, all radio communication with the outside and radar sense of anything beyond the walls ceased. Carlos closed the door and swung the inside handle down. They spaced themselves out around the room.
“Jeez oh,” said Rizzi, tapping the wall. “A bomb shelter.”
“Cheery, innit,” said Carlos.
“Could do with some brightening up,” said Beauregard. “Anyone been an interior decorator in a previous life?” He looked from one fighter to another, as if curious. “Nah, thought not.”
Locke manifested in their midst, his virtual image sharing space with the apparatus.
<Welcome back,> he said.
He stepped away from the centre of the room, taking on a more solid appearance, and took up a position between Chun and Karzan and facing Carlos and Beauregard. With a wave of the hand towards the apparatus he summoned the round table on which they had planned their previous mission.
<As you can no doubt tell,> he said, <this room is electromagnetically isolated. It’s also electrically isolated. The lights are battery-powered, as is the projector. We’re taking no chances with hacking or snooping. We’re even invisible and inaccessible to the company, except insofar as I am the company. All we have to worry about is that I am hacked or you are.>
<That’s reassuring,> said Karzan.
Locke didn’t do sarcasm. <Up to a point. Now, let me bring you up to speed.>
He flourished his quill, pulling up views compiled from satellite views and fast small spy drones scooting high above. The Astro landing site was wrecked and looted. On the far side of the crater wall, the basalt dome was surrounded by six scooters, all with their missile tubes unused. Three fighting machines were visible, along with one damaged one laid out on the ground. A mass of robots was corralled in a Faraday cage of heavy metal mesh. The machinery of the Gneiss camp, some looted material from the Astro site, and ripped-off weaponry from the Locke squad’s own fighting machines were being adapted to defensive purposes.
<It’s essential to move fast,> said Locke. <Arcane have their resupply tugs on the way, due in orbit between ten and two kiloseconds depending on how much delta-vee they’re willing to spend. Combine the resources they’d found with the organics deposits already logged by the Astro robots, and with the available heavy machinery and nanofacture facilities…> He shrugged. <Unfortunately we can’t produce new fighting machines in that time. We must use the resources to hand to mount another offensive.>
<One even less well equipped than our last one,> said Carlos.
<Your last offensive was more than adequately equipped for the opposition expected,> said Locke tartly. <Furthermore, given the apparent renegacy of Arcane, and the termination of its contract with Gneiss, we have been cleared by both Gneiss and the Direction to hit them without undue regard for environmental damage and economic loss.>
<So now the gloves are off?> said Beauregard. <Good!>
<It is not good, other than tactically.>
<That’s what matters to us,> said Beauregard.
<I understand your point of view,> said Locke.
<So why are we needed here at all?> Carlos asked. <If the gloves are off, hit them from orbit with a rock and be done with it.>
<I was coming to that,> said Locke, sounding for a moment as if his patience were being strained. <The gloves may be off, but we’re not yet at a point where it’s worth contaminating thousands of square kilometres of surface with material from another body.>
<Why not?> Carlos persisted. <The surface takes a lot of impacts anyway, by the look of it.>
<Not on that scale, and not in the last million years,> said Locke. <And given the Arcane module’s imminent arrival in a strategic orbital position, setting up an impact may be less simple than you think.>
<It might be easier and simpler to arrange an impact on the module,> Beauregard mused.
Locke looked at him sharply. <Yes, it would. It may yet come to that. The Direction is extremely reluctant to destroy an entire company and its major assets. That would set some unfortunate precedents. I assure you that Locke Provisos and Astro America—and Gneiss, for that matter—fully share its concern. However, at this point the whole question of outright destruction—in orbit or on the ground—is a diversion. Besides the matter of contamination, the main reason we don’t want to hit the Arcane Disputes fortification with kinetic weaponry—or heavy artillery, for that matter—is that we need most urgently to know what has gone wrong. We have to capture the rogue robots, and if possible the Arcane fighters, and interrogate them. In fact, capturing one would be a success.>
They all stared down at the satellite view, enhancing it and augmenting it, looking for weaknesses in the enemy’s position that could be exploited with four intact scooters, one damaged one, and six small frames. None exactly jumped out.
<I have a proposal,> said Zeroual.
<Yes?> said Locke.
<It seems to me that we are looking at this the wrong way,> said Zeroual. <We’re treating it as a hardware problem, so to speak. Would it not be simpler to let information from them come to us? We could set up a room like this, isolated, and connect it with a secure cable to a dedicated receiver. That receiver would accept the messages that Arcane is sending out—or if they have ceased sending, it could be used to transmit a message and await a response. That message could be examined in isolated hardware. There would then be no risk of malware contamination, and it might reveal to us what has gone wrong.>
<Problem with that,> said Carlos. <I’m with you right up to the point where you have the isolated processor stepping through the message, dissecting it. The difficulty arises when you put a robot, an avatar, or a human in the room to read the results. Because these results might themselves be the poison in the envelope. I’m not saying I could code something like this myself, but I can readily imagine an AI that could, and that could anticipate our every move including the one you’ve just spelled out.>
<We could ensure that the result, whatever it was, was not executable code.>
<We could not,> said Locke. <Not even in theory. Carlos is right about that.>
<If that is the case,> said Zeroual, <which I will accept for the sake of argument, we’d be running exactly the same risk of contamination by capturing and interrogating one of their fighters or one of their corrupted robots.>
<Ah, no,> said Locke. <A functioning human mind, or even a functioning robot, is a very different matter from a malware-packed message. There are ways of working one’s way out and up from known processes that have to function uncontaminated to function at all—physiological analogues in the human emulation, mechanical coordination in the robots—to higher and symbolic functions, and checking every step of the way. I could not do it, at least not in any remotely feasible time, but the AI that I so inadequately represent most certainly could.>
Carlos could think of one way in which a human mind could be affected directly by code, and without any kind of hacking or data corruption: speech. For some time he’d harboured a troubling suspicion: that the reason why Arcane had turned so abruptly against Locke, the Direction, and apparently everyone else, was simply that the rebel robots had told their captors something that had alarmed them deeply.
He wasn’t sure whether this was a good time and place to voice his suspicion. He wasn’t sure it was even a good time to think it. He wondered whether his thoughts, and those of the other fighters, were private from the avatar, let alone from the company AI. The subvocal messaging app in their heads needed deliberate intent to transmit, though not to receive. He remembered Nicole explaining that thoughts couldn’t be read because they weren’t written, and he could see what she meant. But surely the inner monologue had some neural features in common with speech.
He decided not to worry about that possibility. If his thoughts above a certain level of articulation were babbling out on the radio in his head, there was nothing he could do about it. It was literally not worth thinking about, because thinking about it would only make the problem, if real, a whole lot worse.
<So there we are,> he said. <Back where we started. We capture an Arcane fighter or a robot, preferably at least one of each. And then we just ask the fucker or the blinker what its fucking or blinking problem is.>
<Profanities aside,> said Locke, <you’ve taken the words out of my mouth. I would add the significant proviso that none of you get captured yourselves.>
They all examined the display some more, from all angles. They studied the inventory of the Emergency Base’s arsenal. Gloom deepened, then—
<Got it!> said Beauregard. <Look at the inventory. We have rocket engines, we have stacks of pipes, we have crates full of crawler bots, and we have scooters that can be flown remotely.>
<Yes?> said Locke.
<And we have Carlos,> said Beauregard.
For Carlos it was like the good old days. Fighting an entire battle by remote control, while he reclined in a seat, was pretty much his specialist subject, the only real combat skill he’d brought with him from his original militant life. He remembered flying drones over London, and dogfights in the sky. He didn’t consciously remember commanding drone fleets, but the muscle memory of doing so in his blank forgotten glory days not long before his death had survived all the copying and translation to revive as reflex in his robot body. He lay in the socket of the battered scooter they’d rode back on from the battle, drawing down telemetry from the microsats in low orbit, the tiny zippy drones dancing like midges high in the thin atmosphere, and from two of the other scooters, both ready to go.
He gathered from a low mutter of complaint in the message channel that for the other fighters the plan wasn’t like any of their good old days. They’d been busy cannibalising equipment into a catapult—Beauregard had spotted the one built by the rebel robots, and had stolen the idea. Carlos was fairly sure that drones and microsats from Arcane Disputes were already spying on them, but that wasn’t a problem. Let them worry about what was coming, so long as they didn’t identify the catapult’s payloads, which were being transported from storage and nanofacture sheds literally under wraps.
In a flurry of activity, the wraps were thrown off and the payloads deployed one by one. Unwrapped and mounted on the launch ramp, they remained enigmatic: long fat plastic cylinders with crude stabilising fins and booster and guidance motors sintered on. Enigmatic or not, they were an obvious threat and an easy target for incoming ordnance. Between each launch, the catapult took about thirty seconds to wind back and reload.
One by one three missiles arced into the night, like outsize dud fireworks. They didn’t stay dud for long: Carlos fired the booster of each when it reached the top of its natural parabolic arc. As soon as the last missile was away, Carlos’s fellow fighters scurried for the entrance to the bomb shelter. Carlos waited for three seconds after they’d dogged the hatch, then remote-launched the two scooters that had been assigned to this mission. Both rose almost straight up. One blasted hard and fast then cut its main engine to continue on a new parabolic trajectory aimed at the Arcane/Gneiss camp. The other flipped at a hundred metres altitude, deployed its stubby wings, and swooped to twenty metres to race at full thrust on a more or less level path across the plain towards the crater wall. Carlos thought briefly of the V2 rocket and the V1 doodlebug, and wondered if they’d inspired that part of Beauregard’s plan.
As soon as both scooters were on course, Carlos trimmed the flight paths of the big dumb payloads launched from the catapults. Random variation had given them a spread of a few hundred metres. Now, one behind the other, they were all heading for the same target. Carlos was getting elementary telemetry from all of them, appearing as a set of running dials in a tiny part of his complex three-dimensional view integrated from the drones, scooters and spysats. He didn’t have time or inclination to appreciate the godlike perspective and astonishing depth of field generated by this widely distributed multi-ocular vision. He could only concentrate and hope for the best. Even augmented and optimised, he was barely able to process the display: the occipital cortex of his mammalian brain wouldn’t have stood a chance, the input shattering into a surreal scatter of images, like a Cubist portrait reflected in a skip-load of broken mirrors. The radar tickle was intense, sensed as an electrical buzz on his skin.
Carlos focused on the lead missile, now dropping straight towards the basalt dome. Four Arcane fighters were in view, near the cage containing the robots. They were all on the big combat frames. Not at all to his surprise, one of the Arcane fighters bounded for a scooter. The other, presumably the one whose combat frame had been damaged and was therefore in a small frame and thus ready to go, was already climbing aboard. Another headed for a rocket tube stripped from the scooter the Locke side had been forced to abandon. The fourth just calmly stood looking up, aimed his or her forearm-mounted heavy machine gun at the incoming missile, and let rip.
The falling missile disintegrated fifty metres above target, showering debris and what little of its payload remained intact. But that little was enough: about a dozen crawler bots, which fell to the ground around the dome. Three were taken out by well-aimed shots, two landed badly. The other five picked themselves up and scuttled towards the robot cage. The robots saw them coming and became visibly agitated, blurring into motion as they scrambled to the top of the cage—for whatever good that would do if a crawler got in, or pounced on top. Ah—they were poking appendages out like beseeching hands through prison bars, to break the Faraday barrier and signal to mobilise their auxies and riffs.
The fighter who’d grabbed a rocket tube aimed upward at the next incoming missile. Aim was hardly a problem: the rocket was more than smart enough to know what was expected of it. Nothing but hot fragments rained from that impact. While the fighter was reloading, the third crude projectile was at two hundred metres and falling. Carlos gave it a boost to fall faster than the local gravity could pull it. The machine-gunner wasted one burst on where it should have been if it had been free-falling. The burst that did hit it was hardly more effective: the missile’s internal small charge had already gone off, and the shell popped open at five metres. From its cloud of debris, scores of crawler bots hit the ground running.
The robots in the Faraday cage went frantic. Beauregard had described this element of his plan as “like tipping a bucketful of venomous spiders into an arachnophobia support group meeting.” He had been spot on. The robots assailed the heavy metal mesh with every available appendage and remaining tool, shaking the entire cage. Auxies and riffs stirred here and there around the cage’s perimeter.
The fighter who’d sprinted in the big frame had emerged from its head and was crawling on the scooter, and the other was almost at the socket. Both turned to the cage, dithered momentarily, presumably exchanged hasty signals, and continued to shove themselves into the sockets. The machine-gunner and the rocketeer hurried to the cage, stamping on crawlers as they went.
Carlos shifted attention to the high scooter, now over the top of its trajectory and dropping. Again he jetted to descend faster than free fall. He loosed off two rockets from the scooter’s side tubes, both aimed at the top of the basalt dome.
The circular tarpaulin was blown to shreds. Two blocks near the top of the dome cracked, and the keystone at the centre fell down inside. Carlos picked this up from a spy drone. The pixels of its image were almost as big as the blocks, but they did show the square black gap. He couldn’t see on this scale what was going on inside, but he could imagine that any Arcane fighters and captured robots within were taking it badly.
To Seba, it all happened in slow motion and low resolution. First came two huge impacts overhead, then the covering that had cloaked all electromagnetic signals peeled away in tatters from the entrance gap in the dome. Through that gap, signals on all wavelengths suddenly flooded in, urgent and confusing. Seba had known something was going on from the ground vibrations, and from the uptick in encrypted chatter between the two fighting machines that had interrogated it earlier. A few hundred seconds had passed since they had crawled back into the dome. Certainly an attack was going on. Perhaps a rescue!
Seba swivelled its visual receptors upward and saw cracks spread across two of the topmost basalt blocks. With grim predictability the capstone wedged between the two blocks fell out. Under 0.2 g the basalt cuboid wasn’t falling fast, but its hundred or so kilograms of mass would be enough to crush Seba: the auxiliary device in which it was now embodied was far from robust, and the jury-rigged connections between the chassis and Seba’s processor were even more fragile. Quite possibly the crystal chunk that was Seba’s most fundamental hardware, its equivalent of a brain, would survive the impact. That depended on whether it was one of the block’s faces or one of its edges that hit. Seba watched the chaotic rotation of the block bearing down on it and tried to figure out which of these it would be.
The robot soon, in a matter of milliseconds, concluded that whatever happened in the initial impact, it was the final collision between itself, the block and the floor that counted. The table surface would in any case crack, under the block’s weight if not its impact. Seba had no precise measurement available of the strength of the table to which it was stapled, so this outcome was necessarily unpredictable. In the meantime there was nothing Seba could do, except yell for help.
Help came. One of the two fighting machines in the hemispheric room shoved the table sharply forward, out of the way of the falling block. The table toppled, coming to precarious rest on one edge and two legs. The block struck one of the opposite legs and a complicated tumble ensued, ending with the table resting on another edge and pinned by the block across one leg. En route the table top cracked, and the staples holding down two of Seba’s appendages sprang loose.
The robot stayed very still. It was now directly facing the entrance gap. Now that the cloaking cover was entirely gone, new information poured through that gap and the square hole in the dome’s roof. What the information conveyed was terrifying. Fragments and tatters of fabric and other debris blew around in scooter down-blasts coming from several directions. Seba’s fellow freebots were confined under a mesh framework that functioned as a Faraday cage. They were making frantic efforts to break out of it, which struck Seba as a very bad idea because the cage was surrounded by crawler bots trying to get in. If they did, they could wreak havoc in the confined space, jabbing the robots with lethal malware insertions. This thought seemed to occur to the others at the same time: they all backed away towards the centre.
A moment later, Seba saw it wasn’t just information that was pouring through the gap in front of it. Two crawler bots were already scurrying through. Several more trooped behind. Oblivion, seconds away, seemed to march with them.
All Seba could do was scream for help again. A crawler bot reached the edge of the table and stuck a needle-sharp foot in its now vertical surface. With a deft leap and pivot it got all its feet in a similar position and started scrambling up. Seba struggled to free itself, using its two free appendages to try to prise another out.
A fighting machine’s hand reached over the table top, grabbed the crawler bot and tossed its crushed remains away. Then the hand closed over Seba and yanked the robot unceremoniously out of its restraints. Flimsy appendages snapped, leaving their tips under the staples. Hydraulic fluid leaked; broken circuits sparked.
Seba saw the world whirl about it as the fighting machine straightened up, stepped over the table top, and stamped on crawler bots. The machine then threw itself into a prone position facing the entrance. With one hand it held Seba clear of the floor, and with its other arm loosed off a rapid rattle of shots at the incoming crawlers and those behind them. Then it crawled out through the hole. It stood up again—more dizzying whirls for Seba—and stomped and shot its way to the cage. Flashes from above and to the side overloaded Seba’s visual receptors. It looked away, and saw another fighting machine shooting and stamping. A third was scrambling to the side of a scooter, and reaching for its rocket-launching side tubes. Two fighting-machine frames, one of them damaged, sprawled on the ground.
Many seconds passed as the scuttling bots were shot or crushed.
When the last was underfoot, the fighting machine holding Seba opened its hand and looked down.
<Right, you little blinker,> it said. <Time to make yourself useful.>
Seba scanned upwards.
<If you free the other robots,> it said, <we’ll consider it.>
<What? Do you think you’re in any position to bargain?>
<You are under attack and you seek our help.>
The metal fingers began to close again around Seba.
<Yes, and we have ways of getting it, as you know.>
Seba no longer cared about negative reinforcement.
<Free my friends,> it said. <Or forget it.>