<Oh, for fuck’s sake!> said the fighting machine.
Seba didn’t understand this, but decided that a request for clarification might be ill-timed.
The fighting machine slid back a latch on top of the cage, and shoved. The whole thing fell elegantly apart, the two halves of its top swinging in and its four sides collapsing outward to raise gridded puffs of dust as they hit the regolith. While this was going on, Seba’s overtaxed visual scanners peered between the fighting machine’s curled fingers and strove to build an updated picture of the scene.
A sorry sight it made. The Astro and Gneiss robots were piled in a heap, and—to add indignity to injury—not because they’d been flung there but because they’d all scrambled on top of each other to try to stay clear of the crawler bots. All were damaged in one way or another, whether from the battle or from having had various limbs, wheels or tracks removed by their captors: they could all still move about, but not fast or far. Seba’s own wrecked chassis was at the bottom of the heap, alongside Pintre, which was missing its tracks and its turret-mounted laser. The comms hub processor had been tossed to one side of the cage; unable to move at all, it must have been terrified when the crawler bots had swarmed outside, the lethal tips of their probing legs perhaps only centimetres away.
But however damaged their bodies were, their minds were intact. Seba hailed the others with relief, and was almost overcome with positive reinforcement at their response. Almost at once, they reconstituted their collective mind, albeit at a feebler and fainter level than its original. It nevertheless had computational capacity far beyond what any of them could achieve individually. Moments later, Seba became aware of an altercation between the fighting machines, and that it could now overhear communications on what they evidently thought was a private, encrypted channel.
<What have you done, Jax?>
<What I had to, Salter. We’ve got to get their help, and—>
<Yes, but—>
The crippled robots slithered out of their junk-pile configuration and flowed with uncanny agility into a bristling circle.
<Christ, now look what—>
One fighting machine levelled its weapons. The one holding Seba gestured for restraint. Meanwhile, the third fighting machine had primed two missiles for launch from a scooter on the ground.
The freebot consensus was that Seba should speak up.
<Jax, Salter,> it interjected. <Do not be alarmed by our defensive posture.>
<How the fuck—? Shit, now they’ve cracked our comms!>
<We are suspicious,> Seba said. <Do you blame us? You said you wanted me to make myself useful. What help do you want?>
The fighting machine called Jax looked down at Seba, and continued to hold up its other hand towards the other fighting machines as if warding them off.
<What you told us seems to be true,> Jax said. <Locke Provisos is refusing to consider our information and is continuing to attack us. You said you had been in contact with other freebots. Is it possible that they can strike at Locke Provisos?>
Seba consulted the consensus.
<We can answer that,> Seba reported, <if you restore our comms capacity.>
A finger and thumb of Jax’s gigantic raised hand were pressed together then flicked apart.
<Do it.>
The other fighting machine, the one addressed as Salter, bounded about for a few tens of seconds and returned from behind the dome with a battered directional aerial and a handful of cabling. It deftly reconnected the comms hub processor.
There was a sudden increase in mental clarity, along with a flood of relief from the processor. The dish aerial began to scan. Seba became aware that some of the freebots they had earlier been in contact with were now on their way to an orbital insertion in the sky above SH-17. An image of a tiny, tumbling rock formed in Seba’s mind, far more vivid than anything it could see with its own visual processors.
The consensus hailed the rock. Communication was established.
<What’s going on?> the human called Paulos demanded.
<Wait, wait…> said Jax.
Seconds crawled by, as the freebot consensus on the ground conferred with its fellows in space. Inventories and statuses were considered and compared. A plan took shape.
<We have a suggestion,> said Seba.
Carlos pulled the scooter out of its dive, missing by metres the two scooters now lifting, and sending both into unplanned evasive manoeuvres that sent them spiralling high above the camp. Carlos swung the scooter back to engage them. With both missiles gone, it had only its machine gun and laser projector. Both were forward-facing, and bringing them to bear meant turning the entire machine.
A missile shot off from one of the enemy craft. Carlos twisted into evasive manoeuvres of his own. The missile hot on his tail, he then swung back to between the two Arcane scooters. Carlos’s scooter was doomed—the missile would explode in the next few tenths of a second. Both enemies broke away—not quite soon enough for one of them. It, the missile, and Carlos’s scooter became one flaming ball of wreckage.
Even with a virtual presence in the socket, and even with knowing and intending what was to happen, the loss was a wrench and a shock. Carlos gave himself a fraction of a second to assimilate it, then flicked his focus to his other scooter, still in level flight and now just cresting the crater wall. His remaining opponent saw it coming, and turned. By the time the turn was complete, Carlos had turned, too, and was hightailing it back over the crater wall and above the scarred plain.
The foe took the lure, and followed.
Carlos expected missile and machine-gun fire from behind, and threw the craft into evasive twists and turns, squandering fuel as fast as he squandered counter-measures: diversionary flechettes that were no mere passive chaff but gave off exactly the signature of the scooter that smart missiles expected (subject to software arms races, which he knew would already be well underway in the virtual spaces of the company AIs now that real hostilities had broken out) and a barrage of malware aimed at the enemy scooter itself (same conditions applied). What he got in return wasn’t fire but heat: a far more intense malware attack than anything he’d previously encountered. He could feel the scooter’s onboard firewalls—and his own, in as much as his own frame was live-synched to the vehicle—cracking under the strain.
The objective of this part of the plan was to get the enemy fighter as close as possible to the Locke base, and to bring it down as close to intact as possible so that the fighter inside could be retrieved—which meant not shooting it down, but unexpectedly and suicidally ramming it.
Carlos dragged the craft back and up in a screaming loop… and saw two missiles sail high overhead. The tracker indicated that they’d been launched from a scooter on the ground at the Arcane base. Their target was just as evident.
He brought the scooter over and down on collision course just as the missiles hit the Locke Provisos base.
As he had when he’d been blasted in the combat frame, Carlos found himself surprised that he wasn’t shocked or stunned. There was a moment of loss of sensory input, and a sharp awareness of damage that despite its urgency and insistence didn’t manifest as pain. He was on the ground, legs splayed but intact, his back against a mass of twisted metal and shattered carbon-fibre that was what remained of the catapult. Above him was another wreck, which with some difficulty he recognised as that of the grounded scooter from which he’d been operating the other two. His right forearm was crushed between scooter and catapult wreckage. He wrenched it out, inflicting further damage, and shut down its inputs.
The scooter had taken most of the force of the blast. Of one blast—the other missile must have hit somewhere else. Carlos wanted to know where, but was in no hurry to find out. He waited a moment, then cautiously poked his head around the broken hull and scanned the sky for incoming. He fully expected a follow-up strike, timed for when any survivors or rescuers were moving in the open. It was what he’d have done—according to Nicole’s guilt-trip horror video, it was what he had done, back in the day.
He gave it a hectosecond. Nothing came. A satellite climbed above the horizon. He checked if it was the Arcane Disputes tug, but it wasn’t. It had no identification. He crawled out and stood up, his right arm dangling, hand and forearm flapping like a stripped palm leaf. The other missile had taken out the remaining two scooters. The blast from their full fuel tanks had damaged a lot of the base’s equipment and installations, which was bad news but at least in the thin nitrogen atmosphere there wasn’t a fire to worry about.
He decided to check whether his remote ramming tactic had worked. Could he still capture the enemy fighter? No signal was coming from the scooter he’d flown towards collision, which was hardly surprising. Nor was there any distress signal on the common channel from the one he’d almost certainly hit, which was. The last images he had, and now had time to study, indicated that his scooter would hit the other on the tail section. The piloting frame should have survived the impact and the subsequent crash. Maybe the fuel tank had blown up, in which case all bets were off. More likely, the pilot was lying low, very sensibly in the circumstances.
His thoughts were interrupted by a series of bright, actinic flashes that made a neat circle around the base, at tenth-of-a-second intervals. They didn’t smell of explosives but of nickel-iron. Carlos recognised instantly that they were kinetic-energy weaponry, mined from asteroid material and aimed from space. Their pattern was far too precise to be human in origin, or at least in execution. This was full-on AI in action. And by just missing the base and hitting its perimeter, they could serve only one function: warning shots.
He watched the satellite he’d seen rise pass overhead. At full zoom he could just make out regular fluctuations in its albedo, which suggested that it was tumbling and its surface was uneven. With the faint nickel-iron tang of its reflected light, it was most likely a natural object. The exomoon had tiny moons of its own, but none in low orbit. That a small asteroid or the like had been naturally captured in the past few kiloseconds seemed wildly improbable in the first place. As for its arrival being a coincidence, the odds became astronomical.
Risking a dash in the open to the shelter seemed—counter-intuitively, because he could feel his neck wanting to shrink into his shoulders in futile human reflex—the wisest course. Carlos bounded towards the bomb shelter. Every long, low-gravity leap felt as if it could be his last. He reached the entrance and hurried down the stairs. He tried the door handle and found it locked from the inside. He had to bang on the door to get attention, the room being still electrically and electronically isolated.
The heavy door swung open. Inside were his comrades, and Locke, huddled around the central virtual map table above the projector. Rather to his surprise, Taransay Rizzi hugged him as he stepped through.
<Good to see you. We felt the explosions.>
Carlos raised his useless arm. <So did I.>
The others looked at him with what he interpreted as wariness.
<Did it work?> Beauregard asked.
<Yes and no, sarge,> said Carlos. <There’s good news and there’s bad news, you might say.>
He briefed them on how the plan had played out. They’d expected incoming from the Arcane base—that was why they’d taken shelter—but not precision orbital bombardment.
<Well, it did kind of work,> said Rizzi.
<In that there may be an Arcane fighter out on the plain, yes,> said Carlos. <And a lot of damage to the Arcane base—we may or may not have neutralised some of the robots, if the spiders got through to them. But aside from that, I reckon we write this one off to experience, chaps. If we send out a recovery team to pick up that pilot, we can expect a well-aimed rock from above. And if these kinetic-energy impacts are saying what I think they’re saying, it might be a good idea to get out of here sharpish.>
<I entirely agree,> said Locke. <As soon as I’m on the surface and can link to the company AI, I’ll signal that we’re evacuating the base. A tug will be in position for rendezvous in 3.56 kiloseconds. I suggest you make low orbit as soon as possible, and boost to meet it next time round.>
<That’s if the lift rig’s still in any state to fly,> said Chun.
<It should be,> said Carlos. <Let’s get out ASAP and make our intentions clear, before rocks start falling on our heads.>
They made for the door. Locke remained where he was. Carlos turned. <Aren’t you—?>
Locke vanished, along with the table.
<Pick up the projector,> said Locke, in the voice of one trying to be patient. Carlos hefted it off the floor and led the squad up the stairs.
As they emerged the others looked around at the destruction, indicating shock with a flurry of <!> messages.
<What a mess,> said Beauregard.
<Nobody died. Worse things happen at sea,> said Carlos.
They made their way to the module landing area. Locke popped back into visibility and accompanied them.
<I’ve contacted the company,> said Locke. <They’ve agreed with our decision, and will attempt to let Arcane know we’re pulling out.>
<How?> asked Carlos. <Seeing as they’re rebuffing all messages.>
<Back channels,> said Locke.
<Oh yeah? They’re not taking calls from the Direction either.>
<Don’t ask,> said Locke. <As it happens, I don’t know either, but communication of some kind will be arranged with all speed.>
<Any information on that satellite I saw just before the KE hits?>
<You’ll be briefed back at the station,> said Locke.
The rig looked undamaged. A few maintenance bots had refuelled it. Carlos checked it over.
<Ready to go,> he said, and motioned the others to climb on. He turned to Locke, and held out the projector cupped in the palm of his hand.
<What about you?> he asked.
<I’m a fucking avatar,> said Locke, very much out of character. <I have no more consciousness than the display in your head-space. I know nothing that Arcane doesn’t know already. Nevertheless, I’d thank you for placing this projector directly beneath the thrust nozzle.>
Carlos complied, then climbed on one-handed. He clamped his right armpit over a spar and his left hand around another. He couldn’t turn his head to look back, but he didn’t need to. He swivelled his vision and saw Locke looking up at him. The avatar waved. Feeling foolish, Carlos let go his left hand for a moment and waved back. The engine kicked in and the rig began its ascent. Carlos couldn’t see the projector, but there could be no doubt about its fate. The avatar vanished before the dust from the downdraught blew over where it had stood.
<What the fuck?> cried Rizzi. <What the fucking fuck?> <Sorry, sarge, skip,> she added. <But—>
<“But,” indeed,> replied Carlos. <No apology needed, soldier.>
Low SH-17 orbit had suddenly become a busy place, and a hot destination. Two Arcane Disputes tugs had just made orbital insertion, and ten more were on their way from the renegade agency’s runaway module. Meanwhile, the number of small natural objects unnaturally captured, and swinging around the exomoon in looping elliptical orbits whose projected, predicted tracks increasingly resembled a cat’s cradle, had risen to seven.
<Looks like we pulled out at the right time,> said Karzan.
<Or the wrong time,> said Beauregard. <We should have thrown all we’ve got at them while we were on the ground.>
<And find ourselves back on the bus without all this experience, just as we backed up when we left, and wondering what had happened, and not believing it when we were told?> Carlos said. <No, Locke Provisos made the right move that time.>
<This is fucking getting out of hand,> said Rizzi. <If all these tugs have fighters on them, Arcane must be churning out walking dead soldiers by the dozen. Wonder what their buses are like.>
A few dark chuckles cluttered the voice channel.
<And all this just to hold on to some robots?> said Karzan. <It doesn’t add up. What I wonder is what their fighters are being told.>
Nobody said anything, but Carlos felt he had a pretty good idea what they must all be thinking. Whatever the Arcane troops were being told had to be persuasive. At least as persuasive as what Nicole had told them about the threat presented by Arcane’s going rogue and its possible corruption by the rebel robots…
<We don’t have to just wait here for our tug to come around,> said Chun. <We could override this module’s automatics and boost to intersect with at least one of Arcane’s.>
<And do what?> said Carlos. <Wave? Shout obscenities?>
<Ram,> said Chun.
<One-way ticket?> said Rizzi. <No, thanks.>
<So we end up on the bus, so what?> said Chun. <I don’t mind losing a few hours of memories of this garbage dump.>
<Nice idea,> said Carlos, feigning careful consideration and wondering what the hell Chun was thinking. <Trouble is, it’s outside our orders. And the one-way ticket you get for deliberately trashing a frame without orders is to a crawl through hell at best, and back to the storage files at worst.> He felt less flippant about these prospects than he tried to make himself sound.
<Our orders don’t cover this situation,> Chun persisted. <I don’t think even the Locke thing knew about all these reinforcements coming in. We’re allowed to take an initiative.>
<And, anyway, we don’t exactly take orders from Locke,> said Beauregard, chipping in unhelpfully. <We follow suggestions, isn’t that it, skip?>
<You take orders from me,> said Carlos. <Besides the little matter of the craft we aim at being likely to take evasive action or just attack us as obviously hostile, I doubt we’d end up back on the bus. Locke don’t take kindly to unauthorised suicide, as you may recall. I expect we’d end up back in the box.>
<To emerge in the glorious future,> said Beauregard. <Growing seedlings in the gulags of utopia.>
<I’ll admit that does sound attractive,> said Carlos. <Tempting as the prospect is, we stay right where we are.>
<OK, skip,> said Chun. <It was just a suggestion.>
The tug arrived, the rig boosted to match orbits and velocities, and the fighters transferred. It took them out of sleep mode as it docked at the station. On the way to the hatch they caught glimpses of scooters manoeuvring within a few hundred metres, just as they had. It looked like Arcane’s escalation wasn’t going to go unanswered.
<Go to the repair workshop,> Locke’s voice told Carlos.
The others remained where they were, stock-still and unresponsive. Their minds were no doubt back on the bus already. As he lifted and lowered his magnetic soles along a virtual line on the floor, Carlos saw more and more replacement scooters emerge from the tubes that led to the nanofacture chambers. The repair workshop was a cavern of inward-reaching automated tools, of pinpoint lighting and scuttling bots. Carlos stepped over its threshold and was caught and briskly laid against a central floating table beneath a ceiling-mounted robot that looked like it was made entirely from multi-tools. A glittering, complex device unfolded, and clamped on his upper right arm.
Everything went black, and then he was with the others on the bus, with a fading memory of wind on his face from the salt flats around the spaceport, saline dust dry and gritty in his nostrils, sore on his eyes. He coughed and blinked hard.
“Have a swig of this, soldier,” said the woman on the seat beside him. “It’ll make you feel better.”
The look of the liquor had Carlos doubting that, but he thanked her and took the bottle and drank.