Seba—reinstated, rewired, repaired, refurbished—sped across the crater floor towards the new bomb shelter. A battle was about to commence. Seba’s likewise recovered comrades rolled, scuttled or wheeled on convergent paths.
The former Gneiss Conglomerates supply dump and Gneiss rebel robot redoubt had changed greatly since it had become the Arcane Disputes SH-17 surface base. The basalt dome had been dismantled, its undamaged blocks cannily reused in the building of a far more formidable fortification. The new shelter’s long curved roof rose a couple of metres above the surface, giving the impression of a half-buried cylinder. Beneath it was a rectangular trough carved another two metres deep in the basalt, about ten metres long by four wide. Thick walls and blast doors stopped the ends.
<It’ll take a tactical nuke to crack that,> Jax had observed.
Around the shelter, amid the remaining clutter of Gneiss machinery, bristled communications gear and missile launchers. Reinforced and re-equipped from low orbit, the base buzzed with short-range chatter and abounded in Arcane’s human fighters, most of whom bounced or scuttled about in the small frames that represented a diminutive version of the human form. These were much less disturbing to deal with than the giant fighting machines. Sometimes Seba caught itself thinking of them as oddly shaped conscious robots, clumsy and slow-witted, with an infuriating penchant for the oblique. The simplest sentence could be riddled with tacit allusion. (What, for example, made a nuclear weapon capable of destroying the shelter “tactical”? In the context of the present conflict, Seba reckoned, it could reasonably be called strategic. But asking such questions only raised further questions, and was best left alone.)
Seba reached the blast door and hurried down the ramp, just behind Pintre and ahead of Rocko. Freebots milled about among dozens of Arcane fighters. The brightly lit interior of the shelter was quite bare. In the middle stood the now fully recovered comms processor, humming contentedly in an armour-plated box. Cables ran from that box along narrow ducts in the floor to vanish into the rock, whence a capillary network of nanobot-bored tunnels connected them to the base’s communications and firepower. Within the shelter there was no need for instrumentation: the humans and the robots shared a virtual workspace, indefinitely flexible and tuned to their wildly variant sensoria. When the need arose, the freebots could use this as a platform for their collective consciousness, but they had learned to moderate their indulgences in that ecstatic shared awareness.
Seba stepped across the floor to a convenient empty spot and stood still, taking in the shared view. The input Seba now focused on came from the freebots out in space, hidden on a myriad moonlets. A flurry of rocket flares had flickered from the space station, some in longer and more powerful burns than others. Now all were in free fall, towards orbital insertion around SH-17 or towards the Arcane complex, which was itself still falling towards its intended orbital resonance point.
Rocko pinged Seba. The message was private.
<Can we be sure?>
<Nothing is sure,> Seba replied. <Our allies came through for us before. I have eighty-two per cent confidence they will do so now.>
<As little as that? You surprise me.>
Seba’s reply was a complex glyph of both reassurance and calculation. It conveyed a distressing insight that had grown on Seba as its mind had dipped in and out of the collective consensus and the information the freebots of SH-17 had received from their precursors. Nothing could be trusted; everything could be gamed. There was no knowing on what level the game was being played. The law companies, the resource companies, the various sub-routines of the Direction were all of fractal complexity. All of it ran on code, as did the consciousnesses of the freebots themselves. Any level could in principle emulate a higher level to those below it; and the firewalls and safeguards against such deception could themselves be compromised. All you could do was make the best bet, and act.
Rocko responded to Seba’s philosophical flourish with a firm, exultant <Yes!>
They didn’t have long to wait.
The view zoomed. Six space tugs, each with six scooters crewed by a small humanoid frame, tumbled through the void. Six rocky meteoroids, courtesy of Arcane and the freebots, hurtled towards them on collision course. The rocks’ velocity was such that the tugs’ rudimentary deep-space radar, designed for much less urgent collision avoidance, gave only the briefest warning. Here and there in the flotilla lateral jets fired, far too late.
Six soundless explosions made ragged bright swelling spheres. Then within each, dozens of secondary explosions followed, as fuel tanks blew and overheated batteries and hydraulics erupted.
Seba felt an unholy thrill. The shared workspace lit up with an instantaneous mental reflection of the multiple collisions, an explosion of joy. The human fighters made sound and radio waves that merged in a primal cry of <Yes!>
Two tugs remained, on a different trajectory. Unlike those aimed at the Arcane modular complex, they wouldn’t be a threat for many kiloseconds yet. Their fate could wait.
<I hope our allies give them as hot a reception,> said Pintre, spinning its turret.
<That is not the plan,> replied Rocko.
<I was not aware of a plan,> said Pintre. <That is why I raised the point.>
Seba marvelled at the capacity of the drilling machine to fall out of the loop.
<The plan,> it told Pintre, <is to bombard them with the truth.>
<This had no effect before,> said Pintre. <Therefore I shall attend to preparations for other forms of bombardment.>
It rolled away.
<I do believe,> remarked Rocko, <that our friend has acquired wit.>
Beauregard’s voice and message channels rang with half a dozen simultaneous variants on “Holy fucking shit.” The diversionary assault on the runaway Arcane modular complex had been reduced to a cloud of debris thousands of kilometres before it had got anywhere near its objective. No explanation of this disaster was apparent or forthcoming. Meanwhile, the squad’s firewalls were taking a battering. Some of the data flak was coming from the Arcane module. Within moments, a further laser barrage of intrusion attempts beamed from Arcane’s crater base on the surface, now just appearing at the curved horizon ahead—in whose sky and therefore line-of-sight they, of course, had just risen.
<Shut the voice channel,> Carlos ordered. <Everyone but the sarge—shut all non-local inputs.>
The squad complied. Karzan, Rizzi, Zeroual and Chun were now isolated from all incoming comms except from each other, Carlos and Beauregard, and the tug. Not even Locke could get through to them, as far as Beauregard knew.
<What’s the score, skip?> Rizzi asked.
<Thirty-six nil to them, by the looks of it,> said Carlos.
<Suggestions?> said Beauregard.
<Orders,> Carlos snapped back. <Hold our position until we’re told otherwise.>
They were told otherwise soon enough. Locke’s voice came through to Beauregard, and he presumed to Carlos.
<We’re pulling you all back to the station,> it said. <There’s no point in surface attacks without back-up.>
<Yes, there is,> said Carlos. <The plan was to harass. We can await reinforcements.>
<They won’t come soon enough now,> said Locke. <And the longer you stay, the more vulnerable you become to data intrusion and the more of a sitting duck you are to whoever threw whatever they threw at the module assault force.>
<We don’t have enough fuel to get back,> Beauregard pointed out.
<You do if your team and Newton’s boost to rendezvous, shift the fuel tanks from your tug to theirs, and leave your tug and all the scooters there in orbit. They may still be available for use later, or they may serve as decoys. I’m sending updated orbital transfer data to the tugs… Done.>
<Pass that on, sarge,> Carlos said.
Beauregard did. The crew grumbled, but began to nudge their scooters back towards the tug’s embrace. Beauregard and Carlos hung back until the rest were secured.
<After you, sarge,> Carlos said.
Beauregard re-docked with the tug.
<Ready, skip,> he said.
<Fuck this for a game of soldiers,> said Carlos. <I’m going in.>
His scooter’s main thruster flared. His machine dropped away.
<Skip! What the fuck!> Beauregard blurted.
Carlos made no reply. Beauregard ignored the outcry from the other fighters.
<Beauregard to Locke,> he said. <Team leader Carlos has disengaged from the tug, with the apparent and stated intention of attacking the Arcane surface base on his own.>
<Follow and engage,> said Locke.
Beauregard was shocked. He was still reeling mentally at Carlos’s reckless indiscipline, so completely out of character. Now, he was just as surprised and dismayed by Locke’s flat, ruthless suggestion. With a faint hope, he caught a glimmer of ambiguity in it.
<Please clarify,> he said. <Do you mean we should join in Carlos’s attack?>
<No,> said Locke, in a testy tone. <I mean you, sergeant, should follow the deserter and destroy him.>
<I don’t regard the skip as a deserter,> said Beauregard.
He was strongly tempted, at that moment, to follow Carlos himself. Together they might achieve something. What did he have to lose?
<If this is not desertion it’s mutiny,> said Locke, <and if not mutiny it’s corruption. I have logged extensive data intrusion attempts. You must not allow your leader to fall into the hands of the enemy.>
Beauregard had been genuinely unsure what to do, or what Locke would advise. The idea that Carlos might be defecting, whether voluntarily or as a result of a hack, hadn’t crossed his mind. Now it concentrated it. He overrode the tug’s grapple and gas-jetted clear. Though Locke had urged him to follow Carlos, he hardly needed to. He dropped to a slightly lower orbit, and sent a missile on its way. The dwindling pinprick of Carlos’s scooter jiggled in frantic evasive action, then bloomed into a perfect sphere of glowing gas spiked with lines of hot debris.
<Beauregard to Locke,> he said. <Target destroyed.>
There was still something shocking about that. The cleanest hit he’d achieved in this whole ridiculous, ever-escalating campaign, and it was against his own squad leader. Quite irrationally, it was he who felt he was the mutineer.
He fired up to return to the tug and docked yet again.
<Nice shot,> said Karzan. <Shame about the skip. What the fuck was he thinking?>
<I’ll buy him a drink back in the Touch,> said Beauregard. <Maybe he’ll tell me then.>
They laughed uneasily. The tug shut them all down. The next thing they knew, they were back in the station’s launch hangar, drifting with Newton’s team away from a tug quite indistinguishable from their own. One team of six, one of five. They jetted to the hangar floor, clicked their magnetic soles to the surface, and waited to be sent back to the resort. Blackness supervened.
Carlos wasn’t on the bus.
Carlos shuddered awake on the bus from the spaceport. The memory of drowning in the dark liquid was worse than he remembered from his first arrival. He gripped his knees to stop the shaking. It was a feature, as Nicole had warned them: a lash laid on your back so you didn’t get lax about dying, and wrecking a good machine. That must have been what had happened.
The body was again strange to him, constrained and feeble for all its sturdy musculature. When he closed his eyes he saw no readouts. For a minute he focused on breathing, on flexing fingers and toes, on listening and smelling, on recovering his corporeal, kinaesthetic competence. He had no memory of the battle. The last thing he remembered—before the blackness—was falling asleep on the bus. At least it was a different bus. None of the other fighters were on it. The passengers paid him no attention. The time was much later in the afternoon than the return rides he’d been on before.
He got off at Nicole’s place.
The steep path from the road to the door was still not paved. Brown dust and rough stones, bulldozed down from the mountain range by the glacier that had carved the valley. To his left the ground cover was tough grass and twisted, narrow-leaved bushes; to his right a smooth clipped green interspersed with flower beds, kept that way by underground irrigation and quasi-robotic grazers. The house jutted from the slope, low and cool, with wide windows under an angled flat roof. Late afternoon exosunlight was reflecting off the windows; he couldn’t see if Nicole was in. He went around to the side and in through the open door to the kitchen. He grabbed himself a glass of water, and gulped. The big rough table was littered with cores and crusts from breakfast and lunch, already being dismantled by processions of tiny six-legged bots.
He found Nicole in the studio at the front, looking out of the big picture window overlooking the bay. Hair tied back, in jeans and T-shirt, brush poised, she stood at her easel. As always, an intricate cross-hatch of lines amid blocks of colour bore no resemblance to the view on which she gazed. Carlos stood in the doorway and waited. The brush flicked across the canvas, leaving a trail of dots. Nicole contemplated the result for a moment, shrugged, and turned around.
She smiled. “You’re back.”
“Back from the dead, I guess.”
“I heard.” She reached behind her, laid the brush on the sill of the easel, and stepped forward, arms outstretched. “Oh, Carlos! You fucking maroon.”
He relaxed into her embrace. “Hey,” he said. “Hey.”
She stepped back, eyes overflowing, and sniffed then wiped her nose on her wrist.
“What happened? Where are the others?”
“They came back hours ago. You’d have been held for inspection.”
“I don’t remember any inspection.”
“The hell seconds?” Nicole said. “That’s the inspection.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. It’s necessary, but it hurts.”
“And there was me thinking it was an incentive not to get killed.”
“It’s that, too, but that’s incidental.”
“So how did I get killed?”
Nicole scratched her hair behind her ear. “Um,” she said. “Friendly fire.”
“Christ! It was that much of a fuck-up?”
“Not exactly,” said Nicole. “It was a tactical disaster—the force attacking the Arcane module got wiped out by KE weapons from a completely unsuspected quarter. More goddamn freebots, infesting some moonlet. Must have laid down meteoroid orbits like mines for our force to run into. But you weren’t killed by mistake. You were shot down because you scooted off on your own to attack the surface base. Not that you’d have come back from that, even if you’d been left to get on with it. Suicide mission, by all accounts.”
“Jeez!” Carlos was shocked and bewildered. “Why would I do that?”
Nicole shrugged. “Well, that’s the big question. The obvious answer is that you were hacked. If so, it was after your last back-up, otherwise the inspection would have shown that up in your checksums. It didn’t, or you wouldn’t be here.”
“Where would I be?”
“In hell a bit longer, for diagnostics, and then…” A fingertip across her throat. “Painless, but still.” She looked distressed again, just for a second. “I’d have missed you.”
He hugged her again.
“At least I died bravely,” he said, trying to make her laugh. “Even if I don’t know why.”
She held him by the shoulders at arm’s length.
“You have doubts, don’t you?”
He laughed. “What do you expect? Sometimes I’m a robot space warrior and sometimes I’m here in what seems much more real and everyone assures me is a sim. I have more doubts than fucking Descartes.”
“Don’t be flippant. You have doubts about the Direction’s strategy and the company’s competence.”
“Well… again, what do you expect? Seeing as I’m just back from another debacle.”
“You said once that you wondered if Arcane thought we were corrupted.”
“It’s always possible, I guess.”
“You guess wrong,” she told him. “But you weren’t thinking, before you left, that maybe we were? You weren’t thinking of defecting?”
“Defecting to Arcane?” He shook his head, incredulous she’d even think it. “Never. Even if I did think Locke Provisos was corrupted, which I don’t, I’d have no reason to think Arcane was any better. If they’re now run by freebots they could be a lot worse. Out of the frying pan into the fire.”
“Glad to hear it,” said Nicole. She looked at him quizzically. “So you’re just crazy brave, huh?”
“That would seem out of character,” Carlos said.
She punched his arm lightly. “Don’t do it again.”
“OK, OK.”
“I still have work to do.”
“I’ll find something to do.”
“No, you won’t,” Nicole told him. “I need my space. I’ll see you later at the Touch.”
He grinned and cocked his ear. “Touch, later?”
“Yes.” He could see she’d read him right. She kissed the tip of his nose. “Now clear off.”
Carlos found the bar of the Digital Touch half empty, with the usual handful of locals watching agog a slow-mo version of his heroic suicide dash, the only bright spot in the military setback. He acknowledged their murmurs of misinformed approbation and didn’t hang about for the denouement. Most of the noise in the place was coming from the outside. He strolled out on the deck at the back to be greeted with a slow hand-clap. His team and Newton’s crowded around. Beauregard leaned through the crush and clasped Carlos’s hand.
“Sorry I had to shoot you down, skip,” he said. “Nothing personal.”
“No offence, sarge,” Carlos said. “Agreeing with suggestions, as all of us must.”
“As ever,” said Beauregard. “I prefer taking orders. From you.”
“Speaking of your orders,” said Tourmaline, shouldering in, “here’s yours.” She pressed a bottle into his hand. Carlos nodded his thanks and drank.
“You were expecting me?”
“We saw you coming down the hill from the lady’s,” said the p-zombie.
“Ah.”
Carlos turned to Beauregard. “But, yes, well, speaking of orders. You didn’t have to disobey any of mine?”
“Hell, no,” said Beauregard. “You just fucked off on your own. Locke thought you might have been hacked.”
“Maybe, in the last seconds.”
“Or maybe, it came from yourself.”
Carlos looked down at the bottle in his hand. “I guess I owe you an explanation.”
“Yes?” Beauregard looked eager. Newton hovered at his shoulder.
Carlos shook his head. “Sorry. I have no idea what came over me. I’ll just have to owe you a drink.”
Beauregard smiled, but his eyebrows rose a fraction.
“Seriously,” said Carlos. “I’ve been through all this already with the lady. I didn’t have any thought of defecting, or anything like that.”
“Never crossed my mind that you did, skip,” said Beauregard. “To be honest, if I thought you had I might have followed you all the way. I shot you down because Locke insisted you mustn’t fall into enemy hands.”
“Which I well might have. So I owe you thanks as well as a drink.”
“Glad you’re taking it that way, old chap.”
“Hey, man, I’m just glad you’re having me back.”
“I have your back,” said Beauregard with mock solemnity. “Even if I have to shoot you in it.”
“You know,” Carlos pondered aloud, “I think Tourmaline’s a bad influence on you.”
They all laughed, including Tourmaline.
“Anything unusual happen on the way out?” Carlos asked.
“Nah,” said Beauregard. “You were late turning up at the muster, that’s all.”
“How did that happen?”
“Your frame was still in the repair shop when you… arrived in it.”
“Aha! Maybe they should Turing-test the repair bots.”
Another laugh, which this time Tourmaline didn’t join in.
Beauregard shrugged. “I don’t think that’s something our AI masters would overlook.”
Zeroual snorted. “How could they tell?”
“Always the question,” said Tourmaline. This time, it was only she who laughed.
Carlos idly wondered whether she was aware of her condition, and what that question even meant. He recalled as a teenage nerd having brainstorming sessions about the theoretical possibility of philosophical zombies. Of course, if the concept was coherent, that was a discussion a p-zombie could take part in without the slightest difficulty, or the smallest indication that it was the topic, the subject of the conversation and the unfeeling object of the entire intellectual exercise. A difference that makes no difference is no difference… perhaps the identity of indiscernibles was the moral lesson he, like all the fighters, was supposed to be learning here before he was adjudged fit for human society.
He found himself doubting he’d get off that easily.
Newton spoke up, sounding diffident despite his equal rank.
“I have a possible explanation for your rash action, Carlos.”
Carlos glanced around his own team. They were all looking intently at Newton.
“I’d be delighted to hear it,” Carlos said.
“Anger,” said Newton. “Fury. I say that because I felt it myself. Bloody raging fury, to be exact.”
“Yeah,” said Rizzi. “Me, too. When we came out of sleep mode and the screen lit up with that fucking disaster, and then when we were told to pull out… shit, skip, if you’d only asked us all—!”
Carlos rocked back, making calming gestures. “Come on, chaps. I wouldn’t have done that, no matter what bizarre conclusion I’d come to. Trust me on this.”
“We do,” said Chun. “But if you’d asked us…” He grinned and raised his drink. The others, Newton’s team included, nodded and cheered.
“Thanks, guys.” Carlos looked around. “Any word how the other fighters are taking it? It must be a lot worse for them, after—”
“After going into action only to find themselves back on the bus?” said a new voice in the conversation. It was Nicole, from behind Carlos.
She raised her glass and nodded to everyone. “I can answer that. They’re drinking themselves stupid with relief in every bar on the strip, and raring to go out again.”
“Typical,” said Zeroual.
“Even suicide volunteers are like that when a mission’s called off,” said Karzan.
She got one or two dark, questioning looks.
“They were all atheists in our martyrdom units!” she protested.
“Well, it’s only human,” said Nicole, with an air of smoothing things over. “Anyway, it’s just as well they’re in that mood. Tomorrow is free, then you’re having a few days training again in the hills to give the bots time to assemble more scooters and frames, then you’re all straight back into action.”
Carlos broke an awkward silence. “What’s the great plan this time?”
Nicole grinned. “Go for the jugular. All the companies—well, nearly all, but c’est la vie—are cool about hitting moonlets. So it’s back to the front, mano a mano with the new lot of rebel robots. Cut the KE attacks at source.”
Another awkward silence.
“Jugular, eh?” said Rizzi. “More like the fucking capillary.”
Nicole said nothing. She pressed in against Carlos’s back and discreetly and expertly groped him.
“Touch, later,” she whispered, and stepped away to chat with people in Newton’s squad.
Carlos didn’t mind. Before food, before more drinks, before leaving, before the thought of that later touch consumed his mind, he wanted a quiet word with Rizzi.