CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Sendings

Carlos had never seen the hangar so crowded. Given its size and that of the frames, the term was relative. But with ninety fighters from Locke Provisos, and an equal complement from the Morlock Arms and Zheng Reconciliation Services enforcement agencies who’d arrived from revival and training in other modules, all being wirelessly shepherded into a timed, staged deployment, there was inevitably a certain amount of milling around. The steady procession of rank upon rank of scooters floating in close formation from the rear of the hangar to the front filled yet more space. The scooters had bulked up since their last deployment, flanked with extra fuel and reaction-mass tanks.

Carlos had made sure his squad were on the last of the six buses out of the resort that morning. He’d guessed that meant they’d be the last to arrive. They were scheduled among the last to go into action, with two kiloseconds to wait before they boarded their scooters. He made sure his squad was mingling with others, and slipped away.

He gas-jetted to the side of the hangar, clicked his feet to the floor and looked about for the entrance to the corridor to the repair workshop. The layout had changed since his last memory of it, when he’d gone there to get repaired after his last surface mission. Any more recent memory of the workshop’s location had gone AWOL with his previous version. Carlos hurried past shafts, looking down each as he went. Incomprehensible, quasi-organic machinery toiled and spun. Ten seconds ticked by, then twenty, all experienced as ten times longer by his internal clock speed and longer still by his cold sense of urgency. How long until his absence was noticed? Any moment now. Then he saw an angular, intricate and obviously incomplete piece of apparatus being tugged into a corridor by one of the spidery robots.

He lifted one foot off the floor, lurched forward to dislodge the other and drifted after the robot down the shaft. Propelling himself by fingertip thrusts at the side walls, he soon overtook the machine and its load. A few more painfully stretched seconds later he reached an open hatchway. His memory of experiences in the frame was eidetic, but he couldn’t explain why that particular hatchway looked familiar—scuff marks on its rim, perhaps. He peered inside, and recognised the repair workshop where he’d taken his damaged forearm. This was where he must have come to himself when he arrived off the bus for his last sortie.

The chamber was ovoid, five metres long by three wide. With his spectroscopic sense Carlos could smell oil, nanoparticles of steel and carbon-fibre swarf. The surfaces bristled with tools. The centre was occupied by a long bench, the top and bottom of which could be used as worktops.

Carlos edged himself over the threshold, and began to scan and explore. The machinery didn’t react to his presence. This wouldn’t last—the machines would wake up when the robot arrived and hauled in a job. The place was not as cluttered as its human-operated equivalent would have been. But among all the clamped-down or magnetically held devices, parts and supplies there were random placings and inexplicable objects enough.

Worse, he didn’t know what he was looking for. Something in this rounded room had sent his earlier version haywire. He had no idea what. Quite possibly it was invisible to him, if his frame had been hacked into by a tool that had itself been hacked.

He recalled the orientation in which he’d been placed for repair. He thrust forward to that side of the worktable, and rolled into the closest equivalent position he could find. From the curving walls above, machines looked down. He peered at and between them, zooming his vision, scanning for clues. Nothing but random scratches and smudges. Carlos swept his vision this way and that. No anomaly caught his attention.

While he was searching, the spider-bot arrived at the hatch and extended a limb to hook over the threshold. Other limbs flickered above its main body, pushing its bulky, complicated load with feathery thrusts like a sea anemone’s fronds juggling a dead crab. The component began to drift into the room.

The complex, multi-tooled machine that on his earlier visit had clamped to Carlos’s frame now stirred into life. Tiny directional lights winked on. Carlos reached for the table surface, making to shove himself out of the way before anything untoward befell. One of the limbs stretched towards him, then retracted. From one of the limb’s many joints a section swivelled upward. A finer appendage of the tool flicked out, and pointed towards a scuffed square centimetre close to the tool’s mounting bracket. The beams of light, narrow as pencil leads, converged on the spot.

Was the tool pointing something out to him?

Yes, genius, it probably was.

Carlos pushed himself away from the workbench and floated up, like the astral body of a patient having a near-death experience. Under a higher magnification the scuffed area was a page of text in the synthetic local language of the sim, inscribed on the surface in microscopic font.

As he read it, he understood at last why the Arcane fighters had sided with the freebots.

He knew why his earlier version had, on reading this very text, decided to flee to the Arcane base at the first opportunity or die trying. He had never felt so shocked, so betrayed, so shafted in his life.

In the two seconds it took Carlos to read it, Beauregard came in.

Alerted by a twang of his proximity sense, Carlos turned his sight around, to find Beauregard an arm’s length behind his shoulder. Carlos had a momentary impulse to block Beauregard’s view of the inscription, but knew this was futile. The patch had been literally spotlighted. Even if Beauregard hadn’t zoomed in on it or had time to read it yet, the image would remain in his memory and could be enhanced and assimilated in seconds.

<Hey,> Carlos said, trying to buy time while readying his next move, <I thought I’d look for—>

Beauregard struck first. He grabbed Carlos by the right wrist and somersaulted to reverse their relative positions, then pushed off hard, feet against the wall. Carlos found himself thrust back and banged against the heavy component the spider-bot had just tugged in.

He ducked, grabbed at the object with his free hand, and pivoted Beauregard over his shoulder. Now it was Beauregard’s head that slammed into the floating mass. The spider-bot emitted distress and warning signals as it snaked a limb around Beauregard’s neck. The fixed tools in the room flexed themselves and opened out manipulators, poised to grab like the pincered arms and hands of sumo wrestlers.

Beauregard let go of Carlos’s wrist to wrench with both hands at the spider-bot’s grapple. It soon gave way. Carlos spun himself around, assisted by his internal gyroscopes, and thrust off for the hatchway. He grabbed the threshold, swung his legs out and pulled sharply to launch himself back down the corridor towards the hangar. A second later he looked back, to see Beauregard emerge from the hatch in hot pursuit, slamming from side to side of the corridor, zig-zagging after him.

Carlos rolled in mid-space, jetted one of his frame’s tiny onboard compressed-gas thrusters and shot downward. His magnetic-soled feet clicked to the floor just as Beauregard—still on a rebound—sailed above his head. He reached up and grabbed Beauregard’s ankle. Just as deftly, Beauregard used his momentum to force Carlos to lean back, then stamped with his free foot at Carlos’s arm. Carlos held on. The limb rang with pain. Beauregard jack-knifed, to head-butt the back of Carlos’s knees. The magnetic attachment gave way. They both tumbled into the space of the corridor, turning over and over, grabbing for the sides, kicking at each other, trying to find footing.

Carlos eventually fought his way to holding both of Beauregard’s wrists. This grip momentarily left Beauregard’s feet free. He brought his knees to his chest and stamped both heels at Carlos’s midriff. The impact broke Carlos’s hold and sent the two antagonists flying in opposite directions.

The wrong directions, from Beauregard’s point of view.

Perhaps confused by their whirling fight, he kicked out at the wrong moment. He went flying back, to be snagged and spun around by the waiting arms of the spider-bot, now guarding the workshop hatchway. Carlos hurtled out of the corridor and into the hangar. Flailing, he blundered into a phalanx of Morlock Arms fighters, still in free fall and drifting towards the cavernous rectangular grin of the launch slot. Their ranks broke up into colliding cartwheels as Carlos starfished through like a spinning shuriken. A dozen or so impacts on heads, torsos and extremities slowed and steadied Carlos. With both feet on someone’s shoulders, he looked around for a way of escape before anyone thought to seize him.

The parade of scooters was still going by, like an aerial fly-past at a military display for some short ambitious tyrant. Carlos jumped. His thrust of feet down on shoulders sent the unlucky fighter crashing into a cascade of companions, and Carlos flying up to the nearest scooter. He grabbed a skid and clambered over the craft’s carapace to the control socket. As he snaked himself in he found all the connections live and lighting up. The machinery of the frame connected with the control circuitry of the scooter. As suddenly and sharply as ever, he found himself one with the machine.

He pushed down with his feet and eased up with his hands, angling the scooter above the repetitive procession of its identical counterparts, and thrust forwards above them faster and faster, to fly through the gap between the launch catapults and out of the station into the welcoming dark and blazing light and humming smells and screaming sounds of space.

Beauregard at last freed himself from the spider-bot by applying all the strength of his hands and arms to systematically snap every limb of it, until the device ran out of limbs. A kick at the rim of the hatch launched him down the corridor, caroming off this side and that until he reached the opening to the hangar. He grabbed the edge of the bulkhead and took stock. Carlos was nowhere to be seen. A roil of fighters flailing back into formation, and a single gap in the echelons of scooters moving towards the launch catapults, tracked his passage and left an unsubtle clue as to where and how the mad treacherous fucker had fled.

Beauregard’s comms channels rang with indignant queries—from his own squad, from Newton, and from the Morlock Arms contingent that Carlos had disrupted. Locke would be on the case any second now, breathing fire and demanding an accounting. Beauregard chose to pre-empt that. He cut across the incoming babble and called the company.

<Beauregard to Locke,> he said. <Team leader Carlos has once again absconded with a scooter. Please advise.>

<Explain the circumstances leading up to the incident,> said Locke.

Beauregard assumed that Locke knew the preceding circumstances perfectly well from internal surveillance. If not contemporaneous—the AI having more pressing matters on its mind than snooping on obscure corridors and repair workshops—a simple track-back from Carlos’s abrupt emergence in and hasty departure from the hangar would do the trick. Locke would be checking Beauregard’s version of the story against the record. Beauregard chose his words with care.

<Carlos took advantage of the unavoidable distractions of the muster to make an unauthorised visit to the workshop in which the frame in which he’d defected was repaired. As soon as I noticed his absence I informed my squad and set out after him. I guessed where he’d gone because in the sim he had speculated that that workshop might be compromised. I found him there. When he sought to draw my attention to something he claimed to have found I attempted to restrain him. After a struggle he escaped back to the hangar.>

<And evidently out of it,> said Locke, in a tone of more than usual dryness. <Stand down your squad.>

<But that’ll further disrupt the offensive,> Beauregard objected.

<The plans and battle order are already updated,> said Locke. <Stand down your squad at once.>

Beauregard relayed the order to Chun, Karzan, Rizzi and Zeroual. A general call brayed across the common channel. It was as if Locke’s normal quiet, insistent voice-in-the-head had been amplified, and become as impossible to ignore as a nearby pneumatic drill.

<Locke to all hands! Morlock and Zheng, copy and disseminate! You will all have noticed the departure of a scooter. The motivation of this departure is not yet clear. The mutineer’s squad has been stood down without prejudice. The absence of six fighters and scooters from the force should not significantly affect the outcome of the coming engagements. Revised plans are being downloaded to you all as I speak.

<It is essential that our current deployment is not further disrupted by responding to the mutineer. There must be no attempts to pursue or destroy his craft. Provoking such a response from us may be the purpose of the ploy, if ploy it is. Not a single unit of fuel or ammunition should be wasted on this diversion. Be assured the incident will be thoroughly investigated. Now carry on as normal.>

Beauregard watched as four fighters drifting forward with the rest dropped out of the ranks and jetted to the floor, where they stood in a disconsolate huddle as the parade passed by. He jetted over to join them. On the way he called Newton, who with his squad was just ahead of where Carlos’s had been.

<Best of luck, old chap,> he said.

<Thanks, mate.>

Beauregard burned to tell Newton what he now knew from the microscopic message which Carlos, then he, had read. He didn’t dare. Newton would find out soon enough.

<This could be the big one,> Beauregard said, ambiguously to anyone else but he hoped plainly to Newton. <The battle we’ve all been looking forward to. All the best.>

<Thanks again,> said Newton. <Don’t worry, mate, I got this one.>

<Cheers,> said Beauregard, and signed off.

If there were ever to be an investigation of the coming catastrophe this conversation, ambiguous though it was, could be taken in evidence. He didn’t want to prolong it. Come to that, he could do his bit to make sure there never was an investigation—at least, none in which he would be a suspect. When treason prospers…

This story was going to be written by the victors—no, by the victor!

Beauregard gas-jetted downward, swung his legs to vertical and clicked his feet to the floor. The others gathered around.

<What the fuck just happened, sarge?> Rizzi asked.

<Yeah, and why aren’t they letting us go out?> added Chun.

Beauregard raised his hands. <You know almost as much as I do.>

He summarised the fight in the workshop, omitting to mention the message that had sent Carlos off on his wild jaunt, and almost certainly on his previous escapade.

<As for why we’re stood down, it’s obviously because we’re under suspicion.>

<Shit,> said Rizzi. <Bit unfair, that.>

<Maybe so,> said Beauregard. <The fact remains, Carlos has been corrupted or has defected or deserted. There’s no excuse this time about scooting off on a suicide mission. We’ve been under his command, so naturally we’re under a cloud.>

<I don’t believe it,> said Rizzi. <Carlos found out something that made him do it.>

<Then why didn’t he let the rest of us know what it was?> Beauregard countered. <Why didn’t he report it to Locke, come to that?>

<You didn’t give him a chance, sarge,> said Rizzi. <You said yourself you just grabbed him.>

<Indeed I did,> said Beauregard. <And if his intentions were good, he’d have explained to me why it wasn’t necessary to restrain him. Instead he fought me like an enemy.> He paused, glanced at the others, then back at Rizzi. <Why are you defending him?>

<I’m not, sarge!> she said. <I’m just trying to understand.>

<Maybe you know more about Carlos’s thinking than you’re letting on,> said Beauregard.

<No more than you do, sarge,> said Rizzi.

She was obviously lying, because she’d gone with Carlos to meet the old man in the mountains, but the others didn’t know that and it wasn’t the time to tell them. Not yet.

<We’ll leave it there for now,> said Beauregard, turning away.

Don’t get into arguments, he thought. Just give suspicions and mistrust time to rankle. That should do it.

They stood and watched in uneasy silence as the last of the scooter armada passed over, latched on to the launch catapults and were hurled out into the dark.

Locke’s voice returned.

<You’re all going back to the sim,> it said. <Unfortunately because of the situation you will experience the transition as if you had been killed in action. You will of course remember what has happened up to now, because you’re not being restored from your earlier back-up but from the one we’re about to take. But because of the security lapses, your minds have to be checked. Please understand that—like your standing down and return to the sim—this is not a punishment, merely a precaution. The Direction’s representative will speak to you back at the resort. I fully expect that military tasks can be found for you as the operation proceeds and that you will be back in action shortly. If not, however, you should simply take this as an opportunity for time off.>

The blackness overcame Beauregard before he had time to reply.