Predictably, the stood-down squad found themselves back on the bus. Less predictably, they were on their own, with no local passengers, and the time of day was early to mid-morning, as if it were soon after they’d left. It couldn’t be the same day, even if it was roughly the right time of day. They’d been away, in real time, for little over a kilosecond—nearly a fortnight later in the sim.
Beauregard found himself shaking in his seat. Unlike Carlos, he hadn’t been killed in any operation, and his previous returns from action had been smooth. This time, it was much worse than his first arrival. The nightmare now fading too slowly from his mind was of whirling disorientation and a sense of sudden utter helplessness, followed by a succession of hammer blows to the head and a complete draining of all colour and meaning from the world. In that hellish limbo he had seemed to linger for minutes on end. He came out of it feeling as if his soul had been put through a wringer, and then hung out to dry.
The others, he could see, were emerging from similar private torments, rooted in the particular circumstances of their own death or brain-death. Beauregard had no way of knowing whether this was derived from genuine brain-stem memory of their actual deaths, or whether it was an illusion deliberately created and individually attuned. Not that it made any difference to how bad it felt. The fighters sat silent and pale, quivering involuntarily, looking around for reassurance and, in the cases of Chun and Rizzi, reaching for any nearby shoulder to clutch for comfort; Karzan and Zeroual, turning to each other.
Beauregard disdained such dependence. He held himself together and tried to think. He understood that the experience was a by-product of the security check on each mind. But that check was to ensure the mind hadn’t been meddled with. The system couldn’t—in any reasonable time—read memories. His secrets were safe in his head.
Not so for the visual and other inputs to his frame, which he took for granted were recorded as a matter of course. His reading of the microscopic message was certain to be uncovered as soon as any post-mortem—so to speak—examination was carried out. With the squad minus the renegade Carlos safely stashed in the sim, and with the offensive on its plate right now, the company could afford to take its time in picking over the bones of the incident. On the other hand, Locke Provisos might well have specialist units devoted to such inquiries, which wouldn’t divert any physical or information resources from the conflict.
In short, he had no time to lose. He had no time to convert anyone to the Rax, even if he’d wanted to. Which he didn’t, though it would have been convenient if he could have, not for its own sake but to create temporary allies. He didn’t even have time to turn the others against Carlos, which had naturally enough been his first impulse. They all trusted the sarge, but Carlos was the leader. And he didn’t have time to spin an elaborate ruse. In all his time in intel he’d found that by far the best way to turn people—or to trick them into working for you without their knowledge—was to tell them the truth. Or as much of the truth as possible. Chop with the grain, and see the wood split.
He looked around the bus. He was at the back, with a couple of empty seats in front of him. Rizzi was by herself at the front, saying something to Chun, who had just taken his hand off her shoulder. Karzan and Zeroual were behind Chun and huddled together on the seat they shared.
“Everyone OK?” Beauregard asked.
They all turned.
“More or less, sarge,” said Rizzi, still looking wan. The others nodded.
“Good,” said Beauregard. “I’m still feeling a bit shaken myself.” He took a deep breath. “I’m afraid I owe you all an apology, especially you, Rizzi. I couldn’t say any of this in the hangar, not with Locke able to overhear our every word. I’m not sure I should even say it here, but if they spy on us here they can spy on us anywhere. Are you all up for that risk?”
“Yes, sarge!”
A gratifying chorus. He felt almost humbled.
“OK,” Beauregard said. “I’m sorry I had to pretend to challenge Rizzi out there, question her loyalties even. I’m sorry, too, that I misrepresented Carlos. What I didn’t say—what I couldn’t say, and which Locke will soon find out, is that I know exactly why Carlos went off on his own. This time, and that time above SH-17. He hasn’t been corrupted, quite the reverse in fact.”
He could see from their faces that this thought came as a relief.
“So what did happen back there, sergeant?” Zeroual asked, his upper body twisted around, one arm crooked over the back of the seat and the other curled about Karzan’s shoulders.
“There was a message in the repair workshop,” Beauregard said. “It had been written in tiny script, by one of the machines there. It may have been hacked by Arcane, or by the freebots directly—I don’t know. Carlos read it, and I read it just after he did. He must have read it just before our last mission, too. And having read it myself, I understand why he fought his way past me and hijacked a scooter, and in fact why he broke ranks and fled toward the surface last time out. He couldn’t share the information, he couldn’t even risk discussing it.”
They were all agog. Beauregard knew that he was doing so well, and sounding so sincere, because he was telling the truth. The longer he could keep this up, the more truthful information he could convey, the easier and more credible it would be to slip in the lie later on: the disinformation, the doubt. The one lethal drop in the drink.
“So what did it say, sarge?” Chun asked.
“It said that Locke Provisos is working for the Rax.”
“How?” said Rizzi, perplexed and challenging.
“By using tactics that mean more and more veterans are revived and thrown into action. The more veterans revived, the greater the chances of some of these being Rax sleeper agents who were never identified. And when there are enough Rax cadre out there, Locke will coordinate them in a surprise attack on the rest of the fighters and re-activate any other systems and sub-systems already suborned by the Rax.”
“But, sarge!” cried Karzan. “If Locke is Rax, then—oh!”
She got it, all right.
“Yes,” said Beauregard. “We’ve been fighting all this time on the wrong side.”
Their colour had been coming back after the trauma of the post-death. Now they’d all paled again. Not Zeroual, not visibly, but his widened eyes did the same job.
“I can see you’re all shocked,” Beauregard said. “So am I. I’m sure you can imagine how I felt when I read it, and had to go out and act normal in front of you and Locke. But I’m still sorry I had to be so brusque with you, Taransay.”
Rizzi blinked hard. “No problem, sarge. I understand.”
“But, sarge,” Karzan said again, this time more reflectively, “how could you or Carlos tell if the message was true? You remember the lady warned us the robots and AIs know how to push our buttons. Isn’t telling us our company is corrupted just the kind of disinformation they—or Arcane by itself—might use against us?”
“Good point,” said Beauregard. “And you’re right, we were warned the robots can be manipulative little blinkers. And Arcane itself is an AI when all’s said and done. The message said the Arcane fighters who did us over down on SH-17 had found all this out from the robots they captured, who in turn got it from robots around G-0, the ones left over from last time. And it claimed to have evidence—I don’t recall all the details, but I read it in my frame. Now, of course, any link in that chain could be a disinfo insert point, no doubt about it. So we can’t rule that out. But what convinced me, and must have convinced Carlos, wasn’t anything in that message. It was something I thought myself.”
He looked them in straight in the face, one by one.
“What convinced me is that no other explanation makes sense of everything that’s happened. Why should Arcane’s fighters, then the entire Arcane Disputes agency, side with the robots and start fighting us? Why indeed, unless they’ve seen very good evidence themselves. Why is every message they send to us firewalled out? Because they’ve been frantically trying to tell us what they know, and what Locke doesn’t want us to know! Why are we losing every battle with the robots and with Arcane, if Locke Provisos really wants to win? Because all it really wants is to get more and more fighters out of storage and into combat.”
That was making sense to all of them, Beauregard noted with satisfaction.
“Jeez,” said Rizzi. “We have to phone the lady and warn her.”
She reached into her back pocket. Beauregard raised a warning hand.
“Wait!” he said. “We have to think carefully about this. We don’t know if Locke monitors all our conversations, including this one. That’s a risk we have to take. But we can be damn sure the phones are monitored.”
“You may have a point there, sarge,” said Rizzi. Still unsure, still wary, but her hand moved away from her pocket.
“Besides,” added Beauregard, “I’m not entirely sure Nicole can be trusted. After all, she’s backed Locke’s failing strategy at every point. Who’s to say she isn’t in on it?”
“But she’s the Direction!” Rizzi said. “She’s it’s, uh, plenipotentiary in this sim.”
Beauregard could see how this thought swayed the others, from the looks of doubt and perplexity, the glances exchanged. He swept them all with a smile. Steady, steady. This was not the time for a deep breath, for a sideways glance, for a tongue-tip to the lips.
“How do we know that?” he said, in as quiet a voice and gentle a tone as he could summon.
“Because…” Rizzi said, thinking aloud, “… she told us.”
“Precisely. She told us.”
They all stared at him, almost but not quite as astonished and appalled as they’d been by the news about Locke.
“Did we ever think to check?” he added.
“And even if we had,” said Chun, “how could we check?”
Rizzi held his gaze longest, and turned palest. She clapped a hand to her mouth.
“Sorry, sarge,” she mumbled past her palm. “I’m afraid I’m going to be sick.”
Hand to her mouth, gagging noises rising from her throat, she stood up and stumbled to the front of the bus.
“Going to be sick!” she repeated, and banged on the front window with the heel of her free hand.
The driving automation, programmed for such emergencies, slowed the bus to a halt and opened the door. Rizzi stumbled down the steps and staggered to the edge of the road, stooping. There was a low rough-hewn rock face in front of her, with bushes at the top. She reached out with one hand and leaned against the rock, head down, shoulders heaving. Then she straightened, looked up, scrambled up the rock in a sudden frenzy of expert grips and steps, and shot away through the bushes and out of sight.
Commotion.
Karzan jumped up. “Shall I go after her, sarge?”
Beauregard considered. Rizzi wasn’t just running away from him—she was almost certainly running towards the old man. It might be possible to cut her off. She had a map, he could be sure, but he could guess her route. He struck the balance, and shook his head.
“No, no. Waste of time. Anyway, she’s shown her hand. I reckon we can write her off as Rax.”
“Taransay’s never Rax!” Karzan protested.
Beauregard sighed. “Perhaps not. Maybe I’m being hasty. Maybe she is. Could be some misplaced loyalty to the lady. Whatever. The sooner we get to the lady and get some sense out of her, the better.”
They all nodded grimly.
Beauregard waved, and raised his voice. “Drive on!”
On the way he told them his plan.
Taransay ran for ten minutes. She heard the bus start up again almost as soon as she’d got up the cliff, but that could be a ruse. She dodged and weaved through the trees, and when she reached open ground she ran straight ahead for about five hundred metres until she had a skyline to get behind and then dashed to the side. She dropped to the ground and did a low crawl between clumps of a sort of spiny fern until she had a clear sight-line back.
No pursuit. She backed out of the thicket, picked thorns from her sleeves and trousers, and took a bearing towards the mountain where she and Carlos had met the old man. It was sure to take longer than it looked. She had no food, no weapons and one water bottle. The sun was fierce. No doubt she could find water along the way. She set off, walking this time, pacing herself.
Her nausea hadn’t been wholly a pretence. The thought of being inside a sim and working for an agency that had been all along controlled by the Rax made her feel sick, and a little dizzy. Beauregard was up to something dodgy, of that she’d been sure as soon as he’d cast doubt on the lady. Hard to put a finger on why she trusted Nicole and not Beauregard. Should be the other way round. Nicole hadn’t led her in battle, and Beauregard hadn’t determined the battles she’d been in. All inconclusive, or defeats, and all of them Nicole’s fault and no blame falling on the sarge. But there it was. Always known he had something to hide. Whereas there was no way Nicole was Rax. She could well believe that Locke was, but not Nicole. She doubted that Carlos would believe it either. But he’d evidently believed something was wrong with the agency, something so wrong it had to be fled.
So maybe everything else Beauregard had said was true.
Which raised the question of what he hoped to achieve by undermining Nicole.
The squad got out at Nicole’s house and walked straight up the path. Unarmed, but Beauregard didn’t expect any problems on that score. He looked at the front window and saw Nicole standing behind her easel. She didn’t seem to have noticed them. Beauregard marched to the front door and tried the handle. The door was unlocked. He let himself in. With more or less hesitation, the others followed.
The entrance hall was cool and dim. Light fell from the stairwell, and from an open door to the right. The floor was of grey flagstones, rough and gritty, lumpy underfoot with embedded small coiled marine fossils, some of them cracked. The wood of the walls and furnishings was pale, rustic looking, polished as if by a patina of years. At the far end of the hallway, a few metres away, something skittered. A cleaning robot. Nothing to worry about.
Without a word, Beauregard stepped forward and turned into the big front room: a studio, as he’d expected, white-walled, high-ceilinged, cluttered. Sketchbooks lay everywhere; abstract paintings, unframed, stood stacked dozens deep against every wall. The smell of oil paint and turpentine hung on the air. Nicole’s brush flicked fast on the canvas. She didn’t turn.
“Come in,” she said. “I’ve been expecting you.”
She made a final brush stroke, stepped back and considered it for a moment.
“Ah,” she said. “Like that.”
Then she did turn around, still holding her brush. The old, oversized white shirt she wore was spattered with paint. Tiny dried-out droplets freckled her face and clogged hairs in her eyebrows. She didn’t look alarmed, or disconcerted. Perhaps vaguely puzzled at the sight of Beauregard facing her, with Karzan and Zeroual and Chun behind him, just inside the doorway. After a moment she frowned.
“Where’s Rizzi?”
“She didn’t want to come with us,” said Beauregard, truthfully enough. She hadn’t asked where Carlos was.
Nicole nodded.
“So,” she said, in a light, casual tone, “what brings you here?”
“You know about Carlos,” said Beauregard.
“Yes.” She gestured vaguely. “Locke called. Sorry you’ve been stood down, but I can see why.”
“Oh, so can we,” said Beauregard.
Zeroual and Karzan stepped to either side of him, and then took another step into the room. Chun remained in the doorway. Nicole’s eyes widened a fraction.
“Locke expected me to speak to you individually,” she said. “It would have been better, you know.”
“We’re here to speak to you collectively,” said Beauregard.
“Fine.” She shrugged. “Speak, then.”
“Locke is Rax,” said Beauregard. “And we’re not sure about you.”
She smiled. “Locke is Rax? Ridiculous. And how would you know?”
“A message got through from Arcane. Carlos read it and so did I.”
“So that’s why he did a runner?” She sounded surprised. “Interesting. Why didn’t you?”
“Why didn’t I what?”
“Take off after him, if you believed that message. You could have jumped on a scooter too.”
Beauregard hadn’t expected to be asked this. He hadn’t considered it an option at the time. He improvised.
“Unlike Carlos,” he said, with a self-deprecating grin, “I have military discipline. It’s a habit.”
“Even when you believe your military, ah, adviser is suborned by the force you once died fighting?”
“Like I said, discipline,” said Beauregard. “One can’t go haring off on a mere suspicion.”
“But you can come haring here, seeking to intimidate me?”
Beauregard stepped back and raised his hands. “No, no. Not to intimidate. To inquire. To set our minds at rest.”
“Oh, that,” Nicole said, sounding amused. “Well, you can set your minds at rest. I’m not Rax.”
No such assurance about Locke. Interesting.
“I’m sorry,” said Beauregard. “But it’ll take more than your say-so to convince us.”
“What would it take?” Nicole asked.
“An audit trail,” said Chun, unexpectedly and unhelpfully, from behind Beauregard’s shoulder.
“If you want to inspect thirty trillion lines of code,” said Nicole, “be my guest.”
“Exactly,” said Beauregard. “To convince us, you don’t need to tell us anything. We’ve had enough of being told things. You need to do something.”
Beauregard nodded to Zeroual and Karzan. They sprang forward and grabbed Nicole by the arms. She didn’t struggle. The paintbrush dropped to the floor as Zeroual clasped her right wrist and squeezed. Nicole cast him a contemptuous glance and swept the look to a glare at Beauregard.
“Something I would not do willingly, I see. You think you can coerce me?” She laughed. “You have taken the wrong prisoner for that, soldier.”
Beauregard took a folding knife from his pocket and opened it.
Nicole’s paint-spattered eyebrows rose. “Torture? Yeah, that’ll work.”
“We know very well it won’t,” said Beauregard. “But this will.”
He went over to the stacked canvases, swept them over with a clatter to the floor, picked up the one that had been nearest the wall and slashed it.
“No!” howled Nicole.
She threw herself forward against the grip of the two fighters, who held on to her and hauled her back.
“Oh yes,” said Beauregard. “We know this’ll work because we know what you are.”
He tossed the painting into a corner and picked up and slashed another, and another, and another.
Nicole writhed. “Stop! You crazy son of a bitch! Stop!”
Beauregard held up a canvas by the wooden frame, and punched through it, by way of variety and to show that he could. He glanced at Chun.
“Anything noticeable yet?”
Chun peered around, then stalked over to the window, carefully edging around the tableau of Nicole, Karzan, Zeroual and the easel.
“Sky’s gone a funny colour,” he reported back. “Kind of… greyish white.”
Nicole winced, but stood firm.
Beauregard slashed another painting.
“Ah,” said Chun. “Now it’s the sea. The waves are definitely higher.”
Karzan and Zeroual were beginning to look scared. Nicole was staring straight at Beauregard, her lips a line. Still defiant.
“And, by the way,” he said, “Carlos knows what you are, too.”
Her lips twisted to a smile.
“It wouldn’t surprise him. He’s always thought I’m a goddess.”
Beauregard slashed again. A shade of yellow dropped out of the world’s palette. They could all see the difference, subtle though it was.
“Oh, he knows you better now,” said Beauregard. “He knows you very well, Innovator.”
At that she sagged and the fight went out of her.
“All right,” she said. “All right. Just tell me what you want me to do, and I will consider it.”
“Good,” said Beauregard. He closed the knife and put it away. “Now let’s sit down in the kitchen and have a civilised discussion. If you don’t mind?”
“Yes,” said Nicole.
Taransay had been walking for several kiloseconds when the sky abruptly changed colour. From one second to the next, it paled from blue to a silvery grey. It hadn’t become overcast; the sun, close to noon now, was as clear as ever. A few tens of seconds later, a wind swept up the slopes from the direction of the distant sea. Taransay closed her eyes and opened them again. The sky was unchanged. Resisting the inclination to veer away from the wind, she pressed on. Then she stopped, her vision altered again. This time it was more general, and harder to pin down. It was as if the light had changed. Every shade had shifted a little along the spectrum. Even the sun looked odd to her sidelong glance.
She wondered if this was a consequence of dehydration, or hunger, but a quick gulp of water made no difference. And she was far from starving yet! So what was it? Was it possible that what was changing wasn’t in her body, but in the world? This world that seemed so real it was easy to forget that it was a sim.
But it was a sim, of that at least she was sure, and it seemed someone was monkeying with the colour settings. And with something else, more fundamental perhaps, that accounted for the change in the air. Was that even possible?
Taransay had no idea. All the more urgent, then, to find Shaw.
The squad stalked through Nicole’s house. The curious hush of a kitchen, full of potential noise from taps and machines and crockery. Dishes and cutlery reflected light from the big back window, overlooking a yard a quarter of which was in the shade now, brown dry soil dotted and patched with an artificially irrigated green that looked all the more vivid now that some tones were arbitrarily missing. Another piece of rustic furniture, planed smooth on top, knobbly and gnarled everywhere else, dominated the room. They sat down. Zeroual made coffee. The robot prowled in, checked around and sauntered out, indifferent as a cat to its owner’s anguish.
The sun was high now. Beauregard glanced at his watch to confirm that the time was almost noon. He couldn’t be sure when they’d arrived back in the sim, but at least two if not three hours had passed. Eight, perhaps ten seconds out in the real world? Add the time when they’d been spoken to by Locke, between the departure of the last scooters and the black flooding of their minds. A good few seconds, if he remembered right, bearing in mind they were thinking ten times faster than they ever had in real life. Throw in however long the transition itself took—it had seemed like an eternity at the time, and minutes even in retrospect, but that meant nothing.
In any case, ten to fifteen seconds, minimum. Time enough for the fighters to get well clear of the station. Time enough, too, for Locke to start investigating, if not perhaps yet to discover what Carlos had found.
Still no time to lose.
He sighed and looked across the big table at Nicole, who sat staring straight at him and not seeing him, her hands wrapped around her coffee mug as if her fingers felt cold.
“What we want you to do,” he said, “is move us all out.”
She closed her eyes and opened them again.
“What? Move you out of the sim?”
She sounded almost relieved. There was a light note in her voice, as if she were about to add: why didn’t you just ask nicely?
“No,” said Beauregard. “Move the module. The sim module and the nanofacturing and arms complex, the lot, just like Arcane did. Shift the entire fucking kit and caboodle. Now.”
Nicole looked startled, but still as if she thought this was more lenient than she’d expected.
“Move it where?”
This was the crunch. The others weren’t expecting it. Beauregard was annoyed with himself to find he’d let the tip of his tongue flick across his lips.
“To the only place we can be safe and make a real life for ourselves. The surface of the primary. The superhabitable. SH-0.”
The others gasped. Beauregard could hear the objections begin to rise in their throats. He held up a hand above his shoulder, not looking at the others, only at Nicole. She was alarmed now, all right, and incredulous.
“You call that safe?”
Beauregard sat back.
“Compared to what’s about to break loose around this station,” he said, “yes.”