Dogs of War

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  I know such things about what has gone on here, more unhappy thoughts, and the logical conclusion to them all: I know too much.

  He looked up into the guileless, brutal face of the Bioform. You wouldn’t hurt me, would you, boy? But of course he would, if Murray wanted it. He wouldn’t be able to help himself.

  He wouldn’t want to. Hartnell had imagined the scenario more than once, usually just before the whiskey bottle came out again. In his little mental plays, Rex always hesitated, at least briefly.

  He scratched the Bioform under the jaw, feeling the muscles there, feeling that strained dialogue inside between man and dog. “You’re all right, Rex,” he said softly. “You did all right. You’re a Good Dog. I’ll see if I can get you a new voice.”

  A kind voice, came the machine interpretation of Rex’s thoughts.

  Abruptly Hartnell felt very sad, although the whiskey was at least part of that. He took another swig and patted Rex’s arm. “You’re all right,” he repeated.

  “Did you find out what went wrong?”

  Hartnell glanced up to see Asanto there, silhouetted against the bright sky. Probably he was supposed to say something that would reassure her precious shareholders, but instead he just shrugged and snorted. “Don’t you ever take that off?” He waved at her long coat and scarf.

  “This stuff has the best anti-bug screen money can buy,” she told him, tugging at the scarf a little. Then her eyes flicked to Rex. “So it and its squad were just… on their own recognizance for half an hour?”

  “He. Rex is a he.” Hartnell abruptly felt frustrated with her, which he recognised as really being frustrated with Murray and the whole bloody business. “Rex and Dragon are ‘he’s. Honey and Bees are ‘she’s. Or Honey is, and we tell Bees she is because that’s how we think, as humans. Bees is—”

  “They, presumably.”

  He shrugged. “Bees is bees is bees. Seriously, did you actually read the dev specs on distributed intelligence combat units. They were not expecting the fucking things to have actual, you know, intelligence. They were supposed to be like smart robot sons of bitches – just get a load of them together and have them do some math to make decisions. Only Bees is like a person. Or not a person, not really a person, but you can talk to Bees. Bees could ace the Turing test. And nobody in the AI world gives a damn because Bees isn’t one of their supermegabrain computers, but just…”

  “Bees.”

  “Actual bees, yes. Sorry, that was a bit of a rant.”

  She stepped closer, examining Rex. “Tell me about the safeguards.”

  “Safeguards,” he echoed dumbly.

  “What happened when the leash snapped, Hart? I take it Rex did more than mark a few trees and bite a postman.”

  “He…” Hartnell took the next slug of whiskey too quickly and inhaled half of it, doubling over and choking until a firm clap on his back got him breathing again. “Ah, aha, thanks,” he gasped.

  Asanto was staring at him. Actually she was staring past him at Rex, whose vast paw had just administered the required assistance. “Look at that,” she said wonderingly.

  “Good boy, Rex.” Hartnell coughed a couple more times. “You’ve seen the specs, you’ve seen the safeguards.”

  “I’ve seen the general lack of them.”

  “Rex follows orders. He’s plugged into a strict hierarchy, does what he’s told. And when comms went down…”

  “Yes, what then?”

  “Rex made contact with a camp-full of refugees. In the absence of instructions.” Just the thought made Hartnell’s palms sweat, or sweat more. He couldn’t imagine what had been going through Rex’s limited thoughts right then. He couldn’t imagine how it had happened. And the Bioforms themselves weren’t much help. It wasn’t only comms that had cut out – they had no recordings from the squad’s cameras for that period either. All they had was Rex’s limited ability to recount what they had done.

  “They were looking for bad guys,” Hartnell explained. “They did… they did it well, really well. Hear that, Rex? Good Dog, good boy. They went in and, I don’t know, somehow nothing kicked off, and Bees was looking for weapons – it was kind of all half-assed because it’s not really what they’re trained for, but somehow they did the right thing.”

  “Some sort of secondary programming?” Asanto suggested.

  I need to shut up now. I really do need to just nod and shut up. “No,” Hartnell’s mouth insisted, against the better judgement of the rest of him. “They made the decision to play it that way. Which is why Rex here is better than a robot. It’s why Bioforms are the future.” Take that back to your shareholders.

  “And then the fighting kicked off,” she pointed out.

  “Ah, well, yes, but what happened was a shitload of Anarchistas basically drove up and started shooting. And I don’t know what the hell they were there for – whether they were going to move the refugees on or they were going to press-gang some new recruits, or they were visiting their sick grandmother. But they saw our boys, and Rex saw them and correctly identified them as hostiles. And the civilians ran for it, and judging by the relatively few non-combatant casualties I reckon our squad must’ve been covering their escape.” “Seriously?” She didn’t sound convinced.

  Hartnell opened his mouth, but closed it again. “I don’t know,” he muttered. “Some of the Redmark guys said it, but I don’t know.” He smiled weakly at the Bioform. “Sometimes I just don’t know what goes on in that big head of yours, Rex. And I know you’d tell me if you could.” And he saw it again, that hunching and head-hanging that meant, Please don’t ask me; that guilty dog whine.

  “You did OK, boy,” he said, and scratched at the Bioform’s jaw again. Unlike Rex, he could lie like hell when he needed to, and he sure as hell wasn’t saying anything to Asanto about the order Murray had been trying to give, when the comms went down; about the way that Murray was waging war on Campeche State, Anarchistas and civilians alike.

  8

  Rex

  Honey is unhappy.

  She is sitting still and she is eating; she is not doing anything different. It is only on her channel to us that she is being unhappy. I understand that this is because she does not want Master to know.

  We should not keep things from Master. Perhaps I should tell Master about Honey, then? If Master asked, I would have to. Perhaps that means I do not have to unless he asks, or why would Master have arranged things this way? I am not entirely satisfied with my logic but there is nobody I can ask to help me with it. I am whining again, deep in my throat. Something is going wrong. Like Hart with the comms outages, I cannot find it to stop it. I just know the wrongness is there.

  Honey tells us we should all eat as much as we can. We are about to go and fight the enemy in a big attack. Master has found where all the enemy have gone, so many enemy that all of us and all our human friends will go and fight them. We have to fight them until there are none left. Then we must dispose of the bodies. Master was very clear about this.

  But this is not why Honey says to eat. Honey thinks something else is going to happen. Honey says be ready.

  Hart is going through my systems again, checking them one by one. It tickles when he is in my head. Feedback chip, database, comms, targeting, hierarchy, each tested in turn. He says I am in good shape. He scratches me where I like it, under my chin where my jaw implants ache sometimes. I like Hart.

  Hart does not like Master. I can smell it on him. Hart also thinks something is going to happen. Perhaps I should tell Hart about Honey. But I don’t. I don’t know why, but I don’t.

  Dragon and Honey and I gulp down our ration packs. We can eat lots of things, but ration packs are the best for us. They have Recommended Vitamins and Minerals. Bees has charged up fully from her station, and has requisitioned 20 per cent additional units. Because we are about to fight, everyone gets everything they ask for.

  Ellene Asanto walks past and speaks to Hart. She worries Hart. She worries Master and makes him angry. Now
she is not scared any more I cannot tell what she is feeling. Her clothes have a buzz to them. Or perhaps it is not her clothes. Perhaps it is her.

  Honey’s channel: It is her.

  Ellene Asanto is not in my hierarchy. She is not enemy. But she is not just a human like most of them. She is important to Hart and Master. I do not know what she is or how I am supposed to react to her.

  I think that means I can investigate her. It will be like the camp when comms went down. I will send in Bees.

  Bees’ channel: Clarify objective?

  I tell Bees I want to know about Ellene Asanto.

  Bees’ channel: Clarify objective further?

  I don’t know what I want to know. I just want to know.

  Bees’ channel: (uncomplimentary emoticon).

  But Bees does what she is told and sends some units to fly close to Ellene Asanto and deploy her special senses: senses that nobody else has. Bees says that even Master and Hart do not know all of the things she can sense.

  I speak to Honey: Tell me.

  Honey’s channel is silent.

  Dragon’s channel: I think Ellene Asanto is a special objective, meaning one that he will be given orders about.

  Master and some of the Redmark officers are looking at a satellite view of the enemy. To me, it just looks like the other camp only much, much bigger and with more structures. Village, says my database. Soon it will be much, much smaller with no structures at all. When the bodies have been burned and buried there will be very little left.

  Honey’s channel: All the evidence will be gone.

  Bees’ channel: Receiving… encrypted signal detected… decrypting… decrypting… decrypting…

  All around us, Bees’ units come to rest as she links them into her decryption effort, applying more and more processing power. I want to tell her to stop, but she is doing what I ordered, in her own way. Was this what I wanted to find out? I am unable to decide.

  Honey’s channel: Be ready.

  I want to ask, Ready for what? but Honey is standing up, shaking crumbs off her coat. Honey is checking the systems of her Elephant Gun. Dragon is running diagnostics on his targeting software. Bees is decrypting… This is not even something that Bees is supposed to be able to do.

  I look to Master. He is subvocalising to his officers, but my ears can hear his voice still. It is not wrong to eavesdrop if they built me that way. He says, “…keep her busy here, but I need you to make sure you find plenty of weapons, bomb parts, all the usual. It’s not as though anyone’s going to be asking too many questions, but this needs to look like just another Anarchista training camp…”

  Bees’ channel: Decryption complete. And then I can hear Ellene Asanto’s hidden transmission, the one she is sending with her implants and her clothing.

  …suspect this is the clean-up. They’ll send in the Bioforms to get rid of the evidence of the chem attacks. Please say you can send me some kind of backup, or we’re looking at hundreds of civilian casualties at the very least…

  I heart Hart swear. His eyes are very wide and they’re on Asanto, and I realise he was connected to Bees’ systems and he has heard all this.

  9

  Hartnell

  …suspect this is the clean-up. They’ll send the Bioforms in to get rid of the evidence of the chem attacks. Please say you can send me some kind of backup, or we’re looking at hundreds of civilian casualties at the very least….

  Hartnell went very still, midway through checking Bees’ intra-swarm comms architecture. For a mad moment he thought Bees was the source of the signal, but then he followed the transmission to the source: there was Ellene Asanto, standing alone in the middle of the camp. Asanto, here on a ticket from the Bioform project’s shareholders. And he supposed that was just about plausible, still, if you thought those shareholders were worried about the phenomenal bad publicity they would be exposed to if the wider world found out how the war in Campeche was being prosecuted.

  But he kept on listening to Bees’ meticulously decoded eavesdropping. Asanto wasn’t even focusing on the Bioforms, save as a vector for Murray’s atrocities. She knew chemical weapons had been deployed in the area. She was here for proof. The shareholders wouldn’t want proof, save to bury it. Asanto was here with a spade, sure enough, but she’d come to dig.

  Oh crap, she’s not from the shareholders at all. Hartnell looked over at Murray, still deep in his planning. Because there was a big old refugee camp out there, and plenty of the beds were filled with people who had incriminating burns and scars. The powers that be, the government interests and multinationals that effectively funded the counter-insurgency – and most particularly their attack dogs at Redmark – had been savage in crushing the populist uprising here. Media access had been tightly controlled: the rest of the world believed the Anarchistas were terrorists. Only it sounded as though not everyone believed it. Perhaps Asanto was a journalist, but from what Hartnell saw of her tech, she was something more than that.

  She’s UN deep cover . He was convinced of it. Last he’d heard, the UN had been asking questions about the war in Campeche State, just the latest is a succession of corporatefunded paramilitary actions to combat unprofitable developments across the globe. And they might well ask. The Anarchistas were finished, they just didn’t know it yet. The real work Murray was engaged in was mopping up the spillages; getting rid of anything incriminating that might come back to bite those in charge.

  Hartnell was uncomfortably aware that he himself might fall into that category. And, as for Rex and the others… They weren’t robots. You couldn’t just wipe their databanks and have brand-new tabula rasa soldiers for the next war. Cheaper and easier to breed new ones. That was the final advantage of Bioforms over human soldiers. In the end, if all else failed, they were disposable.

  Hartnell hacked into Murray’s personal systems. It was something he’d been doing for weeks now, a trivial piece of secret rebellion for his own satisfaction. Now he went straight for incoming communications and called up a list of past messages.

  He saw Ellene Asanto’s face. Murray was already on to her. He knew they were compromised. Was he blocking her transmissions, or was he not aware that she was a living wire?

  Either way, he would have to kill her. All part of the cleanup. Maybe she even knew it. Maybe she accepted that as the price of her attempt to expose Murray and his paymasters to the world.

  “Rex, I think it’s time you and your squad got going,” Hartnell announced, trying to keep his voice steady. The dog Bioform cocked his head: his senses would read all that fear like a book, but he wouldn’t understand the cause.

  “You’ve got supplies, food, ammunition, right, boy?” We are ready, Rex confirmed in his ear.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t install a new voice for you, boy,”

  Hartnell told him, subvocalising. “That would have been good.”

  I think so too. Hart?

  “Yes, Rex?”

  What is going on?

  Hartnell looked up into the Bioform’s so-trusting eyes. “Nothing, boy. It’s all gravy. You just go do your job.”

  Why are you unhappy?

  “I’m fine, boy.” A lie, and Rex could tell. Hartnell glanced over at Murray, still absorbed. The whole camp felt like a time bomb, filled with armed men awaiting Murray’s orders. How much worse if the Bioforms were there when it all kicked off?

  Using the transmission channel Bees had isolated, he sent a signal direct to Asanto: He’s onto you.

  And to Rex: “OK, boy, come on, off you go.”

  Rex’s channel: But we are supposed to attack alongside our friends. That is the plan.

  Asanto had barely reacted. Hartnell had to give her credit for that: she was cool as you like, standing there surrounded by the enemy. Us, we’re the enemy.

  “You head off, Rex. Get going, boy.” Hartnell was filing orders even as he gave them, inserting an advance recon job into the queue, engineering a history for it. That was what the Bioforms were good at,
after all. Such a step had been in and out of the plan as Murray had formulated it. Would he believe he’d left it in by accident? Hartnell left his boss’s electronic fingerprints all over the decision, hoping against hope.

  Rex stood, stretched, whined a little. Hart?

  “You’re a Good Dog, Rex. I know you’ll do the right thing.”

  Dragon was already gone, slithering off invisibly into the trees. Honey dropped to all fours and padded away; even she could be surprisingly quiet when she needed to. Bees was… Bees was gone and still here, multitasking.

  “Your squad needs you, Rex,” Hartnell sent, and Rex was slinking away. If he’d had a tail it would have been between his legs. His uncertainty, and the unhappiness that came with it, was in every movement.

  Hartnell busied himself with some final touches of system work, counting the seconds, then the minutes, imagining the Bioform squad getting further and further away from what was about to be ground zero. How long do I have? How long do I need? The second question highlighted his major problem: no win condition. He was in a maze full of blind ends with no way out.

  There was another presence in the system. Hartnell registered it from its movements: channels opened, files inspected. He backtracked hurriedly, hiding his own tracks as best he could. In the midst of the officers, Murray had gone very still, concentrating on his implants and his eyescreen. “Hart…” His gaze was still focused inwards, but his voice arrived via Hartnell’s earpiece. “Is there something you wanted to tell me?”

  Hartnell took a deep slug from his bottle. What does he know? Where’s Asanto? Murray had superior access to the system, after all. Hartnell could get places because he was clever; Murray just strode in by right. Everything Hartnell had uncovered was there for Murray to stumble over.

  Ellene Asanto was very still.

  In the shared space between their minds, Murray found Bees’ fragmentary recording of Asanto’s transmission. “Holy fuck!” he shouted, startling the men around him.