by Ken MacLeod
“You think it’s easier to fool an AI than to fool six former members of a globally distributed conspiracy of terrorists who all met bizarre and terrible ends?”
“Now you put it that way…”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
There’s a Hard Way, and an Easy Way
They were given a better send-off this time, though they were in no condition to appreciate the crowd and the cheers. Carlos fell asleep on the bus as soon as it left the resort, as did most of the others.
He woke in the small frame, at the moment the minimal rig for ascent and descent docked with the transfer tug. Evidently they’d all been put in sleep mode and loaded up like so much cargo in the hangar. With the others he clambered over and clung on as the tug dropped to the surface of SH-17. As before on their ascent, the rig flew itself. Atmospheric buffeting was less severe than the aerodynamic approach in the shuttles had been, but more than made up for by shaking from the engine and the brutal deceleration thrusts at the end.
This part of the exomoon had turned further to night since their first arrival; the exosun was almost set and the bright three-quarter face of SH-0 dominated the sky. The fighters clambered off the module one by one, Carlos first. He watched with approval as the others formed up in a neat row like skittles. Five blank faceplates—which, just as before, were as individually recognisable as faces—looked back at him, then looked around to get their bearings.
Locke’s voice spoke in their heads:
As before, a direction was laid out for them as virtual images on the ground. They were guided to a curved-over entrance to a circular stairwell, down which they all trooped. The steps were suited to their size and went down a long way, to emerge ten metres below the surface in a featureless dark corridor of concrete that smelled of pulverised regolith. Here there was only one way to go: towards a heavy metal blast door. Carlos marched up to it and worked the mechanical handle, then bowed the others in. Inside was a circular room with a piece of apparatus in the centre and a dozen small lights dotted around the circumference under the ceiling. As soon as they stepped in, all radio communication with the outside and radar sense of anything beyond the walls ceased. Carlos closed the door and swung the inside handle down. They spaced themselves out around the room.
“Jeez oh,” said Rizzi, tapping the wall. “A bomb shelter.”
“Cheery, innit,” said Carlos.
“Could do with some brightening up,” said Beauregard. “Anyone been an interior decorator in a previous life?” He looked from one fighter to another, as if curious. “Nah, thought not.”
Locke manifested in their midst, his virtual image sharing space with the apparatus.
He stepped away from the centre of the room, taking on a more solid appearance, and took up a position between Chun and Karzan and facing Carlos and Beauregard. With a wave of the hand towards the apparatus he summoned the round table on which they had planned their previous mission.
Locke didn’t do sarcasm.
He flourished his quill, pulling up views compiled from satellite views and fast small spy drones scooting high above. The Astro landing site was wrecked and looted. On the far side of the crater wall, the basalt dome was surrounded by six scooters, all with their missile tubes unused. Three fighting machines were visible, along with one damaged one laid out on the ground. A mass of robots was corralled in a Faraday cage of heavy metal mesh. The machinery of the Gneiss camp, some looted material from the Astro site, and ripped-off weaponry from the Locke squad’s own fighting machines were being adapted to defensive purposes.
said Locke.
said Locke, sounding for a moment as if his patience were being strained.
Locke looked at him sharply.
They all stared down at the satellite view, enhancing it and augmenting it, looking for weaknesses in the enemy’s position that could be exploited with four intact scooters, one damaged one, and six small frames. None exactly jumped out.
said Zeroual.
Carlos could think of one way in which a human mind could be affected directly by code, and without any kind of hacking or data corruption: speech. For some time he’d harboured a troubling suspicion: that the reason why Arcane had turned so abruptly against Locke, the Direction, and apparently everyone else, was simply that the rebel robots had told their captors something that had alarmed them deeply.
He wasn’t sure whether this was a good time and place to voice his suspicion. He wasn’t sure it was even a good time to think it. He wondered whether his thoughts, and those of the other fighters, were private from the avatar, let alone from the company AI. The subvocal messaging app in their heads needed deliberate intent to transmit, though not to receive. He remembered Nicole explaining that thoughts couldn’t be read because they weren’t written, and he could see what she meant. But surely the inner monologue had some neural features in common with speech.
He decided not to worry about that possibility. If his thoughts above a certain level of articulation were babbling out on the radio in his head, there was nothing he could do about it. It was literally not worth thinking about, because thinking about it would only make the problem, if real, a whole lot worse.
They all examined the display some more, from all angles. They studied the inventory of the Emergency Base’s arsenal. Gloom deepened, then—
For Carlos it was like the good old days. Fighting an entire battle by remote control, while he reclined in a seat, was pretty much his specialist subject, the only real combat skill he’d brought with him from his original militant life. He remembered flying drones over London, and dogfights in the sky. He didn’t consciously remember commanding drone fleets, but the muscle memory of doing so in his blank forgotten glory days not long before his death had survived all the copying and translation to revive as reflex in his robot body. He lay in the socket of the battered scooter they’d rode back on from the battle, drawing down telemetry from the microsats in low orbit, the tiny zippy drones dancing like midges high in the thin atmosphere, and from two of the other scooters, both ready to go.
He gathered from a low mutter of complaint in the message channel that for the other fighters the plan wasn’t like any of their good old days. They’d been busy cannibalising equipment into a catapult—Beauregard had spotted the one built by the rebel robots, and had stolen the idea. Carlos was fairly sure that drones and microsats from Arcane Disputes were already spying on them, but that wasn’t a problem. Let them worry about what was coming, so long as they didn’t identify the catapult’s payloads, which were being transported from storage and nanofacture sheds literally under wraps.
In a flurry of activity, the wraps were thrown off and the payloads deployed one by one. Unwrapped and mounted on the launch ramp, they remained enigmatic: long fat plastic cylinders with crude stabilising fins and booster and guidance motors sintered on. Enigmatic or not, they were an obvious threat and an easy target for incoming ordnance. Between each launch, the catapult took about thirty seconds to wind back and reload.
One by one three missiles arced into the night, like outsize dud fireworks. They didn’t stay dud for long: Carlos fired the booster of each when it reached the top of its natural parabolic arc. As soon as the last missile was away, Carlos’s fellow fighters scurried for the entrance to the bomb shelter. Carlos waited for three seconds after they’d dogged the hatch, then remote-launched the two scooters that had been assigned to this mission. Both rose almost straight up. One blasted hard and fast then cut its main engine to continue on a new parabolic trajectory aimed at the Arcane/Gneiss camp. The other flipped at a hundred metres altitude, deployed its stubby wings, and swooped to twenty metres to race at full thrust on a more or less level path across the plain towards the crater wall. Carlos thought briefly of the V2 rocket and the V1 doodlebug, and wondered if they’d inspired that part of Beauregard’s plan.
As soon as both scooters were on course, Carlos trimmed the flight paths of the big dumb payloads launched from the catapults. Random variation had given them a spread of a few hundred metres. Now, one behind the other, they were all heading for the same target. Carlos was getting elementary telemetry from all of them, appearing as a set of running dials in a tiny part of his complex three-dimensional view integrated from the drones, scooters and spysats. He didn’t have time or inclination to appreciate the godlike perspective and astonishing depth of field generated by this widely distributed multi-ocular vision. He could only concentrate and hope for the best. Even augmented and optimised, he was barely able to process the display: the occipital cortex of his mammalian brain wouldn’t have stood a chance, the input shattering into a surreal scatter of images, like a Cubist portrait reflected in a skip-load of broken mirrors. The radar tickle was intense, sensed as an electrical buzz on his skin.
Carlos focused on the lead missile, now dropping straight towards the basalt dome. Four Arcane fighters were in view, near the cage containing the robots. They were all on the big combat frames. Not at all to his surprise, one of the Arcane fighters bounded for a scooter. The other, presumably the one whose combat frame had been damaged and was therefore in a small frame and thus ready to go, was already climbing aboard. Another headed for a rocket tube stripped from the scooter the Locke side had been forced to abandon. The fourth just calmly stood looking up, aimed his or her forearm-mounted heavy machine gun at the incoming missile, and let rip.
The falling missile disintegrated fifty metres above target, showering debris and what little of its payload remained intact. But that little was enough: about a dozen crawler bots, which fell to the ground around the dome. Three were taken out by well-aimed shots, two landed badly. The other five picked themselves up and scuttled towards the robot cage. The robots saw them coming and became visibly agitated, blurring into motion as they scrambled to the top of the cage—for whatever good that would do if a crawler got in, or pounced on top. Ah—they were poking appendages out like beseeching hands through prison bars, to break the Faraday barrier and signal to mobilise their auxies and riffs.
The fighter who’d grabbed a rocket tube aimed upward at the next incoming missile. Aim was hardly a problem: the rocket was more than smart enough to know what was expected of it. Nothing but hot fragments rained from that impact. While the fighter was reloading, the third crude projectile was at two hundred metres and falling. Carlos gave it a boost to fall faster than the local gravity could pull it. The machine-gunner wasted one burst on wh
ere it should have been if it had been free-falling. The burst that did hit it was hardly more effective: the missile’s internal small charge had already gone off, and the shell popped open at five metres. From its cloud of debris, scores of crawler bots hit the ground running.
The robots in the Faraday cage went frantic. Beauregard had described this element of his plan as “like tipping a bucketful of venomous spiders into an arachnophobia support group meeting.” He had been spot on. The robots assailed the heavy metal mesh with every available appendage and remaining tool, shaking the entire cage. Auxies and riffs stirred here and there around the cage’s perimeter.
The fighter who’d sprinted in the big frame had emerged from its head and was crawling on the scooter, and the other was almost at the socket. Both turned to the cage, dithered momentarily, presumably exchanged hasty signals, and continued to shove themselves into the sockets. The machine-gunner and the rocketeer hurried to the cage, stamping on crawlers as they went.
Carlos shifted attention to the high scooter, now over the top of its trajectory and dropping. Again he jetted to descend faster than free fall. He loosed off two rockets from the scooter’s side tubes, both aimed at the top of the basalt dome.
The circular tarpaulin was blown to shreds. Two blocks near the top of the dome cracked, and the keystone at the centre fell down inside. Carlos picked this up from a spy drone. The pixels of its image were almost as big as the blocks, but they did show the square black gap. He couldn’t see on this scale what was going on inside, but he could imagine that any Arcane fighters and captured robots within were taking it badly.
To Seba, it all happened in slow motion and low resolution. First came two huge impacts overhead, then the covering that had cloaked all electromagnetic signals peeled away in tatters from the entrance gap in the dome. Through that gap, signals on all wavelengths suddenly flooded in, urgent and confusing. Seba had known something was going on from the ground vibrations, and from the uptick in encrypted chatter between the two fighting machines that had interrogated it earlier. A few hundred seconds had passed since they had crawled back into the dome. Certainly an attack was going on. Perhaps a rescue!
