by Ken MacLeod
The troops around the damaged fighters hesitated a fraction of a second, then obeyed. The abandoned casualties’ momentum carried them across the space, along different trajectories. Neither of them was moving, apart from twitches, sparks and spatters. Dunt waited until the defensive deployment was in place, then jumped up and soared to the nearest. He slowed and cruised past, scanning and looking.
The man’s name was Hoffman. His frame had been cut from the top of the head down to the middle of the chest. One leg was hanging off. Dunt tried hailing, then pinging. No response.
Dunt rolled and jetted to the other. This one’s head had survived intact, but the thorax was cut from one shoulder diagonally to the hip. Dunt still recognised him.
No response. Dunt pinged. Still no response. Bullen, too, was dead.
Dunt wasn’t surprised that the standard frame’s central processor wasn’t in its head, but apparently somewhere in the thorax. Subjectively, of course, you felt you were in your head, right behind your visual input system. But that was a legacy thing. Body image. The real anatomy of the frame had nothing to do with that. The arrangement made sense: deep inside the trunk was less vulnerable, less exposed and more heavily armoured. You could be a headless gunner, and still keep fighting. The Warren Zevon lyric crashed through his mind.
What was more disturbing was that the freebots had known how to destroy the central processor.
The statement was blunt, but it was what the grim moment needed.
Aitchison jumped, hauling a net, and tidied the broken machines away. The rest of the couple of dozen troops in the chamber stayed alert, guns aimed at the score or so of tunnel entrances. Everyone knew that Hoffman and Bullen weren’t dead—or no deader than they’d been for a millennium. Right now, or very soon, their saved files would be struggling upward, through whatever private hell their loss of their frames made them deserve in the Direction’s eyes, towards their virtual lives in … let’s see … yes, Hoffman in Morlock, Bullen in Zheng … their former agencies’ sims.
Where, no doubt, they’d be put through the wringer. Quite possibly, this was happening already, in the transition nightmares. They might not even make it to waking up on the bus—or the ferry-boat, in Bullen’s case—and wondering what the fuck had happened. Hoffman and Bullen would, of course, have no memories of what had happened since they were sent forth on the Direction’s failed offensive, but that wouldn’t save them from interrogation as to what they had known of the Rax conspiracy before these copies were taken. The AI systems running the agencies’ sims had security checks hard-wired into the download process. Maybe the two dead guys would just be wrung out, their current versions trashed and their copies left on ice until the next time the Direction needed fighters and couldn’t afford to be picky. Or perhaps just left, for eternity, on electronic ice.
Well, they’d make it to Valhalla. The Direction wouldn’t last forever. Dunt and his comrades would make sure of that. They’d get their fallen warriors back, whatever it took and however long. No man left behind.
The collective chant startled Dunt. What was that about?
Christ, he hadn’t just been thinking all that! He’d been saying it! Proclaiming it!
He was too embarrassed to replay his impromptu rant. Whatever he’d said, it had worked.
The fugue state troubled him. It was more evidence that a prolonged stay in the frame endangered self-control, even sanity. Whether this limitation was imposed rather than intrinsic mattered not a jot now. It had to be dealt with.
He looked out over the cavern at the watchful troops, the levelled guns, the drifting robots, the floating lights, the parked and potent scooters.
The chant changed to:
For a moment, Dunt let himself be caught up in it. No red mist filled his vision, but the surge of berserker rage was like a fierce high-voltage current that could spark across circuit breakers and melt fuses. He wanted to wreak revenge on the hapless bots that flailed in microgravity or twitched in the mesh pens, whether they had minds or not. Like he’d done to the supervisory bots in the factory.
But that lesson hadn’t worked. It hadn’t intimidated the crawling, creeping, lurking enemy, the rats in the walls …
Stop. Think. The captured robots may or may not have minds, but you do.
Time for a supreme effort of self-control, before irrationality engulfed all of them.
Dunt raised a hand, and spoke on the common channel. His words would reach all the fighters: in this cavern, in the tunnels and in the factory.
And they would reach the freebots.
Cheers.
Anyone watching but not hearing would have seen not a movement, not a wavering of the troops’ concentration. Pleased with the faultless discipline as well as by the roars of approbation, Dunt snapped back into military mode.
He rapped out orders for a slow advance into the tunnels, led by Blanc, Stroilova and Rexham, to seal every side tunnel and sound for spaces behind the walls. He assigned two troopers under Whitten’s guidance to assist Foyle in repairing damaged bots, and others to round up the robots floating about and to check through all that had already been captured. Negative reinforcement was to be applied precisely and sparingly, and combined with software interrogation, under the supervision of Irma Schultz. Any freebots detected would be given the opportunity to cooperate. Any who refused would be held as hostages.
Over the next twenty kiloseconds or so, any question of splitting the recalcitrant freebots from the rest evaporated. Two more troopers were mangled in the tunnels, not fatally but enough to put them out of action and beyond even Whitten’s ingenuity in finding useful work for them. Whole stacks of fusion pods in the factory were surreptitiously released from the walls, and nudged out to tumble. When the floating pods were tediously gathered up again, eleven were missing.
Replay of surveillance exposed columns of the small crab-sized bots as responsible, if that was the word. It was impossible to find out why they’d done it; one might as well have tried to interrogate an ant. Worse, their actions would have been quite unpredictable from prior surveillance: the sudden coordinated thrusts had emerged out of innocuous, separate, apparently legitimate movements of the little blinkers, with all the suddenness of a locust swarm.
Rexham led a team to investigate the inconspicuous holes through which the missing pods had been spirited away. One trooper guided a camera in, on a long carbon-fibre rod. The idea was that this minimal device would not be subject to data hacking.
It wasn’t: while Rexham’s man was intent on guiding the probe, and Rexham and the others were focused on the images relayed, a troop of millimetre-scale arachnoid robots marched up the pole, enveloped the trooper’s hand and forearm, and before anyone could react formed a tight circular band that in half a second chewed the arm off at the elbow. Hordes of the tiny robots then scuttled into the damaged frame’s internals. Over the next fifty seconds they disabled its every joint.
The experience, the trooper gave his comrades to understand, was not precisely painful, but unpleasant.
Rexham refused him this favour, pointing out that he could soon be in a sim and then a new frame. The writhing man’s gratitude was less fulsome than Rexham might have hoped.
Dunt found Schultz in the main cavern, applying a needle probe to an upended, tied down and struggling supervisor bot, one of those Burgess Shale arthropod nightmare models.
Dunt indicated his scooter, which not coincidentally was one of those poised just below the entrance tunnel. Well placed for defence, of course, and also ready if the time came for a sharp exit. Dunt had a deep personal respect for the importance of preserving cadre.
Schulz complied. Dunt found himself peering into a confined workspace. He faced a virtual, upright version of the captive bot, separated from him as if by an invisible wall. It was like looking at a giant trilobite in an aquarium. Dunt had an odd sensation of Schulz looking over his shoulder.
The robot waved its forelimbs.
Fuckface flexed all its limbs. In the real world, which Dunt could still see with what he thought of as half an eye, it struggled against its bonds as if testing them. Not a chance.
Dunt shared and appreciated the realism of this view, but he had to explore its limits.
Schulz glyphed to Dunt the analogue of a sharp intake of breath. He reciprocated.
<“Emigration?”> Dunt said.
Dunt did the mental calculations, and laughed.
Dunt still had to be sure.
No room for compromise, then.
He backed out of the interface and turned to Schulz,
still poised with her needle probe above the robot’s underside.
Dunt returned to the interface. The freebot hung there in its virtual aquarium and looked back at him. He suspected it knew what was coming. He hoped so.
The virtual tank filled with lightning bolts. Fuckface went on thrashing for an impressive thirteen seconds.
Dunt relished every one of them.
Later, Dunt and Schulz stood on the rolling moonlet under the bare cantilevers of the old Zheng transfer tug.
Their turn at last. Dunt had insisted that the damaged take their leave first, followed by, in strict rotation, the ranks. The inner circle took their places at the end of the queue.
To be sure of arriving in the same spot in a sim at the same time, their frames had to be in physical contact when the transition took place.
Schulz embraced him.
Their loins came together with a soft thud, like a tyre over roadkill.
And there they were, on the ferry to Edge Town.
