by Ken MacLeod
Leap this torrent, wade that. In over her head. Good job she didn’t have to breathe. Out, up the bank, grab a clump—heave, haul, dodge sideways, run on.
Was the frame, through the blue glow that had been part of the mat that engulfed the module, communicating with the environment? The frame had comms to the eyeballs; coming out of its ears; sensitivity in all spectra, sonar like a bat’s synaesthesia of sound and vision.
She thought of stressed rock and grains of quartz popping their surplus electrons; of other piezoelectric effects, of geomagnetism, of bio-electrical currents. But no. Any such subtle spark-gap signal would show on her heads-up display and resound in her hearing.
The closest she came, and it was just a guess, a hypothesis that she’d have to formulate very carefully to give Locke and Zaretsky a breakable idea to test, was gene expression. Genes expressed through a radically different phenotype from anything they had encountered in billions of years before.
Think of it this way, she told herself, as she ran and tried to not think about running.
Genes are molecular machines. Natural nanotech. The hard parts of the frame, some of the structural members, were—like bones, teeth and hair—material churned out by molecular machinery. The power supply, the instruments, the processor on which her mind ran—were products of cruder technologies: 3-D printing and electrical and mechanical engineering. But most of the rest was molecular machinery, down at the messy, fuzzy interface where nanotechnology became hard to distinguish from synthetic biology.
It was at that scale, she reckoned, that the genes of the organism that had infected the frame found something to latch on to. An opening, a way to transmute their own expression. And, from there, the transformations had proliferated, to affect the workings of the frame and the impulses it transmitted to her mind. In itself it was as mindless as the parasitic worms that reshape the behaviour of their insect hosts. Her newly acquired tacit knowledge and ability, this route and this running, were something like instinct.
So far, it had served her well. Whether the alien genes were now committed to their new vessel and shared its interests was an open question.
As was whether they had completed their work, or whether she faced transformations yet to come.
She didn’t let that troubling thought slow her down. It was only a guess, only a hypothesis. Her route was tortuous, yet always straight in front of her. A glance around after a stop or turn always revealed a sight line down what almost seemed an avenue, low and narrow as it might be but adequate, a coincidental clear run between the random growth of the tall trunks. Rain poured continually down her body, but she could now see through it well enough. Lightning scored the ground and trees crashed in the gales, but behind her, or ahead of her, or off to one side, and always where she wasn’t.
After a while the rain stopped, but it made so little difference to her pace that she hardly noticed.
This providential ease and preternatural agility ended at the edge of the forest, and with the break of day. Less than a kilometre from the river bank Taransay saw an unexpected glimmer on the ground ahead and slowed to a wary walk. As she drew closer she saw the gleam was the light of the rising exosun reflected off a sheet of water that extended well in among the trees.
Dismayed but not surprised, she walked then waded towards the site of the shelter and the stash of goods it covered, just in from where the trees ended. The water was to her hips, turbid and fast-moving. What had been low vegetation giving way to shingle shoals and the river was now an unbroken lake to the trees on the far bank, and probably beyond. The bend in the river was flooded out of view. Fallen trees, their branches sticking up with absurd angularity like broken window-frames, floated downstream. From the relative speeds of the debris, she saw that the flow got faster towards the middle.
She found one of the lander wings upended against a tree, tens of metres from where she’d left it propped against the other, of which there was no sign at all. One of the empty cargo pods was beached a little further away. She waded on, against the resistance of the current and the drag of plants around her feet, searching and scanning for the supplies. Denser than the wings, they might still be on the bottom nearby. No such luck.
Shit.
Salvage, if possible at all, would have to wait until the waters subsided. She had no idea how long that would take, but from the strength of the spate it would not be soon. Tuning her scans, she detected a faint output from the instrument packs and waded over. Like the plants, they still flourished under the flood: deep-rooted, and turned to the sky. Through water the signal was probably too weak to carry through the atmosphere, but they were still in place and would be back in action when the water level went down.
Unlike her supplies. She wished she had thought of staking stuff down, or even of tethering the loads to the sturdy instrument packages. Bugger.
She looked downriver, pondering whether it was worth searching there. Probably not. She turned around. Five flying jellyfish were rising, upstream from her. They soared aloft and then scudded along in the stiff breeze. She watched them pass overhead, still rising, and then her gaze was caught by a movement among the trees to her left. She whirled, crouched to neck-deep in the rushing water and zoomed. The rifle, like the empty rucksack, was still on her back. She struggled to keep her footing—it was harder when she zoomed because she didn’t have the visual feedback.
Closer the shape came. She tried to unsling the rifle from her shoulder. Shooting under water was not advised, but the weapon and ammo were waterproof and should be fine.
Pattern recognition, don’t fail me now … whatever moved under the trees was bulky, and its gait quadrupedal, not at all like the slinky slither of the giant millipede things. Closer still.
Fuck. It was one of the bearer bots.
She stood up straight, retracted her zoom and waded forward. The robot stood at the edge of the flood, way back under the trees. In a few strides she was splashing, ankle-deep, along a shoal. Down to her right the current swirled in harsh eddies, grinding and shifting stones. Fresh rags of plants marked the deeper water, bobbing and shifting. She took care to keep to the other side of them.
Waist-deep again, through faster water and over softer ground. She stopped ankle-deep, a few metres from the robot. It stood at the water’s edge like a nervous sheep.
It looked like they’d saved everything. She looked at them with new respect.
So much for initiative. At least being literal had worked.
She ordered the robots to load up. They were just deploying their manipulative arms—the effect was ludicrously centaur-like—when she noticed the laser comms device flashing. It wouldn’t have had much opportunity for transmitting and receiving, not in the shelter or in the storm, even if it were capable of acting autonomously, which she doubted. Puzzled, she picked it up, laid it on the soggy ground, and opened it.
Of course. Duh. It had a radio receiver as well as a two-way laser communicator.
And the radio receiver had a message on loop, for her and for the Locke module.
She read off the numbers.
About now, actually.
The content of the message caught up with her, almost a second after she’d read it.
Direction troops? WTF?
No time to figure that out. Taransay slammed the kit shut and passed it back to the robots.
them the coordinates of the Locke module.
Forget security now. The landers must be almost here. Presumably the Locke module had received the message hours ago—but of course, they had no way of communicating it to her. They would now be making what preparations they could. Possibly they had mastered downloading to the frames. If so, they had weapons—one machine gun almost out of ammo, and three kiddy-sized rifles. Not much of an arsenal against forty heavily armed attackers. But with defender’s advantage and guerrilla tactics—albeit against troops trained and practised in exactly those tactics, in this life and the last—who could tell?
Her own rifle at the ready, Taransay skirmished from tree trunk to tree trunk back to the edge of the forest, and peered into the glare of the now higher but still low exosun.
And there they were. Two pairs of black dots, above the horizon and sinking fast.
Then, a flash. Another flash. And then there were two black dots, still coming her way. Two trails of black smoke drifted down behind them.
Taransay remembered what had happened to the cargo lander a long day and night ago, and the flying jellyfish she’d seen rising this very dawn.
Three times is enemy action.
The planet, or the landscape, or some unknown thing within them was defending itself.
Or defending the module, and her.
She looked at the flickering blue glow on her right arm.
Now it was around her waist, too, and both ankles.
She watched the descent for a moment longer. Now the black triangles were clear, and converging. They would land on the water. That would slow them down, but not by much.
She shouldered her rifle and sprinted between the trees, fleet as a deer. The laden bearer bots bounded after her like hounds.
The real chase began before she’d gone two kilometres. She’d turned her radar off—it was too blatant a beacon—so the first she knew of the pursuit was a flash overhead, just above the canopy. Her reaction was snappy enough to get a good sniff of the light from the small explosion and a swift scoping of the debris. Fullerenes, biomarkers, methane and oxygen; falling rotor gears and scorched tatters of polycarbonate ribbon and chitin. Quick deduction: a small, fast surveillance drone had collided with one of the floating jellyfish or the buzzing little rotary mats, with a bang.
That wouldn’t easily happen twice, she guessed. Flight software updates were no doubt being applied this second. And grateful as she was to her blind guardian angel of the forest, her probable location was now very likely pinpointed.
She stopped. The four bearer bots lolloped up and halted, almost but not quite tumbling over each other and their own legs. No time for sentimentality: the mindlessly loyal machines were now more useful as decoys than for portage. She sent them off in four different directions, on randomly circuitous routes that would eventually, if they were lucky, converge on the module. The instructions didn’t include the location of the module; they just guaranteed that they would blunder into its range, where they would be electronically lassoed by default. It was the best she could do.
Off they went, in every direction but backwards. She ran on. The blue glow was bright now, in the dark beneath the efficient leaf cover, and its tracery spreading. She spared her glances at its progress across her frame to once every hundred seconds, and in those intervals it grew visibly. It was as if she were being slowly covered by blue hairline cracks.
Not a good look, Rizzi.
Would the glow make her more conspicuous? Hard to tell. Looked at objectively, the light it gave off was very faint, certainly fainter than the inevitable heat signature of the frame. For all she knew, its pattern might even work as camouflage, breaking up her outline amid the dapple.
And all such considerations were outweighed by its advantage in telling her where to go. Again, she didn’t know how she knew, or how it knew what she wanted to do. But she let its artificial instinct, if that was what it was, guide her steps.
At a basalt outcrop that jutted three metres above the forest floor, and was itself thick with plant growth, her impulse told her to ascend and hide. This she did, and ended up prone on the tiny rugged summit, peering through stalks and fronds that she’d pulled around and over her. Rifle at her shoulder, covering the way she’d come. She was still ahead of the pursuit. For how long? Minutes, she guessed. Hectoseconds.
Time to think, when you can think ten times faster than you could in the flesh.
She had no idea what she was up against. Hadn’t the Direction, Carlos, the freebots and the crazy Axle crowd in Arcane done a deal to fight together against the Rax? Why would the Direction send forty troops, evidently committed enough to go into action after half their number had been blown out of the sky? What were the troops here to do? What did they intend to do with her? Destroy her? Capture her? Destroy or capture the module? Carlos must be as baffled as she was, or there would have been some explanation in his message.
The frame was not a combat frame, but it had—as she’d found in the bizarre fight around the module back when it was hurtling through space towards SH-17—plenty of combat-capable features. If it came to a fight she had the rifle, a dozen clips of standard ammunition and a glass knife. Not much, but better than nothing. And whatever help the glow could give. So long as she wasn’t deluding herself—or it was deluding her—about what it could do.
Using radar, sonar, or lidar could betray her location. But passive reception—sight across a broad spectrum, hearing, the spectroscopic sense of smell, gravimetry and radio waveband scanning—she could safely use, and did.
Encrypted chatter at five hundred metres. Sweeping her focus from side to side, she triangulated the hotspots. Twenty, spread out a kilometre to either side of her and moving forward at a rapid clip. Some were ahead, some behind, in a shallow W formation, those at the extreme flanks furthest forward. None were haring off after her decoy bots.
Fuck, they were good. This was a skirmish line well adapted to the terrain. They moved only a little more slowly than her enhanced running. Now the five at the mid-point of the line were only three hundred metres away. She wanted to slip down the far side of the rock and outrun them, but the inexplicable impulses that urged her actions told her firmly to stay put.
The flanks passed her on either side, well out of sight. If they closed around her she’d be surrounded. They pressed on. All she’d seen of the fighters so far was dots on her overlays.
Seconds later, she saw them for real. One came out of a clump of trees fifty metres away, heading straight for her. She glimpsed another a hundred metres to that one’s right.
With short legs, broad torsos, long arms and a shallow dome for a head, they bounded along like chimps. Upright, they’d be about one and a half metres tall. The frames were sleek and black, with laser cupolas like bulging shoulder muscles and machine guns on their forearms. Her firmware had the type catalogued as 2GCM: fighting machines for a two-gravity planet.
Vulnerabilities? None to a rifle slug.
Taransay flattened against the rock as the fighting machine hurtled towards it. She had about as much chance against this thing as a vervet against a baboon. Just as it seemed about to charge straight into the outcrop like a headless rugby tackler it rose to its full height, arms up, and jumped. The hands came down on either side of her, the feet swung by above her. Down it crashed on the other side and onward it rushed.
In the hundred seconds during which she lay still and watched the zigzag line of fighters pass by her entirely, Taransay had plenty of time to study the 2GCM’s specs. Its senses were as formidable as its weaponry. No way, no fucking way would it have missed a frame and a rifle right in front of it and then right under its iron arse. Its gravimeter by itself would have spotted the anomaly as it swung over her.
She rolled over and sat up. The tracery of blue lines was now all over her frame. As far as she knew, invisibility cloaking was still impossible. What was just about possible
, she tried to convince herself, was hacking of one frame’s processing by another.
It was also possible that the Direction troops weren’t interested in her at all, and she had simply been ignored.
Neither was a possibility she intended to count on.
She projected the path taken by the pursuit, if pursuit it had been. It would take them straight to the Locke module. There was no point in breaking her radio silence. The module’s occupants would have received the warning before she had. They might have by now succeeded in downloading to the three repaired frames—which, if hers was anything to go by, would have some unexpected features. They had three rifles with ammunition, and the machine gun, with almost none.
Not enough.
She visualised a route that would flank the skirmish line by about a kilometre on its left, and held that visualisation for a couple of seconds longer than necessary. Then she climbed down from the outcrop and set off at a run. The terrain here was rougher than she was used to, the tree cover more broken. The outcrop she’d lain on was one of many. They were thoroughly weathered, the hard rock split and splintered, the breccia mingled with millennia of ash falls to form soil that sustained small plants and buzzing swarms of tiny flying mats. Underfoot, the mulch often gave way to fresh growth of low plants analogous to grass but quite unlike it in shape, more shield than blade, and to bare patches of basalt worn level.
On and on she ran, diagonally upward on a gentle slope. The gradient was barely noticeable. She had no plan beyond getting ahead of the advance without being detected and taking what opportunity she could to slow them down. A notion of setting a boulder rolling and crashing faded: the slope wasn’t steep enough, and precariously balanced erratics had been so far conspicuous by their absence from the landscape. And why should she expect them? Maybe she was just used to areas that had undergone recent glaciation. If ice had been here in the past million years or so, the surface effects had long been erased by the shorter cycles of vulcanism.
