by Ken MacLeod
Now and then the lie of the land took her line of sight above the treetops, and she saw the volcano summit, its smoke rising in morning exosunlight. The past night’s small eruption, simmering. It called to mind the first surprise after the module’s landing, or impact: the mat that had engulfed it and rolled it bodily out of the path of an advancing flow of lava. At first the action had seemed intelligent and purposeful, even friendly; later a mindless urge to investigate new molecular machinery, the blind groping of an organism randy for novelty; but now the manifestly useful effects of the glow, and the collisions of flying jellyfish with incoming landers, drew Taransay to revisit the first speculation.
She drew level with the furthest advance on the left flank of the skirmish line about ten kilometres from the module. They were still heading straight for it, maintaining their formation, the shallow W now a scrawled wave.
The dot that flagged the nearest bounding fighter stopped moving. After a few seconds, the others stopped, too. A babble of encrypted exchanges followed. Then the remaining nineteen began to move again. The central advance party moved ahead, the rest fell in to form two diagonal lines behind, turning the shaky W into a tight inverted V.
Taransay waited. The stationary dot continued transmitting, in diminishing intensity and length and at increasing intervals. The effect was like fading cries for help. Taransay dismissed this impression but decided to investigate.
Something had made the fighter stop. It behoved her to find out what.
The trees were closer together down the slope, the canopy filtering out most of the exosunlight. Taransay’s visual acuity seamlessly cranked up to compensate. She found the 2GCM in a rare clear patch, as if spotlighted. Only the shoulders and dome of the frame were visible. The long knuckle-walking arms, the short sturdy legs and most of the torso were engulfed by a two-metre-wide mat. Mat and frame together rolled on the ground, but never got far, like a steel ball trapped by a magnet. The mat had two ragged scorched holes in it, and the ground and nearby tree trunks and branches were scored and scarred by machine-gun and laser fire.
Taransay took cover behind a tree. From there she could just about see the trapped 2GCM by radar and sonar. She hailed the fighter.
The self-styled soldier glyphed her a laugh.
Interesting.
She stood and looked at a nickel-iron and carbon-composite metamaterial dome and a pair of mighty shoulders protruding above the surface of a hairy blue-green ball that shot out bulges in odd places, as if knees and elbows were punching at it from the inside. A haunted killer robot trapped in an alien organism.
And it was scared of her?
Scared, and armed. She stepped back.
Well, that was that explained.
the soldier said.
Taransay could think of one way the fighter could destroy her. She recalled the exact locations of the sudden bumps and bulges and edged around so the gun-bearing forearms were pointed away from her.
This was not at all the right thing to say. The ball of mat and machine convulsed again, and rolled. Then it stopped, as if giving up. The soldier said something inarticulate.
There didn’t seem much to say to that. Perhaps he, or she, really was suffering in ways she couldn’t imagine. Taransay took the opportunity of the hiatus to check the location of the other dots. Four more had stopped moving. The rest were converging again, and tighter. Their arrow-shaped formation was still headed straight for the module.
Then, as she watched, the dot at the front stopped. The two behind moved towards it, and merged. Then they disappeared. There was a flash far off, bright enough to shine a pinprick glare through the trees. A couple of seconds later, a heavy crump.
But she didn’t need to. She could smell the light.
She was answered by the roar of machine guns. She threw herself flat as the balled-up mat and its captive rolled around spraying bullets like some deadly Catherine wheel. It stopped when the magazines ran out. In the distance the same sound was repeated like an echo, in seemingly endless salute. It wasn’t an echo. One by one the dots vanished. The soldier she’d been talking to returned no pings.
Warily, when all was silent, she walked over. The mat had new holes in it, but seemed otherwise unaffected. It continued to encroach on what was left of the frame. Taransay scanned it and saw the arms bent inward to the chest, which was riddled with the criss-cross fire from the two muzzles. The processor, deeply buried in the torso, had been quite thoroughly destroyed.
Funny how one never felt that inside your chest was where you were. You were still in your head, where you’d always been.
There seemed little further point in maintaining radio silence. She called Beauregard.
She told him what the soldier had said.
Taransay checked the locations of her four bearer bots.
She was already running.
Beauregard was unloading the third of the bearer bots to arrive when he heard a warning from Chun, who was sitting on top of the module with the machine gun and keeping watch.
Beauregard checked his memories.
Beauregard and Zaretsky flattened to the trampled, mat-crawled, slippery ground on either side of the module, under its overhang, their toy-like new rifles trained on the unseen advance. A rumble from the volcano made the ground quiver under their frames. Beauregard eyed a circular slithering thing a centimetre from his visor with distaste. The movements of its cilia irritated him like those of an insect fluttering at a windowpane. The colours and forms around him were still making him feel as if nauseous. He had no guts to be nauseated with. Yet the feeling remained, a distaste of the mind. It must be metaphysical, like with that guy in Sartre’s novel looking at a tree root. The otherness of things, the thingness of things. Christ, he’d have given anything to see a tree root, gnarled and ancient, crusted with lichen, crawling with tiny red spiders. A worm. A maggot. A moth butting at a light.
Something blue, bipedal and about half a metre high stepped from between the tall plants beyond the crater. It wasn’t a frame, but it was a humanoid shape. Beauregard zoomed his vision. It was like a naked woman, utterly unselfconscious of her nakedness. But this was no lissome Eve. It was squat, every feature compressed as if squashed down by a heavy hand from above. Like an image of a naked woman in a distorting mirror.
Beauregard had the presence of mind to stretch the image vertically. It became a blue full-length portrait of Rizzi, smiling, looking puzzled. He let the distortion go, and her image snapped back like an elastic band to a misshapen dwarf.
Her lips moved. Her voice boomed, distorted by the dense atmosphere. At the same time, but ten times faster, the radio-telepathic words sounded in his mind:
He’d already seen how far its blue lines were spreading.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Per Ardua Ad Astra (“But the Stars Are Hard”)
The bulk carrier was 1.9 kiloseconds out from SH-119. Half an hour, roughly. To those of its complement not still training in the sim it would feel like five hours. They had a lot to do and not enough time to do it. With every second that passed without the awaited signal from the freebots, the window for finalising the plan narrowed. Newton felt the ETA creeping up on him, like a distant baying of dogs soon to be snapping at his heels.
Jax copied him and the rest of the command group—Voronov, Salter, Paulos and Rillieux, with Baser on the side as freebot liaison—into the telescope feed. Its input came from sensors liberally scattered across the mesh that held the cargo together. Software stitched the images and cross-haired the area of interest. Even so, it was hard to make out what made that particular speckled grey patch of regolith different from any other.
Then Newton spotted a tiny flash in one of the speckles. A thirty-centimetre-wide hole, with an even smaller round thing moving inside. Newton conjecturally sharpened the object’s image to a dish aerial, held by a robot partly out of sight.
A second dragged by.
nounced.
The dish aerial promptly vanished. Not promptly enough. As Jax pulled the viewpoint back, a spark shot from the upper left quadrant and down the hole. A bright flash and a small eruption of debris followed.
Four Rax scooters were in criss-crossing close orbit around SH-119. In that feeble gravitational pull, even close orbit was slow. The moonlet’s own slower rotation carried the surface beneath them on wavy courses. From a viewpoint down there, the effect would be of permanent and erratic overflight. To Newton, as to any fighter in a frame, the entire orrery could be grasped as straightforwardly as the movement of hands on a clock. To a mining bot, with its quite different specialisations, predicting the passages of the orbiters would be as tedious as it would be pointless—one or more would be in the sky at all times.
Jax zoomed in again. The hole was now wider and a lot less circular. The slow fountain of debris included alloys and synthetic molecules.
He glyphed her a warning smile.
Voronov twirled a virtual hand in an abstract space. The message unfolded.
The message was a lot of information for a one-second blip, but otherwise sparse and stark: a 3-D map of SH-119’s surface and tunnels, voids and work areas. It reminded Newton of a dusty acrylic museum model of a human brain with red dye to limn the blood vessels. Superimposed was a snapshot of Rax deployment. A hemisphere of control extended from the main port inward to the fusion factory, and an inverted bush of more tenuous forces expanded in from a smaller entry point almost exactly opposite. Overlaid on the lot were the broad hexagons of Rax surface surveillance: pinned by a dozen or so guard posts, connected by scores of threads of comms relays and snooping devices, and the whole lot watched over from the slow orbiters. The surveillance seemed like overkill until you reflected that the surface area was around three hundred square kilometres, and highly uneven: a fair-sized county and a rugged one at that.
