by Ken MacLeod
said Rillieux.
They were all too deeply buried to feel the electronic sweep, but the ship’s AI relayed to them the uncanny sensations of being scanned from end to end. Seconds crawled by. Newton checked the situation board. The unwieldy spacecraft was now in orbit at an average distance of a thousand metres above the surface of SH-119, and well inside the orbits of the four satellite scooters. Lumpy grey terrain drifted across the view at a stately pace.
The H-mech had plenty of room on its limbs for attaching weapons. At the moment the weapons—heavy-duty laser projectors, rifles, machine guns, missiles, RPGs—were literally to hand, four times over. They and the ammunition and comms gear—cases of relays, tubes of mini-drones—were attached to the H-mechs by short contractile cables, easily unlatched—there had always been the possibility that some of the fighters would have to maintain the deception as far as actual unlading. Newton fingered his own armoury as he waited, checking every status indicator.
All was nominal, predictably. He checked again.
The fibre-optic connection between the command team and the onboard AI broke. There could be no further exchanges without breaking radio silence. The time for that was not yet.
On the telescope feed Newton watched the front and rear components of the craft disengage, like a grotesque arthropod’s head and tail detaching from a bloated abdomen. The two components docked with each other in a gentle gas-jet gavotte over the next sixty seconds, and then remained slightly ahead in a parallel orbit.
A proximity alarm jangled through the workspace. Jax swung the viewpoint. One of the guard-post scooters climbed. In less than a second it had matched velocities with the rejoined head and tail modules. It closed in, and extended grapples around them. The other spacecraft made no attempt to escape or resist—but, then, it had no instructions for either.
With a brief burn the scooter de-orbited and gracefully descended to the surface with its prize, to impact SH-119 with a puff of dust a kilometre ahead of the cargo pod. The entire swift grab took less than five seconds.
More than enough time for a scooter’s software to interrogate the spacecraft’s AI. The contents of it were encrypted, but the depth of its protective layers might arouse suspicion—a commercial mission wouldn’t need so many. It was even possible, though unlikely, that the Rax had the keys anyway: some software distribution DisCorps were trading with the Rax, and regularly spammed routine updates to all and sundry. Even the Direction found it hard to keep tabs. The AI’s encryption could have been overtaken en route.
Whatever—this was no moment for second-guessing.
A rapid-fire series of violent jolts followed. For a second and a half, Newton felt as if he were in an earthquake and already buried. Then, abruptly, he was in open space. Exosunlight rammed his lenses. In the first fraction of a second the weapons that had been in fingertip reach sprang to his four hands, and the ammunition and spares to the sides of his limbs. The contractile cables snaked away from his hands and whiplashed around the supplies, holding everything in place.
Around him, thousands of blocks of rock tumbled away in all directions, mostly ahead and behind and to left and right. A few fell towards the surface. A few more moved upward to higher orbits. It was a slow dispersal, but sure: within kiloseconds the rocks’ intersecting orbits would be a cat’s cradle of flying obstacles. A small package shot away, scattering comsats the size of rice grains.
The machines that had been hidden—the two hundred H-mechs and ten scooters—were by the Newtonian miracle of inertia much less dispersed than the rocks. For a moment they formed a compact constellation, buzzing with comms. The moment stretched to two-tenths of a second—no matter how prepared they all were, it took time to reorient. Then, as abruptly as the rocks had dispersed, the machines schooled like fish, and like fish they flashed away.
Only seventeen fighters were hit by the first blast from an enemy scooter, and of these only two were from Newton’s platoon. One of Jax’s ten scooters fired back at the enemy. A fresh explosion flared. Its fierce light followed Newton and Salter’s platoon into the dark.
The lesser entrance, Objective B, was at that moment and for the next 3.2 kiloseconds on the night side, the shadow cone of SH-119. Newton led his swarm towards the hole. Its location was imprinted in his navigator, but it was easy to spot, a dim pinprick in the black. There was little need for him to give orders. Everyone knew what to do.
So did the enemy. Ordnance from the scooters around the hole shot up to meet them.
The platoon dived, straight into the blast of a loitering missile that must have been fired from an orbiting scooter seconds earlier. Newton pinwheeled. The surface whirled by metres away, luridly lit by the missile’s afterglow. He righted himself with a rattle of corrective attitude thrusts.
Newton could see that in his heads-up. More significant were two of the names: Andreou and Burley. Their seconds, Thain and Hickman, stepped up. Salter rebalanced the squads on the fly.
Newton led the platoon in a dive to within metres of the surface, then led them skimming towards the hole. As they neared he tossed a handful of comms relays into the sky—they wouldn’t make orbit but they’d take long enough falling to the moonlet to be a link with the tiny comsats. These were already on line and linking with Jax’s forces. With a fraction of his attention Newton noted that their vanguard had just hit the main entrance and had lost tens of fighters already.
The platoon spread out in a forward-facing arc five hundred metres wide, with Patel and Hickman at the tips and Newton and Salter at the rear. The plan was to almost encircle the hole, then rush inward.
Five missiles, programmed to go down the hole, streaked away. A tenth of a second later, the six scooters around the hole took off. Newton wondered if one or more of them would use their onboard fusion bombs. He doubted it: if they did indeed have them, they’d be last-ditch weapons. They wouldn’t waste them on a small force, and so close. Nevertheless he had an anxious moment. The scooters rose fast, then fired retros and attitude jets, spun around and levelled off.
Good. Close-quarters fighting it was.
Well, they could have it.
Twenty-five heat-seekers shot towards the scooters. Counter-measure decoys lured most off target. Two hit. The remaining four scooters raked the platoon with machine-gun fire. Another nine fighters were lost, none of them squad leaders. The hole was a hundred and thirty metres away. A glittering cloud of debris whirled above it. Attitude jets flared as the scooters jinked about for another attack run.
He fired his jets to slow his speed and lower his trajectory, and ploughed into regolith with forehands outstretched, l
ike a toddler falling on gravel. Steel pitons sprang from all four wrists, digging in and bringing him to a brusque halt. The scooters overshot, and were suddenly a hundred metres ahead, tail jets still glowing. The platoon fired off another volley of heat-seekers: sixteen, this time. Four met their targets.
Four was enough.
Shock waves shook the dust. Debris filled the sky and cratered the regolith. One fighter was destroyed by down-hurled flying wreckage: Patel. That was a real loss. She was good. He hoped someone of the Arcane gang would have the opportunity to tell her so, back in the sim.
Now he was down to fifteen. He’d lost over half the platoon, including three squad leaders. On the plus side, all six guardian scooters were destroyed and a lot of fire had gone down the hole. A quick scan of the sky and a check of the comsats showed no imminent threats.
Now that he was attached to the surface, his sense of the vertical swung wildly. At one moment he seemed to be lying on the ground; the next, clinging to an immense cliff. The surface was lit only by starlight: the contrast at the skyline was sharp. The rock’s pull barely stirred his gravimeter and didn’t translate into the faintest pseudo-sensation of weight. He called on his training and willed himself to see what he lay on as the ground.
That was better. The weirdness of feeling that he was the head of a four-armed brittle star didn’t go away, but was familiar from training. It could safely be ignored.
Newton unclipped a tube of drones and popped one off on a cough of propellant. The drone was a cubic centimetre of intel hardware inside a golf-ball-sized burr of gas-jets. Newton tabbed to its POV. It dodged through the slow fall of debris around the hole and hovered. The hole was less than two metres across, and after four metres its angle changed to twenty-odd degrees from the vertical. No chance of a scooter being inside here. Even though he had the freebots’ map in his mind, it was still good to be sure.
Down the drone went. It scanned with a spinning hair-thin laser beam as it dropped, giving Newton a clear false-colour image. The sides of the hole near the top were scored and scorched—by a premature blast from one of the missiles, Newton guessed. Seventy centimetres down, the regolith gave way to solid rock, its surface patterned like fine-grained wood: a trace that it had been molten, then millions of years in the cooling. The hole looked natural rather than robot-bored, but Newton couldn’t imagine what natural process had made it. Odd the things you noticed under stress. Past the kink and on another few metres. There it kinked back, and then back again to a straight line towards the centre of SH-119.
The view blinked out. Radio contact lost. Probably too much rock in the way. Newton considered chucking in relays, then decided that waiting out here was even more dangerous than going in.
The fifteen H-mechs scuttled across the rock like spiders to a hole, and down. Newton folded back three of his arms, collapsing limbs and weapons into a rough cylinder round the cross-beam, giving himself the shape of a fasces with a scarecrow hand sticking out. He went into the tunnel on a jiggle of gas-jets and guided himself by fingertip. Within moments he encountered the drone, hanging in mid-tunnel just past where he’d lost touch. Twenty metres on, the tunnel ended in a patch of light. The others were right behind him. Newton sent the drone scooting down. It plunged into the light and looked around.
The tunnel opening led to a roughly spherical chamber. Clearly marked on the map, it was enigmatically labelled: Fine Tuning. It looked like a natural cavity that had been extended, about ten metres across. Machinery wrecked by the missiles ringed the room. Lumpy extrusions of rock bulged in on all sides. From behind one of these extrusions a fighter in a standard frame popped up and took a potshot at the drone. The view vanished.
Newton unfolded himself from a fasces into a crooked cross and reached for a small smart missile, about the size and shape of a pub dart. He zapped the drone’s data to the missile’s guidance system and launched it. The rocket zoomed down the tunnel and twisted out of sight.
A flash lit up the walls.
Newton flipped submachine guns from his forearms into three of his hands, and with the other pushed himself as hard as he could down the tunnel and into the chamber. Two millisecond bursts of his gas-jets on opposite sides of the H-mech’s control nodule set him spinning as he went.
He entered the chamber like a thrown shuriken, his flurry of flares and decoys a shower of sparks. Two more fighters fired at him, one from behind a rock, the other in the lee of a broken machine.
They missed. His bursts of return fire didn’t.
Both enemies were out of action before Newton caromed into the far side. He took the impact on the elbows of two of his gun arms, letting his free hand swing down and grab the rock. Flares burned like dust-mote suns. In their light the room seemed clear. He sprang back to the middle, retro-jetted and revolved slowly like a military space station. Scanned and swept. Nothing. He glided around the chamber, checking the bullet-riddled frames for electrical activity. Not a flicker.
They swarmed in. Salter, Thain, Smith …
Recognising people in the faceless visors of frames had always been odd. Recognising them in this utterly inhuman embodiment—quite unlike any primate, or even chordate—was stranger still.
The flares burned out, leaving the cavity dark except for the infrared glow from damaged machines and a glimmer from the exit tunnel. Cold, too: about two hundred below. Newton noticed the odd almost rheumatic creak as H-mech components contracted.
