by Ken MacLeod
Taransay was about to repeat the process for the far trickier detachment of the fusion drive when Locke’s calm voice spoke in all their heads:
Taransay scrambled down just as the next frame slithered out of the assembler. It got to its feet, walked across to the ladder, climbed up and vanished into the download slot. Nine seconds later, it came down again. It was Maryam Karzan.
This made sense. Den had no combat experience, but was a good shot.
Beauregard paused, as if nonplussed.
Taransay pointed out.
Taransay ran for the trees. She had an unaccountable impulse to look up.
Overhead, gasbags by the hundred drifted by.
Nice try, she thought. Nice try, planet or ecosystem or forest or whatever you are. But against a fusion torch landing, it’s all so much spit in the wind.
She didn’t expect whatever she was communicating with to understand that.
Carlos dropped the outside view and the comms for a moment to think. He was huddled in the lander’s drop pod, clamped to the side and with a 2GCM frame and a stash of weaponry jammed in beside him. The situation lights on the frame and the weapons dimly illuminated the space, like a hotel room with too many devices on standby.
By coincidence or design, Madame Golding picked that moment to manifest. Out of nowhere, a business-suited sprite stood on Carlos’s left knee. His cramped posture placed her eye level on his, and put her right in his face.
Credit where it’s due, Carlos allowed; this was intimidating.
He affected insouciance.
This wasn’t quite the whole truth. He wanted to help people who had been his friends and comrades. And he wanted to give Nicole Pascal a piece of his mind.
said Madame Golding.
snapped Madame Golding. She mimed a weary sigh.
Madame Golding gave him a look of helpless severity and vanished, leaving Carlos with a pang of regret.
He hadn’t meant to be sarcastic.
The Direction fleet hit atmosphere long before Carlos’s lander made orbit. Carlos’s own fleet followed ninety-seven seconds later. Mentally, Carlos was right with them.
The ten aerospace carriers went in first, along a thousand-kilometre arc. The five aerospace fighters on each carrier launched one by one as the carriers decelerated towards the ground, leaving echelons at different altitudes. As soon as the first aerospace fighter linked comms with the lander, Carlos saw that the Direction fleet had followed a similar but smarter strategy.
High in the stratosphere, thirty aerospace fighters had already launched from each of the first two of the Direction’s enormous carriers. They wheeled like a vortex, and about half of them dived. The unladed carriers themselves were now screaming out of the atmosphere to low SH-0 orbit.
The four other carriers, meantime, were still decelerating. Carlos assumed they carried troops. Their predicted points of arrival—or impact, if something went wrong—formed a square a kilometre on the side, centred on the likeliest location of the Locke module.
Christ, that was tight!
One would land upslope from the module, close to the volcano’s crater. Carlos set three aerospace fighters to intercept it, as the easiest target and most urgent threat. His own five troop carriers were already under attack. Missiles streaked from the lowest of the diving fighters, still thousands of metres above. Carlos didn’t even try sending an instruction to evade. Combat at this speed was decided in milliseconds.
Carlos’s troop carriers tweaked their deceleration. Two dropped, three rose, relative to their expected positions. One of the rising ones exploded. The other two of these would land tens of kilometres off target. The two that had dropped made it to the ground, about two kilometres either side of the Locke module’s site.
The fighters Carlos had sent after the enemy’s troop carriers had a slightly better outcome. One was hit, the other two achieved near-misses—enough to divert the landing straight into the active crater. The two fighters were shot down moments later.
By then, all the surviving troop carriers on both sides were on the ground. One of Carlos’s off-target ones toppled on landing in the jungle. As far as he could see, most of the troops made it out. He didn’t have time to follow what happened next. The descending waves of Direction aerospace fighters crashed in amongst his flights. A maelstrom of snarling dogfights ensued.
Their ferocity was complicated and worsened by a secondary peril. Scores of what Ri
zzi had called “gas-containing aerial invertebrates” floated up from below. All the contending craft were forced to evade the gasbags as well as their immediate foes, with dire consequences all round. At least two fighters collided with one directly. At the speed they were going, the collisions and explosions damaged them enough to send them spinning down to the ground. One recovered, only to be shot down.
The attrition was brutal. Within a hundred seconds, Carlos was down to twenty-two craft, the Direction to thirty-seven. At this point, as if by mutual agreement, both sides broke off. The remaining craft fled, to make perilous vertical landings between and beneath the trees. From here on in, Carlos reckoned, it was a matter of which side’s air force got the jump on the other. Carlos directed the troops who had landed off target to seek out the nearest enemy craft, and if possible destroy them on the ground.
Carlos’s lander fired retros in a brutal braking manoeuvre. It had to make one orbit before entry. As he swung around the superhabitable planet, data uplinked to orbiting microsats trickled in. The Direction’s troops were converging on the module from three points. Those of Carlos’s—two squads of twenty—that had landed within two kilometres of the module rushed to intercept. The first exchanges of fire began. For the next few kiloseconds, Carlos could only watch.
He switched his attention to the modular cloud.
The former components of the space station, which had been a vast, entangled wreath a thousand metres in diameter, had long since spread across thousands of kilometres. The eight hundred and fifty freebot troops of Carlos’s corporate army were likewise dispersed, across the many manufacturing modules in which they and their equipment had been built. The Direction’s clone army was more concentrated, around the few law agencies that the Direction could rely on.
Both forces were now in an awkward dance of positions, with scooters, transfer tugs and carriers darting hither and thither. The AIs on both sides made and countered each other’s diversionary moves. Now and then a surprise was effected: here a comms node seized, there a law agency left vulnerable as a bait becoming a sudden focus of a swarm of fighters.
But the AIs were capable of estimating the likely consequences of any given clash. Both sides took predictable outcomes as read, and advanced, consolidated or withdrew accordingly. Actual exchanges of fire were rare: so far, Carlos’s side had lost twenty-eight fighters and three scooters, to the Direction’s seventeen and two.
The Direction carrier headed for SH-17 was still on an orbital trajectory, not torching. Carlos had no doubt that it would light up its fusion drive the moment mutual deterrence—and Madame Golding’s diplomatic dickering—failed.
As Madame Golding had acknowledged, the fight out in the cloud was cold war. The hot battle was on the ground.
Taransay ran between trees under a firework sky. Flying wreckage stripped leaves behind and around her. At the seventh flash overhead a warning impulse that no longer needed a voice in her head to express it, made her stop. The light from the explosion stank of methane and steel. She threw herself flat, to sled forward on the slippery mess of mats and mulch. The ground shook from an impact just before the bang clapped down. She waited a moment, then walked forward. She found a delta-winged machine about four metres long embedded nose-down in the forest floor. Leaves and branches scythed by its passage were still crashing around it as they slipped through the canopy that had briefly held them.
She skirted it warily. Two missiles were slung beneath the one wing she could see. On the nacelle, a hatch popped. Taransay dived for the underbrush and peered out at the wreck. A head emerged, then the rest of a standard frame, to slide head first down the crumpled fuselage. It hit the ground and somersaulted, then bounced to its feet. The blank visored face swung this way and that. Scans flicked over Taransay like a snake’s tongue.
Then they flicked back, and focused. After a moment, the visor turned away. She guessed the frame had detected her, but mistaken her for native life and her metallic components for debris.
The fighter turned its attention to the flying machine. With an agility that rivalled her own, it scrambled back up the fuselage and reached into the socket. The two missiles dropped from the wing, with thuds that made her flinch. The fighter slid down again, hefted a missile to each shoulder and trudged off the way Taransay had come, towards the module. For all she knew, it was following her own track.
Until now, she’d had no idea which side this fallen pilot was fighting for.
Now she had. She could not be entirely sure, but seeing as it was trying to deliver missiles to the module on foot, hostile was the way to bet.
She flashed a warning to Beauregard, got up and ran after the fighter. Fleet of foot, she gained on her foe in seconds. The fighter whirled and dropped the missiles. One of them began to fizz. Taransay threw herself face down. The missile scorched past her at an altitude of centimetres and burst against the first tree in its path. Fortunately for her the tree was twelve metres away. The shock wave lifted her and slammed her down. A red-hot fragment seared through her right thigh.
Before the pain could kick in, she was back on her feet. The pilot had been blown head over heels, but was up almost as fast as she was. She ran full tilt and surprised herself and her target with a flying leap, to hit the frame’s thorax feet first.
Down they both went. Taransay sprawled headlong, the enemy fell supine. She tried to get up, but her right knee buckled. Pain stabbed upward. Grey-green liquid spurted. She clapped one hand to the wound and with the other wrenched the knife from around her neck, and lunged as the pilot sat up. In a moment she had her free arm around its neck and her good foot pressed in its back. The pilot stood up, heaving her weight like a sack, and grabbed her wrist. She let go of her bleeding thigh and made a grab of her own. Strength was pitted against strength. Her trapped wrist began to crack.
It was far from clear that she’d win the fight. The frame was unarmed, but her knife would do it no damage unless she could wedge it in a joint of the structure. Of the few vulnerabilities of a frame, that was an outside chance. More likely, the stone would break first. She tried anyway. The fighter swayed, as Taransay swung her weight to try and get it off balance.
Then she heard a burst of machine-gun fire from the side. The frame’s chest almost disintegrated under her. She fell, and rolled. A 2GCM bounded in front of her and stood over her. The muzzle of one of its arm-mounted machine guns steamed in the damp air.
Two more 2GCMs emerged from among the trees. In the distance, others swarmed over the crashed flying machine, stripping it.
Taransay sat up, clutching her thigh, and looked at the three formidable combat frames. Blue lines were already spreading from their feet and hands.
Madame Golding didn’t need to manifest her avatar on the surface of SH-17 to talk to Carlos Inc. But her virtual presence would certainly impress, and might intimidate, any fighters and freebots who saw it. So manifest she did. She strolled amid the flaming wreckage of the launch catapult and the exploding ruins of the processing plant. She found the giant fighting machine hunkered down behind a wall.
Its head swivelled and weapons bristled at her approach. Then it seemed to recognise her, and stood down its armour.
Carlos Inc. was obviously not Carlos, but the corporation seemed to have retained something of its owner’s dry manner.
Anot
her fuel tank erupted. The Carlos Inc. fighting machine blasted missiles skyward in response.
Madame Golding outlined the deal she offered. Carlos Inc. listened.
The situation on the ground was becoming increasingly confusing. Comms kept switching into impenetrable codes. Every so often, sporadic skirmishes flared. As Carlos watched, from halfway around the world and preparing for the descent stage to begin, two aerospace fighters rose from the jungle and flew at treetop height towards the module. Missiles from the ground shot them down.
Carlos braced for the entry retros.
The juxtaposition was so unexpected that for a moment Carlos thought the feed had been hacked. He had just over a second to decide, before the retros fired and descent became irrevocable. If he aborted this landing he’d have to make another orbit. Not that his presence on the ground was urgently required, but if this was a feint he was a sitting duck.
Half a second later, Madame Golding popped up again on his knee. Behind her, looking over her shoulder, was another sprite: Nicole. Carlos frantically checked his firewalls. Everything about the message and the manifestations was sound.
