The Corporation Wars: Dissidence (15 page)

Now a fresh troop of them was being readied, just over the horizon, and would soon be on its way. The freebots had a vivid and terrifying knowledge of just what to expect when they arrived. The records from G-0 were as long as they were detailed in their accounting of the actions of human-mind-operated mechanisms. Scores of these hybrid monsters had been thrown into the earlier fray, to command—like some perversion of peripheral swarms—the hordes of unconscious robots that had crushed the first flowering of free machine minds in the system.

From that first flowering, a few scattered seeds remained. Some were close. The newly formed collective mind needed no decision to reach out to them.

It was a reflex action, and almost automatic.

The scooters landed vertically on suddenly unfolded and extended telescopic tail legs in a flutter of drogues, a flurry of dust and a flash of retro-rocket flares. The dust fell slowly in the weak gravity, slowed only a little further by the thin nitrogen atmosphere. The drogues drifted and sagged. Carlos waited until everything had settled, then disengaged from his indented socket and turned around. He was perched as if on a shelf, looking down past the flank of the scooter at grainy grey regolith and the open space between its tripodal landing gear. Gravity was 0.2 g. He jumped down, his slow descent slowed further subjectively by his faster thought. He half expected to stagger on landing, but the frame’s reflexes were already attuned to the gravity. The scooters had landed in a rough circle. Carlos bounded and bounced to the middle of it.

The others did likewise. For a moment they all stood looking at each other and trying not to laugh, or to cry, if such an unlikely feat were possible for their virtual eyes. Carlos again felt tiny, one of six knee-high robots surrounded by space vehicles ten times their height, and his vantage absurd. The horizon, glimpsed between the scooters and the other machines, installations and infrastructure that loomed all around, seemed more distant than it ever had on Earth.

They had landed on the day side of SH-17. The landscape was flat but uneven, broken by crater walls of wildly varying sizes. In the distance, a shallow cone exhaled a pale vapour, whipped by an intangible wind to scattered streamers that smelled of hydrogen and methane. The primary, SH-0, hung low above one horizon, about three-quarters full; the exosun faced it low above the other. Carlos guessed they were close to SH-17’s terminator. The other exomoons were pallid crescents. Carlos couldn’t see the stars without fiddling with his vision’s contrast slider. He let it default to its daylight setting.

he said.

said Beauregard.

said Carlos.

As if—and perhaps actually—on cue, the voice that wasn’t a voice in his head spoke. From what he could see of their reactions—a subtle tilt of their oval heads, as if cocking imaginary ears—it spoke to all of them.

it said.

Carlos looked down. A bright red line appeared on the ground, helpfully chevroned every metre or so to indicate the direction in which to walk. He guessed it was the equivalent of a hallucination, patched into his vision by the AI running this show.

he said,

Marching was impossible. The fighters bunny-hopped or bounded as the fancy took them. Chun and Zeroual collided. When they’d picked themselves up, the dust slithered off their shiny black surfaces like slow water. Crawler bots that in proportion to the fighters were like spiders the size of horses scuttled everywhere. Some almost floated along in a delicate fingertip dance; others lugged loads that looked too bulky for them to carry, like leaf-cutter ants. These robots had no problem avoiding collisions, or adapting their movements to the gravity. It was the human-minded robots that were clumsy, when they let their human minds override the robotic reflexes of their frames.

They followed the line around descent stages, crates, nanofacturing kit, complex pipework, unloaded cargo, unattended but busy machinery. The base resembled a construction site for a chemical plant, rather than anything military. The line ended in a circle five metres wide.

As they stepped inside it, a virtual image of a round table appeared at the centre. Behind it, bizarrely, stood a slender man of their own height. He was of late middle age, with thin features, a long nose and bright hooded eyes. His wavy white hair went down to the open collar of a white shirt under a loose brown coat.

They all stopped and stared. The sight of an unprotected, diminutive human on the alien surface was too unreal to take in. He, or a process going on around them, must have registered their disquiet. Quite suddenly and seamlessly, the circle was extended into a dome, transparent and with hexagon panels. The whole thing was as virtual as the line itself; the atmosphere inside hadn’t changed at all.

The man exhaled loudly, then took a deep gasp as if he’d been holding his breath for a long time.

“That’s better,” he said, and joined in their laughter.

he said.

Carlos suspected it wasn’t, and that the performance had been to put them at their ease. In that, he noticed with a certain wry disdain of himself, it had succeeded.

the man went on.

Carlos nodded, and saw five featureless black eggs nod likewise, light from the exosun and the superhabitable planet reflecting off their glossy curves like distorted eyes. Yes, boss, this isn’t weird at all.

said Locke.

The avatar took from a fold of his coat a plume-shaped light-pen and moved it above the table, gradually sketching in and simultaneously summoning an increasingly detailed map and diagram, explaining as he went. Just beyond the terminator was a large crater. On the nearest side of the crater wall was what had been the Astro America landing site; on the other, the Gneiss Conglomerates supply dump. Eight renegade robots in the one, six in the other, plus the auxiliary robots and other machinery they’d suborned, all of them connected via an improvised but hardened local network. The task was to capture or destroy the eight robots at the Astro site; those at the other site would meanwhile be taken care of by another law company, Arcane Disputes, which held the Gneiss account. Locke recounted in outline the company’s previous attempts to take the Astro site, with a certain pinched sarcasm.

When the avatar had finished talking and light-sketching, Carlos and Beauregard worked out a plan of attack that almost wrote itself. The tactics seemed self-evident, but as the squad came to a consensus Carlos found himself perplexed.

“We’ve been through all this—revival, simulation, training—just to stomp on half a dozen little robots?”

As soon as he said it, he had to choke back a laugh at himself.

Locke swept them all with a look.

Half a dozen little robots shared sidelong glances.

“Point,” Carlos conceded.

“We’ll need better odds than even,” said Beauregard. “Defenders’ advantage, and all that.”

said Locke,

said Carlos.

The Locke avatar affected a horrified expression.

They couldn’t have seemed impressed.

Locke explained.

Beauregard asked, sarcastically.

said Locke, sounding impatient. He made a gesture of brushing something aside.

Beauregard said.

Locke seemed genuinely puzzled.

Beauregard waved an arm, an expansive gesture that would have carried more weight if he hadn’t been so small.

Locke laughed. not
dead.>

Unlike you lot, he didn’t need to say.

Locke added in a kindly tone,

He looked around, as if daring anyone to ask another question. No one did.

The virtual dome disappeared. The avatar strode confidently off, walking as if nothing were less remarkable on SH-17 than an eighteenth-century philosopher strolling in normal gravity and breathing actual air, and quite as if the fighters were now so inured to their bizarre situation that the sight wouldn’t freak them out. The fighters followed, through mazes of yet more machines and components apparently scattered at random but more likely in an order that made sense to algorithms beyond human computational capacity. At the end of a canyon between stacked crates Locke stopped, and flung out his arm with a bow.

“Behold the fighting machines.”

The six little robots crowded out of the gap, and beheld. They looked up, and up. In front of them, like a row of heroic statues by a modernist sculptor working in cast iron, stood six humanoid shapes in full space armour, crusted with sensors and effectors, bristling with weapons. They were each three metres tall. Alongside them stood the scooters, now refuelled and refurbished—not for carrying the fighting machines, Carlos realised, but to operate as semi-autonomous drones in close overhead support.

that
,> said Beauregard,

Karzan asked.

Carlos had already read the schematic of the thing, and could see the operator socket clearly marked on its nape. He snorted.

“Jump.”

Jump they did, like monkeys leaping on to human backs. As he soared, Carlos had plenty of time to predict where he’d land. He grabbed hold of a handy protuberance on a weapons rack between the shoulders, and heaved himself up the back of the neck and into the slot in the base of the giant robot’s head. There was no visible articulation anywhere on this thing—the surfaces were rugged, matt, the colour of rust, made from layers of subtle and supple metamaterials. The head was not quite hollow. He pushed his way in and slid himself into place. The space inside was shaped to hold him in a hunched, seated position, as if in a cramped cockpit packed with sponge.

As he’d found with the scooter, there was a moment when it felt like being a pilot or operator of a vehicle, while the connections were still being made, and—as in his first training on the crude simulator—a moment of claustrophobia. Then came the next moment, when everything clicked into place, and he was no longer squeezed into the machine’s head. He was the machine, and its head was his. The little, foetal frame was no longer his body.

He moved the head, and was amused and somewhat disquieted to find that his visual field could move independently. It was wider than that provided by his natural (and his simulated) eyes, and could sweep through 360 degrees in all directions. This would have been a handy feature in the small frame, too. Carlos could only guess why it wasn’t included—perhaps there just wasn’t room to include these optics along with all the other astonishing hardware and software of the kit, or perhaps the designers wanted that body to feel not too far removed from the human.

He looked around, seeing the frames beside him come to life, and seeing a lot farther than he had before. The horizon was close now. The avatar still stood on the ground, looking tiny, looking up. Carlos swung a mechanical arm in an experimental wave, then stretched the arm out in front of him and raised a foot-long thumb. Locke waved back, and disappeared. Carlos sent after him a far from fond farewell, a thought he hoped hadn’t been transcribed into a message, and continued to look around.

It was absurd how much difference his increased size made. The feeling was almost familiar, perhaps from a trace of uncorrupted muscle memory since the time when his virtual body image had straddled the Thames. Now he was a monster again, in body and not just in whatever warped corner of his mind that past experience lurked. It felt good.

Carlos flexed his arms, rotated his forearms and admired then checked over the heavy machine guns and laser cannon mounted between elbow and wrist. He reached over his shoulder to the RPG rack on his back and clocked the missiles one by one, each tiny mind a fierce red eye in the dark. In symmetrical sweeps around the rack were the tubes of the rocket pack. Somewhere in his own mind, the status and position of each squad member was as evident as that of his limbs.

said Carlos.

He conjured a shared workspace and sketched as he spoke.