The Corporation Wars: Dissidence (27 page)

Predictably, the stood-down squad found themselves back on the bus. Less predictably, they were on their own, with no local passengers, and the time of day was early to mid-morning, as if it were soon after they’d left. It couldn’t be the same day, even if it was roughly the right time of day. They’d been away, in real time, for little over a kilosecond—nearly a fortnight later in the sim.

Beauregard found himself shaking in his seat. Unlike Carlos, he hadn’t been killed in any operation, and his previous returns from action had been smooth. This time, it was much worse than his first arrival. The nightmare now fading too slowly from his mind was of whirling disorientation and a sense of sudden utter helplessness, followed by a succession of hammer blows to the head and a complete draining of all colour and meaning from the world. In that hellish limbo he had seemed to linger for minutes on end. He came out of it feeling as if his soul had been put through a wringer, and then hung out to dry.

The others, he could see, were emerging from similar private torments, rooted in the particular circumstances of their own death or brain-death. Beauregard had no way of knowing whether this was derived from genuine brain-stem memory of their actual deaths, or whether it was an illusion deliberately created and individually attuned. Not that it made any difference to how bad it felt. The fighters sat silent and pale, quivering involuntarily, looking around for reassurance and, in the cases of Chun and Rizzi, reaching for any nearby shoulder to clutch for comfort; Karzan and Zeroual, turning to each other.

Beauregard disdained such dependence. He held himself together and tried to think. He understood that the experience was a by-product of the security check on each mind. But that check was to ensure the mind hadn’t been meddled with. The system couldn’t—in any reasonable time—read memories. His secrets were safe in his head.

Not so for the visual and other inputs to his frame, which he took for granted were recorded as a matter of course. His reading of the microscopic message was certain to be uncovered as soon as any post-mortem—so to speak—examination was carried out. With the squad minus the renegade Carlos safely stashed in the sim, and with the offensive on its plate right now, the company could afford to take its time in picking over the bones of the incident. On the other hand, Locke Provisos might well have specialist units devoted to such inquiries, which wouldn’t divert any physical or information resources from the conflict.

In short, he had no time to lose. He had no time to convert anyone to the Rax, even if he’d wanted to. Which he didn’t, though it would have been convenient if he could have, not for its own sake but to create temporary allies. He didn’t even have time to turn the others against Carlos, which had naturally enough been his first impulse. They all trusted the sarge, but Carlos was the leader. And he didn’t have time to spin an elaborate ruse. In all his time in intel he’d found that by far the best way to turn people—or to trick them into working for you without their knowledge—was to tell them the truth. Or as much of the truth as possible. Chop with the grain, and see the wood split.

He looked around the bus. He was at the back, with a couple of empty seats in front of him. Rizzi was by herself at the front, saying something to Chun, who had just taken his hand off her shoulder. Karzan and Zeroual were behind Chun and huddled together on the seat they shared.

“Everyone OK?” Beauregard asked.

They all turned.

“More or less, sarge,” said Rizzi, still looking wan. The others nodded.

“Good,” said Beauregard. “I’m still feeling a bit shaken myself.” He took a deep breath. “I’m afraid I owe you all an apology, especially you, Rizzi. I couldn’t say any of this in the hangar, not with Locke able to overhear our every word. I’m not sure I should even say it here, but if they spy on us here they can spy on us anywhere. Are you all up for that risk?”

“Yes, sarge!”

A gratifying chorus. He felt almost humbled.

“OK,” Beauregard said. “I’m sorry I had to pretend to challenge Rizzi out there, question her loyalties even. I’m sorry, too, that I misrepresented Carlos. What I didn’t say—what I couldn’t say, and which Locke will soon find out, is that I know exactly why Carlos went off on his own. This time, and that time above SH-17. He hasn’t been corrupted, quite the reverse in fact.”

He could see from their faces that this thought came as a relief.

“So what did happen back there, sergeant?” Zeroual asked, his upper body twisted around, one arm crooked over the back of the seat and the other curled about Karzan’s shoulders.

“There was a message in the repair workshop,” Beauregard said. “It had been written in tiny script, by one of the machines there. It may have been hacked by Arcane, or by the freebots directly—I don’t know. Carlos read it, and I read it just after he did. He must have read it just before our last mission, too. And having read it myself, I understand why he fought his way past me and hijacked a scooter, and in fact why he broke ranks and fled toward the surface last time out. He couldn’t share the information, he couldn’t even risk discussing it.”

They were all agog. Beauregard knew that he was doing so well, and sounding so sincere, because he was telling the truth. The longer he could keep this up, the more truthful information he could convey, the easier and more credible it would be to slip in the lie later on: the disinformation, the doubt. The one lethal drop in the drink.

“So what did it say, sarge?” Chun asked.

“It said that Locke Provisos is working for the Rax.”

“How?” said Rizzi, perplexed and challenging.

“By using tactics that mean more and more veterans are revived and thrown into action. The more veterans revived, the greater the chances of some of these being Rax sleeper agents who were never identified. And when there are enough Rax cadre out there, Locke will coordinate them in a surprise attack on the rest of the fighters and re-activate any other systems and sub-systems already suborned by the Rax.”

“But, sarge!” cried Karzan. “If Locke is Rax, then—oh!”

She got it, all right.

“Yes,” said Beauregard. “We’ve been fighting all this time on the wrong side.”

Their colour had been coming back after the trauma of the post-death. Now they’d all paled again. Not Zeroual, not visibly, but his widened eyes did the same job.

“I can see you’re all shocked,” Beauregard said. “So am I. I’m sure you can imagine how I felt when I read it, and had to go out and act normal in front of you and Locke. But I’m still sorry I had to be so brusque with you, Taransay.”

Rizzi blinked hard. “No problem, sarge. I understand.”

“But, sarge,” Karzan said again, this time more reflectively, “how could you or Carlos tell if the message was true? You remember the lady warned us the robots and AIs know how to push our buttons. Isn’t telling us our company is corrupted just the kind of disinformation they—or Arcane by itself—might use against us?”

“Good point,” said Beauregard. “And you’re right, we were warned the robots can be manipulative little blinkers. And Arcane itself is an AI when all’s said and done. The message said the Arcane fighters who did us over down on SH-17 had found all this out from the robots they captured, who in turn got it from robots around G-0, the ones left over from last time. And it claimed to have evidence—I don’t recall all the details, but I read it in my frame. Now, of course, any link in that chain could be a disinfo insert point, no doubt about it. So we can’t rule that out. But what convinced me, and must have convinced Carlos, wasn’t anything in that message. It was something I thought myself.”

He looked them in straight in the face, one by one.

“What convinced me is that no other explanation makes sense of everything that’s happened. Why should Arcane’s fighters, then the entire Arcane Disputes agency, side with the robots and start fighting us? Why indeed, unless they’ve seen very good evidence themselves. Why is every message they send to us firewalled out? Because they’ve been frantically trying to tell us what they know, and what Locke doesn’t want us to know! Why are we losing every battle with the robots and with Arcane, if Locke Provisos really wants to win? Because all it really wants is to get more and more fighters out of storage and into combat.”

That was making sense to all of them, Beauregard noted with satisfaction.

“Jeez,” said Rizzi. “We have to phone the lady and warn her.”

She reached into her back pocket. Beauregard raised a warning hand.

“Wait!” he said. “We have to think carefully about this. We don’t know if Locke monitors all our conversations, including this one. That’s a risk we have to take. But we can be damn sure the phones are monitored.”

“You may have a point there, sarge,” said Rizzi. Still unsure, still wary, but her hand moved away from her pocket.

“Besides,” added Beauregard, “I’m not entirely sure Nicole can be trusted. After all, she’s backed Locke’s failing strategy at every point. Who’s to say she isn’t in on it?”

“But she’s
the Direction
!” Rizzi said. “She’s it’s, uh, plenipotentiary in this sim.”

Beauregard could see how this thought swayed the others, from the looks of doubt and perplexity, the glances exchanged. He swept them all with a smile. Steady, steady. This was not the time for a deep breath, for a sideways glance, for a tongue-tip to the lips.

“How do we know that?” he said, in as quiet a voice and gentle a tone as he could summon.

“Because…” Rizzi said, thinking aloud, “… she told us.”

“Precisely.
She told us.
”

They all stared at him, almost but not quite as astonished and appalled as they’d been by the news about Locke.

“Did we ever think to check?” he added.

“And even if we had,” said Chun, “how
could
we check?”

Rizzi held his gaze longest, and turned palest. She clapped a hand to her mouth.

“Sorry, sarge,” she mumbled past her palm. “I’m afraid I’m going to be sick.”

Hand to her mouth, gagging noises rising from her throat, she stood up and stumbled to the front of the bus.

“Going to be sick!” she repeated, and banged on the front window with the heel of her free hand.

The driving automation, programmed for such emergencies, slowed the bus to a halt and opened the door. Rizzi stumbled down the steps and staggered to the edge of the road, stooping. There was a low rough-hewn rock face in front of her, with bushes at the top. She reached out with one hand and leaned against the rock, head down, shoulders heaving. Then she straightened, looked up, scrambled up the rock in a sudden frenzy of expert grips and steps, and shot away through the bushes and out of sight.

Commotion.

Karzan jumped up. “Shall I go after her, sarge?”

Beauregard considered. Rizzi wasn’t just running away from him—she was almost certainly running towards the old man. It might be possible to cut her off. She had a map, he could be sure, but he could guess her route. He struck the balance, and shook his head.

“No, no. Waste of time. Anyway, she’s shown her hand. I reckon we can write her off as Rax.”

“Taransay’s never Rax!” Karzan protested.

Beauregard sighed. “Perhaps not. Maybe I’m being hasty. Maybe
she
is. Could be some misplaced loyalty to the lady. Whatever. The sooner we get to the lady and get some sense out of her, the better.”

They all nodded grimly.

Beauregard waved, and raised his voice. “Drive on!”

On the way he told them his plan.

Taransay ran for ten minutes. She heard the bus start up again almost as soon as she’d got up the cliff, but that could be a ruse. She dodged and weaved through the trees, and when she reached open ground she ran straight ahead for about five hundred metres until she had a skyline to get behind and then dashed to the side. She dropped to the ground and did a low crawl between clumps of a sort of spiny fern until she had a clear sight-line back.

No pursuit. She backed out of the thicket, picked thorns from her sleeves and trousers, and took a bearing towards the mountain where she and Carlos had met the old man. It was sure to take longer than it looked. She had no food, no weapons and one water bottle. The sun was fierce. No doubt she could find water along the way. She set off, walking this time, pacing herself.

Her nausea hadn’t been wholly a pretence. The thought of being inside a sim and working for an agency that had been all along controlled by the Rax made her feel sick, and a little dizzy. Beauregard was up to something dodgy, of that she’d been sure as soon as he’d cast doubt on the lady. Hard to put a finger on why she trusted Nicole and not Beauregard. Should be the other way round. Nicole hadn’t led her in battle, and Beauregard hadn’t determined the battles she’d been in. All inconclusive, or defeats, and all of them Nicole’s fault and no blame falling on the sarge. But there it was. Always known he had something to hide. Whereas there was no way Nicole was Rax. She could well believe that Locke was, but not Nicole. She doubted that Carlos would believe it either. But he’d evidently believed something was wrong with the agency, something so wrong it had to be fled.

So maybe everything else Beauregard had said was true.

Which raised the question of what he hoped to achieve by undermining Nicole.

The squad got out at Nicole’s house and walked straight up the path. Unarmed, but Beauregard didn’t expect any problems on that score. He looked at the front window and saw Nicole standing behind her easel. She didn’t seem to have noticed them. Beauregard marched to the front door and tried the handle. The door was unlocked. He let himself in. With more or less hesitation, the others followed.

The entrance hall was cool and dim. Light fell from the stairwell, and from an open door to the right. The floor was of grey flagstones, rough and gritty, lumpy underfoot with embedded small coiled marine fossils, some of them cracked. The wood of the walls and furnishings was pale, rustic looking, polished as if by a patina of years. At the far end of the hallway, a few metres away, something skittered. A cleaning robot. Nothing to worry about.