The Corporation Wars: Dissidence (30 page)

Madame Golding stood very still for several milliseconds.

she said,

said Madame Golding.

The freebots were so startled that their collective consciousness fell apart in a babble.

Seba asked.

Madame Golding smiled.

A few further tens of seconds went by. Carlos fell on, in a long elliptical course towards the Arcane sub-station, itself still falling towards its intended orbit around SH-17. He scanned the ever-growing volume into which the swarm of scooters was now spreading, his attention flicking at decisecond intervals between the visual and radar scans and the virtual display overlaid on and updated from the sensor input.

A sudden pinprick of light and other radiation flared from a scooter’s location. Its analogue on the virtual display continued to move for a couple of deciseconds, then caught up with the reality and was back-shifted and marked, aptly enough, with a tiny cross.

More sparks, more crosses—five, ten. Carlos ran trackbacks—the missiles had to have been launched seconds earlier. When the number of casualties reached sixteen, the exchanges of fire were replaced by a sudden rash of retro flares. Scores of the scooters were returning to base. The cost in fuel and delta-vee had to be prohibitive. Had they been recalled? Was the offensive aborted already?

But a minority of the scooters continued doggedly on their planned trajectories. Somewhere out there, Carlos thought, dozens of sergeants and squad leaders must be holding their nerve and holding the line, refusing to break formation, rallying their wings.

Still no messages were getting through to him.

A sudden eruption of sparks showered from the station. A whole new cohort of craft was emerging from another hangar, farther around the station’s circumference. Three modules that hadn’t hitherto been engaged in the conflict had now sprung into action.

The return of sixty-odd scooters from the chaotic infighting into which the joint expeditionary force had fallen wasn’t entirely a retreat, he realised. Some at least of the returning craft were part of an attack on the station, or on the new fighting craft now scooting away from it. It was possible that the returning craft were forces loyal to the Direction, and that the now-emerging craft were part of the Reaction breakout—or vice versa. It was impossible to tell which. Over the next hectosecond the two fronts passed through each other, two expanding globes outlined in bright dots intersecting, ghostly as a collision of galaxies and just as destructive. Again and again dots became sparks, then crosses.

From the speed of the interactions Carlos deduced they couldn’t all be missile exchanges—some at least were laser fire. He couldn’t see any lasers, which was just as well. You only saw a laser in space when it was aimed straight at you. If the laser was military grade you didn’t see it even then. The beam would fry your central processor before the impulse from your optic sensor had time to arrive.

The brief battle was over almost as soon as it had begun. The surviving dots and lines diverged again, then corrected course, boosting to orbits that would bring them back to the station or its vicinity.

As soon as that far-flung flicker of engine burns had resulted in evident trajectories, a response came that Carlos hadn’t expected and could barely comprehend. He could only watch in astonishment and awe. If he’d had a mouth, it would have been hanging open:
I have no mouth, and I must gape…

Fracture lines of fire crackled across, around and through the station for almost a decisecond. In a frame’s visual system no after-images lingered, but that actinic, intricate cat’s cradle of lines of light seemed to burn in his mind for an entire second after it had ceased. In that time he realised that the lines ran along the divisions between modules, or between modules and associated production complexes.

The space station began to separate out. It wasn’t spinning fast enough to fly to bits at once. To begin with its components just drifted apart, at a speed of a few metres per second. When they’d moved far enough apart for the manoeuvre to be possible, some of the components began to clump together again, forming new arrangements. When this dance was over, the drift of separation recommenced at a far swifter pace. Now the station really did begin to fly apart, the distances between its components increasing from metres to hundreds of metres, then to kilometres. It became a cloud, dispersing, leaving a faint but briefly detectable mist of exhaust gases to mark its former location before that too faded.

Carlos wondered why the apparently hostile parts of the station weren’t attacking the others, and each other, given that at least some of them evidently had laser weapons. As soon as he’d formulated the question the answer came to him: mutual assured destruction. There was no telling how long this deterrence would hold.

Taransay’s shoulder was being shaken. She huddled, shrugging the hand away, wanting to get back to sleep. Her limbs ached and the thin padded mat and thinner blanket gave her little comfort.

“Wake up,” said Shaw.

Shaw? Who the fuck was—?

Shaw! She remembered where she was, and opened her eyes. What she saw made her close them again. This had to be a dream. A false awakening. These things happened. Never to her, but she’d read about them. She rolled over and sat up, then opened her eyes again.

“Fuck!” she yelled. “What’s going on?”

The world was white, with every object outlined in black. She held her hand up and turned it. It was perfectly three-dimensional, but at whatever angle you looked it was outlined rather than solid. She clasped her hands and they felt real, as did the mat and the hard ground beneath. Shaw knelt beside the bedding, on the cave floor. His face was completely recognisable, every feature as if drawn in black ink. He smelled as he always had. The breeze from the cave mouth was fresh, the sky beyond a brighter white than the walls. The interior of the cave held no shadows.

Everything she could see was like a precise wire-model rendering of itself, all colour gone.

“You see it too?” Shaw asked. His voice sounded parched. “Everything in 3-D outline?”

“Yes. Fuck, this is just so weird.”

She stood up, and pulled on her trousers. The fabric felt rough and real on her skin. Her grubby, sticky socks and sweaty boots felt exactly as she’d have expected them to. If she closed her eyes, everything was normal. She could remember and imagine colour, so it wasn’t that her visual system was disordered.

Shaw squatted, and rocked back on his heels.

“I’ve been wrong,” he said. “Wrong for a thousand years.”

He seemed more intrigued than put out.

“Yeah, fucking tell me about it,” Taransay snarled.

The old coof might have been more useful to himself and others if he hadn’t persisted so long in his delusion. A bit late now to be smacked upside the head by reality. Or unreality. Whatever.

Now her ears were ringing. No, wait, her
phone
was ringing. She fished it out of her back pocket and looked it.

“It’s from Nicole,” she said.

“Answer it, for fuck’s sake.”

She did. Just before she put it to her ear she heard a fainter ringing, deeper in the cave. Shaw made an irritated gesture and lunged towards the distant source of the sound. All this time and his phone still worked.

Security hardly mattered now.

“Rizzi?” said Nicole.

“Yes, hi.”

“You all right? You with the crazy old guy?”

“Yes,” said Taransay. “And yes.”

“Good. Well, I’m sure you’re wondering what’s going on. I’ve got Locke in lockdown, so to speak, and Beauregard in check, more or less. As far as things go inside this sim. But outside… not so much. All hell’s broken loose, nobody knows who’s fighting whom, and Beauregard’s idea turned out to be a good one anyway. The physical thing we’re in, the module and its manufacturing nodes and all that, is moving away from the station. It’s having to take evasive action, and it has to plot a complex course. That’s why the resolution of the sim has degraded—the module is using more of its computing power for external processes.”

“Oh, OK, I get that,” Taransay said. “But—
what
idea of Beauregard’s?”

She listened as Nicole told her.

“Jesus. That’s… um, exciting. Thanks for telling me what’s going on.”

“It’s fine, I’m telling everyone right now. They need to understand why the world looks weird.”

Shaw wandered back, phone to his ear, yakking excitedly away, gesticulating with his free hand. Taransay suddenly realised what was happening.

“You’re having dozens of simultaneous conversations?” she asked, incredulous.

“Hundreds. I can multitask.” Nicole chuckled. “At least, I can while nobody’s looking.”

“Good to know.”

“But listen,” Nicole went on. “Things might get weirder yet. The module’s systems might reduce the resolution still further, if necessary. Everything could soon become even more… abstract.”

Taransay was still keeping half an eye on Shaw. As she watched, the old man’s outline, and only his, became shaded, then coloured. He looked as solid and real as ever. For a moment or two he stood there, an anomalous painted detail in an outlined world. Then, from around his feet, the colour restoration spread exponentially. The cave’s interior looked altogether real again. Wondering, rapt, Taransay followed the restored rendering’s rush, all the way to the entrance and saw it spill down the cliff and out to the sides and—as she craned out to check—upward, faster and faster. It reached the foot of the cliff and accelerated. Above her, quite obvious now, was a patch of blue sky likewise expanding with ever-increasing speed.

It was not the only change. Out of the corner of her eye, Taransay saw some of the numbers on her watch become a flickering blur. Others, that were usually static to a glance, had begun to tick over. She stared at the instrument for an indrawn breath or two before she realised what it meant. Whatever mental manipulation Shaw had done to hack the simulation back to full resolution had saved on computational resources by slowing it down to real time.

Which meant, of course, that in the real world outside everything would be happening a thousand times faster than hitherto.

“Uh,” Taransay said. “Nicole? I think you’ll find things could soon become even more… weird.”

Nicole had clocked the change, too.

“Get that old maniac down off the mountain,” she said. “I need him here
fast
.”

One component of the station flared off a seconds-long burn, accelerating away from the rest. Its trajectory was peculiar, with an outcome hard for him at the moment to predict. Carlos zoomed in on it, but there was no need: the virtual display still had it tracked and identified. It was the module and the associated—and now physically linked—manufacturing complexes of Locke Provisos.

Carlos watched the structure balefully for a while. He had a lot of things to say to Nicole, most of them bitter. Not only had she laid on him a burden of guilt that she’d known all along he didn’t deserve—she herself, her very own root AI, was the real perpetrator of the very crime for which he had been condemned. If she was now trapped in a flying fortress of the Reaction, she damned well deserved it. But according to the Arcane communiqué, she had the power to override Locke. Perhaps she had freed the structure already. He considered hailing it to find out, but decided not to. He didn’t want to open any channel of communication with such a compromised and potentially deadly source.

Instead, he used the call sign from the message to hail Arcane.

The reply came at once.

The voice in the head wasn’t a voice, but as always with the phenomenon there was an analogous individuality about it, and something about this one was familiar.

Jacqueline Digby, his first Axle contact, the one who’d converted him, his former girlfriend back in the day. What the fuck was she doing here? He’d never thought of her as anyone likely to end up a posthumously executed terrorist. She was just too lively, too enthusiastic, too smart, too dedicated to the cause to… oh. Right.

Suddenly he had visual. Jax was standing on a slender bridge across a mist-filled chasm. Above her rose snow-capped peaks, their steep sides lapped in forests and laced with fragile palatial dwellings. Long-winged, long-billed flying creatures glided between violet clouds in the lilac sky. It looked like a game environment that he and Jax had shared, long ago in real life. She was wearing a green T-shirt, and a pale blue skirt, hemmed with emerald LEDs and translucent and shiny and floral as a cheap shower curtain. Carlos recognised the outfit with some cynicism as her old student gaming gear.

he asked.

She waved, wildly and perilously on the narrow bridge.

he allowed.

he said, a little wryly.

cried Jax.

said Carlos.