The Corporation Wars, page 88
said Jax.
There was a moment’s pause. Paulos and his crew joined the other H-mechs on patrol in mid-space, to cover the remaining Rax even more effectively.
She waved a limb. Suddenly they were all in a shared workspace with Salter, Newton, Whitten and Stroilova. There was a moment where everyone took in the situation in the respective locations.
said Jax.
Baser could see why. By now, Salter had been joined in the drive chamber by the rest of her squad, all tooled up with missiles and machine guns.
This was true enough.
Baser asked Mogjin. Mogjin apprised Baser of the plan. Baser appreciated the courtesy, and extended it to Newton.
Baser knew that its conscious existence was about to end. To the robot’s annoyance, the most pressing matter on its mind was fighting down an awkward legacy from its time as a spider: the impulse to scuttle. Any indication of alarm or any sudden movement might alert Dunt—and if Dunt were to detonate the fusion pod he was clinging to, the explosion might disrupt or even abort the far larger cataclysm the freebots had planned.
Baser stayed very still, and waited. It did not have long to wait.
The first shock wave, from the fusion factory, broke Newton’s grip on the drive flanges and hurled him and everyone else to the other side of the chamber. The second, from the separation detonations, slammed them all hard against the drives. A third shock wave threw them sideways in another tangled heap, as the cone of rock lurched to a lateral thrust away from the remainder of SH-119.
From that tangled heap, Newton looked straight up at the fusion drives. He remembered that his control nodule could detach from the H-mech frame. In principle, it was just possible that he could jet out along the tunnels and chambers and get clear before the drives ignited. He remembered, too, his earlier thought that human beings could be as brave as robots.
He didn’t want to let the side down. That was what it was all about, for him, in the end.
None of the drives was seriously damaged. They all ignited at full thrust.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Morturi Te Salutant (“The Dead Man Says Hello”)
They were dancing on the fake marble floor of the cool hallway. Tinny music blasted from a cheap radio bead on the table by the vase. Ten seconds they had allowed themselves, nearly three hours of subjective time away from the tension and toil.
A siren sounded. Blum stopped mid-turn. Her head flinched down, her gaze flicked to the nearest doorway. She looked like she was about to take a dive for cover. Then she straightened with an embarrassed laugh.
“Old reflex,” she said. “In the ’stan it meant incoming.”
“And here?”
Blum grimaced. “Emergency outside. Get the fuck out.”
She held up a hand. Carlos high-fived her.
With that mutual slap of palms, they were back in the real.
Carlos had a momentary sense of looking in a mirror, as his combat frame faced Blum’s: two iron giants, face to face across a spar of the old transit tug. Then, still in unison, they turned away from each other and to the world. They were at the launch area, the former Astro America site.
It took Carlos a tenth of a second to gather his wits. He looked up at the boiling sky.
Something small and bright raced away from where SH-119 had been, out towards the gas giant G-0. The rest of the moonlet was crazed with searing cracks.
Carlos Incorporated.
Carlos Inc. grasped the fate of the SH-119 expedition at a glance—a glance through sixty-two sensors and thirteen separate data feeds. Nothing at all could have survived in the main part of the rock, least of all the Rax. He didn’t know which, if any, of the fighters and freebots of the expedition had made it into the part of the rock that was shooting away. For a bleak moment, his look alighted on Seba Inc. and Lagon Inc. Both machines went about their business, as if oblivious to what had happened. Hollow shells of what they had been.
He turned his many-eyed gaze on the modular cloud. The Direction’s fleet was on the move. It consisted of six large craft, the size of bulk carriers. They were not, they never had been, intended to consolidate SH-119 after Arcane had fought the Rax. He read the pattern of their flares, studied their trajectories and marked their evident destinations. Five were headed for the Locke module’s landing site on SH-0. The other, already peeling away, was aimed at where he stood. He estimated ETAs for two possibilities: chemical thrust to transfer orbit, and fusion drives. That done, he flicked his attention to his corporate affairs, on the ground and in the modular cloud.
Information came in like a spring tide over flat sand. His corporate mind had channels dug and walls built, but still it was almost overwhelmed by the flood. To his human mind it felt like trying to read a hectare of spreadsheet.
It was like becoming a god, but a god beset by the prayers of a million devotees and the subtle murmured urgings of a hundred conclaves, the squabbles of Byzantine hierarchies and the scribblings of a thousand scriptoria, all in the welter of a bloody crusade.
Basic frames: how many completed? How many animated by freebot processors? Transfer tugs, landers, scooters, aerospace fighters, weapons. Combat frames: type, model, specification. Fusion pods and drives: some of his front companies had bought them through intermediaries from DisCorps that had traded with the Rax. Others, of course, had been bought by DisCorps completely loyal to the Direction, and passed on to its clone army. How many drives did each side have ready to use? Agreements and acquisitions, franchises and subsidiaries. Material supplies available now, and contracted for later. Manufacturing capacities, acquired and acquirable. What was negotiable, what was affordable, and what was out of reach.
Espionage reports; leaks; deductions from public information and market moves.
Production of the Direction’s clone army was being ramped up. Its vanguard had already been tested to destruction on SH-0—to which its crack cohorts were now headed. The moonlet and the Rax had been taken care of; the main prize now became urgent.
Carlos Inc.’s own army of freebot-operated frames out in the cloud was now a thousand strong. A hundred had access to combat frames capable of fighting down on the superhabitable. Of the rest, he’d need—what? At least eight hundred and fifty to seize strategic targets in the cloud: law agencies, comms nodes, metallics processing plants, nanofactories … the list went on, relentlessly.
That left him fifty to plug into aerospace fighters, to give orbital cover and close air support to the hundred that would be fighting in high-gravity combat frames on the surface. The aerospace fighters were lighter and more agile versions of the scooters in which he and his comrades had fought before: faster and more aerodynamic, better armed with air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles. They were a lot smaller than the jet fighters Carlos remembered from life, and larger than the drones with which he and his enemies had battled in the skies of Earth.
He reviewed the reports from the Locke module of what had happened to the Direction’s 2GCM fighting machines. Certain modifications could be made on the fly—a sprayed-on ceramic shell to give extra resistance to SH-0’s invasive organisms, an update to the software shields to fight off their hacking—but most who went into the superhabitable’s jungles wouldn’t be coming back.
This was a one-way trip.
He already knew he could rely on his freebot army. They were all volunteers. A corner of his mind was pierced with awe at their heroism. Unlike revived veterans in frames, the freebots had only one life to lose and they knew it. He reminded himself that he and his comrades—and their foes, for that matter—had already demonstrated their mettle for doing just that, back in the day. As had millions upon millions of human beings throughout history. Heroism was cheap; most times and places it could be bought for starvation wages. There must be a clever evolutionary explanation for that, but he couldn’t think of it right now.
Right now he was running for the launch catapult.
Carlos Inc. at that moment was cutting a deal with Astro America, flashing a warning to the Locke module, issuing instructions to his corporations in the cloud, calling for Madame Golding and getting no reply, suppressing the yammer of the Direction rep in his head, and dickering with the freebot corporations on SH-17 and elsewhere all at the same time. He had to step down his corporate-level cogitations to summarise his conclusions in a way that would make sense to Blum.
Blum took in the implications.
They both knew this was unlikely. If they were destroyed, their copies in the Arcane and Locke modules would have no particular reason to meet up, even if they could. Carlos would remember nothing of Blum. To Blum, Carlos would be just a Locke defector he’d plotted escape with in the Arcane sim.
Blum bounded away, and vanished down an alleyway behind the processing plants of the site.
Carlos returned his full attention to corporate affairs. Most of the capabilities of Carlos Inc. ran in the combat frame’s capacious software. Between one leap and the next, Carlos abstracted the higher-level functions and copied them across. The feeling was peculiar: an increase of lucidity, a dawning of understanding, combined with the suspense of a software update. Transfer complete, Carlos set the combat frame to mind its own safety and to run the corporation in his absence. His direct commands could override it, but they’d be intermittent and delayed. The delay would at most be 1.6 seconds each way, but at the speed of interaction required that might be too long. The fighting machine would stand in for him just as the chassis of the departed freebots did for them.
And probably become just as hollow a memorial. A walking monument.
Carlos stopped at the end of the ramp. He scrambled out of the fighting machine’s head, clambered over the spiky thorax, swung around the jutting pelvic structure and shimmied down a leg. It got him to the ground quicker than jumping. After so long in the combat frame, he felt as exposed and vulnerable as a hermit crab scuttling for a new shell.
A lander was already racked. Two lading robots trundled up, bearing the supplies Carlos had ordered. He wedged himself into a pod along with the weapons and 2GCM frame and clamped himself to the side. The lid closed. He connected with the lander’s comms system and clicked in to the viewing sensors as the pod was swung into place.
The lander’s launch was a violent blow, followed seconds later by acceleration as the rocket engine kicked in. Then he was in free fall and—after a few more brief burns—transfer orbit. The cratered surface of SH-17 fell away beneath him, the fertile orb of SH-0 loomed ahead. Carlos gave the view part of his attention. The rest was occupied with calculating his rendezvous with the transfer tugs and carrier spacecraft that would soon be pulling away from the modular cloud.
Hundreds of seconds went by. The aerospace fighters docked with the carriers, ten large frameworks with chemical rockets and with fusion drives in reserve. The ground forces were racked on five transfer tugs, likewise equipped. They boosted out from the cloud and set course for SH-0.
Both sides were now in a race. Neither had the capacity or the inclination to destroy the other at long range. The fight for which they were armed and prepared would be in the skies and on the ground of the superhabitable.
The predicted trajectories jockeyed for kiloseconds. Then it became clear that Carlos’s troops would arrive first.
This challenge was answered moments later by a blaze of fusion drives from the Direction fleet.
Carlos hesitated. If his side cut straight across with fusion drives, his planned rendezvous with them would be impossible. On its own, his lander would soon be vulnerable. But to let the Direction’s forces land before his would give the enemy a free hand on the ground. Well—he could direct his forces almost as well from the lander, if it survived, in space and on the way down through the turbulent atmosphere.
He gave the order. His expedition’s fusion drives flared: fifteen sparks sprinting the distance.
Between where Carlos was and where he was headed, there would be no sleep mode. He had more than enough to do for him not to need it. He called Madame Golding again, and got no reply.
There was no longer any point in radio silence. The Direction knew where they were. Its troops were on their way. The laser comms device was in constant contact with Carlos and his relief expedition. At any moment, one side or the other would lose patience with subtle orbital calculation. Both sides would start torching, and after that all bets were off. The bearer bots had straggled in. With the last of the nanotech tubes now on stream, Beauregard and Zaretsky had started making frames. The area around the Locke module looked like a building site, trampled and muddy, with half-completed structures and unfinished processes in untidy heaps. The workers on the site looked as if they too were under construction, incomplete.
Taransay was by no means sure that her own transformation was complete, but she had no doubt that the others looked grotesque. Beauregard, Chun and Zaretsky had been joined by the ever-loyal Den. On the screens in Nicole’s house, Den had seen Taransay’s new form. The sight hadn’t deterred him from downloading to the first frame out of the assembler. The frame had come out clean. As soon as its foot touched a mat the blue lines started to spread. Den now looked like a black glass humanoid robot with blue impetigo. Beauregard, Chun and Zaretsky were further advanced, somewhere between Den’s condition and Taransay’s: their visors warping into squashed caricatures of their real faces, their boot-like feet sprouting sturdy, almost prehensile toes.
Taransay paused in her calibration of a genome reader. A needle probe from the device skewered a small mat, which writhed uncooperatively but trickled useful information to Locke and those of the science team still inside the sim.
She looked up. Overhead, above the clearing, a dozen gasbags glistened in the exosunlight. Their altitudes varied from a hundred metres to a thousand. All were tethered by one or more long ribbon tendrils to the tops of trees. The tendrils, taut and humming in the wind, were stronger than they looked. The gasbags strained against them like kites, but the fine lines held.
Taransay snorted, and glyphed an apt metaphor for the sound before it was one-tenth complete.
said Den.
Taransay’s laugh boomed, annoying her.
But the matter was serious, and becoming more so by the kilosecond. She understood what was happening to her body. The science team was on the case, all the more so now that Zaretsky was part of the case as well as the team. Their investigations had confirmed her hypothesis. Her original frame had been produced in some module of the space station, which now seemed part of a more innocent age long ago—in a process modelled on biological growth. Many of its components were carbon-based. The nanotech software was likewise inspired, at a certain level of abstraction, by the molecular coding of genes—optimised, streamlined, refined. That laid it open to subversion by the flexible genomes of native life, honed by billions of years of opportunistic horizontal gene transfer and pitiless natural selection.
