The Corporation Wars: Dissidence (11 page)

With a sense of dread fighting with eager anticipation in its circuits, Seba sent the message, then rolled back out and reported back.

The gas giant and its many moons were at that time about half a billion kilometres distant. The message would take a good kilosecond and a half to get there. How long the robots in the G-0 system would take to decide on a response could not be predicted. And then another kilosecond and half, at least, would pass before any reply came back. Nothing could be expected for another three kiloseconds, and perhaps longer.

said Lagon, with its customary level of good cheer.

said Seba.

said Rocko,

The following morning Nicole arrived at Ichthyoid Square in battledress kit. The vehicle was otherwise vacant: since the first hungover daybreak she’d stopped rousing and picking up the crew en route. One by one they jogged up and took their places to stand at ease in a row by the plinth. Carlos nodded to Beauregard, who told the others to board.

“You’re joining us today?” Carlos asked, climbing in.

“Uh-uh,” said Nicole. “Think of me as an embed.”

Carlos tried not to. “Why the change?”

“You’ll see.”

Nicole drove through the village and past her usual turnoff, all the way past the terminus and depot and out along a coast road that curved up a gentle slope over the top of the headland to the left of the cove. The rising sun and the ringlight cast converging beams across the sea, blending within minutes to a single glimmer on the waves. The road turned inland and uphill. The vehicle bumped on to an unpaved track through the woods and on up above the tree line to an arid upland of scrub and dust broken by tall jagged outcrops of sharply tilted sedimentary rock, some with trees growing from their cracks and on their summits.

Nicole turned off the track and pulled up close by in a low declivity that looked like a flood gully, raw and steep-sided with a mix of rough and rounded stones along the bottom.

“Here we are,” she said. “All out.”

They all piled out and lined up to face her. Insectoids buzzed and darted. In the distance, pairs of flying things circled on updraughts and now and then plummeted to rise moments later frustrated or triumphant.

“It’s time to move the game up a level,” Nicole said. “Live fire exercise.”

She said this as if it were a special treat.

Carlos frowned. “You want us to shoot at each other?”

“Of course not!” said Nicole. “You have to capture an objective from opponents who’ll be shooting back.”

“Opponents?”

“Fighters of roughly your level of skill and armament. Their only advantage is that they know the terrain.”

Carlos scratched his head. No helmets, let alone armour. “What if we get killed? Or seriously wounded?”

“You’ll be medevacked out and find yourself waking up on the bus from the spaceport tomorrow morning. Same applies to me, actually.”

“Excuse me,” said Karzan, while Carlos was still trying to get his head around the notion. “Does that apply to the other side, too?”

“Oh no,” said Nicole. “And don’t worry about them. They’re p-zombies.”

“If you don’t mind my saying so,” said Beauregard, “this sounds like a mind game. Part of this test we’re supposed to be on. To find out if we’re still psycho killers.”

Nicole’s laugh rang around the gully.

“That’s the exact opposite of the truth.” Her shoulders slumped for a moment. She glanced down, then up. “Look, in the real battle you’re going into, you’ll be killing
conscious
robots. Our intel and wargaming indicate that they’re capable of being highly manipulative little blinkers. They’re fucking AIs, right? They can push all your buttons. You have to be prepared for that. You have to be ready to destroy the enemy without hesitation. Everyone clear?”

“No, I’m not,” Carlos said. “You told us we’d be judged by whether we treat p-zombies as people. Now you’re telling us it’s OK to kill them.”

“These are both true,” said Nicole. “You must treat p-zombies as people in everyday life at the resort and so forth, because you can’t tell the difference from conversing with them. Nevertheless, when I or anyone else on behalf of the Direction tells you to kill p-zombies, it is not part of the test and it is not ethically wrong.”

“Why would it be ethically wrong even if they
weren’t
p-zombies?” Ames asked. He scratched his beard and frowned as everyone turned to look at him. “Seeing as we’re all ghosts here anyway.”

“In a sense it would not,” said Nicole. “It’s just easier all round. If I ever have to test you with a mind game, rest assured I would be much, much more devious than this. If this is a test, it’s of your fighting ability and your willingness to obey orders.”

Carlos looked along a line of shuffles and shrugs, and guessed a consensus.

“Yeah,” he said. “As long as it’s what you really want us to do, we’ll do it.”

Nicole gave him a wry smile. “Good to see military discipline taking a firm grip.”

She opened a comms screen, spread it out to a square metre on the vehicle’s bonnet and pointed to the objective on the map. It was a leaning rocky outcrop about forty metres high, a couple of kilometres distant. Half a dozen defenders armed like themselves with knives and AK-97s would be on or around it, tasked with preventing the team from getting to the top.

The defenders, from their own point of view (insofar as p-zombies could be said to have one) were local farmer militia protecting a crucial satellite uplink from an occupying or invading army. No landmines or IEDs, and no drones, but the enemy might well have prepared the predictable nasty surprises: traps, pits, spikes, rocks poised to fall, that sort of thing. They’d have the same comms equipment as the squad. The zoom function of the screens would give them the equivalent of powerful binoculars. They hadn’t been given a specific warning, but they could be assumed to have already spotted the vehicle and drawn their own conclusions.

“Do the p-zombies really believe all this?” Rizzi asked. “That we’re part of an invading army?”

“Yes,” said Nicole, as if it was a stupid question.

“How?” Rizzi persisted.

Nicole looked puzzled. “The AI that runs the sim can give the p-zombies any beliefs it likes. It may have generated these farmers and their farms and their entire back story this morning, for all I know. Or it could have given existing p-zombies the equivalent of a shared paranoid delusion.” She shrugged. “What does it matter?”

Rizzi shook her head. “If that’s how you say it is, fine.”

“Anyone else have questions?”

No one had. Nicole bowed out to Carlos and Beauregard. “Over to you. From here on, I’m just an observer.”

Carlos flipped back and forth between map and satellite view. He zoomed in and out a few times. There was plenty of cover from hillocks, tussocks, outcrops and gullies, but there seemed no way to approach the objective without being picked off as soon as they came within a thousand metres.

His frown met Beauregard’s. “This is going to be tricky.”

“Piece of piss,” said Beauregard.

He slid the margin of the map seaward, over the forest, and with a fingertip stabbed at one clearing after another and traced the paths between them.

“What do you see there?” he asked.

Carlos enlarged the satellite view of one clearing. “Homesteads.”

“Exactly,” said Beauregard. He looked around. “OK, everyone, back on the truck.”

“Hey!” said Nicole. “That’s not the idea of this exercise.”

“It’s my idea. If you have a better one, spit it out.”

Nicole folded her arms. “Like I said, I’m an observer.”

“Fine,” said Beauregard. “Observe from the back seat, or from here. Your choice.”

Nicole stayed, grim-faced.

Beauregard drove.

“When I slow down, Rizzi,” he shouted, “hop out, keep under cover and get in position to keep an eye on the target. Maximum zoom on your phone.”

“Got it, sarge.”

At a point where the road took them below the skyline of the target outcrop, Beauregard slowed the vehicle to walking pace. Rizzi vaulted out.

“Keep me updated,” Beauregard said. “Any moves.”

“Copy that.”

As they accelerated away, Carlos glanced back. Rizzi was on her belly, already halfway up the slope. In a minute or two they were back among the trees.

“Next left,” said Carlos, map-reading from the passenger seat.

Another couple of minutes, on a rutted unpaved road, took them to the first clearing. There was a wooden house with a garden that looked like a research station. Labels fluttered from reed poles among the varied crops. A gracile, eight-limbed robot danced along furrows. A woman in a black dress and a big straw hat stared at them from amid a square plot of knee-high grasses.

Beauregard stepped out of the vehicle, his AK-97 in one hand, and strolled to the gate. The woman turned and ran towards the house. Beauregard took her down with one short burst, and with another wrecked the expensive delicate machine. It skittered about giving off sparks, then flipped over and twitched its limbs in an uncoordinated manner.

Beauregard sauntered back to the vehicle.

“Got a lighter about your person, Karzan?”

She was the only one apart from Nicole who smoked.

“Yes, sarge.”

“Give the shack a good splash from the jerrican, then torch it.”

Karzan lugged a ten-litre tin of petrol up the garden path. After a minute inside she paused on the porch to toss a lit piece of twisted paper behind her, and hurried back.

“Good work,” said Beauregard, as the flames took hold. “Onward.”

At the next homestead they found a man around the back welding metal into strange shapes. Beauregard gave him enough time to get his phone out, then shot him mid-sentence. Karzan repeated the operation with the petrol. The smoke from her previous exploit was rising heavy and thick a few hundred metres away and a hundred metres in the air. Beauregard’s phone pinged. He listened, nodded, and relayed the message from Rizzi’s observation. The enemy were making an awkward and hurried descent from the pinnacle.

“Third time’s the charm,” said Beauregard, restarting the engine. “Expect trouble. Ames, Chun—eyes to the front and sides. Karzan, behind us.”

Carlos, uninstructed, looked around and upward. A slow hundred metres on into the forest, he noticed a treetop just ahead begin to sway anomalously.

“Floor it,” he told Beauregard.

The vehicle shot forward. The tree crashed across the road just behind them. Karzan opened fire with her AK.

“Got him!” she yelled. “I think.”

“Let’s hope,” muttered Beauregard, still driving fast. He slewed the vehicle to a halt at the edge of the next clearing.

“OK, everybody out. Full kit. Karzan, the petrol.”

The door of the house was locked, the windows shuttered. Karzan doused the porch and set it alight. The squad trampled across a backyard racked with marine aquaria, smashing glass as they went. Sea creatures flopped on grass, gill-covers opening and closing. Ames, Carlos noticed, stood on as many heads in passing as he could. Carlos wondered whether there was such a thing as a p-zombie fish and if so, what difference it made to the fish.

From among the trees behind them they heard crashing sounds and someone screaming. Beauregard cocked an ear.

“One adult,” he said, walking on. “No kids, as per usual. I suppose it’s a population thing. Pity, though, in a way. They have such a piercing scream.”

“Were children ever a thing?” Karzan asked. “They might be false memories. Women popping out little animals and turning them into persons by babbling at them? How does that work, again?”

“They back you up, your mum and dad,” said Beauregard.

They pressed on through the woods, uphill. What breeze there was came from the direction of the sea. Smoke drifted overhead, its scent tickling their nostrils. Beauregard’s phone pinged again.

“Rizzi, yes… Good, good… Copy that. Keep the line open.”

He glanced down at the phone, then waved the other three forward.

“Twenty metres to the edge of the trees,” he said. “Get down before you reach it, then forward low until you get a clear view of the hillside. The enemy are coming down pell-mell. Wait till you’re sure of a hit. Whites of their eyes, and all that.”

Carlos ran, then crawled, forward to a position behind the bole of a large tree. Hundreds of metres away and a bit to his left, six people were running downhill. Squiggling little shapes, but hard to think of as p-zombies. He waited, tracking the laggard of them through his sights.

“Fire at will,” said Beauregard.

Carlos breathed out, and fired a single shot. The running shape fell over. The fusillade that followed took down the rest before they’d had time to throw themselves to the ground.

Beauregard stood up and scanned with his screen.

“No movement,” he reported. “OK, let’s take the castle.” On the phone he added, “Rizzi, keep watching the objective.”

As they approached the outcrop Beauregard improvised a method of trap-detecting. He and Carlos spread out their screens and magnified the view, scanning the ground immediately in front of them as they went. Karzan followed close behind Carlos. Chun and Ames walked behind Beauregard. All three kept a watch on the side and top of the outcrop in case anyone was still there. It wasn’t hard to spot the route by which the defenders had scrambled down. Beauregard and Carlos scanned it carefully nonetheless, after checking with Rizzi that there was no sign of any remaining resistance. This side of the outcrop was steep, but at least it sloped away from them rather than towards them, and there were plenty of ledges and shelves where the strata had split.

They climbed to the top without incident. Carlos walked out of the clump of wind-bent trees and shrubbery that clung to the summit. He paced warily to the edge of the overhang, and zoomed his screen. He saw Nicole doing likewise, standing on the lip of the defile they’d originally stopped in. He waved; she waved back.

“Mission accomplished, I guess,” said Ames, from beside him.

“Yeah,” said Carlos. “I’m curious as to what the lady will have to say about how we accomplished it.”

“I’m not,” said Ames, and stepped off the edge.

Carlos lurched back. “Fuck!”

“Indeed,” said Beauregard. He motioned everyone back, then approached the edge and leaned over, peering through his screen. He returned shaking his head.

“Forty-two metres on to rocks,” he said. “Not a chance. Pavement pizza.”

Chun retched in the bushes.