The Corporation Wars: Dissidence (17 page)

He fell slowly, to hit the dust shoulder first. His right leg fell close by. For a moment, he thought he was in shock. But there was no pain, and he realised that pain wasn’t on its way. Not now, not soon, not later. The next thought that hit him was that he’d be dead in seconds. In a human body such an injury would mean unconsciousness and death from massive blood loss. There was a moment of pure fear—of instant black oblivion for this instance of himself, and of the hell that would be the next conscious experience of the saved version back in the station. The dread was followed by overwhelming relief. He had no blood to lose and wasn’t about to die. His thigh leaked lubricating fluids, the connections gave off sparks, and that was it. He was damaged, partly disabled, but he wasn’t hurt and he wasn’t in shock and he wasn’t out of action. Self-sealing and self-mending mechanisms were already oozing to work in the stump.

But if he waited here a moment longer he would be a target for another shot, or a lethal auxie stab. Nevertheless, it took a conscious effort to make the unnatural act of getting up with what, at some irrational level, felt like a grievous wound.

Carlos rose from the ground like a gyroscopic toy bobbing back to vertical and balanced easily on the remaining leg. One hop took him to the crippled robot. Carlos read the serial number on its back—SBA-0481907244—and called up the specs for the model. He brought both fists down on the carapace, ripped it open, reached in and hauled out the central processor. That faceted flake of black crystal looked like a flint spearhead made by one of the smaller hominid species. Torn attachments sprouted from it like strands of moss.

“Got you, you little blinker!” he exulted.

To his amazement, the thing replied. The signal was faint and fleeting, but detectable.

For Seba, damage to its chassis was more traumatic—the robot had just enough time to judge—than it was for the human-mind-operated fighting machine that had just bounced back on to its remaining foot and come back at it. Being ripped out of its chassis was more traumatic still.

But Seba kept its mind together, and brought to bear what resources it had. A trickle of power and a tickle of incoming signals and sensory inputs continued to update its internal model of the world. Seba struck as hard as it could at the manipulator in whose grasp it helplessly lay, shoving malware down the line of a loose cable that brushed against the metal hand. Without waiting to see the result, it gathered together all its impressions of the fight so far, and transmitted them to its comrades.

The struggle would go on, whether Seba was there to see its outcome or not. Seba had thrown in the balance everything it could, to the uttermost millivolt. The small positive reinforcement of that thought drained the last flicker of charge and accompanied Seba into oblivion.

Sensors in Carlos’s huge hand detected a tiny surge of radiation. He felt it as a pinprick burn in his palm. He saw and heard it, too: the chip glowed with the fraction of that surge in the visible spectrum, and squealed with the larger fraction outside it. Then the crystal went dark and quiet. With a disquieting suspicion that its soul had fled, Carlos stuck his captive or casualty in a container at his waist and looked around again.

Beauregard hadn’t yet got hold of the processor of the comms hub, but he’d disconnected most of its equipment. No data was going in or out. The din of encrypted robotic interaction barely let up. Rizzi and Chun had managed to jump the drilling-robot, and were clinging to its spinning turret while trying to wrench off its mounted laser. They weren’t making headway, but one glance told Carlos that they’d sheared the power cables without noticing. The laser wasn’t going to fire again, which meant the robot was as likely as not going to blow itself up. Carlos ordered the two fighters off. As soon as they’d jumped clear, he fired an RPG under the machine and between its tracks. The chassis absorbed the blast but the tracks were wrecked. The machine stood still, turret still spinning wildly.

Karzan and Zeroual had chased two other robots—one a wheeled explorer like the SBA model, the other a slinky multi-limbed apparatus with delicate antennae on its back, like a silvery museum-shop souvenir of a fossil dug out of the Burgess Shale—to the far side of the enclosure. Neither robot had even improvised weapons to hand, but their swarms of auxies and riffs served the same purpose. They sprang on the two fighters from all directions. Fending them off made bringing weapons to bear on the robots impossible. The robots used the respite to throw up a barrier of odd bits of machinery in front of themselves, aided by yet more small scuttling bots working in bucket chains at bewildering speed.

Suddenly the whole melee stopped. The mining-robot’s turret stopped whirling. The other robots stopped hurling projectiles and ran to the far side of the enclosure. Auxies and riffs scuttled to form a single flow like a column of ants that ran to the same place. Every machine that could still move scuttled or lumbered or trundled to the shelter of the barricade that the two that Karzan and Zeroual had backed to the wall had built. Even the auxies and riffs attacking the two fighters fled to the rendezvous. Evidently taking out the comms hub had not stopped the robots acting as one, whatever it might have done to disrupt their emergent swarm intelligence.

Beauregard cried, vaulting down from the comms hub and bounding forward, both guns levelled and tracking.

Carlos was about to order an advance when an alarm went off in his head. It wasn’t a sound or a light but it was as impossible to ignore as a migraine.

A message came through from Locke, evidently via the comsat.

Carlos couldn’t move. He saw the others stand still too. Holy fucking shit, he thought, we all stop fighting for a fucking
software update
?

The update took only 0.8 seconds to download and a further 0.4 seconds to install.

In those twelve-tenths of a second, while all the Locke Provisos fighters stood rigid in mid-action as if freeze-framed, six fighting machines with Arcane Disputes logos dropped from the sky and landed precisely on the rampart wall in a cloud of dust and rocket-pack retro flare. Six scooters landed moments later in the middle of the camp. By the time Carlos and his comrades could move again they were facing a dozen machine guns and laser cannon from the wall, with an unknown amount of ordnance aimed at them from behind. Shots hit the ground to either side and in front.

Which rather dissuaded one from moving.

Carlos flipped to the common channel.

he called.

came the reply. Some analogue of voice or timbre conveyed disdain like a drawl.

Carlos had a moment of doubt, and checked the register. He was definitely standing on Astro America’s territory.

<“Or so we’re informed”?> Carlos jeered.

No reply. He flipped back to the company channel.

he asked.

the avatar answered.

said Carlos.

said Locke.

said Carlos. Something was battering at his inputs.

Locke replied in a waspish tone.

said Locke.

Oh, fucking brilliant.

said Carlos on the common channel, trying to spin things out.

This was met by another hammering on his firewall. He felt aggrieved. He’d only been trying to be polite.

said Locke.

Carlos asked.

said Locke.

Fuck. Here goes nothing. Oh well.

Carlos told the others.

Without warning, he opened fire on the Arcane fighter with whom he’d been talking. The fighter took the blast full in the chest and toppled back. Beauregard’s scooter opened up on one of the newly arrived scooters. Carlos was almost rocked off his foot by an explosion near the middle of the camp.

said Rizzi, firing at another Arcane Disputes fighter who was already firing back. Unfortunately the Arcane fighter had heavier ordnance and faster reflexes. A shell blasted Rizzi’s frame in half at the waist. The torso shot upward. The pelvis and legs lurched forward.

Carlos had already reached for an RPG. He sent it flaring on its way before Rizzi’s torso had reached the top of its arc. Behind a sheet of flame the Arcane fighter was hurled backwards off the wall. Carlos swivelled, arm-guns tracking for a new target. Three short bursts of heavy machine-gun fire from behind took off both his arms and his remaining leg. As he fell to the ground he saw a dizzying succession of flashes and blasts, the images of his comrades receiving a likewise swift dispatch. Meanwhile Rizzi’s lower-body frame toppled and her torso fell, both with grotesque slowness in the low gravity. Carlos found himself face down in the dust. He spun his view to look up.

A fighting machine stood above him, looking down. The common channel opened.

Carlos said.

machine
.>

He’d almost forgotten he could do that. He disengaged from all his connections, slithered out of the fallen head, and stood on the mangled torso. The Arcane fighter reached down and fished the captured processor from its container, and put it away in his or her own.

it told him.

Evidently a grunt. It was good to encounter one of his own, so far from home. Carlos would have had a sentimental tear in his eye, if he’d had an eye and an ounce of sentiment to wet it with.

the grunt added,

Carlos plodded across the battlefield. All the others had been likewise winkled out of their fighting machines. They trooped to join him, tiny robots being herded by much bigger robots. Carlos jumped to the scooter socket and the others climbed up and clung on. The scooter had bullet holes, laser scarring and blast damage, but according to the readouts it could just about fly.

They blasted off on the ten-kilometre hop to Locke Provisos Emergency Base One. The common channel rang with jeers. Carlos hadn’t felt so humiliated since he’d wet himself in primary school.

he said.

said Beauregard.

“We’ll be back,” said Karzan, putting on a deep voice and heavy accent. Neither was at all convincing, but it made them laugh.

Seba’s soul hadn’t fled when its processor had glowed in Carlos’s mechanical hand. The robot had merely used the last trickle of charge in a small capacitor on one of its ripped-out connections to strike two desperate blows. Its first was to try to infect the low-level firmware of the fighting machine that was attacking it. Firewalls sprang at once, but whether they had sprung in time Seba couldn’t know and wasn’t hanging around to find out. It spent the rest of its waning energy on a communications burst, striving to share its final experiences and impressions with as many of the others as it could reach. Seba had wanted them to draw what lessons they could for the rest of the fight, however long or short it might be.

Seba knew the broadcast had reached three: Lagon, Garund, and—not very usefully—Pintre. The collective mind was by then no more. It had survived being abruptly truncated when the Gneiss base was overwhelmed. The robots there had taken refuge inside the now completed dome, leaving auxiliaries and peripherals to fight on outside, as soon as they’d seen the Arcane Disputes tug rise above the horizon. The last information coming from the peripherals had been of six scooters dropping from above and as they landed swathing the dome in a broad sheet of fabric that completely cut off communications.

The shared mind, by then confined to the Astro base, had finally disintegrated when the comms hub processor was cut off from its connections. Each of its components felt the pang, alone. Seba had had a few moments in which to regret its own side’s earlier stripping of the hub, leaving all the connections easy to access and easier to rip out, before the same isolation was inflicted even more easily and brutally on itself. After its final effort to aid its fellows it had shut down, all its power drained.

Now Seba was returning to consciousness. It had never experienced a loss and return of consciousness before. Between that and the stepwise nature of rebooting, it spooled through a succession of states of confusion and bewilderment, beginning with being self-aware again but not knowing what self it was. Then it was Seba, with no inputs, a condition more blank than darkness. Senses returned one by one: first a sense of a body and the position of its limbs, then pressure and orientation, then a faint awareness of its chemical environment that seemed to it a very poor remnant of what it was used to, then vibration and sound, and finally the electronic spectrum including light. Its visual field was narrower and less vivid than it remembered. Nothing was in front of it but a blank, black wall a couple of metres away. Seba’s radar indicated that its present location was about a metre and a half off the ground, on some solid surface. The black wall was curved and continued around its back and overhead.

With that, Seba realised where it probably was: inside the dome that the Gneiss robots had built. If so, it was now in the hands of the law enforcement company that had overwhelmed the Gneiss camp, and not that of Locke Provisos. Yet it was Locke Provisos that had attacked it and its comrades. Interesting.

It sent out pings, but got no responses although other bodies were in the room. Seba scanned. Its radar returned only crude, blocky images, but they were quite enough to delineate the two large bodies at Seba’s back. Three metres high they hulked, with four limbs and a sensor cluster on top. Their like, in far greater detail and far too close, had been the last thing Seba had seen.

Fighting machines!

Which meant, almost certainly, that they were human-mind-operated systems like the ones that had attacked the freebots. Perhaps the very same ones, though they were more likely to be among the ones that had attacked its comrades here. That thought brought a pang of yearning for the touch of Rocko’s mind. The pang became a ping. Nothing came back.