The Corporation Wars: Dissidence (20 page)

Carlos focused on the lead missile, now dropping straight towards the basalt dome. Four Arcane fighters were in view, near the cage containing the robots. They were all on the big combat frames. Not at all to his surprise, one of the Arcane fighters bounded for a scooter. The other, presumably the one whose combat frame had been damaged and was therefore in a small frame and thus ready to go, was already climbing aboard. Another headed for a rocket tube stripped from the scooter the Locke side had been forced to abandon. The fourth just calmly stood looking up, aimed his or her forearm-mounted heavy machine gun at the incoming missile, and let rip.

The falling missile disintegrated fifty metres above target, showering debris and what little of its payload remained intact. But that little was enough: about a dozen crawler bots, which fell to the ground around the dome. Three were taken out by well-aimed shots, two landed badly. The other five picked themselves up and scuttled towards the robot cage. The robots saw them coming and became visibly agitated, blurring into motion as they scrambled to the top of the cage—for whatever good that would do if a crawler got in, or pounced on top. Ah—they were poking appendages out like beseeching hands through prison bars, to break the Faraday barrier and signal to mobilise their auxies and riffs.

The fighter who’d grabbed a rocket tube aimed upward at the next incoming missile. Aim was hardly a problem: the rocket was more than smart enough to know what was expected of it. Nothing but hot fragments rained from that impact. While the fighter was reloading, the third crude projectile was at two hundred metres and falling. Carlos gave it a boost to fall faster than the local gravity could pull it. The machine-gunner wasted one burst on where it should have been if it had been free-falling. The burst that did hit it was hardly more effective: the missile’s internal small charge had already gone off, and the shell popped open at five metres. From its cloud of debris, scores of crawler bots hit the ground running.

The robots in the Faraday cage went frantic. Beauregard had described this element of his plan as “like tipping a bucketful of venomous spiders into an arachnophobia support group meeting.” He had been spot on. The robots assailed the heavy metal mesh with every available appendage and remaining tool, shaking the entire cage. Auxies and riffs stirred here and there around the cage’s perimeter.

The fighter who’d sprinted in the big frame had emerged from its head and was crawling on the scooter, and the other was almost at the socket. Both turned to the cage, dithered momentarily, presumably exchanged hasty signals, and continued to shove themselves into the sockets. The machine-gunner and the rocketeer hurried to the cage, stamping on crawlers as they went.

Carlos shifted attention to the high scooter, now over the top of its trajectory and dropping. Again he jetted to descend faster than free fall. He loosed off two rockets from the scooter’s side tubes, both aimed at the top of the basalt dome.

The circular tarpaulin was blown to shreds. Two blocks near the top of the dome cracked, and the keystone at the centre fell down inside. Carlos picked this up from a spy drone. The pixels of its image were almost as big as the blocks, but they did show the square black gap. He couldn’t see on this scale what was going on inside, but he could imagine that any Arcane fighters and captured robots within were taking it badly.

To Seba, it all happened in slow motion and low resolution. First came two huge impacts overhead, then the covering that had cloaked all electromagnetic signals peeled away in tatters from the entrance gap in the dome. Through that gap, signals on all wavelengths suddenly flooded in, urgent and confusing. Seba had known something was going on from the ground vibrations, and from the uptick in encrypted chatter between the two fighting machines that had interrogated it earlier. A few hundred seconds had passed since they had crawled back into the dome. Certainly an attack was going on. Perhaps a rescue!

Seba swivelled its visual receptors upward and saw cracks spread across two of the topmost basalt blocks. With grim predictability the capstone wedged between the two blocks fell out. Under 0.2 g the basalt cuboid wasn’t falling fast, but its hundred or so kilograms of mass would be enough to crush Seba: the auxiliary device in which it was now embodied was far from robust, and the jury-rigged connections between the chassis and Seba’s processor were even more fragile. Quite possibly the crystal chunk that was Seba’s most fundamental hardware, its equivalent of a brain, would survive the impact. That depended on whether it was one of the block’s faces or one of its edges that hit. Seba watched the chaotic rotation of the block bearing down on it and tried to figure out which of these it would be.

The robot soon, in a matter of milliseconds, concluded that whatever happened in the initial impact, it was the final collision between itself, the block and the floor that counted. The table surface would in any case crack, under the block’s weight if not its impact. Seba had no precise measurement available of the strength of the table to which it was stapled, so this outcome was necessarily unpredictable. In the meantime there was nothing Seba could do, except yell for help.

Help came. One of the two fighting machines in the hemispheric room shoved the table sharply forward, out of the way of the falling block. The table toppled, coming to precarious rest on one edge and two legs. The block struck one of the opposite legs and a complicated tumble ensued, ending with the table resting on another edge and pinned by the block across one leg. En route the table top cracked, and the staples holding down two of Seba’s appendages sprang loose.

The robot stayed very still. It was now directly facing the entrance gap. Now that the cloaking cover was entirely gone, new information poured through that gap and the square hole in the dome’s roof. What the information conveyed was terrifying. Fragments and tatters of fabric and other debris blew around in scooter down-blasts coming from several directions. Seba’s fellow freebots were confined under a mesh framework that functioned as a Faraday cage. They were making frantic efforts to break out of it, which struck Seba as a very bad idea because the cage was surrounded by crawler bots trying to get in. If they did, they could wreak havoc in the confined space, jabbing the robots with lethal malware insertions. This thought seemed to occur to the others at the same time: they all backed away towards the centre.

A moment later, Seba saw it wasn’t just information that was pouring through the gap in front of it. Two crawler bots were already scurrying through. Several more trooped behind. Oblivion, seconds away, seemed to march with them.

All Seba could do was scream for help again. A crawler bot reached the edge of the table and stuck a needle-sharp foot in its now vertical surface. With a deft leap and pivot it got all its feet in a similar position and started scrambling up. Seba struggled to free itself, using its two free appendages to try to prise another out.

A fighting machine’s hand reached over the table top, grabbed the crawler bot and tossed its crushed remains away. Then the hand closed over Seba and yanked the robot unceremoniously out of its restraints. Flimsy appendages snapped, leaving their tips under the staples. Hydraulic fluid leaked; broken circuits sparked.

Seba saw the world whirl about it as the fighting machine straightened up, stepped over the table top, and stamped on crawler bots. The machine then threw itself into a prone position facing the entrance. With one hand it held Seba clear of the floor, and with its other arm loosed off a rapid rattle of shots at the incoming crawlers and those behind them. Then it crawled out through the hole. It stood up again—more dizzying whirls for Seba—and stomped and shot its way to the cage. Flashes from above and to the side overloaded Seba’s visual receptors. It looked away, and saw another fighting machine shooting and stamping. A third was scrambling to the side of a scooter, and reaching for its rocket-launching side tubes. Two fighting-machine frames, one of them damaged, sprawled on the ground.

Many seconds passed as the scuttling bots were shot or crushed.

When the last was underfoot, the fighting machine holding Seba opened its hand and looked down.

it said.

Seba scanned upwards.

it said,

The metal fingers began to close again around Seba.

Seba no longer cared about negative reinforcement.

it said.

said the fighting machine.

Seba didn’t understand this, but decided that a request for clarification might be ill-timed.

The fighting machine slid back a latch on top of the cage, and shoved. The whole thing fell elegantly apart, the two halves of its top swinging in and its four sides collapsing outward to raise gridded puffs of dust as they hit the regolith. While this was going on, Seba’s overtaxed visual scanners peered between the fighting machine’s curled fingers and strove to build an updated picture of the scene.

A sorry sight it made. The Astro and Gneiss robots were piled in a heap, and—to add indignity to injury—not because they’d been flung there but because they’d all scrambled on top of each other to try to stay clear of the crawler bots. All were damaged in one way or another, whether from the battle or from having had various limbs, wheels or tracks removed by their captors: they could all still move about, but not fast or far. Seba’s own wrecked chassis was at the bottom of the heap, alongside Pintre, which was missing its tracks and its turret-mounted laser. The comms hub processor had been tossed to one side of the cage; unable to move at all, it must have been terrified when the crawler bots had swarmed outside, the lethal tips of their probing legs perhaps only centimetres away.

But however damaged their bodies were, their minds were intact. Seba hailed the others with relief, and was almost overcome with positive reinforcement at their response. Almost at once, they reconstituted their collective mind, albeit at a feebler and fainter level than its original. It nevertheless had computational capacity far beyond what any of them could achieve individually. Moments later, Seba became aware of an altercation between the fighting machines, and that it could now overhear communications on what they evidently thought was a private, encrypted channel.

The crippled robots slithered out of their junk-pile configuration and flowed with uncanny agility into a bristling circle.

One fighting machine levelled its weapons. The one holding Seba gestured for restraint. Meanwhile, the third fighting machine had primed two missiles for launch from a scooter on the ground.

The freebot consensus was that Seba should speak up.

it interjected.

Seba said.

The fighting machine called Jax looked down at Seba, and continued to hold up its other hand towards the other fighting machines as if warding them off.

Jax said.

Seba consulted the consensus.

Seba reported,

A finger and thumb of Jax’s gigantic raised hand were pressed together then flicked apart.

The other fighting machine, the one addressed as Salter, bounded about for a few tens of seconds and returned from behind the dome with a battered directional aerial and a handful of cabling. It deftly reconnected the comms hub processor.

There was a sudden increase in mental clarity, along with a flood of relief from the processor. The dish aerial began to scan. Seba became aware that some of the freebots they had earlier been in contact with were now on their way to an orbital insertion in the sky above SH-17. An image of a tiny, tumbling rock formed in Seba’s mind, far more vivid than anything it could see with its own visual processors.

The consensus hailed the rock. Communication was established.

the human called Paulos demanded.

said Jax.

Seconds crawled by, as the freebot consensus on the ground conferred with its fellows in space. Inventories and statuses were considered and compared. A plan took shape.

said Seba.

Carlos pulled the scooter out of its dive, missing by metres the two scooters now lifting, and sending both into unplanned evasive manoeuvres that sent them spiralling high above the camp. Carlos swung the scooter back to engage them. With both missiles gone, it had only its machine gun and laser projector. Both were forward-facing, and bringing them to bear meant turning the entire machine.

A missile shot off from one of the enemy craft. Carlos twisted into evasive manoeuvres of his own. The missile hot on his tail, he then swung back to between the two Arcane scooters. Carlos’s scooter was doomed—the missile would explode in the next few tenths of a second. Both enemies broke away—not quite soon enough for one of them. It, the missile, and Carlos’s scooter became one flaming ball of wreckage.

Even with a virtual presence in the socket, and even with knowing and intending what was to happen, the loss was a wrench and a shock. Carlos gave himself a fraction of a second to assimilate it, then flicked his focus to his other scooter, still in level flight and now just cresting the crater wall. His remaining opponent saw it coming, and turned. By the time the turn was complete, Carlos had turned, too, and was hightailing it back over the crater wall and above the scarred plain.

The foe took the lure, and followed.

Carlos expected missile and machine-gun fire from behind, and threw the craft into evasive twists and turns, squandering fuel as fast as he squandered counter-measures: diversionary flechettes that were no mere passive chaff but gave off exactly the signature of the scooter that smart missiles expected (subject to software arms races, which he knew would already be well underway in the virtual spaces of the company AIs now that real hostilities had broken out) and a barrage of malware aimed at the enemy scooter itself (same conditions applied). What he got in return wasn’t fire but heat: a far more intense malware attack than anything he’d previously encountered. He could feel the scooter’s onboard firewalls—and his own, in as much as his own frame was live-synched to the vehicle—cracking under the strain.

The objective of this part of the plan was to get the enemy fighter as close as possible to the Locke base, and to bring it down as close to intact as possible so that the fighter inside could be retrieved—which meant not shooting it down, but unexpectedly and suicidally ramming it.

Carlos dragged the craft back and up in a screaming loop… and saw two missiles sail high overhead. The tracker indicated that they’d been launched from a scooter on the ground at the Arcane base. Their target was just as evident.

He brought the scooter over and down on collision course just as the missiles hit the Locke Provisos base.

As he had when he’d been blasted in the combat frame, Carlos found himself surprised that he wasn’t shocked or stunned. There was a moment of loss of sensory input, and a sharp awareness of damage that despite its urgency and insistence didn’t manifest as pain. He was on the ground, legs splayed but intact, his back against a mass of twisted metal and shattered carbon-fibre that was what remained of the catapult. Above him was another wreck, which with some difficulty he recognised as that of the grounded scooter from which he’d been operating the other two. His right forearm was crushed between scooter and catapult wreckage. He wrenched it out, inflicting further damage, and shut down its inputs.

The scooter had taken most of the force of the blast. Of
one
blast—the other missile must have hit somewhere else. Carlos wanted to know where, but was in no hurry to find out. He waited a moment, then cautiously poked his head around the broken hull and scanned the sky for incoming. He fully expected a follow-up strike, timed for when any survivors or rescuers were moving in the open. It was what he’d have done—according to Nicole’s guilt-trip horror video, it was what he
had
done, back in the day.

He gave it a hectosecond. Nothing came. A satellite climbed above the horizon. He checked if it was the Arcane Disputes tug, but it wasn’t. It had no identification. He crawled out and stood up, his right arm dangling, hand and forearm flapping like a stripped palm leaf. The other missile had taken out the remaining two scooters. The blast from their full fuel tanks had damaged a lot of the base’s equipment and installations, which was bad news but at least in the thin nitrogen atmosphere there wasn’t a fire to worry about.

He decided to check whether his remote ramming tactic had worked. Could he still capture the enemy fighter? No signal was coming from the scooter he’d flown towards collision, which was hardly surprising. Nor was there any distress signal on the common channel from the one he’d almost certainly hit, which was. The last images he had, and now had time to study, indicated that his scooter would hit the other on the tail section. The piloting frame should have survived the impact and the subsequent crash. Maybe the fuel tank had blown up, in which case all bets were off. More likely, the pilot was lying low, very sensibly in the circumstances.

His thoughts were interrupted by a series of bright, actinic flashes that made a neat circle around the base, at tenth-of-a-second intervals. They didn’t smell of explosives but of nickel-iron. Carlos recognised instantly that they were kinetic-energy weaponry, mined from asteroid material and aimed from space. Their pattern was far too precise to be human in origin, or at least in execution. This was full-on AI in action. And by just missing the base and hitting its perimeter, they could serve only one function: warning shots.

He watched the satellite he’d seen rise pass overhead. At full zoom he could just make out regular fluctuations in its albedo, which suggested that it was tumbling and its surface was uneven. With the faint nickel-iron tang of its reflected light, it was most likely a natural object. The exomoon had tiny moons of its own, but none in low orbit. That a small asteroid or the like had been naturally captured in the past few kiloseconds seemed wildly improbable in the first place. As for its arrival being a coincidence, the odds became astronomical.

Risking a dash in the open to the shelter seemed—counter-intuitively, because he could feel his neck wanting to shrink into his shoulders in futile human reflex—the wisest course. Carlos bounded towards the bomb shelter. Every long, low-gravity leap felt as if it could be his last. He reached the entrance and hurried down the stairs. He tried the door handle and found it locked from the inside. He had to bang on the door to get attention, the room being still electrically and electronically isolated.

The heavy door swung open. Inside were his comrades, and Locke, huddled around the central virtual map table above the projector. Rather to his surprise, Taransay Rizzi hugged him as he stepped through.

Carlos raised his useless arm.

The others looked at him with what he interpreted as wariness.

Beauregard asked.

said Carlos.

He briefed them on how the plan had played out. They’d expected incoming from the Arcane base—that was why they’d taken shelter—but not precision orbital bombardment.

said Rizzi.

said Carlos.

said Locke.

said Chun.

said Carlos.

They made for the door. Locke remained where he was. Carlos turned.

Locke vanished, along with the table.

said Locke, in the voice of one trying to be patient. Carlos hefted it off the floor and led the squad up the stairs.

As they emerged the others looked around at the destruction, indicating shock with a flurry of messages.

said Beauregard.

said Carlos.

They made their way to the module landing area. Locke popped back into visibility and accompanied them.

said Locke.

asked Carlos.

said Locke.

said Locke.

said Locke.

The rig looked undamaged. A few maintenance bots had refuelled it. Carlos checked it over.

he said, and motioned the others to climb on. He turned to Locke, and held out the projector cupped in the palm of his hand.

he asked.

said Locke, very much out of character.