Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

‘Any deep space stuff?’

‘Aye, a few, but it’s hard to tell fae leakage ae tight-beam transmissions. The odd asteroid miner, I reckon. Maybe a fort or two.’

Carlyle chewed a lip, sucked hot coffee from her helmet nipple. ‘Makes sense. The squatters don’t seem to be AO, whoever they are.’

Orr sniggered. ‘Squatters coulda picked a better place to fittle into. Makes me wonder why they didnae fittle straight back out.’

‘Yeah,’ said Carlyle. ‘Well, assuming.’ Assuming a lot about the squatters’ tech level and motivations, was what she meant. She sat up, hunkered forward, elbows on knees, looking around. ‘When your demons have finished we might have something to go on. Meanwhile …’ She toggled to an open circuit. ‘Time for a bit ae combat archaeology.’

T

he mission profile was straightforward. They were neither to hide from nor confront the squatters, but instead pull down from the busy sky as much information as they could about them, then scout the diamond machine-mountain for any traces of usable tech and/or dangerous haunts, and get the hell out before sunset. Her familiar had found no signals in the noise bounced back from the precipitous face, but as Carlyle stalked forward alone, the Webster reaction pistol strapped to her hip, her backup team behind her to keep her covered, she felt her knees tremble. It wasn’t so much the possible soul-searing dangers presented by the incomprehensible posthuman artifact, as it was a fear of screwing up. This was her first big job for the firm, one she’d fought hard to get, and she had no intention of blowing it. And on the plus side of the ledger, there was always the chance that the tech in here would be radical and capable of being parlayed into wealth beyond the dreams, etc. There was always that, but it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t what kept you walking forward, like a soldier into enemy fire. The Carlyles led from the front, always had, from the days when the worst any of them faced was a chibbing in a Glasgow close.

From a few metres away she saw that the lower part of the face, to about head height, was overgrown with moss and grass, evidently on the slow stacking of windblown dust. Above that the slope was sheer, the surface so smooth that nothing could gain purchase. The gap, a triangle ten metres high and three across at the base, had been dark only from a distance, and by contrast. As she walked into the cleft Carlyle could see that the interior was almost as bright as the outside. The passage itself was only a few paces long.

The ground level of the space opened out before her. It was so like a forest of frost-rimed low trees that for a moment she wondered if it was indeed that, perhaps a region of the heath trapped under this machine and preserved. A closer look at the nearest of the objects showed her that there was nothing biological there: the clear crystalline structure was replicated on an increasing scale from the frost that covered the needles through to the needles themselves, and the branches, to the main stem that sprouted out of the floor.

The floor was like ice, its transparency diminishing with depth. Looking up, Carlyle saw that the entire interior of the machine was encrusted with similar tree-like structures, the ones above hanging down like enormous chandeliers, their prismatic bevelled sides shining with every colour of the visible spectrum in the sunlight that slanted through the outer surface.

‘It’s diamond all right,’ said Shlaim.

‘How much carbon is locked up in this?’ Carlyle asked.

‘Many millions of tons,’ said the familiar. ‘An entire coal measure, I would say, save that coal measures seem unlikely here.’

‘Or an entire carbonaceous chondrite? Could they have done that?’

‘If so it would be a quite profligate use of anti-gravity.’ Shlaim sounded skeptical. ‘Or they could have lowered it from a skyhook, I suppose, but it would seem pointless… .’

Carlyle laughed. ‘Since when has that ever ruled out anything they did?’

‘In any case,’ said Shlaim, ‘it appears to have been grown or manufactured in situ. From atmospheric carbon, like a plant.’

‘It’s no just carbon,’ Carlyle said.

‘Indeed not.’

Looking down the aisle between rows of diamond shrubbery Carlyle could see other, metallic colours interrupting the riotous monotony of the prisms. The frequency and size of these interruptions increased towards the centre of the artifact, where an arrangement of copper and steel, conical in outline, complicated in detail, rose a hundred metres or more from the floor. The grail in this cathedral, or the host. It looked more like a machine than the rest of the structure did, its hints of organic form echoing animal rather than plant structures.

She walked along to the nearest apparently metal object. About a metre and a half high, it seemed a miniature of the thing in the centre. Squatting beside it, she peered at the intricate surface. Fluted, mirror-smooth steel, veined with copper that could have been tubing, in a series of varied but individually precise diameters. In among the copper were other lines, green and red, that resembled and might even be plastic insulation around wires. Checking her head-up, Carlyle saw that this object was slightly above the ambient temperature of the artifact. She switched to IR and looked again at the central cone. It too glowed, more strongly than its smaller counterparts.

‘Something going on here,’ she said. ‘Some kinda circulation. Flow of electricity, maybe fuel.’

She reached a hand towards it.

‘Don’t touch it!’ warned Shlaim.

‘Course not,’ said Carlye. ‘Just waving the inductance—’

‘I would still caution against—’

Something fizzed and melted on the object’s surface. A jolt of heat or electricity jackknifed Carlyle’s arm back.

‘Shit!’ She wanted to suck her fingertips. She jumped up and backed off, clutching her numb elbow. The thing was moving, flowing as though melting into the floor. It spread, and long tendrils that looked like dribbles of mercury reached the bases of a few of the diamond bushes. These too began to move, branches clicking into new and different shapes like a multitool with nanchuk blades, the trunks becoming dislodged from nowrevealed grooves in the floor as they did so. Carlyle backed off farther, and drew the Webster. Within seconds the metal object had become the central component of a frightening arachnoid array of skittering legs and waving arms, the whole freestanding and rotating as though deciding where to pounce. She could see lenses , formed through some complex infolding of prisms, and they were scanning her.

‘I think at this point there is nothing to lose by firing,’ said Shlaim, with irritating calm.

The Webster roared and bucked in her hands. The machine leapt backwards several metres but was otherwise unaffected. Projectiles ricocheted for what seemed a long time. Before the sounds tinkled to a halt Carlyle turned to sprint for the opening. All around her, machines were assembling themselves. She fired as she ran, hitting the metal cores here and there with effect before the diamond carapaces could form around them. Liquid bled and burned.

Out of the opening she sprinted as far and as fast as she could, then threw herself forward and rolled.

‘Fire at will!’ she shouted.

A Charnley bolt singed the air a metre above her. There was a flash. Then a cacophonous sound from her radio speakers deafened her. Something shorted in her helmet, stinging her neck. She rolled farther, over the lip of ground. The team were all blazing away at the opening. The banshee outcry ceased. Carlyle slammed another clip in the Webster and fired at the gap in the wall. The robot walkers were rocking back and forth on their spring-loaded legs as they lobbed shells from their field pieces, to no effect Carlyle could see apart from chewing up the soil around the face of the edifice. The diamond walls hadn’t taken a scratch.