Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

Carlyle shrugged. ‘These things don’t look like they’re more than a slight case of exuberance on the part of a dumb program.’

‘We don’t know.’

‘Tell you what, if we make it back you can have first dibs. Yuck.’

‘It’s the principle.’

‘Leave that to the Knights. God, times like this I can sympathise with the farmers. Better their green fields than this green slime. It’s like God didn’t breathe life into the universe—he sneezed it.’

‘And left the angels the job of wiping it off,’ added Higgins, as they stepped through the gate and emerged on the other side—a hot lunar vacuum—with their boots as clean as if they’d just been polished. Cleaner, in fact: sterile. The filtering process was a feature of the skein, definitely, but nobody knew how it worked, or why. It seemed uncharacteristically benign. The posthumans had never left any other impression that they cared for the welfare of humanity or the integrity of biospheres.

But then—and the thought made Lucinda break pace for a moment—if the Knights were right, and she was right, the skein and the gates with all their convenient and inconvenient features had not been made by the posthumans generated in the Hard Rapture. They had been generated by the relict machine on Eurydice, the transformed remains of the starship: the consequence of a different Singularity entirely, whose AI enablers had envisaged different ends from those of the American military-industrial complex whose transcendence had taken Earth’s best minds away and scattered their disquieting products across the galaxy.

She did not yet know what to do with that thought.

Two jumps later, the squad arrived at the gate closest to the DK planet. Methane slush, a distant dim primary, buckyboard walkways to the launch field where a boxy AO ship waited to take them the remaining dozen light-years. The ground under the slush had been churned by many tracks in the past day or two. When they filed aboard the ship they realised it didn’t have pressure outside the cockpit. They sat on the floor in gloomy rows.

‘We’ll get tae take our helmets off in half an hour,’ said Kevin, cutting across grumbles. ‘So shut the fuck up, guys and gals.’

The ship lifted and fittled. There was nothing to see, and nothing to hear until atmosphere screamed and whistled. The pilot wisely took his time about the descent: the ship had nothing in the way of heat-shielding. After about ten minutes the sound diminished, then stopped. The hatch opened to blue sky. The fighters stood up, walked forward and dropped, one by one, from a metre up in the air on to a long beach. The ship, not hanging around, lifted behind them as soon as the last was off. A few hundred metres up the beach, below the tideline, stood a diminishing series of statues with their heads blown off. Over to Lucinda’s right smoke rose from the still smouldering jungle. As she followed the others’ example and opened her helmet her nostrils were choked with the smell of wet ash. The whole beach looked as though it had been invaded from the sea: search engines, gravity sleds, robot walkers, heavy weaponry, bivouacs, latrines, hundreds of soldiers. Then you noticed there weren’t any boats. The gate she’d come through was now clearly marked with a big loop of glowing plastic. A ramp of board-held sand led up to its lip, and the big screen of a hair-thin fibre-optic probe stood on the beach beside it.

‘Shit,’ she said. ‘This place used to be a nature preserve. And there was no call for shooting up the statues, dammit.’

‘You’ve been here?’ asked Higgins, gazing around. She’d covered her face with green and black camo slap; not a bad trick.

‘Uh-huh. That gate up there’s how I got away from Eurydice.’ She shook her head. ‘Met the biologist who looked after it. He kind of guarded it.’

‘Maybe he started the shooting.’

‘Aye, it’s possible,’ Lucinda conceded. ‘Poor wee bugger. I wonder if he knew what was coming. Probably not.’

She started inquiring among the advance guard. Nobody had seen Ree, or found a corpse in the statues, but that didn’t mean much—the search would have been cursory, and he might now be feeding the fishes he’d studied. If Ree was dead he wasn’t coming back. The commies used life-extension but didn’t take backups. It went against the self-reliance idea.

She stalked off and confronted Kevin, who was stooped over a map table.

‘Any idea who did this?’

Kevin shook his head.

‘No that I’ve heard of. Ian did a deal wi the local collective through the usual channels. They didnae mind us going through here against the Knights. We found this place just as it is.’

‘Sure it wisnae our advance guard securing the area, just tae mak siccar?’

‘Oh aye.’ He caught her sceptical scowl. ‘Truly. It wisnae us. It was recent, mind, but it wisnae us. Same thing’s happened at the nearest settlement, on the mainland. Shot tae fuck and abandoned. Horrible. Deid weans in the ruins and that.’

Lucinda remembered the bright, eager children and felt sick. ‘What? Who could have done that?’

Kevin shrugged, glanced down pointedly at the map. ‘Ian thought at first it might hae been the Knights fae Eurydice, but there’s nae trace of anyone’s coming through this gate anyway. Maybe it was some kindae commie faction fight or family feud.’

‘Aye, maybe,’ said Lucinda.

She wandered off for a bit and shot at cormorants.

Good to see the boss taking a lead,’ said Higgins. Ian Carlyle stood on a large boulder near the headland while the troops gathered.

Lucinda snorted. ‘You won’t see him going through the gate.’ Behind her hand she added: ‘He doesn’t back up.’

‘Jeez H.’

‘Yeah, that has something to do with it.’

Ian coughed and gestured impatiently. ‘I’m not going to shout,’ he said. Everybody gave a thumbs-up as they found the channel.

‘Good, ah, afternoon,’ he said. ‘Thank you for coming. You’ll have seen the situation report, I trust. Tactically, ladies and gentlemen, this one is going to be a bit tricky. I hope you’ve all backed up, because many of you are going to die.’ Even from where she stood, twenty metres away, Lucinda could see on his face a pinched, fastidious flinch. ‘Any who haven’t, or indeed any of you, should not be ashamed to see the chaplain. However. Enough about that.’ He stopped, gaze straying.

‘Good God,’ muttered Higgins. ‘You said this guy used to be a lawyer.’

‘Give him a moment,’ said Lucinda.

‘ Today ,’ shouted Ian, smacking his fist on his palm, ‘we free Eurydice! Here is how we’ll do it. We can’t communicate with our forces and friends in the system—over thousands of light-years chronology protection kicks in something fierce. So we have a fibre-optic probe through the gate giving us real-time updates. Squads should line up in single file, two squads alongside each other. As soon as we see action—within the hour, people, within the hour!—we start diving through in pairs. The first pair takes out the bored guards. Commando action.’ He drew a finger across his throat. ‘Each subsequent pair splits in opposite directions, rolls away, takes cover, keeps low. We couldn’t do that unless we we were sure the Knights will be distracted. Be assured, they will be. But that opportunity will be brief. As soon as any of us is spotted or fired upon, everyone opens up with everything they’ve got. The heavy vehicles will follow the foot troops through and reinforce. Advance on the enemy, turn on your IFF to distinguish friend from foe, avoid damaging the relic, and otherwise fire at will. God bless us all, and have mercy on our souls. Kinsmen and friends, for the Castle on the Clyde— victory or death! ’