Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

She was just about to order their deployment when the machine went over a landmine. The prow reared up. She saw clouds. For a moment the search engine continued to move forward, impelled by the cusp of its rear tracks on which it balanced like a kid on a bike doing a wheelie. A second explosion threw it over on its back.

Lucinda, like everyone else in the vehicle, hung there upside down for a moment. Then the shell seats swung around on their gimbals, the display and controls following, and she was upright again.

‘Looks like we were expected,’ she said on the general circuit. ‘Use your own initiative, everyone. Mission unchanged.’

‘I can’t breathe!’ Calder gasped. His chest was moving so fast that the shock-gel was resisting it.

‘Try to breathe normally,’ she said. He stared back without comprehension, his eyes like a trapped animal’s. She released the solvent to clear the shock-foam. The cabin filled with the hiss of popping bubbles. Calder screamed again, coughing on the acrid spray.

‘Calm him down,’ Lucinda told Winter. ‘Move slowly.’

She turned her attention to the soldiers’ icons on the screen in front of her. All thirty of them were fine. They could get out of an upside-down search engine in half a minute. It was a standard drill.

‘OK everybody, out the back!’ she said, and tabbed the hatch release. It opened a fraction, then stopped. A quick check of the rear view showed that the search engine’s topple had jammed it against a boulder.

‘Sorry, belay that,’ she said. The fighters had already rolled to their feet and were crouching on the inverted ceiling. ‘Hang on a minute.’

The number two engine was close behind hers. She called on it for a shove. Its prow nudged her machine’s stern away from the rock, then it reversed, changed course a fraction and ploughed on past her. A second or two later it was grinding over the nearest gun emplacement and, she devoutly hoped, crushing whoever was inside it. She opened the hatch.

‘Go!’ The fighters ran out one by one, rolling for cover on the rough, rust-covered ground, their plasma rifles up and firing within seconds. She slammed the hatch shut again and studied the display. The rest of the small battlefield was confusing, as ever—the enemy, hard-suited like her own side, popping up here and there, firing. The laboratory blockhouse was no doubt as impenetrable as a search engine, and a lot of fire was coming from that. Lucinda was pleased to see that the one search engine and several running troops who’d got between it and the artifact were not being fired upon. On the other hand, the defenders had no doubt called in air support. One more search engine was coming up behind her. She signalled to it for a pickup, grabbed the copydeck, opened the hatch again and led Winter and Calder to the back and out. The open hatch of the other vehicle gaped a few metres away. They dashed across, heads down as plasma bolts fizzed through the drizzle.

The only person in this engine was the driver, a Carlyle man. The soldiers had all deployed. Lucinda shoved Winter and Calder toward empty seats and ran to the front and swung in beside the driver.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Patch me through tae the team wi the fancy gun.’

He did. A moment later the laboratory blockhouse was punched through, its layered sheet-diamond reduced to what looked more like charcoal as it crumbled. Beyond it a gap was torn in the clouds, revealing a blue blink of sky.

‘Fuck,’ said the driver, who hadn’t seen this kind of focussed destruction before.

‘Go that way,’ Lucinda said, pointing at the nearest tentacle of the fastness, which lay across their path about fifty metres ahead.

‘There’s no entrance,’ said the driver.

‘Then fucking make one!’

‘No need to shout,’ he grumbled. The vehicle ground forward at a little more than a walking pace. Twenty metres, ten. She scanned the horizon through the sensors, saw the expected fast-growing dots in the sky through the clouds. Five. The great thick cable of the fastness’s extension loomed like a wall of black glass, and like black glass, it broke. The search engine crunched inside and swung to the right, moving up the widening tube. All the comms links with the other search engines faded out. Lucinda hit the floods. The walls, ridged and grooved like the inside of an old blood vessel, gleamed back. She scanned the seams by eye and with the search engine’s instruments, trying to interpret them by something she couldn’t explain in words but that she refused to call intuition, hoping that this primordial posthuman artifact might follow some pattern familiar from other artifacts plundered in her years of combat archaeology.

‘There,’ she said, pointing at a confluence of irregularities. ‘Log on to that.’

A flexible needle probe poked out from the prow, tapping in to the wall. Incomprehensible data in abstract geometric shapes flickered across the forward screen.

‘Eleven-dimensional environment,’ Lucinda said. She glanced back over her shoulder at Winter and Calder. ‘No use for you guys.’

Winter laughed hollowly. Calder had his eyes shut and was breathing slowly.

‘Let’s move on in to the hub,’ Lucinda said.

‘Couple of hundred metres,’ the driver said. ‘Two minutes.’

She nodded and went to the rear of the vehicle. Calder opened his eyes.

‘Sorry about the panic attack,’ he said. ‘Claustrophobia, maybe asthma.’

‘You should have said. Are you OK now?’

He looked around the interior, looked away from the view of a tunnel of black glass on the forward screen. ‘I can cope.’

‘Good.’ She held out the copydeck, still in her hand. ‘Soon as we find a node to downlink this to, we can have you out of here.’ She smiled, in a way she hoped was reassuring. ‘You and anyone else you can rescue.’

‘Won’t it take time?’ Winter asked.

‘To the copies, yes,’ she replied. ‘Hours, days.’ She waved a hand. ‘To us, seconds maybe. In and out.’

Calder’s face showed alarm again. ‘I don’t want to go in,’ he said.

‘What? It’s not you that’s going in, it’s just a copy.’

‘A copy that’ll think it’s me.’

‘Well, sure. You can upload the memories afterwards. Or not, if you prefer.’

He shook his head stubbornly. ‘I won’t do it.’

‘But—’ she began.

‘Leave it,’ said Winter. He clasped Calder’s knee. ‘It’s OK, mate. It’s OK.’

Lucinda went back to the command console. The vehicle was just emerging from the extension into the hub, whose interior space was wider and higher than the lights could reach. The black glass of the floor was smooth and free of dust. Here and there, small stacks of instrumentation showed that the Knights had taken their investigation here further than they usually dared. Complex crystalline shapes hung down like stalactites to within a few metres of the floor. Lucinda read the runes of the scans and guided the driver carefully across the vast floor, on a course that took them back around to the curve of the wall close to another groin of hub and extension. A small stack of apparatus from a previous investigation lay a few metres from where Lucinda asked the driver to stop. Perhaps this augured well for her intuition.

Again the probe tapped a seam. This time, the picture that came up was of a landscape, topographically similar to the one they’d travelled through, but curiously barren. It reminded her of the hills around the relic on Eurydice.

‘Yes!’ she shouted.

Whatever it was, it was a human-adapted virtual reality. She was about to stick the copydeck in its slot when a movement on the visual display caught her eye at the same time as the driver yelled. She looked up to see five Knights holding a cosmic-string projector aimed straight at the search engine. After them another man, carrying a Webster, walked out of the tubular extension and around behind and then alongside the gun-crew to face her.