Insurgence Read online

  Now, its operating conceit had shifted to being war correspondents on the observation deck of a military spacecraft in the heat of the action. Incoming missiles, whether rockets or rocks, were being tracked in breathless real time. Flashes flared across the screen as the module’s counter-measures hit. The commentators—now in flak jackets and helmets—no longer intoned, they gabbled.

  In another way than time it was closer to the reality of their situation. They really were in a spaceship, albeit a very small and clunky one. Together with what equipage of fuel and nanofactories and so forth it had managed to haul along with it, it wasn’t much bigger than the actual spacecraft shooting at it.

  Beauregard took in about half a minute of urgent reportage, flinching repeatedly. Nicole had been right—it was like flying through flak. He drained his coffee, brushed croissant flakes from his chin, kissed Tourmaline in a hurry and left at a run.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Newtonian

  Forty seconds after launch from the space station, Harold Isaac Newton saw a diamond-bright flare two kilometres to his left. He didn’t need to check the roster of his squad to know whose spacecraft had just been destroyed. Jason Myles, gone. Pity, that. He liked Myles, inasmuch as anyone of sense could like a democrat. Knowing that the fighter had lost, at most, a few hundred seconds of memories, and ten times that number subjectively, made this less poignant than a death. Myles would reawaken back in the sim, shaken by the hell-black night of recovery, and wondering what had happened.

  Newton was wondering that, too. Just before launch, his ally Beauregard had sent him a message, unencrypted but cryptic. This could be the big one. The battle we’ve all been looking forward to. All the best. It had a double meaning. The fighters had all been looking forward to this battle. After several inconclusive engagements and one outright disaster, they were riding out in force at last to attack the freebots’ fortifications and installations on rocks and moonlets in the swarm of planetary rubble around SH-0.

  But Newton and Beauregard had been looking forward to another battle: the one that would come when the hidden cadres of the Reaction showed their hand and made their bid. As both men were well aware, a big mobilisation like this was one good opportunity to do just that. Beauregard had obviously some additional reason for thinking this was the one. Neither had solid evidence that any hidden Reaction cadre besides Newton existed, but they had reasons to suspect it, and to be watchful for untoward events.

  Something was up, no doubt about that. Beauregard’s squad leader, Carlos, had swiped a scooter and shot out of the hangar ahead of the rest on some mission of his own. Carlos was now far ahead, and far away. Beauregard, and the rest of his squad, had been stood down as a result. They were obviously under suspicion—quite unjustified, in the cases of all but Beauregard. Unlike Newton he wasn’t a Rax sleeper, but his disloyalties ran as deep and his attitudes were as good as.

  But that was Beauregard’s problem. The big guy could look after himself, and undoubtedly would.

  Newton’s own problems were rather more immediate.

  First off, he couldn’t give the impression he wasn’t surprised. His squad’s comms net rang with indignant shock. People were already rattled by Carlos’s defection or mutiny, and well aware that it hadn’t been his first unauthorised departure.

  Newton reported.

  said al-Khalid, Newton’s second-in-command.

 

  Newton flashed a complaint and warning to Zheng Reconciliation Services, whose ninety-strong echelon was ten kilometres ahead.

  he reported.

  said Irina Sholokhova, out on Newton’s right.

  Newton reprimanded.

  No response, not even an acknowledgement, came from the Zheng group. Newton scanned the sky ahead, his visual and radar senses turned to the max. As always the visual spectrum view was dominated by the big superhabitable planet SH-0, with a mass four times that of Earth and ten times Earth’s complexity in appearance. Less visually stimulating, but much closer, hung the exomoon SH-17, a bright three-quarter view with a ragged terminator separating its light and dark sides.

  The ninety scooters of Zheng Reconciliation Services were spreading out, individuals or squads beginning to orient to their assigned targets, along three successive arcs behind which six similar arcs—the Locke Provisos complement of which Newton’s squad was part, and the Morlock Arms teams behind them—followed like ripples.

  Then three flashes flared, roughly evenly spaced along the Zheng echelons. If Newton had been breathing, he would have gasped. Three of the Zheng squad leaders had been taken out. Before Newton or anyone else had time to process the shock, a storm of flashes erupted apparently at random across all the wings of the fleet. It was as if the entire armada of tiny spacecraft was being assailed by an unseen enemy. Evidently the Reaction breakout had begun, and in full force.

  Newton ordered, over an outcry of confused queries from his squad.

  al-Khalid reported.

  Newton scanned backward. A wave of new craft had emerged from the space station. More flashes ensued—among the fleet and among the newcomers. Trajectory analysis was far too complicated to apportion blame. It wasn’t at all clear whether the fresh forces were participating in the unexpected attack, or had been sent forth to counter it.

 

  the Locke AI responded.

  So Locke didn’t know what was going on, or was unwilling to tell. Interesting.

  Newton said.

  cried Sholokhova.

  In a corner of his sensorium, Newton saw a new message header wink for attention. From Carlos, and suspiciously long. He didn’t open it.

  Locke said. Newton loyally relayed and reinforced the instruction to his squad.

  Ahead, a flicker of attitude jets came from dozens of Zheng scooters. They spun over, facing back towards the station rather than out towards the freebot enemy.

  Newton knew instantly what was coming next.

 

  The renegade Zheng scooters’ jets, eclipsed but not entirely obscured by the bow-on views of the spacecraft themselves, scratched a line of sparks across the sky ahead. Thirty-six fighters from the Zheng echelon were now heading straight for the Locke echelon. The distance closed rapidly. Newton lurched sideways, the flinch feeding straight to his craft’s attitude jets. As he dipped below his previous trajectory, and his immediate comrades diverged in similarly random paths, he made a frantic appeal for information.

 

  No explanation came. If the Zheng fighters were returning at the request of their agency, or of the Direction, they would surely have said so at once. Therefore they were hostile.

  Newton shared this line of thought in swift signal exchanges with the other squad leaders in the Locke echelons. Consensus was immediate.

  Newton summarised the conclusion to his own squad.

  Attitude jets and main boosters fired all around him, throwing scores of fighters on different courses and speeds at once, the neat successive arcs fragmenting into a chaotic scramble. Newton instantly turned over control of his craft to its onboard automation. No skill he possessed could make a difference to the outcome of any encounter with the hostile craft. Close-quarter space combat was entirely a matter of not being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There were no guaran
tees, not even any clever moves. The only chance was chance.

  What made matters worse was that Newton was on the enemy’s side. They had no way of knowing that, and he had no way of telling them without being instantly detected and destroyed by his own.

  In this respect, Newton was a victim of his own success—and that of the quantum-key encryption that had made online anonymity possible, for a few brief, glorious years before quantum-computational AI had cracked the Internet wide open again to surveillance and the spooks. These years had coincided with Newton’s last years at school and all his years at university. In the real world, he had fulfilled the hopes his parents had so blatantly, and slightly embarrassingly, signposted with his name. In the last decades of the twenty-first century, physics and astronomy were hot areas in their own right—and not, as they’d been exactly a century earlier, mainly a training gym for mathematical skills that found their most lucrative application in, well, lucre, the creation of financial instruments so complex they could crash an economy, let alone computers.

  But, just as Isaac Newton had put as much into his researches in alchemy and the Apocalypse as he had into writing the Principia, Harold Isaac Newton had pursued a double life. Hardworking student by day, sociable enough drinker and clubber on weekend evenings, and assiduous exerciser on weekend days, Harry Newton had cultivated an online persona that reflected his true self and beliefs and concealed only his real name and any background details that might identify him. Otherwise he was quite overt: he was young, male, black, British and reactionary.

  That the world was in a bad way seemed obvious. The Accelerationist claim that the way out was to double down on the very ideologies—liberal, democratic, egalitarian, progressive—that had got it into its present mess struck Newton as manifestly absurd. Reaction, on the other hand, made sense. The ancient empires had ensured stability, and orderly progress, for millennia; modernity had bought faster progress at the price of recurrent catastrophe, from the French Revolution on. Newton wrote prolifically, first in comments on Rax sites, then increasingly, as his fame spread, in the main posts. He attacked democracy, equality and their proponents with style, wit and a deadly precision that came from close observation.

  Carver_BSNFH was his handle, an innocuous enough pseudonym. No one ever figured out what the letters stood for or got the joke. Whenever he had to think about his response to a comment or an issue, he asked himself “What would a BSNFH say about this?” And then he’d say whatever came to mind. The trolling was epic. Newton was immensely tickled that so many people assumed his online persona was false: white racists thought no black person could be that smart, and white leftists thought no black person could be that reactionary. Black people, Africans in particular, had no such illusions. Some of them even agreed with him—“traditional leadership” had become an almost fashionable solution in parts of the climate-ravaged continent.

  When he was finally approached online by a cadre of the Reaction to do more for the cause than write, the assignment he suggested for himself was obvious. He joined the Acceleration, and spied on it from within. The Accelerationists were delighted to have a recruit with his qualifications: young, talented, black, working-class, politically aware and sound. The writing of Carver_BSNFH continued uninterrupted, and carefully avoided giving any impression of inside knowledge of the Accelerationist movement. When the movement turned to selective violence, he saw at once that nothing could do more to discredit it, and he pitched in as one of the boldest bombers. Boldest, but not brightest: as he recalled, his attentats seemed to be dogged by bad luck, much of which he had prepared very carefully in advance. Not carefully enough, however. At some point in his sabotage of the sabotage campaign, he guessed, he must have outsmarted himself. So it was as an Axle terrorist that he died, and as an Axle terrorist that his accidentally preserved brain was posthumously sentenced to death…

  …to wake in Acceleration heaven, a dull egalitarian utopia with a democratic world government calling the shots and pulling the strings from back on Earth. Just to rub it in, fate had landed him in the employ of an agency named after John Locke. As Carver_BSNFH had often argued, the work of John Locke marked where Western civilisation had taken a fatal wrong step. Locke had invented liberalism, the first political ideology. He had tried to justify property and government. And to whom, Carver_BSNFH demanded, did these need justifying? To the propertyless, and to the governed. Once you made that rabble—by definition the least successful and assertive members of society—your arbiters, you were asking for and bloody well deserved every revolution and dictatorship and gulag they inflicted on you.

  Newton had never felt so alone. He knew he couldn’t be the only Rax cadre here. It was vanishingly unlikely that no one else had slipped through the net. If they’d missed him, they’d have missed others. In the weeks of training in the sim, and in the battles, he kept a watch for any hint of Rax sympathy, and found none. Nor had anyone of like mind found him. No one had even sounded him out—but then, he had an all too perfect disguise in the colour of his skin. Beauregard was the only person who’d seen beyond that and seen through him, and Beauregard wasn’t Rax. As Newton had often wryly reflected, Beauregard was merely the sort of cool, rational, confident guy most Rax wished they were, and really, really weren’t.

  Newton couldn’t presume that any other Reaction veterans among the walking dead warriors were in the same bind as he was. They might not, in life, have been secret agents inside the Acceleration. Some neat cheating back on Earth could have placed them in the agencies’ storage post mortem; Newton could think of half a dozen ways this could have been done, from switching identities to subverting the agency AIs themselves. Obviously there had been coordination and planning behind this outbreak, but he was out of the loop.

  And if he didn’t get inside the loop in the next couple of seconds, he was going to get blasted out of the sky. Newton had no way of knowing how much had been exposed by the outbreak—quite possibly the Direction’s AIs were tearing through old personnel records with a new vigilance right now. So any death he faced out here might not be followed by a reboot of the recording of himself.

  This time, death might be final—or the beginning of something worse.

  The converging flights of scooters—renegades and loyalists—passed through each other like wave fronts. Turbulence: flashes of destruction. By now so much evasive action was going on that Newton found himself the only fighter in the Locke contingent still heading towards the objective. Then more Zheng scooters up ahead broke and turned back towards the station. All of them!

  Newton’s radar sense stabbed a warning.

  Incoming!

  He overrode the random lateral evasive burn with a forward burn on his own account. Behind him, an explosion bloomed, then faded in hundredths of a second.

  Nothing had hit him. The second wave passed over. He was alone, and out ahead of everyone else. Behind him was chaos. It was impossible to tell who was attacking whom. His own squad members were spread across a volume of tens of kilometres. Even as he looked, two of them flared and winked out.

  Al-Khalid hailed him.

  Newton had to make a quick decision. If he was under suspicion back in the sim, his best defence would be a demonstration of rigid loyalty and discipline.

  Newton said.

  said al-Khalid.

 

  said al-Khalid.

  There was no point in berating the man, or the rest of the squad. Let the agency do that. Newton decided to bow to the inevitable, but to maintain his own course of rigid obedience.

  he said.
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  Al-Khalid wasted no more time on his stubborn commander.

 

  A volley of course corrections flickered in response. The remnants of the whole Locke complement were hightailing it back to the station. As far as Newton could see, with the little attention he could spare, they all made it.

  As the last scooter made it into the station, the station itself began to do something strange: it was separating out into its hundreds of component modules, or into molecule-like clusters thereof. This, Newton knew, was the mission’s emergency response to imminent catastrophe: to scatter as far and fast as necessary so that some at least of it would survive. He’d always envisaged such a catastrophe as cosmic, or at least astronomical—anything from a nearby gamma ray burst to an unstoppable asteroid collision or exosolar mass eruption. Obviously the Reaction breakout—if this was what it was—was being responded to as a disaster on a similar scale.

  Then, to Newton’s surprise and dismay, the Locke module shot away from the rest, accelerated by a mass-profligate fusion-engine burn. Within seconds it was hundreds of kilometres away, and making utterly unpredictable course changes. It didn’t take more than a moment’s subconscious calculation to show that his fuel reserves gave him not a hope in hell of catching up with the fleeing Locke module. There had always been something disturbing and discordant in seeing from the outside the place in which he had lived, an entire simulated world, as a physical object a few metres across. Now there was the added disquietude of seeing it dwindle fast then vanish from his scope.