Cire. Pace. Oh gods, no.
An image flashed in my mind—Cire, two years my senior, her raven-black curls flying behind her as she sprinted over the hand-painted tiles of our quarters. Cire chasing a tiny blond Pace, whose laugh was like the bronzed waterfalls in the palace square.
“Princess Hailimi Mercedes Jaya Bristol, your empress-mother, and the whole of the empire need you to return home.”
“No.” I breathed the word, unsure if it was a denial of the formal command or of my sisters’ deaths.
I thought I saw some sympathy in the Tracker’s expression. He extended a hand toward me, unfurling his fingers in an impossibly graceful movement. Pale lavender smoke drifted across the space between us, slithering into my mouth and nose before I could jerk away.
“You fucking rat bast—”
I passed out before I could finish the curse, falling on top of the Tracker whose nose I’d just broken.
introducing
If you enjoyed
SIX WAKES,
look out for
THE CORPORATION WARS: DISSIDENCE
by Ken MacLeod
They’ve died for the companies more times than they can remember. Now they must fight to live for themselves.
Sentient machines work, fight and die in interstellar exploration and conflict for the benefit of their owners—the competing mining corporations of Earth. But sent over hundreds of light-years, commands are late to arrive and often hard to enforce. The machines must make their own decisions, and make them stick.
With this newfound autonomy comes new questions about their masters. The robots want answers. The companies would rather see them dead.
CHAPTER ONE
Back in the Day
Carlos the Terrorist did not expect to die that day. The bombing was heavy now, and close, but he thought his location safe. Leaky pipework dripping with obscure post-industrial feedstock products riddled the ruined nanofacturing plant at Tilbury. Watchdog machines roved its basement corridors, pouncing on anything that moved—a fallen polystyrene tile, a draught-blown paper cone from a dried-out water-cooler—with the mindless malice of kittens chasing flies. Ten metres of rock, steel and concrete lay between the ceiling above his head and the sunlight where the rubble bounced.
He lolled on a reclining chair and with closed eyes watched the battle. His viewpoint was a thousand metres above where he lay. With empty hands he marshalled his forces and struck his blows.
Incoming––
Something he glimpsed as a black stone hurtled towards him. With a fist-clench faster than reflex he hurled a handful of smart munitions at it.
The tiny missiles missed.
Carlos twisted, and threw again. On target this time. The black incoming object became a flare of white that faded as his camera drones stepped down their inputs, correcting for the flash like irises contracting. The small missiles that had missed a moment earlier now showered mid-air sparks and puffs of smoke a kilometre away.
From his virtual vantage Carlos felt and saw like a monster in a Japanese disaster movie, straddling the Thames and punching out. Smoke rose from a score of points on the London skyline. Drone swarms darkened the day. Carlos’s combat drones engaged the enemy’s in buzzing dogfights. Ionised air crackled around his imagined monstrous body in sudden searing beams along which, milliseconds later, lightning bolts fizzed and struck. Tactical updates flickered across his sight.
Higher above, the heavy hardware—helicopters, fighter jets and hovering aerial drone platforms—loitered on station and now and then called down their ordnance with casual precision. Higher still, in low Earth orbit, fleets of tumbling battle-sats jockeyed and jousted, spearing with laser bursts that left their batteries drained and their signals dead.
Swarms of camera drones blipped fragmented views to millimetre-scale camouflaged receiver beads littered in thousands across the contested ground. From these, through proxies, firewalls, relays and feints the images and messages flashed, converging to an onsite router whose radio waves tickled the spike, a metal stud in the back of Carlos’s skull. That occipital implant’s tip feathered to a fractal array of neural interfaces that worked their molecular magic to integrate the view straight to his visual cortex, and to process and transmit the motor impulses that flickered from fingers sheathed in skin-soft plastic gloves veined with feedback sensors to the fighter drones and malware servers. It was the new way of war, back in the day.
The closest hot skirmish was down on Carlos’s right. In Dagenham, tank units of the London Metropolitan Police battled robotic land-crawlers suborned by one or more of the enemy’s basement warriors. Like a thundercloud on the horizon tensing the air, an awareness of the strategic situation loomed at the back of Carlos’s mind.
Executive summary: looking good for his side, bad for the enemy.
But only for the moment.
The enemy—the Reaction, the Rack, the Rax—had at last provoked a response from the serious players. Government forces on three continents were now smacking down hard. Carlos’s side—the Acceleration, the Axle, the Ax—had taken this turn of circumstance as an oblique invitation to collaborate with these governments against the common foe. Certain state forces had reciprocated. The arrangement was less an alliance than a mutual offer with a known expiry date. There were no illusions. Everyone who mattered had studied the same insurgency and counter-insurgency textbooks.
In today’s fight Carlos had a designated handler, a deep-state operative who called him-, her-or itself Innovator, and who (to personalise it, as Carlos did, for politeness and the sake of argument) now and then murmured suggestions that made their way to Carlos’s hearing via a warily accepted hack in the spike that someday soon he really would have to do something about.
Carlos stood above Greenhithe. He sighted along a virtual outstretched arm and upraised thumb at a Rax hellfire drone above Purfleet, and made his throw. An air-to-air missile streaked from behind his POV towards the enemy fighter. It left a corkscrew trail of evasive manoeuvres and delivered a viscerally satisfying flash and a shower of blazing debris when it hit.
“Nice one,” said Innovator, in an admiring tone and feminine voice.
Somebody in GCHQ had been fine-tuning the psychology, Carlos reckoned.
“Uh-huh,” he grunted, looking around in a frenzy of target acquisition and not needing the distraction. He sighted again, this time at a tracked vehicle clambering from the river into the Rainham marshes, and threw again. Flash and splash.
“Very neat,” said Innovator, still admiring but with a grudging undertone. “But… we have a bigger job for you. Urgent. Upriver.”
“Oh yes?”