The Corporation Wars: Insurgence by Ken MacLeod

Author:Ken MacLeod
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780356505022
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2016-11-28T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Fighting Machines

The rock loomed, looking like a knobbly cinder about a hundred and fifty metres on its long axis. From ten kilometres out Newton could easily see that its natural rotation had been stabilised. Forty kilometres above SH-17, it orbited the exomoon with one face always to the ground. Newton’s trajectory brought him from slightly below it to slightly above, before his scooter slowly matched velocities. His forward scanning detected nothing untoward. Solar power panels glittered at the fore and aft ends.

Closer, more details appeared. The uneven surface was cobwebbed with fine pipework. Newton wondered if they’d been landed, or nanofactured in situ. A carbonaceous chondrite could well contain enough organics to make the latter possible. An artificial bulge on the upper surface resolved into a flexible tank, about ten metres long and at the moment about eighty centimetres at its thickest. Presumably this was where the extracted kerogene was stored. Enough for his scooter to refuel with, if so. This rock had potential! More even than his surveys had shown!

Closer still, Newton saw movement on the surface. Dozens of small spider-like robots, about the size of a human hand and almost certainly mindless, picked their way among the delicate pipes. Their movements seemed to Newton almost unnaturally slow and graceful, reaching and gripping before contracting their extended limbs, as if they were climbers on a rockface – which in a sense they were, though the risk here was not of falling down but of floating off.

Newton drifted his scooter ever closer to the surface, seeking a point of attachment that wouldn’t damage any of the machinery or pipework. It was difficult to maintain an intuitive sense of scale; the surface was so complex that you couldn’t help but see it as ridges and valleys, rugged terrain and plain, with drifts of dust and patches of ice and a spatter of craters. He ghosted above the long fuel bag, and then forward, looking for a clear space.

Two unexpected developments made Newton freeze in horror, or at least to experience the atavistic analogy of that reflex echoed in his frame’s circuitry.

First, a larger robot than any he had hitherto detected on the rock clambered above the horizon, just up ahead of him. Multi-limbed and with a cluster of lenses and other sensors on its upper body, the effect was exactly that of a spider popping up in response to any disturbance of its nest or tremor in its web. In two of its limbs, held high above the rest, it clutched a two-metre-long tube. Even from more than ten metres away, Newton’s spectrographic sense could smell the explosive charge inside the tube’s black muzzle.

The fucking blinker was a freebot.

A moment later, above the wider horizon of SH-17 behind him, another spidery shape climbed, heading in his general direction. He scanned it and saw that it was a lifter, laden with the frames of eighteen fighters. Arcane Disputes was either evacuating the exomoon – or rising to defend it.

To defend it

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.