Reality 36 (34 page)

  He had to know what the hell was going on. Experience told him he needed to know yesterday. There was something big going on here. He was surfing a wave of probabilities outside of his ability to predict; k52 would have a hard time attaching meaningful numbers to all the variables at play, but Richards had a hunch that the shit was about to hit the fan.

  Which all inevitably led to Big Daddy; Big Daddy was the only option.

  Big Daddy was in the back of the truck.

• • • •

Big Daddy's official designation was The Delafuente Mark 14 Combat Mech, a three-metre bipedal death machine of Euro design and outrageous cost, racked and stacked with all manner of overpowered weaponry capable of reducing the conventional army of a moderately sized nation to slag. Mechs like the Mark 14 were what governments deployed when fullscale air assault was judged too soft.

  There was room for a human pilot, though remote operation was the norm. They were also big enough to accommodate their own, moron-level Class One should either pilot or remote connection, or both, be broken.

  When they'd first seen the mech at the New London Arms Expo, Otto had come over all weird. He rarely got excited about much, but Richards could have sworn that he got dewyeyed and sparkling when he saw it, a real boy-meets-puppy moment. Denying him would have felt unfair. He regretted his generosity almost straightaway, because it was always Richards that ended up in the driving seat.

  And to think he'd deliberately forgotten to have it sent home after the Pallenberg job. Lucky him. Here it was, conveniently stored in the good old USNA waiting for another outing. Hooray.

  Big Daddy looked down at him from the back of a van, hunched over like an ogre in a box, its ridiculously small hands clasping its w-flanged knees. While its lamellar camouflage was inert, it displayed a silvery-blue colour on its armour panels, a graphite black elsewhere. The mech's body a sculpted swoop of rounded shapes and gaping gunports. Beautiful, if you liked that kind of thing, which Otto did, and Richards didn't. To him it looked like a toy Japanese robot of two centuries back.

  "Come on then," said Richards. He inserted part of his mind into the machine. It was like putting his head in the mouth of a lion. He shuffled it out of the truck. With incongruous delicacy, Big Daddy stepped down onto the ground and unbent its spine and limbs until it stood at its full height. Big Daddy whirred and clunked as its legs extended, weapons unfolded and shoulders moved back and locked into place. There was a loud hiss and clank as its spine straightened and the vertebral locking pins engaged. The hum of its nuclear batteries rose as its engines came on line and then dropped back as its automatic systems check got underway. The surface shimmered as the lamellar camouflage cycled through a number of configuration patterns, finishing on a reproduction of the factory wall behind it. Weapons made serious sounds as they powered up and down. Ammo feeds clunked as Big Daddy primed his cannons. Noises that set Richards' imaginary teeth on edge.

  "Big Daddy ready," it grated.

  "That's just super," said Richards sarcastically. He had Big Daddy open its cockpit and his smaller sheath clambered in. Only when the android was in the mech did he switch his full awareness to the mech's sensing systems, plastered in red phallic power displays.

  He looked over the site's defences again and swore. If he got in, but couldn't get the war mech out, this was going to be expensive.

  "Big Daddy ready," said the mech again.

  "For the love of…!" Richards banged his sheath's fist against the interior of the larger machine. He felt like a Russian doll, a machine in a machine in a machine. "I heard you the first time!" He pushed the One to the back of Big Daddy's cramped cyberspace where it waited placidly. Richards and his war donkey, he thought. He took over completely.

  Richards grumbled as he set the monster to walking, clanking and hissing noisily. "Let's get this over and done with," he muttered, and Big Daddy and the android sheath spoke with him. He went over to the wall of the factory he'd been hiding in and walked through it without stopping.

  Outside the atmosphere the Three in the commsat intensified Richards' controlling signal, relaying it from base unit to war machine.

  Karlsson's creatures knew he was coming. His Gridpipe back to the base unit cut through the Grid like a shark's fin in water. It lost some coherency as he passed into the fortress's EM umbrella; this would grow worse as he approached the walls. Richards checked the signal, formulated back-up orders to Big Daddy's onboard brain should his influence be curtailed, but the Gridpipe was bright and loud. If there were problems with the feed, then the Three on the satellite would switch to pulsed laser communciation – only when he got inside would there be a problem. These were eventualities, it was all systems go.

  Richards was confident there would be no problem.

  The straight way to the factory would be the best.

  A swarm of drones stooped to attack Big Daddy as he stomped through a weed-choked car park. Richards blew them from the sky with a volley of mini-missiles from Big Daddy's shoulder mount.

  "I hate this. So unsubtle," he muttered. A homeless family scurried across his path. He paused to let them by. "You better get away!" he said to them, Big Daddy's speakers rendering his advice in an ear-mincing bellow. "It's going to get messy around here, war messy!" He realised he was enjoying himself, riding high on a squirt of simulated adrenalin, and that irritated him.

  In five minutes he'd decimated a squad of dog drones and reached the edge of the lagoon Karlsson's factory squatted in. He raised Big Daddy's fist and extended the mech's plasma thrower. The weapon wheezed as it sucked in a tank full of atmosphere, then roared it back out as a beam of superheated ionised air that atomised the fence and flatribbon projectors for a ten-metre stretch. He walked through, shooting down drones as he went. Fire came in from the turrets above the factory, heavy-calibre rounds that he had to set Big Daddy into, like a man walking into driving rain. Some of the camolam was scratched and stopped working. Otto was going to be pissed off.

  "Fuck off," said Richards, and hurled dumb-fire missiles at the near-I cannon. EM pulses swamped them, but as they were mechanical detonators atop solid fuel rockets guided only by Richards' aim, they flew on. A couple were shot down by more direct means, but Richards fired Big Daddy's arm cannon at the guns tracking the rockets and that was that. Then the rockets did for most of Karlsson's heavy ordinance.

  On he stomped, Big Daddy's feet sloshing through the murky water, bringing up unidentifiable industrial wrack into the light that was swiftly carried back below and crushed by his huge weight. EM attacks rained down on the mech, dispersing on the machine's faraday armours. Simultaneous electronic attacks sallied out against the commsat and Richards. Twice he was forced to switch communications mode between base unit and war machine. Still he came on. Karlsson had gone to pains to deter unwanted visitors; what he had not planned for was a full-scale assault.

  When he was twenty metres from the factory, Richards launched a dozen limpet mines from Big Daddy's forearms. They flew forward and attached themselves in a neat arc to the wall. High voltage played across them, attempting to disable the bombs' electronics, but there were none, the mines working off clockwork timers of Richards' design. Richards marched on in Big Daddy's body, reaching the wall as the shaped charges imploded, carving a neat hole in the wall just big enough to accommodate the machine. Richards deployed the plasma thrower to melt the remaining foamcrete in the gap, then levelled the launcher again. This time, he loaded it with canisters containing ten thousand short-range ants apiece, and fired them one after the other into the swirling mess of the interior beyond the crude entryway. The canisters blew open in mid air, showering the place with the tiny robots. The pattered into the walls and floors, sprang to their feet and surged away, searching for energy sources. About half of them were picked off by drones, but the rest scuttled into air vents and conduits. With the ants deployed, Richards' job was nearly done.

  Richards stepped forward through a cloud of dust into a world of chaos.

  He was in a large, open loading bay filling the end quarter of the fortress. Eight large pits, big enough for heavy trucks or dirigible gondolas, were set into the foamcrete. Klaxons bellowed and debris rained down from the high ceiling, bouncing across the floor or clattering off Big Daddy's carapace. Anti-intruder smoke casters, fires and dust kept visibility down to a few metres. Infrared wasn't much better, queered by swirling columns of hot air billowing up from the pits in the floor. Fire, too much fire. He hadn't hit it that hard. The building was eating itself. He had minutes at best, but he walked cautiously, fearful of toppling Otto's expensive toy into a loading pit. He brought the plans of the building into mind; he needed to get into the main body of the complex where his ants were congregating. The building worked off a diffuse multi-brain network, blended personality, no main server, multiple redundant systems. He needed to plug into one of those quickly before the whole lot suicided.

  There were the sounds of explosions in the distance. These stopped. His ants were too few to form an effective chain and convey much information back to him through the EM noise, but if the cessation of demo charges going off was anything to go by they'd fulfilled their most important role.

  Or he was walking into a big trap.

  The wall at the end of the hangar was crossed with suspended walkways going in and out of doors cut into the foamcrete. A number of humanoid combat sheaths appeared on these and opened fire with flechette rifles and heavy rail guns. As Big Daddy had eight-centimetre-thick diamondweave armour plate, they might as well have been hurling rotten fruit. Servomotors whined as Richards tilted the big mech's torso upward and gunned them down. Some fell from the walkways and landed in front of him where they struggled to get up. Richards stomped them vindictively to pieces. It did little to improve his mood.

  He approached a large blast door set into the wall at the end of the bay. He raised his fist again, ready to melt the doors to slag, but they slid open before he could fire, to reveal a largecalibre spider cannon squatting in the way.

  "Uh-oh," said Richards. The spider cannon fired a hi-ex shell before he could annihilate it, knocking Big Daddy onto its armoured behind. The mech skidded several metres backwards on its arse and its elbows, drawing a shower of sparks from the floor. Richards sat up. The spider cannon switched to full auto and sprayed him liberally at short range. Warning indicators began to flicker in the mech, but Richards weathered it until the other machine's clip was empty.

  "Nice try," he said, and blew the spider cannon into fragments. He got back up again and walked through the door. Another spider cannon was coming round the corner. He destroyed that before it got a shot off, and lumbered onwards, leaving shattered machine parts in his wake.

  A broad corridor ran the length of the building, to his left the exterior wall, to the right an interior block the height of the building divided into offices and accommodation. On the other side of this block were a series of large workshops and plant rooms, at least according to the plans. There wasn't enough room for Richards to proceed in Big Daddy, and not enough time to blast his way into every room, which wouldn't have been so clever, seeing as he was looking for information, not piles of rubble. He cut Big Daddy's mind loose, took control of his android sheath and clambered out of the front.

  "Stay!" he shouted at the mech, pointing a commanding composite finger.

  "Big Daddy stay!" it agreed enthusiastically. "Big Daddy engage hostiles?"

  "Yeah, yeah, knock yourself out," Richards said. This sheath had no coat or hat. He felt naked. "I'm taking the drones though." Two crow-sized flight drones popped off Big Daddy's back and fell into covering positions. "Right then, let's see what this fucker's been up to," said Richards, and walked off into the warren of rooms. His ants were fighting a hard battle with the building's minds, which were still in the process of trying to kill themselves. He could feel it through the ants; it was a strange one, not like anything he'd encountered before, like Four or Six, but without the self-volition. Neither true AI or near-I. He feared he knew what that meant.

  He walked through a door. Flashing lights and debris made a nonsense of sight. Half the rooms were collapsed in on themselves, demolition charges exploded before the ants could short out the system entirely. He scrambled over rubble, peering into rooms as he went: office furniture coated in plaster and carbon fibres, here bedrooms, there a kitchen whose broken taps pumped a dust-skinned puddle on to the floor. He pushed on. An android leapt out from a wrecked room, gun at the ready. His drones blasted it to pieces with idle efficiency.

  He found the first fibre cluster thanks to his ants, who stood to attention on the back three of their five legs as he walked in. "Cheers, lads," he said, and had them go off to sniff out more vital systems to cripple. The cluster spilled out of a data conduit in the wall like a tangle of filthy spaghetti. He couldn't link wirelessly with the building mind, the shields it had on the broadcast network were too good and the ants had not yet brought it down, so he had to hunt for a direct link for a good minute through optic cables all rendered the same by a coating of dust. He eventually found what he was looking for, a coupling for a fibre that connected all the components of the building physically together. He popped open a panel in his chest and connected himself into the network, then it didn't matter what fancy crap Karlsson had on the network because he was in and ready and no building mind was going to stand up to Richards, AI.

  Richards expected an assault that never came. It was over.

  Richards began to interrogate the building's minds. He got that same sense of detachment he had had through the ants, more immediate to him now he was in. The machines within the network dumped their information into Richards, offering up their treasures without complaint, and he suspiciously sifted it for logic bombs and viruses. Once he'd done that, there wasn't much left.