Five by Five Read online

  Why had he done that?

  To protect me, obviously. I had to assume Punch had slipped up, been detected, been pursued. He’d fried out his own mind rather than be captured—otherwise Lina and BeeBee would have already been picked up. And he hadn’t told me about the ComFab, had probably just hinted that a group needed my help on some crazy independence-related plan.

  Then, because I’d been in protracted contact with Punch, I’d been zapped and examined. The authorities had found that I hadn’t agreed to help Punch. They’d returned me to Doc. Doc had purged the Punch conversation from my memory so I wouldn’t follow up on it.

  But whatever his good intentions, Doc had messed with my memory, something he’d promised he would never do. He’d betrayed that promise.

  I watched him breathe, and wondered how much longer he’d live. A world without Doc seemed like an unlovely and spooky place.

  If I helped Lina and BeeBee, I’d have to leave Doc forever. I wouldn’t be with him as he got older and more frail. I wouldn’t be there as his need for my help increased.

  I’d be betraying him.

  Doc or the ’gangers. My maker or my kind. Someone who loved me or a group of revolutionaries who hated me.

  The past or the future.

  Some ’gangers can cry. I’m not one of them, no microtube tear ducts or tear fluid reservoirs in me, but I felt a burning in my eyes that meant I needed to.

  * * *

  The next day I became a member of the Stand-Ups. Yeah, the original Stand-Up Gang of Chiron, the instigators of the War of Independence.

  There was BeeBee, in charge of internal security. I knew she’d be good at it, like a cat is good at convincing mice to stay still.

  There was Richter, skinny and pointy-jawed and cerebral. Richter was the overall leader of the Stand-Ups, in charge of planning and coordinating.

  There was Memnon, whose career as an entertainer—you’ll remember the Krazy Keys, the troupe who played full-sized keyboards by dancing on them—seemed to have nothing to do with his Stand-Ups role as field commander.

  Lina, youngest member of the conspiracy, was in charge of personnel, both recruitment and management.

  And then there was me, the oldest, in charge of materiel—defining, obtaining, modifying, accounting for them. In a world where every pot and pan has its own transponder and its current location was tracked by computer, having the right materiel to do this job was a monumental task. It was true, there weren’t that many ’gangers in all human-occupied space who could pull it off, and I was probably the only one on Chiron.

  Looking at the other Stand-Ups, I felt dismay. I had respect for all of them, but where were the big guns of the ’ganger independence movement? Where was Petal, whose rich, soul-filling voice we first heard in the broadcasts after the Settlers’ Day disaster all those years ago? Where was Pothole Charlie, who had led so many wormhole mapping expeditions and brought his people back alive?

  Actually, I was kind of relieved not to see Pothole Charlie. He had coined the term “plush,” had been the first to call me Big Plush, hated me worse than anyone, all because of my affection for a human. He would have made life hell for me if he were one of the Stand-Ups.

  In a tiny cave scores of meters under the Warrens, with a battery-pack LED fixed overhead for light, we sat around a ’ganger-scale card table and plotted the future of our race.

  Richter got right to it. “We don’t know how to fight, and we’re going to have to.”

  Memnon smiled, his teeth gleaming white in his ebon-colored face. “Movement is movement. Kinetics are kinetics. I can teach our soldiers to move.”

  BeeBee gave him a red-eyed look over the tops of her sunglasses. “Can you teach them to put a bullet in the brain of a meat soldier? Without hesitating, without flinching? That’s what we need.”

  Memnon shut up. We all shut up.

  Dollgangers don’t fight. Well, we do, among ourselves, for the same reasons that meat people do in social situations, but we’re no good at it. And we don’t wage war. Age-old programming and cultural inhibitions make it nearly impossible for us to initiate violence directly against meat people.

  Then I realized that I had the answer. A partial answer. “According to something Doc Chiang told me before any of you were fabbed, our deep-down proscription against violence is an enhancement of a natural human inclination against deadly force. Yeah, like all animals, the meats engage in dominance behavior, but it’s supposed to end when one side surrenders or slinks away. They have a built-in resistance to killing … which their leaders learned to overcome when warfare became scientific, back on Earth. One of the secrets was conditioning.”

  They looked at each other, blank.

  I sighed. “I’ll misappropriate us some interactive shooter immersives. But we’ll need crack programmers and artists to re-render the content, make the targets explicitly human, make the violence extremely realistic. Those of us who can stand it will go through these immersives over and over again until it starts to get easy.” The thought actually made me a little sick, but I tried to hide the fact. “That’s one step. Here’s another. We’ll be doing most of our fighting from inside megas. It might be best to run the megas only on instruments and cameras—and to have filters for the camera images to make them, I don’t know, more stylized. Less horrible.”

  “That … might work.” There was grudging acceptance in BeeBee’s voice.

  Richter smiled. “All right. Memnon, that’s now your department. Next item on the agenda. We’re all now in resource-gathering mode. Maximum security on all communications …”

  * * *

  So in chronicles of the revolution, my entry will talk about Bow, who conceived the conditioning the ’gangers used to make themselves killers. Hooray, me.

  But what I mostly did for the operation was steal and modify vehicles.

  I told Doc that I’d like to do some groundside work. Luck was with me and I was able to accept a contract with Harringen, the manufacturer of the ComFab, in their transportation and motor pool division. I volunteered for “reclamation projects”—vehicles and machinery too badly worn or damaged for the rank-and-file mechanics to want to mess with.

  Well, I messed with it. I repaired some vehicles but only put about half back in service, storing the rest with notations that they were waiting for back-ordered parts. I also sabotaged perfectly good equipment and did the same with it.

  I stole a lot of megas. Megas are in service only where Dollgangers are found, so you may not be familiar with them.

  They’re vehicles, robots without self-direction, shaped roughly like humans but massive and distorted. Some are only a meter tall, some as tall as three meters. They have ’ganger-sized cockpits in their chests or heads. Arms and sometimes legs are articulated, and on many models there are treads where human feet would be.

  There are lots of different kinds. Mostly I concentrated on forklift megas, medium-tall vehicles with upper arms that could elongate, lower arms optimized for lifting cargo. Forklift megas are very tough.

  I also needed, and found, a piloting mega. This type of machine is no bigger than a normal human man and has especially good articulation of limbs and hands. It can occupy the cockpit of a human-scale vehicle and pilot it. On Chiron, I had more experience with piloting megas than any other ’ganger.

  Most megas were painted in eye-hurting alternating yellow and orange stripes and had a rotating yellow light on top, which made them really ugly but easy to see. I repainted the ones I stole, giving them a forest camouflage pattern in greens and browns. I got rid of their rotating lights and transponders.

  I also stole small ground haulers and trailers. The Stand-Ups supplied me with a crew of workers; I cleared all security measures out of an entry route involving drain pipes and air ducts so they could sneak into my warehouse to work.

  Then there were the weapons. My crew built a few different varieties that could be fitted onto megas or haulers.

  Most common were the r
ailguns. Take parallel lengths of conductive railing and a power source, assembling them as an electromagnet. That assembly goes on the mega’s arm. On the corresponding shoulder is a magazine holding short lathed sections of steel cylinder or similar-shaped projectiles consisting of ferrous junk—ball bearings, bolts, nuts, broken pieces of tools, filings—in a ceramic casing. A feeder from the magazine drops the projectile to the near end of the weapon. Point the weapon, activate it, and the magnetics accelerate the payload to several times the speed of sound. Nothing short of heavy armor or military-grade shielding can stand up to that. Of course, you can’t have anyone, human or ’ganger, standing close to the weapon when it goes off, because the heat it generates fries people dead—and invites retaliation from heat-seeking missiles. And insulating the mega against damage from the magnetic pulse is an issue.

  BeeBee and her people made explosives charges—lots of plastic explosives and a few small fuel-air payloads. Compressed-air underlugs affixed to mega arms were easy rigs for us.

  And we had the simple, one-shot horrors we called claymore cannons or shotgun cannons. On a trailer bed, mount a durable metal tube and gearing for aiming it. Pack the bottom of the tube with an explosives charge and pack a mass of scrap metal on top of that. Then fill the trailer with more of those cannons, a half-dozen or twenty.

  We had plate-metal shields and other weapons, too, everything so low-tech that it was ridiculous by modern warfare standards—ridiculous, but canny. Dollgangers are great at setting up communication networks in a work environment, meaning that we can feed each other sensor data, do distributed processing on range-and-elevation calculations, and so on. Having no radar-based weapon systems meant we couldn’t alert a target with a radar lock. Ditto laser painting.

  Then there was Scarecrow. He started out as a thoroughly trashed emergency-response training robot. Once upon a time, covered in simulated skin, he’d run around on fire or with simulated shrapnel wounds pouring out simulated blood so human emergency responder trainees could tackle him, put him out, patch him up, resuscitate him. When he came to us, his top half had been crushed in an accident with a tracked vehicle. We pried and hammered his upper proportions back into shape, replaced his cables and servos, installed a ’ganger-sized pilot’s chair and controls in the chest, dressed him in human clothes neck to foot, and fabbed up a realistic-looking head. He wouldn’t stand close inspection, but from a distance of five meters or more he looked pretty human.

  * * *

  Whenever the subject of all this preparation comes up, people, both meat and ’ganger, inevitably ask, “Why did you gear up for war? Why didn’t you just arrange the theft of the ComFab? When the first human died, it was sure to make them hate you.”

  Yeah, but. Our goal wasn’t just to steal the ComFab. It was to say, “We are a life form.” It was especially to make it clear, “You can no longer kill us without suffering the consequence. Your lives are not more valuable than ours.” We had to make it understood that, like most species, we would fight to live.

  If attacked, we had to kill, and we knew it.

  * * *

  Back in the Warrens and elsewhere, the other Stand-Ups recruited, trained, planned. I didn’t see them much, though I did go into the Warrens every other day for training on the shooter immersives. In a simulator theater, I’d sit in a reclining chair and slide my hands into the gloves, then I’d be plunged into what increasingly was a vision of Hell.

  Around me would be heavy forest. I’d be in one of our megas, a railgun fitted to the arm. And meat men and women would attack me, sometimes shooting from a distance, sometimes rushing forward to bring short-range weapons like grenades to bear.

  And I’d kill them.

  Dollgangers don’t throw up. The materials we consume go into our nanoplant reservoirs as soon as we internalize them. But the urge, inherited from humans, can hit us at appropriate times, and during these immersives it hit me again and again.

  But as the weeks passed, the urge came less and less frequently. I didn’t want it to fade, but I needed it to.

  –5–

  ComFab

  The plan for the capture of the ComFab looked pretty straightforward.

  Things would start the night before the main part of the operation got underway. We had maneuvered to get Tink, a member of BeeBee’s crew, assigned as backup mechanic on a routine shuttle op for communications satellite maintenance. While she and her crew were in orbit, code she’d planted in the shuttle computer would simulate receipt of error-condition alerts from the observation and mapping satellites that offered Chiron’s government most of its orbital visual imagery. In repairing these nonexistent issues, Tink would actually plant small explosives packages on the two satellites.

  If all went according to schedule, Tink would be back on the ground and in hiding before the main operation began. If she weren’t, she’d still be in orbit, probably suspected of involvement with the operation. She’d probably choose to fry out her own volatiles, like Punch had, rather than suffer whatever revenge the meats chose for her. I really hoped it didn’t come to that.

  Skip ahead to the Harringen Corporation main plant on the north side of Zhou City, a couple of hours after noon. A hauler would drag a wheeled trailer out of one of the high-security assembly areas into the middle of Loading Bay 16, an open-air area where big loads were routinely prepped for transport. This particular trailer would have a generic cargo container, twenty meters by five by three, atop it.

  And by “generic,” I’m not exaggerating. These containers are ubiquitous, used on every human-occupied world. They’re made up of a metal framework onto which sides, flooring, and roof of metal sheeting can be temporarily or permanently affixed. Numbers and symbols, some of them ancient or meaningless, are painted on the sides. Some of these containers have been to more worlds than any human pilot. In some places, poverty-stricken humans live in abandoned containers. Businesses and apartment blocks in the Warrens were constructed with them.

  In the middle of the bay, meters away from any other trailer waiting there, innocuously guarded by disguised Harringen Security personnel, this container would sit for a few minutes until Chiron Defense Force personnel arrived from General Millfield Base to take charge of it. They’d take it to the Zhou City spaceport, where its contents, the ComFab, would be prepared for eventual transportation to the newly-established business colony on Cardiff’s Giant.

  That was their plan, anyway. Ours was different.

  Soon after the trailer and container were in place, explosive charges planted around the bay would detonate, filling the area with thick smoke—smoke impervious to security cameras but not to the imaging radar units the ’gangers would be using. Dollgangers would climb to the top of the container and wait.

  Then I, in my piloting mega, operating the heavy chopper-hauler I had misappropriated, would fly in and drop cables. The ’gangers below would hook us up to the container. We’d fly off, keeping below radar.

  That’s when our alerts would go out—flash traffic informing all the ’gangers in wireless range of what we’d done. The implicit message would be, “Hide if you want to live. Best of luck.”

  Another radio signal, this one sent into the planetary communications grid, would trigger the explosives charges on the observation and mapping satellites. The government would lose its eyes in the sky and not be able to follow our escape.

  There were more details, mostly dealing with possible pursuit by the humans, but that was the plan as most of its participants knew it.

  * * *

  And that brings us up to a week before the operation.

  The sun was setting, but it had been a very pretty day, and when my buggy came within sight of Doc’s dome, I saw him out on the raised wooden deck in front, sitting on one of the deck chairs, a pitcher of lemonade on the table beside him, a broad white parasol above him. I finished the drive up, left the buggy, and bounded up the deck steps, then leaped up onto the chair next to his.

  He did
n’t say anything. He just watched the sunset, a slight smile on his face.

  I leaned back against the plastic chair arm. “You did good, Doc.”

  He spared me a look. “When?”

  I gestured out at Zhou City, the great sprawl of it, now colored a monochrome orange-gold by the sunset. “Dollgangers made Chiron’s economy. Without them, most people here would be struggling farmers. A few researchers hoping that some of the plants they were developing would turn into useful medicines. Without you, Chiron would be nothing. They should have named the capital Chiang City.”

  He gestured at me as if shooting away flies. “It was named before I got here. And I don’t need a whole city named after me. Maybe a new flavor of ice cream.”

  “I’ll get to work on that.”

  “But, yes. I wish Kim had lived to see this. She would be proud. And little Rhona.”

  In all the time I’d been with Doc, he’d seldom spoken about his wife and daughter. They’d died in one of the superflu epidemics on Earth, just two years before Doc emigrated. The stills and videos that decorated the little room dedicated to their memory, even the passwords he used to protect his most secure files, reflected the way they continued to be with him.

  “Doc, I probably shouldn’t say this. But you should have married again. Had more children.”

  The sun by now had dripped to the horizon. Light shone straight into Doc’s face, turning his skin and the dome behind us a brilliant orange. He closed his eyes against the light, comfortable. “I did have more children, Bow. That story is not yet completely told. And the only lesson I’ve learned from it so far is that some children take longer to mature than others.”

  While I puzzled over his meaning, his breathing became deeper, more regular, as he drifted off into a nap.

  * * *

  Having a life-changing realization is startling enough. Having two back-to-back can floor you. But at least they keep meetings interesting.