Soul Bound

1          Soul Bound

1.2        Taking Control

1.2.5      An Idiosyncratic Interlude

1.2.5.8    A bestiary of combat drones

Her thoughts were chasing in circles. She looked up and was surprised to see that the dwarves playing had changed without her even noticing. David had replaced Tarik on Vedad’s team, and they were now engaged in a treasure hunt that involved finding orglife items hidden inside the play arena by positioning the line-of-sight of their drones. Higher value treasures were hidden in an area covered by virtual smoke which had to be navigated by positioning information and a 3D guess at obstacles pieced together from data collected by the drones’ different sensor packages.

It looked like it might be quite fun to play, but it was rather boring to watch.

Nadine: “Why does the game include smoke? Doesn’t it put off the viewers?”

Tarik: “No, if anything it attracts them. The same viewers who watch BattleMatch also watch real battles. They get a vicarious rush, a thrill, from knowing that real people are hurting and dying. Drone Sports flirt with that. In the professional leagues the scenarios are made as realistic as possible, as close as possible to actually controlling military drones. All the basic types of unmanned unit, the spids and dillos, are there in the orglife overlay; viewers can pick the simzen, unit or point of view they want to experience the battle from.”

Nadine: “Simulated citizens? Sounds sick. I’m sorry I dragged you guys into this. Maybe we can find another cover explanation for why we’d be sending drones out to intercept possible enemy drones…”

Tarik interrupted her: “buzzing mirrors”

Nadine: “Sorry. ...possible buzzing mirrors posing as delivery drones from Universal Service. I didn’t realise what drone sports were like. I don’t even know what the units are.”

Tarik: “It’s not that bad. In the leagues, teams get penalties for simzens they kill accidentally. Look, we’ve got time. Do you want to see?” he turned to Bahrudin and pointed at the laptop. “Can you bring up the footage from Ashgabat on that thing?”

Bahrudin interlocked his fingers and pushed his hands forwards, palms turned away from himself, like a pianist about to perform Rachmaninoff, and then masterfully typed away at the keyboard, tapping keys with speed and panache. Tarik looked impressed by Bahrudin’s apparent expertise, as the laptop brought up a bird’s eye image of a green lake in a dry and dusty land, surrounded by occasional green patches of irrigated field.

Nadine suppressed a grin. Bahrudin and Terah were obviously getting on well together, if they’d learned to collude this smoothly in putting on a show of Bahrudin being more than a one finger typist, when Terah was the one actually directing the viewpoint changes.

In the top left corner of the screen there appeared a countdown to expected time of landing, airspeed, and a rapidly decreasing altimeter.

10 km - the height of Mount Everest and the loneliest of migrating birds. She could see the runways of an airport south of the lake and, south of that, a geometric pattern of broad streets and built-up areas - a city. A calm female voice on a command channel noted that the opposition force had picked them up on lidar.

6 km - highest altitude known for rain clouds, plants or land creatures. She watched as the airspeed dropped under the sound barrier. The voice noted the deployment of decoys and counter missiles.

2 km - she could now make out individual stadiums, vast white marble ministry buildings and display gardens surrounding monuments. The delivery vehicle appeared to be aiming for a spot by one of these, where the edge of the city met unpopulated hillsides. The voice noted the release of braking canopies and the start of aerial drone deployment.

500 m - the height of the tallest of the word’s free-standing towers and buildings, and the height at which cities started to disrupt the normal free-flowing atmospheric winds. From here on, drones would be facing birds and man-held sniper rifles in addition to the flak from the rotary cannons of any automated defences the vanguard hadn’t taken out. She could see individual cars, the morning sun reflecting from their windscreens as they screeched to a halt so passengers could gape upwards.

Bahrudin flicked the screen to change the point of view to that of one of the units already on the ground, then froze the picture. On the ground was a 75 m high tripod-shaped monument in gold and white marble, surrounded by a mess of drones preparing a landing surface. Gliding towards it was a low-radar-return contoured wing. Only by comparing cars to the monument and the monument to the delivery vehicle could she grasp how large it was.

Bahrudin: “Ok, so let’s have a look at the types visible so far. That model of Common Aero Vehicle can deliver a payload the size of 100 cars from a 125 km high ballistic trajectory down to the surface using just maneuvering fins and a few parachutes at the final stage if you’re in a rush and there’s no airstrip available. Both Ultramarine and Armed Servo Guard corporations maintain sufficient launch facilities that they can stage an operation anywhere in the world with just a few hours’ notice.”

Bahrudin: “The medium-sized flying ones with legs, that look like dauber wasps? They fill a logistics support role, carrying ammo and other drones around the field of battle. They also have a secondary role, helping out with construction and demolition.”

Bahrudin: “The small disco balls? They’re cheap, light weight, and can be packed with seven different types of active and passive sensors. They also act as comms relays once jamming starts. 5000 of them weigh less than a single car, so they bring loads of spares. Shoot one down and three more pop up, like cockroaches.”

Bahrudin: “The large evil-looking ones with jets rather than fans? They’re air superiority drones, that dog fight with other drones and blast deep into enemy-held airspace. They’ve also got explosives in the nose and can double as smart missiles when mission critical. They’re known as dogs.”

Nadine: “As in ‘let slip the dogs of war’?”

Tarik: “Yeah. But they’re expensive. Games are scored by which side makes the greater net-profit. Use too many dogs and you might take down your objective and yet still lose.”

Nadine: “Tarik, this footage, it’s real, not a game, yes?”

Tarik: “Um, yeah. Sorry, they’re easy to confuse sometimes. But the same goes for arlife conflicts carried out by ASGuard or Ultramarine. They get bonuses for mission completion, and they select a force composition that they think will get them the bonuses for the minimum financial outlay after transport, repairs, ammo replacement and indemnities for collateral damage are paid for.”

Nadine wanted to argue with him, but this wasn’t the time. It was wrong to think of paying for killing civilians in the same terms that they thought about paying for knocking down the wrong building. It was wrong to get a game confused with reality. Wasn’t it?

Nadine: “I can’t see a focus anywhere. Are they not using that sort of drone?”

Bahrudin: “They will already have gone ahead to scout out the target. The mercs almost certainly slipped some into Ashgabat during the night, before they even launched the CAV, as part of the vanguard that took out the defences near the landing point. We may get a glimpse of some later. Let’s look at the ground units.”

He touched the screen and let the action play on until the CAV had touched down and ground units started to disembark.

Bahrudin: “The big one, that looks a bit like grasshopper with wheels on its legs, is an all-terrain mobile derrick that’s used to move things too heavy for the wasps to fly with: pods used for recharge, resupply, refuelling, replenishing ammo, spare drones and other equipment. They’re pretty speedy on roads, and can jump over obstacles.”

Tarik: “Don’t forget loot. Not all operations arrive by air. For a price, mercs will patrol and defend borders, build fortifications, or even enact regime change and keep conquered populations suppressed.”

Bahrudin: “The spider with the bulbous body the size of a minivan is command-and-control. It houses enough computing to run strategic expert systems in the event of satellite uplink getting cut off, and can house a human commander, specialists and prisoners. It’s very agile, and can shelter in burrows or by climbing inside buildings.”

Bahrudin: “The other large ground unit is the mother snake. It contains a swarm of smaller snakes, together with a supply of tools and explosives. It uses ground-penetrating radar and active seismography to map subterranean structures and find minefields. It digs, lays mines like eggs, and does all manner of repair, construction and demolition.”

Nadine: “Wasps? Snakes and spiders? What are they trying to do, trigger every phobia they can find?”

Tarik: “Probably, yeah. But they claim they’re just re-using forms that have naturally evolved to fit functions.”

Bahrudin gave a skeptical grunt before letting the action continue another minute. The movement of the units was definitely creepy - more biological than mechanical.

Bahrudin: “Case in point. Here’s the steaming mantis.” The screen showed a unit with heavily reinforced forearms, a long counterbalance as a tail and a twitching pair of strange antennae on its head. The snake was cutting large slabs of marble from the monument which six mantises queued up to take and use as shields.

Bahrudin: “Not good runners but very fast at moving a shield around to block. They act as decoys, signal jammers and can produce smoke that blocks infra-red as well as visual wavelengths. I sincerely doubt that combination just happens to result in a praying mantis being the optimal form.”

Nadine: “What’re the medium sized ones that look like stick insects?”

She pointed at one that had slowly climbed the monument and whose colouration had changed to blend in with the white and gold, making it hard to spot.

Bahrudin: “They blow stuff up. It doesn’t matter if they don’t have a direct line of sight, as long as the comms net is intact and at least one surveillance drone has added an object to the target list. They use mortars, guided missiles or cannons, whatever’s appropriate.”

He set the action playing again. Smoke started billowing out, hiding the landing area from view. He switched to the viewpoint of a hopper speeding down a road, escorted by waves of flying drones. A couple of minutes later it arrived in front of one of the ministry buildings and a hoard of drones poured forth from the pods. He paused the action.

Tarik: “Here comes the good bit. Now you’ll see the dillos in action.”

Nadine looked carefully at the segmented metal spheres, each twice the size of a beach ball, that had been shot towards the building. They looked more like a balled-up starfish than an armadillo.

Bahrudin: “These are the close quarters melee combat specialist units. Fast, heavily armoured and deadly. They can be equipped with a wide variety of weapons, from flamethrowers and breaching charges to psychoactive gases or non-lethal immobilisation devices, depending upon the mission objective.”

Nadine: “So, the flying units are the hypersonic CAV, the dogs, the wasps, the roaches and the focuses. The big ground units are the hopper, the spid and the snake. The smaller ground units include the mantis, stickys and dillos. That it?”

Tarik: “In arlife there’s a wide variety of rare specialist units such as aquatics, but as far as military units in the game, that’s it. Let’s watch the action now.”

Bahrudin set the image going again, and they watched an old-fashioned aeroplane take out the hopper with a missile attack before being blown out of the air by a sticky. The suicidal attack had been too late, however. The merc forces had already blown an entry through the wall of the ministry and the smoke started rising up to hide the sticks as they spread out to gain maximum coverage.

90 seconds later an explosion rocked the 12th floor, and a swarm of wasps flew out of the resulting hole, carrying an unconscious body between them. Five minutes after that, the CAV had taken off again, leaving behind a human-shaped tele-presence robot, wearing a neat uniform emblazoned with the ASGuard ‘valkyrie’ logo, to explain that Turkmenistan could have its minister of finance back (along with the cryptographic key controlling Turkmenistan’s foreign reserves) when Turkmenistan was prepared to return to the negotiating table over its disputed border zone with the Hashimic Caliphate.

The symbolism of the semi-demolished ‘Arch of Neutrality’ in the background was, presumably, quite intentional.