“Why would anyone demand rights for them and at the same time try to destroy them?” Rice said. “I think the manifesto is a distraction. Their true goal is to disable our defenses. Take out pills, WAIs, and bots, and our fighting force is reduced to a handful of special forces, and even you lot rely on WAIs and pills most of the time.” The director took a breath. “I’m willing to let you and Olafson investigate this doctor. Smells like a possible money trail there. Get a few hours of sleep and head to New Jersey but make sure you’re back for the afternoon briefing. Depending on what you get from the interview, we can revisit the connection off-world. Until then, the preponderance of evidence still points to the al-Muwahhidun. This is our chance to bring our full forces to bear against the caliph. Let’s keep our eyes on that prize. We’re updating the president hourly, and as soon as we have the authorization, we’re sending you overseas.”

Welga quashed a reflexive desire to argue. She and Olafson left the buzzing office area and found a couple of empty sofas in the cafeteria. She closed her eyes, but sleep eluded her, and it was too late to take a drug. She sat up and slipped a tether onto her wrist. Across the room, Olafson’s chest rose and fell regularly. How could he sleep at a time like this? Habit. As a Raider, she’d had plenty of practice falling asleep in stressful situations. It was a necessary survival skill, one that she’d lost in the intervening years of comfortable shield work.

She called up the text of the Machinehood’s manifesto again. They demanded personhood for WAIs, bots, and even animals. The philosophy came straight from every machine rights group, nothing original there except for the addition of the animals. The condemnation of violence sounded as much like the caliph as the Neo-Buddhists. Nothing new there, either, except that those two ideas—machine rights and nonviolence—didn’t usually intersect.

Real fighting had been outsourced to bots for decades. Why risk human soldiers when they could remotely direct machines and let them take all the damage? Special operations teams like hers were all that remained of the vast armies populating human history. The machine rights protesters never objected to using bots in warfare, and they had no qualms about sending them against shields.