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17

Pik Lando and Della Dee followed Wexel-l5 and Dru-2l into a drab, somewhat utilitarian room. In fact, judging from the now empty bins that occupied one wall, it had once served as some sort of storage area.

The room lay at the heart of the long-disused industrial complex that served as construct headquarters. Lando knew that not too far away a thousand recruits were busy studying newly made training tapes, marching back and forth across an empty warehouse, and making their way through a really tough obstacle course.

The entire facility was located deep underground, safe from prying eyes, and invisible to electronic sensors. And like everything else on the planet, the constructs had kept the complex in perfect repair, awaiting the return of their long-departed masters.

The storage room was empty now, empty except for a sturdy metal table and some matching stools. Lando found that these were tall, and almost comfortable, suggesting that they'd been designed for either the lights or the Lords themselves.

Wexel-l5 tried one, got off, and tried it again. He looked like a mountain on a stick.

What light there was came from two strip panels mounted on the ceiling. They flickered from time to time as if reacting to a distant maintenance problem.

There had been more and more of those lately, as the Il Ronnians herded thousands of constructs into concentration camps, and prevented them from performing their traditional duties.

Lando looked at Della. She looked at him. While the storage room was an unlikely venue in which to converse with a being who called himself "God," it was the logical place to interface with what amounted to a super-powerful maintenance computer. Not only that, but it also served as a useful reminder of the machine's original status, one device out of many.

Still, God was the only computer that had survived the night of death, and like any survivor deserved some respect.

Dru-21 wore a purse belted around his waist. He opened the flap, reached inside, and gathered something into his hand.

Then, moving with what Lando interpreted as dramatic deliberation, the light held his hand over the table. Construct looked at construct. Wexel-15 nodded.

The two of them had become quite close in recent days. Whether as a result of his advice, or because of necessity, Lando couldn't tell. But it was good whatever the reason.

The disks clattered as they hit. Some spun like tops, others fell over on their sides. Light winked off glossy black plastic.

Lando looked up at Dru-21. The construct took a disk and placed it at the center of his forehead.

"You are the first off-worlders to commune with God. There could be danger."

Lando turned to Della. "I'll go first. If I survive you can follow."

The bounty hunter picked up a disk and slapped it against her forehead. Her crossed arms and defiant expression said it all.

Lando sighed, shook his head ruefully, and reached for a disk. It felt cool against his skin.

Slowly, reverently, the constructs chose a disk and placed it on their foreheads. A lot of things happened at once.

Wexel-15's eyes rolled back in his head. Dru-21's normally expressionless face convulsed with pleasure, and the humans felt something akin to an electric current surge through their bodies. It brought neither pain nor pleasure, but was distinctly uncomfortable. Lando was in the process of reaching for his disk when the feeling disappeared. He heard a voice inside his head. It felt big, powerful, confident.

"Greetings." The single word seemed to reverberate through every cell of his mind.

Lando stirred uneasily. It felt weird to have someone or something else in his head. It was confusing too. Were thoughts sufficient, or should he speak out loud?

"Thoughts are sufficient," the voice said. "The Lords used thought to communicate with me, and I shall use it to communicate with you. Geeber dorx."

Lando frowned. "Geeeber dorx?" What the hell did that mean? He waited for the computer to reply but nothing came.

Thoughts that felt like Della flooded into the smuggler's mind. A telepathic conference call! It seemed God had a number of tricks up his electronic sleeve. "We would like to discuss the current military situation."

Lando felt God return. "You are to be complimented, Dee-1. Your tactics have been successful. Issle fleeb garbex noghorn . . . planetary rotations from now."

Lando looked around the table. Della shrugged, Wexel-15 looked confused, and Dru-21 was visibly concerned.

The smuggler's worst fears were confirmed. The gibberish was not part of God's normal communications patterns. He swallowed hard.

"Are you aware that some of your thoughts are reaching us in the form of gibberish?"

There was a five-second pause, as if God were checking on something. "Your powers of observation are flawed, Lando-1. All of my primary and secondary systems are operating at or above ninety-seven percent effectiveness."

Wexel-15 looked absolutely stricken, Dru-21's frown became even more pronounced, and Della looked thoughtful. Her thoughts were even, deliberate, as if speaking to a child.

"We believe that the Il Ronnians are trying to find you. If they succeed, their technicians will take you apart and remove you from the planet."

"That is umberlak."

Della shrugged and looked at Lando. He decided to give it a try. "Tell us where you are. We will send troops to protect you."

"I am everywhere ibor nowhere at all."

Lando forced himself to be patient. "That is impossible. Everyone is somewhere."

"Ardo klonk."

There was silence for a moment. All of them felt the same sense of dismay. Della chose her words carefully. "Did you order an attack on the valley that the Il Ronn call 'Holding Area Two'?"

"Yes."

A sensible reply. Expressions brightened.

"It was a poor decision. Many constructs died because of it. Why did you do it?"

There was a long silence followed by: "Nander pog 77784321 orbo."

More gibberish. Faces fell. There was another long silence. Their thoughts were the same. God had suffered some sort of mental breakdown. Why? There was no way to know.

Lando waited for God to read their thoughts, to deny the problem, but nothing came.

Wexel-15 spoke for the first time. His question was appropriate for the general that he had recently become.

"We need information about the Il Ronn. Supply dumps, communications, troop placements, anything you can give us."

"UCKERGAT!"

The thought had an urgent feel.

Dru-21 was the first to respond. "Could you repeat that, please? We did not understand."

"UCKERGAT! UCKERGAT! UCKERGAT! UCKERGAT! UCKERGAT! UCKERGAT!"

Lando shook his head slowly. "I hate to say it, but God is a few planets short of a full system."

Dru-21 tried once again. "God? Are you still there?"

"Abernom 6666 XXXX demidog."

Lando peeled the disk off his forehead and dropped it onto the table.

Slowly, reluctantly, the others did likewise. They started to rise but stopped when the table started to vibrate. Suddenly, without warning, large sheets of paper began to appear from under the tabletop. They hit Wexel-15's knees, startled him, and slid to the floor.

"What the . . .?" Lando got off his stool and dropped to his knees. He saw that a large black box had been mounted under the tabletop. A printer of some sort. It whined softly as sheet followed sheet onto the floor.

God, or the part of God that was still rational, was responding to their request for information. Or was trying to anyway.

The process continued unabated for a full five minutes until it stopped as suddenly as it had begun. Lando estimated that more than two hundred sheets of paper had been delivered.

Humans and constructs worked shoulder to shoulder to retrieve the printouts and stack them on the table. However, due to the fact that Dru-21 was the only person who could actually read the printouts, the rest were forced to watch while he sorted them into piles.

Dru-21 found that many of the sheets were covered with total gibberish, while others made partial sense, but were useless because they dealt with crops, warehouse manifests, or other mundane matters.

Still, he found that some of the printouts contained what appeared to be valuable information about Il Ronnian defenses, troop movements, and so forth, not to mention the beautiful, almost flawless satellite photos of the planet's surface.

It took time to sort them out, select what seemed like the most important, and shuffle them into some sort of order.

So, while Dru-21 worked on that, Lando took the satellite photos and taped them to the wall. They at least were something he could understand without Dru-21's assistance.

The first thing he noticed was that all of them had been obtained from Il Ronnian rather than indig satellites. In fact, knowing the Il Ronnian tendency to steal anything that wasn't nailed down, Lando supposed that the local satellites, if any, were safely stashed in the belly of some warship.

The smuggler couldn't read or write Il Ronnian, but it didn't take a linguist to see that the photo captions featured the same twisted script that he'd seen on captured cargoes, and in numerous documentaries.

The photos were Il Ronnian all right, which meant that God had the ability to tap into their communications systems without them knowing, and steal whatever he wanted. Or had been able to do so anyway, since his abilities seemed more than a little impaired at the moment.

Like Lando, Della was immediately attracted to the photos, and the information that they contained.

The first thing Della noticed was that while the photos were intended to provide the Il Ronnians with intelligence about the constructs and their activities, they worked in reverse as well. The damage caused by the destruction of villages, factories, and artifact sites were like open wounds on the planet's body.

The resolution was excellent. Many of the shots were wide and showed thousands of square miles, while others were closer in and covered a third or even a quarter of that area. And some were tight, so tight that she could make out the identification numbers stenciled across the top of Il Ronnian vehicles, and count heads in a holding area similar to the one that they had attacked the day before.

Quickly, instinctively, the bounty hunter looked for strength and weakness. Where could the constructs attack and cause the most damage? Which areas were so heavily defended that an attack would end in almost certain defeat? What if anything could she predict about the near future? Those thoughts and more churned through her mind as Della studied the photos.

Lando saw the military significance of the photos, but lacked Della's military training, and was drawn more to the wide shots than those that focused on specific installations. He was first and foremost a pilot, a smuggler looking at the target for the first time, fascinated by the overall network of cities, villages, and roads.

What he saw was a series of orderly patterns. Cities packed with rectangular buildings, surrounded by a maze of squared off interlocking streets, some dead-ending, some blocked at both ends, some connecting with others via traffic circles.

And then, radiating out from the cities, the smuggler saw arrow-straight roads and highways that only grudgingly gave way to obstacles like rivers, hills, and mountains. Roads and highways that served as connective tissue, binding hundreds of hilltop villages and lordly estates together, reaching farther and farther out until blocked by climate, terrain, or water.

Like Della, Lando was struck by the extent of the destruction that the Il Ronnians had wrought. Half-excavated cities, devastated villages, blown bridges, severed roads. They were everywhere.

The smuggler was struck by something else as well, the uneasy feeling that there was something familiar about the photos, something he should recognize but didn't. He looked at them in different ways. He turned some of them upside down. But the thought, if thought it was, refused to come.

Finally, unable to put his finger on it and tired of trying, Lando gave up. Della needed help sorting and interpreting tight shots. But even as he worked Lando couldn't escape the feeling that he had missed something, something that was big, and something that was very, very important.

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