Toys - Dev Agarwal

SHE CROUCHED IN A long, smooth trench with soldiers to her left and right. The trench ran through a housing project that had been hit by something early on - the giant fist of a screamer or a pillar-of-fire. Concrete chunks the size of cars littered its streets.

The Salusa had bombed first, then attacked with huge land machines and subsurface burrowers whose tunnels ran for miles and miles, exposing Mannheim's underside. Man-made drains and cellars and jumbled fibre-optics gaped within the channel's smooth bore. They looked clumsy and misshapen compared to the tunnels' flawless curves. The tunnels wound through Mannheim like the arc of a circle of infinite length.

Hiding inside this one, Rebecca stood face to face with the war. She had to remind herself that this was what she wanted. She'd fought to be ringside, front row. What she'd got was raw sewage and vivid injuries and her bowels loose with fear. She was trapped behind the enemy's lines, too scared to sleep, suffocating under an endless, sickening noise.

Salusan engines churned through her. Their drone and pitch shook her body and burned her head with migraine.

Rebecca had never seen any of the machines up close. They were just black shapes in the air, or giant pyramids shaking the city apart as they rumbled on the horizon. But she knew what they were. They were Salusan warmachines - all trying to kill her.

* * * *

Rebecca tried to keep busy. She tagged her latest dispatch, Deep War. Her inbuilt hardware was junk in the Salusa's dampening field, but she was still writing. She pictured her 'ware's yellow graffix in her mind.

Rebecca's boyfriend Bernie had said, "You go to Germany, all you'll get is a hundred UN jocks talking sports cars, football, and you onto the nearest flat surface." Bernie couldn't see the romance of a foreign war. He was an image consultant for JAL suborbital.

To Bernie, history was a fashion accessory and fashions came and went with eye-blink speed. Cyberspace had opened the planet like an x-ray, irradiating every corner and shadow of the globe. But what people found with the whole world open to them was that they needed someone else to tell them what it meant.

Rebecca was a face - both critic and reporter. She was the guiding interface between virtual experience and the vast global audience. Faces like Rebecca Miller travelled Business Class, sifting world culture and packaging it into simple, intense hits of sensation.

The hottest trend for thirty years had been the Salusa. They were marvels. American and Japanese labs developed them from human DNA and kinked them for super intelligence. They had been vatgrown servants to humanity in the wars on poverty, hunger, and overpopulation. They were also man's indentured servants, his corporate slaves.

In the warzone, Rebecca worked on her second Pulitzer. It was an award for a world she hoped was still there to return to, somewhere beyond the unwavering drone of the Salusa at war.

* * * *

An hour later and the thudding syncopation of the engines drained away in one long sonorous hum. The Salusa had switched off the noise. The silence slammed Rebecca till she stumbled and fell. The soldiers were on their knees too, gagging and spitting. Someone was vomiting - and that meant Rebecca could hear their heaving grunts. The soldiers nearest her were smiling at the sound - at any sound - teeth bright in their camouflage paint as they helped her up. Rebecca breathed the sharp, cold air, enjoying the silence.

Eventually, the unit's Major summoned her. She scuttled, head down against snipers, to his command post.

Major Belgo held his command in a square where four housing projects had once met. The remains of apartment blocks carpeted the ground in broken bricks.

The Major sat with his sergeants, Saul and Tate, while the unit's medic inspected a wound on his head. The soldiers had painted their faces till they resembled stylised Apaches. The designs were all unique - emerald ziggurats, butterfly wings, and yin-yang symbols. They were strictly non-reg, but Rebecca had decided Belgo knew what he was doing, bonding the men through their belief in warpaint.

"We have a sighting, a klick to our whisky," Belgo said, seeming to enjoy his own jargon. He was a small man, stone bald, with large, striking blue eyes.

"More nulls?" she asked.

"Salusa. On foot." He was Belgian and spoke English with the precision of a second language. "We will be moving to reconnaissance them and re-establish contact with Fox company, then pass our intel back to UN Command. Are you able to go forward with the advance party?"

She nodded, too vain to admit her fear.

"Corporal Miller, then," Belgo said. He smiled and his dull-eyed men laughed dutifully.

"Cool. I got rank," Rebecca said.

"Battlefield promotion." Sergeant Andy Saul walked over. He slipped his kevlar helmet off. Beneath it he wore a gold earring and a bandanna torn from a piece of parachute silk. The silk flowed over his head like an old flatscreen movie star's desert headress.

Behind him, Belgo twinged as the female medic slapped a glistening worm of sealant onto his skull.

Belgo's eyes met Rebecca's. "My men - each of them knows he is going to die. He accepts this as fact. Do you?"

Rebecca blinked, unprepared. "No."

Belgo nodded. She'd given a good answer. "You are unsure of yourself. Unseated from your role as voyeur, yes?"

She was on surer ground now with this old argument and said nothing.

The British sergeant - Tommy Tate - looked up from working the moving parts on his machine gun. He had a thick, unpleasant face and sticky, hostile eyes.

"I am in the business of protecting my people," Belgo was saying. "I cannot want unsure, confused people unseating me from my objectives." He allowed his words to linger while the female medic, Roper, settled his helmet over his bruised head. A building without an outer wall hung behind them. Its second story, Rebecca noticed, was a bedroom. The floor bowed in a drunken "V," as if the weight of its queen bed had grown too huge for it.

Belgo wiped a greasy thumb over the lenses contoured into his helmet. The pop-down night vision, comm channels, and antilaser flash were all useless now.

"The Salusa scrambled our tactical displays. Their weapons are more sophisticated. Our force is cut off, surrounded and the inferior in size. But we will succeed." He nodded, emphatic. "We will, because every member of Dog company is an asset - must be an asset to one another." He glanced at Saul and the sergeant approached, swinging his carbine up.

The unit only had projectile weapons. Dependable, twentieth century tech that the Salusa couldn't fuck with through their damping field.

"Hey, Daisy." Saul only ever called her Daisy, and appeared to have no idea of her real name. "Do that up now," he said in drawling SoCal. He began zipping up her flak jacket. His hand pressed her breast indifferently.

Belgo talked over Saul's shoulder. "Your cyberspace implants are disabled, but you have surgically perfect vision. I need you to forward-observe the enemy and see what he is doing."

In the army, Rebecca had learned, the commander's orders were the voice of God. For all any of them knew, he was the last officer left in Mannheim.

Rebecca's stomach tightened with fear.

Seeing her flinch, Saul said, "Daisy, you shoulda stayed home, you didn't wanta get yo'self killed."

Rebecca laughed nervously.

"This ain't VR over here, don't you know." Saul's eyes wrinkled, assessing her as a dilemma he had to fix for the unit. The whole squad watched. Rebecca laughed again and said she knew that. Tommy Tate laughed as well, but at her, in a sarcastic bark.

Saul smiled and slapped her flak jacket. And the unit all saw that he had nothing else to say if she wouldn't listen.

* * * *

Rebecca was travelling down a gentle left-hand curve. The air was mausoleum-cold, but devoid of the bone numbing wind that raced above ground.

Rebecca sat in the back of a flatbed truck, crowded with silent Germans. They were rolling down and round in an empty never-ending curve. Always turning left, with the truck's headlights bouncing on sloping concrete. There was no sense of space, just endless grey on grey. They were turning and turning till the world could tip and spill her into a silent colourless ocean.

The Salusa had attacked as soon as the unit pulled out of the trench. She had been crouching beside Saul and a young black soldier called Drucker. Someone tripped a sonic screamer and two grunts burst apart like an exploding butcher's shop.

As the soldiers scattered, Rebecca panicked, rearing up and kicking Drucker away. Then the next she knew, she was flat on her face, mouth numb with the impact. She didn't even feel the explosion that knocked her down.

The Salusa got her. Not the actual, genuine article, but their slaves. The nulls, as Belgo's men called them.

Now fear dug a fist through her gut.

Small tears had frozen in her eyes. They stung in the slipstream as the truck sped on. The descent finally levelled out and they burst into a vast cavern. It was the size of an aircraft hanger, with a distant ceiling lit by giant strip lights.

The Germans spoke softly among themselves. They were stoic on their way to the Salusa, or perhaps they didn't know what awaited them. Without her inbuilt 'ware, Rebecca didn't have a German lexicon and was helpless.

The automated truck pulled to a stop by one wall and parked itself beside a bulky cuboid shape. There were nulls waiting for the truck. Their footsteps stumbled as they came out of the shadows - a whole forest of them. The nulls were clumsy from poor depth perception and damaged motor control. But their faces were peaceful, with none of the cares of Belgo's men.

The prisoners were herded off the truck by the mob of nulls dressed in the clothes that the Salusa had found them in. She was roughly jostled by men in soiled denim and Dior suits, and by women in uniforms of delivery girls and waitresses.

They had all been human once, till some machined process stamped Salusan grafts through their temples. Now they were nulls. The ultimate slave labour. They worked without complaint through frostbite and injuries and starvation, hunting rogue humans with clubs improvised from railing spikes and knives of broken glass.

They were the Salusa's own army and their minds were mush.

A light rose in the far distance and approached in silence. It grew in a widening bubble, becoming diffuse at its edges. In the endless dark yard, she couldn't tell if it was tiny or huge, floating or rolling. The globe shifted, elongating sideways, and raced towards her. It became the headlights of an electric jeep that pulled in by the other side of the shadowed cube.

Two men climbed out, their movements within the vast chamber miniscule and dainty.

Something in their walk, or their cowled, monkish tunics told Rebecca's hindbrain that they were Salusa before conscious thought caught up. One was hidden behind an LCD visor while the other's face was baby-smooth, his small features set around two stunning black eyes. She'd almost forgotten that: Salusan eyes were black tunnels, devoid of any whiteness.

Rebecca's teeth chattered, the fear coming hard. She wanted to disappear, to evade the Salusa's searing attention.

The visored Salusan strode along the line of prisoners. His hand twitched, selecting here, here and here.

He stopped in front of Rebecca. He hadn't stopped before. His visor was a gentle convex, moulding to the face within. The blue surface burned with alphanumerals. He jabbed his fingers at her, marking her as well, then he stepped back to his companion. They spoke together, their voices filled with slithering, nonsense words. "Retam ca kasser arir nir paredispo shangalis."

It was more than a code - they had their own language now.

* * * *

They spoke on and on, she didn't know for how long. But while they talked no one was doing anything to her. Rebecca stood with the other prisoners, docile and not daring to move. She could barely even look about her. She'd been chosen. What did that mean? She had been a face in her other life. Her job had been to find out what was going on. With an act of will, she looked at the machine in the shadows of the wall. It was huge, three times the height of the nulls beside it, and fashioned from black alloy. But she had no idea what it did, what it meant.

The Salusa had stopped talking. They walked to their car, their feet silent in fur-lined moccasins. Everything about them was controlled and hushed. When they sped away in their jeep, its wheels ran softer than their voices in the smooth chamber. The nulls closed on the prisoners. They pulled out the four people that the Salusa had selected. Rebecca didn't resist. Something blurred within her. It was the distinction between what was happening and what she wanted. With just the smallest shift she was a child again, celebrating New Year during Rosh Hashanah, bored but safe. An animal instinct within her knew that she might live an extra minute by cooperating with the nulls.

The machine woke. The cube hummed with a familiar vibration. It was the deep drone that had sunk through her body for the last four days. A null switched on a halogen light and a wonky vertical of buttery light flooded the chamber. It fixed the captives like museum exhibits.

The nulls bundled a German into a man-sized port in the cube's face. He shouted with a high, choked noise, too scared to scream. The machine's hum deepened - the cube grew dark and more intense. And Rebecca was no longer safe. She was trapped on the wrong side of her story.

When the man staggered free she knew what the machine was for. It was an abattoir, amputating humans from their ability to think. But it was also a birth factory. The Salusa fed you to their cube, hitting each struggling, crying patient with a burst of surgery to the frontal lobes. In the machine, humans were just larvae for the Salusa to nurture. They were killing humanity to hatch something new. The man was now a null.

As the next man was forced inside, fear gripped Rebecca at last. The cube had ripped open both her denial and sense of self. She wasn't a face. She was its victim.

"Down, Daisy."

She turned and a wall of sound smashed against her. Belgo's men were racing through the chamber. Bright 'X's leapt from the machine gun in Tate's hands as he ran forward, his eyes excited in his painted face.

Null bodies slammed over, vomiting blood and writhing as they died. A man in a suit bludgeoned her. She struck the concrete floor face down and pain bit her mouth.

Rebecca's ears rang with echoing gunfire.

"Easy. It's over now," Andy Saul said, drawing her upright. Her legs wouldn't take her weight. Her knees refused to work. Saul kept his grip on her elbow. He was saying, "Easy, easy," and soothing her as Belgo strode past. The Major shouted orders, his voice raised but calm. His troops fanned out. Someone set the halogen flood upright and bathed the Salusan cube in its ambient light. Without new instructions, the nulls were happy to stand by, unresisting before the soldiers.

The tall medic, Roper, was having trouble checking her comrades for wounds - everyone's fatigues were caulked with crud. She saw Rebecca and tossed over a water bottle in passing.

Belgo stopped beside Rebecca. He nodded politely but his eyes were already sliding past her, onto the next task.

"Two of them were here. The Salusa." Rebecca spoke fast, eager to please.

"When did this happen?" Belgo asked, his blue stare attentive now.

"They left ten minutes ago - maybe." She pointed into the vault's shadow. "In a Jeep."

"Staff sergeant, move us out. Drucker, Tate, attend to this, please." He pointed his carbine at the Salusan cube.

"How'd you get here?" Words bubbled out of Rebecca. One moment she'd faced the Salusa, the next she was back inside Belgo's precarious safety.

"What?" Tate said with instant belligerence. "Y'ain't 'appy to see us?" He snapped an angular magazine box onto his machine gun. Rebecca forced herself to clamp down and stay quiet.

Saul smiled, but his eyes didn't carry any warmth. They were ancient in his wrinkled face. He slid his helmet from his bandannad head. "You're a lucky lady." He straightened the lank silk over a purple scar on his neck.

"Lot of null traffic comin' here, Daisy. We were followin' it." He set his helmet on her head and tapped it hard. "Keep it down an' stay beside me, now."

* * * *

Tate and Drucker wrecked the Salusan machine. Drucker had a sapper's tool of interlocking plastic blades as long as his forearm. There was no way to turn the cube off, or to get the man inside out, so they didn't bother. They just hacked and tore till the sculpted facia cracked open and spewed millions of sticky white fibres.

"There's a guy in there," Rebecca said. "Trapped."

But no one was listening. Instead, the soldiers carried on stomping the elegant, vicious machine.

Saul chased the Germans away. Without bothering to speak, he shooed them like a farm hand scaring off turkeys.

"What's that about, eh?" Tate said.

He didn't look Rebecca's way, but he didn't have to. Why chase these useless civilians away and continue to carry her?

"'Cause we are definitely expectin' rain," Saul said, turning round. "Get this done an' we're back in the war. Sergeant." His manner stayed dangerously easy. But he stared a moment longer than necessary, waiting for Tate's objection. They were muscular blue-collar guys sizing each other up.

In response, Tate was stonily silent.

"You're walkin' point," Saul said.

Tate still said nothing, but the look he gave Rebecca promised a reckoning.

Grunting with effort, Drucker carried on working alone, levering with his cutting tool till something vulnerable broke within the cube.

The power went off and the nulls went crazy. Screaming and outraged, they ran into the walls or smashed their heads on the concrete floor. The unit crouched in a single organic movement, their weapons ready.

"No firing," Belgo said. "Leave them. Move us out."

The soldiers backed out of the cavern. Perhaps in relief or hysterics, Drucker started giggling. His laughter echoed and bounced around them as the nulls drummed the floor with their broken hands and chewed their mouths bloody.

* * * *

Above ground, the war waited. Rebecca wanted to see the stars, but all she found was a skyline of highstacks that resembled shattered teeth, flickering with ghostly blue flames.

Tommy Tate led them through the wasteland. He walked out in front, untiring and friendless.

Roper nudged Rebecca on. Rebecca stumbled over fist-sized masonry and a stagnant lake of sewage that soaked her boots. This was a patrol in war, walking dazed and exhausted. Rain began falling, gritty and weak. Rebecca jerked awake only when the soldiers glimpsed two Salusa and snapped off gunshots.

"Fuckin' ghosts," Roper said. Rebecca wondered if these Salusa were the ones from the underground chamber. They slipped through the jigsaw puzzle wreckage, never graspable, never quite there. The azure sheen of their devices winked as they popped in and out of sight.

"The enemy denies us vital confrontation," Belgo said, as if his announcements controlled these skirmishes.

* * * *

They walked for five hours through permanent night. The air was dust-laden yet carried an alpine sting. Each accidental graze bit sharply into Rebecca's hands.

"Where the fuck," Rebecca heard someone say. "The fuck is Fox company?"

Rebecca struggled to recall that Belgo's unit was part of Dog company, and there was a plan, however unlikely, to unite with Fox and Charlie.

If there were no soldiers, there were plenty of people here. The unit had followed the Salusa into a pocket of dead Mannheimers. The Germans were scorched in apartments that had turned into glassine cells from the intense heat of orbiting pillars-of-fire.

Beside these tall, slick coffins, the city rose in a vast cliff of wreckage. Staring at the tide of burning ruins, Rebecca found it was like watching a bad tv set, or doing VR with really good weed. It was all so distant. She grew firm with the need to do her job. She could prove that it could be done, even in the inferno of the Salusa's fury. She'd had some vague idea about her own Jewish heritage and coming to Germany, but really that was just a quirk in her background. She was here because of the Salusan technological revolution.

Each Salusan breakthrough had been a faster, longer high than any in history. Humanity's teeming billions were a single junkie, chasing their next hit.

She'd heard a piece of advice, back in the day when it was illegal to buy drugs from a street entrepreneur. "When going to buy dope, don't take a weapon with you. If you don't trust the guy, then don't buy from him."

Stunningly obvious, but it had meant nothing to her. Now in Mannheim, she saw what happened when the whole world did both - never trusting, but always buying.

A heatbox sprang alight before them. Its blinding matrix shredded the nearest soldier. Rebecca and Saul dropped into a ditch as the weapon's glow irradiated a smashed Deutsche Bank building.

The Salusa made so many toys for us, Rebecca thought. These are just more of them.

She almost laughed, pressed into Saul's armoured chest, but couldn't quite manage the effort.

* * * *

Belgo rallied the men to him as nulls attacked from four directions at once, their railing spikes a forest of Zulu spears. Belgo and Saul were both on one knee, taking slow, aimed shots. But the tide of bodies overran them and Tate had to pull the nulls off Rebecca. He drove a serrated bayonet through a man's belly, then butted another into submission. Tate stood astride the dying null as his entrails slopped in a blue and red trail between his boots. The soldier had saved her, yet his dark eyes were barely interested.

The null army moved on, sweeping past the unit with as little control as a riot.

Above them, a pillar-of-fire broke out of the thunderheads and lanced the earth. Its flame cut the sky with eerie silence. The light narrowed and narrowed, brightening all the while, till it was a sliver of blue magnesium. The squad stared upwards, their painted faces turned into stark masks. The flame bent and bent again, the Salusa having learnt to play with the laws of light itself.

Far above the unit came a doleful moaning - a dragon bellowing its challenge through the air.

Drucker stepped up to Belgo. "Roper got hit, sir. She's gone." He tipped his helmet back, his forehead wet with sweat.

"Ah." Belgo's voice was soft. Rebecca thought that he shared her awe at the sight of the Salusa at war. But really it was sarcasm that she heard. "Protect your medic at all costs." His control was slipping as his men kept dying.

Saul said, "Major. We should have linked with Fox by now. Or found their stragglers. So far squat, sir."

"Do we pull back?" Rebecca said without thinking. She winced before Belgo's answering glare.

"Hell no, Daisy." Saul calmly broke the tension. "Salusa's prob'ly got a shitload of ordnance in our rear."

"Sergeant," Belgo said, loading that word with annoyance and renewed determination. "Inform the men. These two Salusa have evaded us. We will press on to the emergency coordinate for UN Command."

Rebecca understood what Belgo was doing. He had a plan, and another behind that. He would have yet more plans, even if he and Saul had to make them up as they went along. Each plan - no more likely to succeed than its predecessor - was a vision, a promise to his men that they could resist the Salusa.

* * * *

"You still need today's bite, yes?" Belgo waited for Rebecca's dutiful nod.

Belgo's men picked through the rubble, staying close. They were more nervous now, as they tried to disengage from the Salusa. Except Tommy Tate, who volunteered to walk point. Tate was becoming something Rebecca had heard of from other wars - the lucky grunt. He was awesome in his violence and the unit invested him with their fortune. They needed to believe that Tate would carry them safely on. The Salusa had everything else, so humanity would have superstition and luck.

Belgo said, "Ms Miller, shall I tell you what I know of the Salusa?" His eyes were reddened in his painted face.

"We are a man standing on the bridge - the one in San Francisco. We do not want to jump. But simultaneously we cannot resist, yes? The ground sways beneath our feet. The wind sings all about us. We see air between our toes and we could do it. Just a step, just swinging over a fence and off. Falling, we would be free. We are frozen though - not taking the step, not refusing it. Mannheim." His hand barely moved to capture the wreckage and blackened sky. "This is our bridge. We cannot let the Salusa go, but we can no longer live by their side."

She got it all, even without active 'ware. It wasn't Pulitzer quality yet, it needed work to take out the refinements - wind sings about us, falling, we would be free - to make it suitably rough. But it was good. Belgo had been working on it as he watched his men die.

Rebecca listened, she could do that at least.

But when Belgo called a rest stop and the unit disintegrated into random movement and conversations, Rebecca realised that everyone had listened. Privacy here was a laughable idea, like toilet paper or running water - or being able to step between buildings without your belly clenching tight in fear of a screamer or heatray.

Saul stood guard while the soldiers rested in a crater. The oiled steel of their weapons glittered off their broad shoulders. The men were both knights from another age and lumpen, crudely formed creatures from the dawn of time.

Rebecca held both images in her head, though she couldn't finish them without diving into cyberspace's sea. She felt its absence like her sense of smell had died. She fumbled with ideas of monochrome W Eugene Smith and pastoral covers of Walter Scott novels.

She struggled to recall a title, when every detail in history used to click into a menu on her retina. Maybe Saul could be Ivanhoe. His face was mixed greasepaint and grime, one eye coloured black, the other artfully green. He was the face of war, instinctive, American, and handsome.

Rebecca idled over smuggling Saul back to her Tenderloin apartment. They'd start out well enough. She'd be elated to come back to safety and hot showers, deli sandwiches and envious stares at the office. Seven PM, she'd find Saul at home, a sexy beast, eager to fuck. In peace, he would be a fitness freak, running, lifting weights and burning the sheets with her every night. But he'd be restless too, awkward with her dense schedule and irresistible career arc.

She'd send him to wharfside barrooms for pool and all-day drinking. The fucking would still be good, but not great. His swearing at cocktail parties and crass conservative attitudes would no longer be trophies of her war but banal faux pas. And she didn't have his manners, she couldn't avoid being bored by him. She'd glide away in her usual guilt-free parting - as she realised that she already had from Bernie. But with Saul she'd have a nagging doubt that she'd stepped on someone's dreams.

Rebecca didn't care enough about anyone else. In her world of faces and guys like Bernie, no one did.

Eyes wandering, daydreaming, she found Saul staring at her. Rebecca realised she'd got it wrong again. He was career military, smart and capable.

His eyes were hard in his greasepaint mask and Rebecca knew that she'd been rebuked, that even her daydreams made her a fool.

* * * *

The unit inched down Moltke strasse, among cars melted into toffee-shaped lumps. This street led to the old Eichbaum tower. It was a UN Command emergency field centre and Charlie and Fox companies should be waiting here.

The tower stood half-hidden in the gloom. Its huge doors of bevelled glass hung wonky and open, as if a vast foot had kicked them aside.

Walking towards Eichbaum, with its smoke-stained windows and pocked concrete, Rebecca saw Germany's proud history scarred and defiled. An obscure satisfaction tweaked in her. She had told herself that she was in Mannheim to show the world the Salusan front-line - the inferno, as she had cleverly tagged it. But her other motives nagged for attention - for more honesty from her. She was Jewish, though not really. It was her inheritance rather than a calling. Now she was back in Germany. Her ancestors had fled Europe or stayed and suffered the Holocaust's murder. She watched Mannheim burn, trying to fit it to her mind that Germany was finally paying. But that belief didn't hold. If anyone now should pay a fraction for the Abras and Matteas and Tamaras lost in the Nazi maw, shouldn't it be Rebecca and her generation, born to success and comfort in the Salusan age?

There was a flash behind the Eichbaum, gold light licking off pewter. The unit scattered in a bomb-burst pattern. Tommy Tate started shooting. Saul's bandana popped up behind tangled concrete. "What d'you see?" he called to Tate.

Tate's heavy machine gun ran dry. He tipped it over and stood up. "Fucken thing." He drew a European automatic from his hip holster. He stood in the open, his fury barely suppressed. The moment stretched, ratcheting on everyone's nerves. Still nothing happened. They were all sick of these collisions and sick of suffering the waiting between them.

"You out, Tom?" Drucker asked from behind a wall.

"'Course I am, y'stupid nigger bastard."

"Sergeant Tate," Belgo's voice snapped. "Come here."

Tate marched back to Belgo, spitting a gob of phlegm into the rubble. Saul waved the remaining soldiers forward, sending another man on point.

"That boy's got to chill himself out," Drucker said, his tone relaxed. He was staring at Tate and Belgo, and Rebecca couldn't tell which man he meant.

A screamer went off, then another, followed by the concussion of collapsing buildings. The explosions rolled closer in a single echo as the Salusa walked their weapons to them. Rebecca's teeth buzzed with feedback.

"Saul, get us out of here." Belgo raised his voice as the next sonic screech howled over them. It was nothing to be concerned about. Screamers went off all the time. The soldiers broke into a loose trot towards the gaping entrance of the Eichbaum.

A shooting star zipped through the air. It turned sideways and punched Drucker's back. He stumbled, grunting. The air was flooded with silver particles. They swept at all angles through the sky.

Rebecca ducked behind a broken wall as the finger-length missiles fell. She had it in her head that she was safe there, that she wouldn't be hurt as long as the Salusa couldn't see her. A missile bounced off the wall, scattering razors of stone across her face. Too breathless to scream, she opened her mouth to suck in air.

Then Saul was dragging her into the open. She fought him, but he body-slammed her, pulling her over the wall, then across loose rubble and up to the huge doors of the Eichbaum.

"Come on, Daisy," he said, leading her up the steps to the entrance. His eyes were constantly moving, alert yet calm, as the rain of missiles increased. Her mother would've called his stare sound as a dollar, and it smoothed away her resistance.

Whining filled the air, growing into an ululating screech as more missiles arced over concrete. Saul shoved her into the tower.

The meteors slashed downwards, popping the folds of Saul's bandanna and striking his shoulder. He frowned, annoyed at the pain. Then his mouth burst with light as the missile exploded within him. She heard him say, "Rebecca," as his lips seared away and his eyes blinked into twin suns that shrivelled his face.

The street was burning. The soldiers were burning. Saul's charred odour rammed into her throat. Another explosive - high as a child's voice - went off and she screamed with it. The meteors spanged and flared as the soldiers rolled and burned outside the doorway.

Incendiaries bounced off the huge door in a cloud, peppering its glass. Bright light and pain exploded through her. Rebecca threw herself down, thinking she'd been hit.

The light grew and grew. It surrounded her, reddening. It became an orange wave, lifting and bathing her, and growing brighter still, till she was in an ocean like an eighth colour, holding her firm. The colour was deeper and stronger than anything Rebecca had known before. She was in motion, held in its invisible current. It sped her past geometric formations that constantly evolved. They grew about her like cell cultures. The current slowed and the patterns stretched into rectilinear towers above a smooth green field. The image reshaped, growing fuller and deeper till Rebecca saw skyscrapers rising over a city park.

Rebecca had arrived in a city. She was standing in a city and it could not be more different than Mannheim. Instead of cluttered ruins beneath a choked sky, she stood on a sunny boulevard.

She could see the sky, azure and smooth. Airships and flying wings ran silently across it. Everything here was elegant and gossamer-thin.

Rebecca was stunned with sensation, dizzy with the bright smell of freshly-cut lawns and the perfume of a hundred flowerbeds. She ran her fingertips over the furred petals of a pink rose, then on the blue veins of a marble column, eager to touch, to feel again. Here, her fingers were smooth and her nails uncracked.

Laughter and panpipes came from youths posed beside statues and bubbling fountains. Everyone was smiling and unafraid. Someone handed Rebecca a glass of pale wine. Its melting berries set her palate tingling.

Traffic flashed past her, veering round the triangular opening of the park in a seamless tide. An amber teardrop broke free and pulled up beside her in a flicker of changed speeds. Two nude boys reclined within, beautiful and unselfconscious. Gold and silver darts shot through the air, urgent messengers for the picnickers idling below.

The panpipes lilted over the chattering crowd. Rebecca looked for the musicians even as heavier horn music joined the pipes. The basser rhythm was sourceless but swelling and insistent. It spread through her body, down to her toes. It shook her in a delirious tremor, spoiling this perfect summer morning.

It was Mannheim. It was the drone of the Salusa's engines and the bite of their deep winter. Saul's face, screaming and white-eyed, flashed into her mind. Remembering, growing cold among such laughter, Rebecca's guard snapped up.

Humanity had taught the Salusa to mark what they owned. The three ovoids of the Salusa's corporate triquetra caught the light on the dorsal ridge of a teardrop car. Her face's sense of story told her to look further. She stepped into the park. The nearest oak tree's leaves were wrong. They were a repeating, manufactured pattern. A picnicking girl's laughter was too regular as well, forming a looping cadence. When two blue-skinned wrestlers backed into her, Rebecca found another triquetra, low on one straining back. Was this a reversal of the natural order, or its progression?

We made them, now they have redesigned us, Rebecca thought.

The strolling lovers, the athletes and picnickers shifted. Her doubt turned them insubstantial. But the city righted itself. Resisting Rebecca, it grew solid again. The Salusa had taught their constructs that they were real. Here, Rebecca was imaginary. She belonged to the old human world of imperfection and war.

The city's colours faded, but it was Rebecca who was dissolving. The wrestlers broke free of each other and one faced her. He smiled, teeth white in his cobalt face. "Why do you hate us so?"

Rebecca fell away, sinking back to the long cold of the war...

She woke with the aftertaste of wine sour in her mouth. Her vision was pale and flat. The magic colour had left, and her body felt soiled with the dregs of perfunctory, clumsy sex. Tears filled Rebecca's eyes.

She was lying on her back in darkness. A slim bar bit into her mouth and someone's palm pressed her shoulder.

"Seizure. Are you back with us, Rebecca?" Belgo's voice came from behind her, but it was Tommy Tate holding her still.

They were in a room that was a tall, round cave. Dim light penetrated the rubble interior, filtered by blast-perforated walls on all sides. She knew then where they must be - high in the Eichbaum tower.

The screwdriver in her mouth was thick with her own spit. Saul must have put it there to stop her swallowing her tongue.

No, she realised, not Saul.

"Where is everyone?" she asked, sitting up.

"Are you epileptic and did not advise us?" Belgo said. She heard him perfectly even though he was whispering. She focused, turning internal switches she thought were gone for good. She flicked her vision through infrared, light sim, night enhanced, till Belgo emerged from the gloom. He lay against a caved-in bookcase with his helmet off. His combat blouse was bloody and his collarbone fat with a field dressing.

"You passed out during the missile strike. My unit is gone. I have lost all my men." He was shrivelled and exhausted. "They used a new attack. Some kind of flechette with explosive cores." He grew breathless. "Sergeant Tate shielded me with his own body."

She replayed the attack. Her tech was back, fully functional again. Belgo had been shouting, his finger raised at Tate. The looming Brit glared down at the little officer. Drucker and the others walked past them to their deaths.

Saul was gone. But Rebecca didn't feel anything - even now she still didn't believe it was real.

Tate watched her from the doorway by the stairwell. He was the only remnant of Belgo's unit left. He'd made it this far by refusing to die. He stood now in casual threat, one palm on the square grip of his holstered pistol. He had replaced his helmet with a maroon beret and scrubbed his face clean. These changes were ominous, like a Japanese death mask. He wasn't playing soldier anymore, he was planning how he would die.

"I saw things. The Salusa switched my hardware back on."

"What things?" Belgo said.

"What they'll do to us." She spoke to Belgo, but her attention was on Tate. His face was white as wax, his eyes unflinching. A badge with silvered wings flashed on his beret.

She rushed her words, intent that both men should understand. " - Or for us. It wasn't clear. We need to respond." Tate wasn't listening. He looked like he would never listen to a woman again. He wanted to take as many Salusa as he could with him. As revenge or completeness, he might also turn his pistol on Rebecca and Belgo.

Glass smashed in the stairwell in a messy splintering sound. Tate crouched, his autopistol out with a cobra's sinuous ease.

She understood now. She'd thought it was the war that had terrorised her with its abrupt, vicious reprisals. But that wasn't war, that was the Salusa. The Salusa had been waiting to do this to humanity for thirty years. They were not opposed to slavery, just to being the slaves.

"If your 'ware works again, can you contact UNCOM?" Belgo asked. His voice was a faint old man's. Rebecca reached out with her implants to touch cyberspace and nothing happened. Cyberspace was still dead. Instead, she sensed the Salusa. It was as if the Salusa had opened a single eye over her. She imagined that there was only one Salusan. Massive and cold. Each individual, each null or vatgrown Salusan merely extended that one self. It could see, it knew everything. Rebecca shrank from the vastness of it.

Tate's broad back, hunched within his stained uniform, disappeared down the stairs. Rebecca accessed her 'ware again to help hunt the enemy. This time the Salusan city leapt at her, vivid and overwhelming. It bathed her with its ocean of warmth and longing.

Her body lifted, sliding free of the cold, dark slam of Mannheim.

The gold youths and blue wrestlers nodded and beckoned her. They reached out over Belgo. Watching him wheeze for breath and fumble for the knife sheathed at his shoulder, Rebecca was revolted. Humanity was broken and failing. Then she thought that fine Aryan ladies might have had just the same nausea at the stench of the Jewish ghettoes, with their lines of inmates in rags and yellow stars.

Rebecca reached over and drew the knife for Belgo. She put it in his hand, one human to another.

Rebecca wanted to tell Belgo what she knew. They'd all seen the dark cube that remade you into a machine and the pillars-of-fire lighting the sky. But only she had met the blue-skinned wrestler happy to be manufactured, or drunk wine in the heart of the Salusan city.

Rebecca realised that she had found her story.

She came to Mannheim expecting that she'd cover the war till the war covered her. But the Salusa turned her upside down and shook out each naive belief. Then their long cold ate her whole. She could tell Belgo that much. This was only the beginning. The future was Salusan and humanity would ever be the same again.

Rebecca knew the name of this dispatch now. It was the long cold and she was lost inside it.

There was another splintering crack outside. Tommy Tate was waiting. He was pure violence, aimed on a single trajectory. Belgo and Rebecca were irrelevant now.

The three of them could be the last humans left in the world. And the Salusa owned them as surely as the golden youths stamped with their triquetras. She had to get out and tell someone - anyone - what she'd seen.

A pillar-of-fire lit the night. Eichbaum's ramshackle interior turned blue, then deepest black. The Salusa, the future, towered above her, massive and threatening, testing their toys to destruction.