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16

The sun was hidden in a black cloud with a glowing core of eerie red.  Missile flares and flashes dotted the darkness, blazing in complete silence.  The great disk of Courtland, seen nearly edge-on, was alive with pinpricks of light.

Then the image of Courtland began to dance as Aristide's transport made a frantic change of course. 

Aristide's bones were not rocked by the sudden change of course.  He felt no jolting, no acceleration, no inertia, no sensation of motion whatever.

Aristide's military transport was slightly less than two meters long.  It was powered by antimatter, and capable of ferocious acceleration.  It also contained a wormhole that led to a pocket universe, a rather small one, but one filled with half a million soldiers. 

The invasion was under way.  Aristide was on his way to drop onto the surface of the rebel Courtland.

The solar system was three months into the war, and during that time Vindex had more than held his own.  His antiproton beams had chopped the Loyal Ten into ribbons until they'd launched their own antimatter weapons, whole armadas of them at once, and then Courtland began to receive damage as well.

Just at the moment when the United Powers began to get the upper hand in the exchange, Vindex launched his countermeasures.  Satellites began to flood into space between Courtland and the Loyal Ten, satellites with antimatter-powered generators that produced potent magnetic fields.  These bent the electron beams that carried the antiproton packets to their targets, and caused most to miss Courtland completely.  If the fields from the satellites had been consistent,  the United Powers could have compensated for the presence of the magnetic fields by aiming off-center and allowing the field to correct the beam to its proper target, but when they attempted this, they realized that the magnetic fields were programmed to shift randomly, and that it was impossible to compensate for them—but because Vindex knew which way the satellites were directing their magnetic fields at any instant, he was able to hit wherever he pleased.  For nearly three weeks the rebel barrage ripped unhindered into loyalist targets, until the Powers could design, build, and launch their own satellite array.

The result was stalemate, with the battle fought more between satellites and anti-satellite weapons than between the great platforms themselves. 

It was hoped that the invasion would break the deadlock.  Forty million attackers would swarm onto Courtland's dorsal surface, seize the wormhole gates, and try to hold against the inevitable counterattack.

Were forty million enough? Aristide wondered.  It had been calculated that more invaders would simply get in one another's way.  But how many of the forty million would survive the journey to Courtland?

Stars whirled in Aristide's display as the transport took evasive action.  Without sound, the war had a curiously flat quality.  Not surprising, considering that the images were being transmitted by a camera in, literally, another universe.

His craft maneuvered through a scene of primal violence, of gamma-ray lasers pumped by matter-antimatter reactions, of lances looping on tails of fire to deliver fatal kinetic punches to the heart of an enemy, sheaves of robot-guided interceptors burning in single-minded fury for the foe, mines that unleashed sprays of bomblets; of antiproton charges turning matter into tortured, lethal bursts of angry, high-energy photons. 

Courtland's convex dorsal surface, ahead, was lit by a continuous, shifting cloud of light, as the lethality proceeded in utter silence. 

"How are we doing?" Aristide asked.

Bitsy's voice sounded in his ear.

"Not badly at all.  The Venger's defenses should be pretty well beaten down by the time your unit arrives."

Bitsy's body remained on Topaz, there being in the invasion fleet no call for a small cat, but her personality had been uploaded to the AI on Aristide's combat suit.  Tecmessa remained behind as well, as Aristide didn't want the magic broadsword captured by the enemy in the likely event that the United Powers were defeated.

Aristide's craft soared past the enormous, gently curving rim of Courtland itself.  Its razor-thin outline stretched as far as the visual sensor could see, and reflected the dull red cloud that masked the sun.  The Powers, at the beginning of the invasion, had spread the opaque cloud between Courtland and Sol, to inhibit the efficiency of Courtland's solar collectors.  The cloud couldn't actually block solar radiation—it wasn't a solid wall—but it shifted the radiation toward infrared, a spectrum where Courtland's collectors would be less productive.

The rim flashed by in an instant.  Aristide was now on Courtland's dark side, and the only light was provided by starshine and the furnace-fire of combat.  The battle ahead seemed to be dying down, which Aristide took to be a good sign.

Still, the vehicle jerked and looped and danced as it avoided real or anticipated fire.  Sensors recorded successive waves of gamma rays, pions, and energetic neutrons, particle refugees fleeing the annihilation of matter. 

"The first wave is coming in to land," Bitsy said.

"What's their casualty rate?"

"Thirty-two percent."

Not bad, he thought, for a first wave.  They were intended to do little more than absorb the brunt of the Venger's defenses and secure the landing areas for the second and subsequent waves, who with any luck would arrive with enough of their forces intact to be able to retake the wormhole gates. 

Aristide saw, amid a host of flares, the trail of an interceptor looping through the firmament.  Decoys sped shining into the night.  The interceptor neared. 

For the first time Aristide felt a degree of suspense.  He clenched his teeth.  The vast paws on his combat suit turned into fists.

Energy flared, a fiery sea of white that turned, as the sensors cooked, to a sea of nothing-at-all.  The feed had gone dead.

"Six minutes," Bitsy said. 

"The ship's still alive?"

"Oh yes.  As are you, by the way."

Time passed.  Suspense hummed through Aristide's nerves.  It was worse, without the video feed.  Trapped with one's own imagination was much worse. 

 "Five minutes.  Task Force Ivan reports that our landing zone is secure."

"Good for us," Aristide managed.  Nothing he had done, or could do, had altered his chance of survival by the slightest amount.  This part of the war was completely automated.  Computer minds calculated danger and reacted to it far faster than a human.

"We're decelerating now.  Good thing you're not outside—you'd be flat as a strip of tin."

There were four inhabited pocket universes anchored to Courtland, each with anywhere between four and fourteen billion inhabitants, all of whom were by now presumed willing to give their all for Vindex.  Though one of these, New Qom, had been founded as a religious reservation with a low technology base, presumably this situation had been altered with the conversion to the faith of the Venger, and the mullahs were now probably as formidably armed as anyone else. 

In addition to the four known enemy pockets, there was at least one more, the one designed originally as a wormhole factory and now used as an antimatter generator.  To capture this, or to collapse its wormhole and divorce the pocket universe from reality, would be a major strike against Courtland's power.

The United Powers didn't know where this pocket universe was located.  Photo reconnaissance had shown any number of new structures on Courtland's dark side, but no one could tell what these structures concealed.  They could hold pocket universes, warehouse war machines, store supplies, or exist simply as decoys. 

Most of them, in any case, were now wreckage.  The invading fleet had plenty of ammunition to spare: anything suspicious was given a thorough working-over.  By now Courtland would be riddled with hot, glowing craters, many of which would have melted clean through the thin computational structure and revealed glimpses of the red-hearted cloud that loomed between Courtland and the sun. 

"Two minutes." 

"Systems check for all personnel."

There.  He'd given his first order of the battle.

Heads-up displays flashed on the suit's visor.  Everything seemed to be in order.  Aristide moved his arms, twisted at the waist, shuffled his feet.  The combat suit's movements integrated perfectly with his own.

 "One minute." 

Data from his unit began to flood Aristide's displays.  His division was intact and one hundred percent functional. 

He looked at the system's clock.  Thirty seconds.  Twenty.  Ten.  Five.

One.

Antimatter reactions sent power surging to the controls of the wormhole gate, and the wormhole expanded. 

Suddenly there were stars overhead, and the endless flat plain of Courtland stretched all around.  Half a million soldiers began moving in unison, still controlled by computer, brief spurts of their maneuvering jets taking them out of their little pocket and onto the enemy platform. 

All around him, Aristide's command was taking up positions.  A phalanx of twenty robots, his personal bodyguard, jetted into formation around him.  They were models of deadly efficiency, flattish ovoids capable of travel by rocket or on wheels, equipped with a kind of superstructure that held close-range weapons and a battery of sensors.  They looked like mantises made out of composite armor. 

No engagements among Aristide's troops were reported.  The battlefield seemed quiet.

Behind him, huge automated battle machines, artillery and armored vehicles, began to pour out of the wormhole.

Aristide felt his confidence increase.  In the carrier he had been nothing but a helpless target.  Now, free and in command, he felt he was gaining a grip on his own fate. 

His unit constituted a full division, fourteen thousand fighters in all.  In early industrial times, this would have been the command of a major general.  As only a couple hundred of his soldiers were actual human beings, the rest being one or another sort of automaton, the military had advanced Aristide only as far as the rank of captain. 

Aristide triggered the channel he used to communicate with higher authority.

"Reporting to Colonel Nordveit.  The Screaming Cyborg Division is in position and awaiting orders.  There is no opposition.  Casualties are nil."

"Very good.  Stand by."  The answering voice belonged to the general's AI.

The plan called for Aristide's division to be in reserve for the first part of the engagement.  Aristide made minute adjustments in his deployments and otherwise stood ready.

But for these warriors in their current incarnations, this was a one-way mission.

The division had taken its place in a busy part of Courtland's surface.  Between two of the pocket universes, the area was full of tracks and tubes for travel between the pocket universes of Pamphylia and Greater Zimbabwe, with cradles for the ships that carried their commerce away, and the maintenance facilities and terminals for those ships.  Enormous cranes stood high against the starfield, standing above the rubble of the facilities.

A red light popped up on Aristide's display.  He called up more data.

"Nano disassemblers active in the area," Bitsy confirmed. 

"Send out an alert," Aristide said.

"Done."

"Do we have a reading on the type?"

"We're working on that."

Nano disassemblers had been anticipated by military planners, of course.  In practice there were only a limited number of ways to disassemble matter on the molecular level, and it was hoped that all of these had been anticipated.  The armor on Aristide's suit, for example, attempted to defeat the disassemblers in two ways.  The inner layers were as smooth as nanotechnology could make them, crystals latticed so closely together that it was hoped disassemblers would be unable to get a grip on anything.  The outer layers provided a more active defense, and contained a number of hooks and grapples designed to seize a disassembler and try to jam its mechanism, like trying to cram a foam-filled beach ball into the jaws of an attacking crocodile.

If these didn't work, there were more active ways of discouraging the disassemblers, which in any case were expected to be fairly inefficient on Courtland's dark side, away from the solar energy that would provide their power.

The principle threat from molecular technology was believed to be in assemblers, not disassemblers, because they could alter the immediate environment in drastic ways.  No one wanted to walk on a pleasant green lawn that had converted itself to nitrocellulose.

"The disassembler is of the Kyoto type," Bitsy said.  "Our equipment is largely proof against it, but we can deploy a Type C countermeasure if we desire."

Aristide considered this.  "Colonel Nordveit hasn't ordered countermeasures."

"No."

Aristide thought aloud.  "The Kyoto type is fairly basic, and Vindex has to know we'd anticipate it."

"That's a fair supposition."

"Let's assume it was deployed to test our capabilities.  Ignore it unless we start seeing hot spots in the environment."

"Shall I send an order to that effect?"

"Yes."

Aristide felt restless after his time in the dull, small, functional pocket universe, and he moved off on an inspection tour of the area.  Movements of Aristide's body were measured by biofeedback sensors and analyzed by an onboard intelligence that converted them into motion on the part of the suit.  Although Courtland possessed one-seventh Earth's gravity—and here near the center of the disk, Aristide could actually stand more or less upright, as opposed to leaning at an angle toward the center of mass—in practice the suit moved with bursts of its jets, and the walking motion remained an illusion of Aristide's neuromuscular system.

As he walked he tried not to think about the tiny machines that were trying to eat their way through the soles of his boots and kill him.

Aristide inspected a tube transport—abandoned, its glassy roof shattered some distance up the line—and a ground-to-air missile battery that had been melted into Courtland's massively parallel, massively quantum surface.  Because the surface was so obviously artificial it was difficult not to feel anxious about attack from below, the local equivalent of orcs boiling up from their tunnels, and Aristide had to remind himself that Courtland was too thin to support any kind of underground transport system.

Colonel Nordveit's voice came on the command channel.

"Stand by.  We're going to open the worlds in ten seconds."

Aristide ghosted to where he had a clear line of sight, and widened his artificial point of view so that he could look toward Pamphylia and Greater Zimbabwe simultaneously.  He ran a mental countdown in his head. 

He was ready for the most amazing piece of destruction he'd ever seen. 

Over his head, the engine flares of ships, moving purposefully against the starfield, swirled in great whirlpools, as if they, too, wished to watch the worlds open.

He saw the flashes first, as engineers detonated the special shaped charges that destroyed the structures built over the wormholes.  Lances of energy stabbed down from above, carrying charges of antimatter that wiped out every piece of matter between the wormhole and the environment—in this case, the vacuum.

A fountain followed, a great geyser of ice crystals rushing out of Pamphylia and Greater Zimbabwe as the atmospheres of the pocket universes began to pour out of the wormholes.

No one outside of the immediate area of the wormholes was in any kind of jeopardy.  So vast was the volume of air in the pockets that the wormholes could vent for weeks before the pressure inside went down by more than a millibar.

Whoever won the battle would cap the wormholes again, presumably.

A few seconds after the first blasts came the vibration, the waves traveling over the surface of Courtland like a storm across the water.  Aristide could feel the waves striking at his insides, driving his viscera up against his heart. 

Still there was no sound.

Seconds later came more shocks, the only evidence that another pair of wormholes, out of Aristide's sight, had also been opened.

Aristide wished for sunlight, so that he could see the great ice plumes in their full glory, the rainbow playing over the crystals as it rose kilometers high over Courtland's surface . . .  He altered his implant display, tinkering with different wavelength bands, but failed to get the effect he was hoping for.

In any case there was more to see.  Diving from on high came fast, tight formations of robot warcraft, plunging almost vertically into the wormholes, their movement so fast that Aristide couldn't really see them, only the fading afterimage of their passage . . . 

Once inside the target universes, the warcraft would either begin demolishing the Venger's defenses or continue on, spreading new, tailored plagues among the Venger's followers.  One of these, Aristide knew, was the cure itself, a virus that would reverse the Vindex plague, restructure the brain to restore volition.  The virus would linger.  Even if all the rebel's disciples were at the moment huddled in biochem warfare suits in deep, air-conditioned bunkers, they couldn't stay there forever: the plague would plague Vindex for a long time.

Zombie plagues were also being spread, these with a life of a week or ten days.  Let Vindex have a taste of his own chaos medicine.

Wave after wave of spacecraft sped into the wormholes.  Some were troop-carriers like Aristide's, agile craft containing entire universes and cadres of shock troops.  Probably there were titanic air battles happening on the other side, Aristide couldn't tell. 

The stream of warcraft dwindled.

"Assault divisions are beginning operations."  Nordveit's voice.  He was from the Other New Jerusalem, a leader of the Lutheran forces that had sung "A Mighty Fortress" as they marched off to victory over those who believed in a slightly different deity.  Now he commanded CCLI Corps, four divisions in this army of the profane, all standing by to reinforce the first wave if—or when—they were massacred.

Invisibly, off in the darkness, soldiers human and machine were moving to seize control of the wormholes. 

Resistance was expected to be fierce, and most likely fatal.  The wormholes were about two-thirds of a kilometer across, and Vindex could blanket the entire area with an unending fire.

Aristide was in reserve.  He moved restlessly around his command and watched the distant wormholes for clues about what was going on. 

Other units were committed to the fight, and Nordveit's corps shifted to maintain the perimeter.  More warcraft sped into battle.  The great ice fountains towered over everything like tombstones.  No news came down to Aristide's level.

A delicate snowfall of frozen oxygen and nitrogen began to drift gracefully down.

Expeditionary force headquarters began to call fire missions for Aristide's heavy artillery.  Salvos of smart ammunition were fired off to pass through the wormhole and land on the other side.

From the trajectory of the shell and rocket fire, Aristide could calculate the invaders' progress.  The advancing forces seemed to be doing well, getting clear of the death trap that was the wormhole bottleneck.

Aristide hoped that such success didn't mean they were walking into an ambush. 

The attackers didn't need to actually conquer the four universes.  For that they would need billions of fighters.  They needed only to do what Vindex had done—seize the only exit, then pump the pockets full of a virus that would, over time, transform the inhabitants into friendlies.  With the inhabitants of the pockets being better prepared, the United Powers would find it a harder job than Vindex had done, but it was far from impossible.

"We're getting some larger-scale disassembler activity," Bitsy said.  Maps flashed onto Aristide's display.  "The disassemblers are fueling themselves by taking apart some of the railway."

Aristide looked at the displays.  "It's not a great threat," he said, "but I don't want that large a hot spot within our perimeter.  Tell the decontamination bots to shut it down."

"Done," Bitsy said.

And then the whole world turned bright.  Aristide watched in horrified awe as six, eight, a dozen pillars of fire shot up from Courtland's surface.  A searing white light illuminated every soldier, every broken building, every shattered structure.  The great fountains of ice crystals that towered over the wormholes gleamed and shimmered, faint rainbows shifting in their interiors.

The pillars of flame leaned and toppled, scouring Courtland's surface with plasma fire.  Aristide could feel the heat through his faceplate, feel the sudden sweat prickling his face.  Cooling units in his suit switched on.  Terror throbbed in his heart.

Aristide watched in helpless dread as whole formations of invaders were incinerated as the white fire passed over them.  They died in utter silence.  Aristide looked wildly in all directions, searching for the blaze that would destroy him, but none of the eruptions seemed near enough to his position.

His legs twitched, eager to leap from the surface that could suddenly open to a world of fire.

"What is that?" he demanded.

"I'm working on that," said Bitsy. 

The plasma fire rolled across the surface, each blast sweeping an arc from its point of origin.  The scale of it all was so gigantic that Aristide's mind failed in its search for superlatives.

"They're wormholes opening up into suns," Bitsy said. "Or near them."

A variation, Aristide reasoned numbly, on the Venger's energy-producing pocket universe. He'd built a dozen of them and, instead of capturing the energy, simply turned it loose in a jet of superheated matter.

Using a star as a flamethrower.  That was new.

The warships circling the battlefield began to respond.  Carefully designed antimatter bombs were sent rocketing into the wormholes to disrupt the flow through the gates and destroy whatever mechanism was controlling them.  Some of the great fires were extinguished as their pocket universes were closed into themselves and detached from this reality, others were directed at useless angles into space. 

But by that point the damage had been done. 

"I don't have access to the numbers that are reaching headquarters," Bitsy said, "but my best estimate is that we just lost something like eighteen million soldiers."

Aristide didn't bother to reply.  Words would not do justice to the scope of the catastrophe.

His fate had once more been taken out of his hands.  He wanted to swear to take it back, but the promise would have been a hollow one.

He had survived only by chance.  He would need a good deal more luck if he were to survive for much longer.

And he did want to survive.  It was one thing to know intellectually that in the event of death he would be resurrected; it was another to look into the stark face of annihilation and say that it didn't matter.

He didn't like death.  He never had.  He had died only once in all his long life, and he didn't want to get into the habit.

"I'm getting reports of nano activity," Bitsy reported. "Different disassemblers this time.  The heat is feeding them."

"Give me the hard data."  It would be a relief to concentrate on numbers. 

For the next several hours he fought nano attacks, spraying hot spots with a variety of aerosols that would either encase the disassemblers or attack them directly with little nanological pit bulls.  The countermeasures worked well enough.  Terse orders came from Nordveit to adjust the perimeter.  The Screaming Cyborg Division moved across a charred wasteland inhabited by the burnt shells and contorted shapes of metal warriors half-melted, like an ice cream cake left too long in the sun.  The remaining pillars of fire stood over the battlefield, leaning at crazy angles.  The shadows they cast were deep and black.

It was lucky, Aristide thought, that most of his fighters were machines, and would have no problems with morale.

Aristide looked at his chronometer, and saw that he had been on Courtland's surface for nearly sixteen hours.  His suit reeked of sweat and burnt adrenaline.  His nutritional needs were met by an intravenous drip, but he took a sip from the water supply in his combat suit, and pulled his arms out of their webbing to break into a personal supply of biscuits and chocolate.

It was the only thing he could do to cheer himself up.

Over the next few hours the remaining plasma pillars faded and died.  The passing of such a vast amount of ejecta had unbalanced the wormholes and caused them to evaporate. 

Aristide's artillery continued to be called on for fire missions.  Munitions carriers dropped from space to resupply.  The pace of the war in both Pamphylia and Greater Zimbabwe had increased, and Aristide concluded that counterattacks were under way.

When the division had been on the surface for twenty hours, Nordveit gave orders to advance toward Greater Zimbabwe.  Aristide gave orders to form his unit and roll toward the wormhole.

In his command of fourteen thousand were a hundred and ninety-four human beings in suits similar to his own.  The rest were specialized robots.  Some traveled on treads, some on wheels.  Some shambled on sticklike legs, and some scurried on dozens of legs like a centipede.  Some crawled, some flew.  Some soared far above the battlefield to image positions over the next hill; some were built to detect mines and other underground structures.  The warriors could detect enemy in the visual spectrum, the infrared, and ultraviolet, detect them by scent, by electromagnetic emissions, by acoustic ranging.  Weapons included chemical-powered slug throwers, mortars that threw antimatter bombs, rail guns, and highly intelligent rockets.  Individual units were built with multiple redundancy and self-repair capability.

The humans weren't needed for the actual fighting.  They were needed to tell the machines when to stop. 

As Nordveit's corps approached Greater Zimbabwe, it closed on the tails of other units moving to the attack.  Aristide's artillery was detached from the main body: it could be resupplied more easily if it remained on Courtland's surface, and the United Powers had not yet advanced so far into the pocket so as to require closer support.

The half-wrecked structures of the great port, the warehouses and terminals and ship repair facilities, canalized the advance into just a few routes.  Ahead was the great crystal fountain of frozen air, lit dimly from below by Greater Zimbabwe's sun.

Aristide moved up to be with his foremost units.  There was limited information coming through the wormhole, and he wanted to be able to evaluate the situation as soon as possible.

Nordveit sent out a tactical briefing.  The situation in Greater Zimbabwe was worsening, with powerful counterattacks coming from all directions.  Nordveit's corps was to stabilize the front. 

There was no mention of continuing the advance.  Perhaps that fantasy had died.

The wormhole grew closer.  The crystal fountain towered overhead, a torrent of pale snow.  

Aristide was calm.  Since entering the battle he had existed only as a statistic, but he made up his mind to make a blip on the chart if he could. 

He wondered whether Nordveit was humming "A Mighty Fortress" to himself.  Perhaps he was.

The order came.  The division stepped out on the double.  Aristide caught a glimpse of the wormhole itself, a broad expanse that looked like a bright green world as seen through a fishbowl lens, and then he leaped into that world and was in an instant surrounded by war.

Greater Zimbabwe had the same dim, eternal sun as Midgarth, and for that reason its inhabitants had the same glowing cat's eyes as Midgarth's population.  Otherwise the pocket was built to mimic the semitropical forests, lakes, and mountains of Africa, and was inhabited by vast numbers of native African fauna who considerably outnumbered its five billion human beings. 

Aristide was buffeted by the breeze of the pocket's escaping air.  He scanned in all directions and found nothing alive. 

The area had contained port and transport facilities as well as hotels for workers and visitors.  All that had been leveled.  Shattered, half-melted vehicles had been shoved out of the cratered roads; the buildings were piles of rubble limited by a few half-shattered walls.  Sticklike trees stood out here and there, each completely stripped of leaves. 

The horizon in all directions was filled with smoke and dull red flame.  Enemy fire continued to blanket the area, some of it bursts of antimatter fired all the way from the other side of the globular universe.  Friendly units provided covering fire, trying to blast the incoming shells and rockets out of the sky before they could damage the invaders.  Damaged robots dragged themselves through the landscape, heading for portable repair facilities. 

Smoke whipped past Aristide as it rushed, with the air, into the great night outside.

Aristide ordered his division to move at full speed through the danger zone.  All units shifted to active camouflage, each individual fighter broadcasting the colors of the surrounding terrain on chameleon panels built into their armor.  The whole division seemed to vanish from the visual spectrum, sensed only as strange, half-seen creeping movements across the countryside.

Aristide took huge leaps, jets enhancing his natural motion so that he cleared forty meters at a stride.  The world trembled around him.  Shrapnel and debris pinged off his armor.  His fighters were channeled into narrow columns by the rubble, and the plunging fire tore the columns to bits.  Aristide saw flashes, rubble flying, pieces of his robot fighters flying in arcs.  He felt a tension between his shoulders, waiting for the rocket that would blast him or the burst of antimatter that would annihilate his very atoms.  He straightened his shoulders and told the tension to disperse.  Somewhat to his surprise, it did.

Hustling through the curtain of fire, Aristide's division was reduced from fourteen thousand effectives to a little over eight thousand.  Five of the casualties were the better-armored humans, and two of these had been killed.  All were people Aristide had trained with, and he paused for a moment to wish them luck in their new incarnation.

Ten million left, he thought. At least.

The division entered a wood, the trees mere toothpicks stripped of leaves.  Legions of wrecked fighters lay beneath the trees like fallen berries.  At each footfall, Aristide left behind a little whirlwind of ash.  Enemy fire fell away to nothing.

CCLI Corps passed through the wood and flowed across open country beyond.  Half of the ground was green hills; the rest was torn soil half-turned to mud.  The Screaming Cyborgs were now ten kilometers from the wormhole.  Overhead bloomed a vast radar cloud, as one side or the other filled the air with chaff.  Nordveit began giving orders directly to his subordinates, to relieve units that were holding specific points.  Aristide made detailed dispositions within the framework of his orders.

At which point everything changed.  The enemy had made a breakthrough on the right, and Nordveit's entire corps was shifted to attack the flank of the advancing rebel force.  Nordveit was in the process of dictating the change in route when the enemy struck.

From ahead, bounding into the air from outside of effective detector range, came a horde of small, agile missiles.  They went supersonic within seconds.  The chaff-filled air, and the missiles' own darting paths, made it difficult to detect them coming, but defensive machines nevertheless picked them up and began filling the air with charges of antimatter, while heavier weapons targeted the area from which the missiles had launched.  Detonations filled the air overhead.

Aristide threw himself flat on the ground, and told his command to do likewise.

The last-ditch defenders, automated chain cannon, began their furious roar.

The oncoming missiles didn't have single warheads, but were instead filled with tiny bomblets, knuckle-sized antimatter grenades.  Even the missiles that were struck by defensive fire were very often able to scatter all or part of their cargo as they broke up over the target. 

Aristide shut off his detectors before the bomblets fell, and so lay in darkness and felt the ground beneath him leap to a continuous roll of detonation.  Pebbles and soil fell on his armor like rain. 

The deadly drumroll came to an end, and Aristide cautiously turned on a sensor or two.  A brown, dusty fog hung over the land. 

"Status," he said. "Now."

"Checking," said Bitsy, and then an instant later.  "We got off light.   Only two hundred twenty-eight machines are failing to report.  Three hundred forty have suffered some kind of damage, and sixty-four of these are disabled completely.  Corporal Kuan was killed by a direct hit."

"Damn.  Get everything up and moving."  Lurching to his feet he suited action to words.

"Bad news," Bitsy said after a brief pause. "Colonel Nordveit has been killed.  As the senior captain, you're now in command of CCLI Corps."

Aristide's head reeled.  "Better give me a status report.  No—get them all moving first.  Then a status report."

The Screaming Cyborgs had fared the best of all during the brief bombardment, probably because Aristide had ordered them to hit the dirt whereas Nordveit, with true Nordic fatalism, hadn't given the order to other elements of his command.  CCLI Corps, Aristide discovered, consisted of slightly less than twenty-eight thousand warriors, not counting the reserve artillery brigades still outside the wormhole. 

"I'd better talk to the division commanders," he said.

They appeared on his displays: Draeger of the Designer Renegades, with her eyes the size of billiard balls, Malakpuri with his pointed beard, and Grax the Troll.

"Right now I don't have a lot of information" Aristide told them. "So if you've got any critiques of Nordveit's orders, or if you know anything that isn't on the displays, you'd better tell me."

The others knew no more than he did.  He contacted his immediate superior, General Aziz commanding Forty-First Army, and received a download of the tactical disposition.  There on the three-dimensional mapscape was the enemy breakthrough, expanding and flowing across country; here were friendly forces, dying, fleeing, or moving into position to contain the foe.

Aristide could find no fault with Nordveit's orders save that they were incomplete, so he continued with the business of swinging the whole corps to the right.

Ahead was a line of low hills, and beyond it was the war.  Aristide pushed his troops forward on the theory that the hills would provide some shelter behind which to shake his route columns into combat formations.  He bounded ahead of the advance elements to the hills, and there he saw that the hills were not natural formations at all, but the debris of combat.

A titanic battle had been fought here, where formations of invaders had met formations of defenders and left nothing alive, nothing functioning.  Trees, earth, and human habitations had been blasted and blackened; and tens of thousands of robot fighters and their human officers had fought here to the death.  The hills were their remains: torn bodies, weapons, limbs, fragments of vehicles and spent ammunition.  Little fires burned here and there.  Shattered crystal glittered in the dim sun; broken antennae reached for the sky like fingers.  Perhaps at the climax of the battle they had torn at each other with mechanical claws.

The husks of machines crunched beneath Aristide's mechanical feet as he climbed the slope.  He hoped there were no live human beings buried somewhere underneath. 

Seen from the summit, the mechanical hills wound across the country like strands of seaweed left behind by the tide.

Standing atop the beaten, crumbling bits of metal and laminate, Aristide took a chill comfort from the fact that his own side seemed to have won this battle, and having beaten the enemy had advanced past this point. 

He looked ahead toward the fight, and ordered small drone aircraft ahead to spy out the way.  What these revealed was that enemy breakthrough was complete: there was no longer any organized force fighting the Venger's legions. 

He called up the dispositions of his own units, and saw that it would be nearly half an hour before they would all be in position to roll into the attack.  That was too long a time—by then the enemy would have poured huge numbers of attackers into the breach.

He called up a tactical map and briefly wrote across it, movement of the big index finger of his battle suit drawing large glowing arrows across the display.

Again he summoned the images of his division commanders, and downloaded his tactical map to their tactical AIs.

"We're going to have to attack en echelon," he said.  "Captain Draeger, you'll go in the instant your units are ready, and you'll attack the shoulder of the breakthrough to cut off any reinforcements to the enemy.  The Screaming Cyborgs will go in on your left as soon as they're set.  Captain Malakpuri, you'll go in next.  Captain Grax, your division will be in reserve till we see where it's needed—I suspect you'll have to support Captain Draeger.  Any questions?"

There were none.  The concept was plain enough, and fine tactical movements were up to subordinates and their AIs anyway.

"Corps and reserve artillery is already hitting the enemy," Aristide continued, "but I'll make sure you can call on it for specific fire missions."  He looked at Draeger and tried to give her a confident nod. 

"Proceed," he said.

Though Draeger was centuries old, her biological age was never more than sixteen: she wore her hair in pony tails that dropped from high on her head nearly to her waist, and she had equipped herself with a pair of eyes twice the size of the human norm.  All the humans in her division were industrial designers from New Penang, and they had equipped their fighters with picturesque but non-functional innovations: weird frills, decorative antennae, brilliantly colored camouflage projections, and full sets of teeth. 

"Death for Art's Sake!" Draeger cried, the divisional motto, and her division kicked its way through piles of wrecked robots and swung over to the attack.  Enemy intelligence had failed, apparently, because the foe were not set to receive them.  But resistance hardened soon enough, enemy units changing front under the guidance of computer brains that were incapable of fear or hesitation.  But by that point Aristide's own division was ready, the Screaming Cyborgs pitched in on Draeger's right, and the enemy gave way again.  Again the enemy adjusted, but then Malakpuri's attack caught them wrong-footed and drove them back three kilometers.

Aristide could observe the action from any point by uploading data from any human or robot.  He watched the robots with fascination: they were deadly little devices, fearless, ruthless, highly intelligent, and unnaturally fast.  Individual combats were almost too swift for Aristide to follow.  An enemy was sighted, a weapon aimed, and bang . . . all in less than a second.  Networked battle computers meant that each saw what all the others saw—the observer need not reveal itself by movement or fire, the enemy could be destroyed by a robot over the next hill, launching smart missiles.  The kills multiplied with incredible rapidity once they began.  Whole units of one side or another were turned to ash within seconds.

Bitsy, he thought, wants me to give her the freedom to create and use these things however she wants.

Never, he thought.  Never.

By that point Grax was up with what he had named the Troll Grenadier Division.  Aristide ordered him in to support the Designer Renegades.  "Grax the Troll!" he shouted, and led his warriors into battle while waving a poleaxe one-handed from an armored fist.  The enemy's defense, hardening again, gave way completely, and Grax and Draeger together sealed the base of the breakthrough, cutting off the enemy attackers from reinforcements.  By now other counterattacks were under way from other directions, and the enemy breakthrough collapsed like a punctured balloon.  In fairly short order the remaining enemy were hunted down and destroyed.

Aristide felt a surge of accomplishment.  He had maneuvered his troops under fire and scored a signal success against a triumphant enemy.  He had earned his footnote in military history.  Confronted by the enemy breakthrough and the death of his superior, Captain Monagas brought his divisions smartly into battle in a neatly timed attack en echelon, resulting in the collapse of the enemy pocket.  It was the sort of thing military officers lived for.

He hadn't thought of himself as the kind of officer who would delight in such notice, but perhaps he was.

He bounded forward to where his command was quietly sorting itself out, the units rearranging themselves under efficient computer guidance.  If they'd been people it would have taken hours. 

His command had been reduced to something like nineteen thousand fighters, now settling themselves along the lines that the invaders had held prior to the enemy breakthrough.  There were no hills of robot dead, but the place was bad enough, broken machine corpses strewn across hills and lying beneath banyan trees stripped of twigs and leaves. 

Aristide established his "headquarters" in the trees, actually just himself and his personal robot guard.  Reserve ammunition was brought up to replenish magazines. 

CCLI Corps had come eighteen kilometers from the wormhole. 

The ground began to tremble as enemy artillery found the range.  Aristide told his command to seek cover where they were, and put his back to one of the banyan trees, so that it would cover him.  He contacted his superior.

"The enemy have found our range," he told General Aziz.  "If we stay here we'll be cut up to no purpose.  I'd like to request permission to advance."

Drops of sweat clung to the general's neat mustache.  Perhaps his cooling units in his suit had failed.

"If we expand the perimeter," he said, "we'll be too thin on the ground.  You'll have to hold where you are."

"We'll take casualties."

"Other units will be brought up to your support."

To use when we're too thin to hold, Aristide thought.  But he kept his thoughts to himself, and obeyed orders.

Heavy fire hammered down.  Aristide ordered his units to leave a skeleton force on the perimeter, and slowly drew the rest back, out of the enemy barrage, but remained in position to counterattack.  There were so many dead robot hulks on the perimeter itself that perhaps enemy reconnaissance would think it fully manned. 

Aristide stood with his back to the tree and ate chocolate and drank recycled bodily fluids. He checked the chronometer and discovered that he had been at war for twenty-six hours.

The enemy eventually found Aristide's main force lying in reserve and shifted some of their fire to the main body.  Casualties began mounting.  Aristide found that while he did not much care about robots in the abstract, he cared about his robots very much.  He wanted to preserve them nearly as much as if they were real, live soldiers. 

The humans, if they died, would be resurrected.  The robot soldiers, on the other hand, would be swept up with the trash.  For the moment at least, Aristide was prepared to call that unjust.

Eventually Aziz passed on the information that made it clear that it didn't much matter what the hell he did with his forces.

"Our forces in Pamphylia have been overwhelmed," he said. "The enemy is pouring through the wormhole to attack our reserves.  We're moving corps artillery to Zimbabwe to get it out of enemy fire."

Which meant, Aristide realized, that the United Powers were abandoning the surface of Courtland.  If the gantlet of fire just inside Greater Zimbabwe was preferable to what lay outside, then what lay outside was hell.

It also meant that there was no way any of the invaders were getting off Courtland.  They would all die here, and then be resurrected at home with no memories of destruction, bloodshed, or defeat.

"We are uploading all combat data to orbiting AIs, for transmission to high command," Aziz continued. "The download should occupy most of our bandwidth for the next several minutes. Please minimize all non-essential transmissions for that period."

Well, Aristide thought.  At least his counterattack would find its way into history, instead of being lost down the wormhole of Greater Zimbabwe.  He was oddly pleased by the fact.

Hours passed in which the enemy bombardment whittled CCLI Corps down from nineteen to fifteen thousand.  On the surface of Courtland, apparently, millions of warriors were flailing their way to annihilation.

"We seem to be losing," Bitsy remarked.

"Yes, damn it."

"You seem upset."

"Was that irony?" Aristide demanded. "I'm not in the mood for irony now."

"Sorry."

"For a moment there I thought I'd avoided becoming a statistic.  Now it looks as though I'll become a number after all."

"As a being made up entirely of numbers, I fail to see the problem."

"Why don't you just shut up?"  Aristide snarled. 

Bitsy did so.

Aristide reflected bitterly on all the erroneous assumptions that had led the failed invasion.  Everyone involved in the planning and execution of the landings on Courtland had known that the odds would be long—Vindex had the devotion of billions of human beings and the resources of four pocket universes, as well as Courtland's own majestic intelligence.  But high command had thought that a chance of success existed—if Courtland's processing power could be sufficiently impaired, if the wormholes could be seized and held, if sufficient biological weapons could be deployed throughout the pockets.

But the United Powers had failed to reckon with the Venger's tapping the power of whole suns that he had created just for the purpose.  Not only had this weapon eliminated millions of attackers at once, but it demonstrated that the Venger's access to energy was essentially infinite.

If the Venger's energy was infinite, then the energy of the United Powers, once they deployed the technology themselves, would be ten times infinite.  But even that much, Aristide thought, wouldn't be enough to overwhelm Vindex. 

Which meant that the United Powers would adopt Plan B.  Courtland wouldn't be conquered, it would be destroyed, along with all its contents, the universes, the continents and seas, the animals and the people. 

The people would be restored from backup.  Eventually.  The rest would be lost forever.

Vindex, Aristide thought, had to know what Plan B would be.  He had to be ready for it. 

And that was terrifying.

He ate more chocolate.  He might as well finish it off: he'd have no use for it in a few hours' time.

Drones informed Aristide of an attack forming to his front.  Heavy weapons hammered the perimeter, destroying all but a handful of the fighters he'd left there.  He called for his own artillery to disrupt the enemy attack before it got started, but only half the guns and rocket launchers had survived the trek through the wormhole, and these were being spare with their ammunition.

When the enemy came Aristide laid down as thorough a barrage as he could, and then the units he'd drawn back from the front line came forward over terrain that they knew perfectly, having already been over it twice.  They met the enemy, and the long annihilation began.

Aristide remained with his back to the banyan tree.  To expose himself would be to die, and though he supposed death was inevitable, he preferred to postpone it.

Aristide's fighters hung on.  The breakthrough, when it came, was on the left—the unit that CCLI Corps had originally been intended to support gave way.  Aristide had to act quickly to keep his flank from being rolled up.  In the turmoil and confusion it was difficult to pick which remote view to upload into his implant, and so in the end it was simpler to supervise the movement himself.  For the first time in hours he left the banyan tree and leaped toward the crisis.

He dropped alongside his warriors into a ditch on the edge of what seemed to be the remains of a banana plantation—the trees, spaced at regular intervals, were broken, and the yellow fruit lay pulped on the ground.  Active camouflage kept him from seeing much of either side in the visible spectrum, but infrared emissions revealed the Venger's warriors on the other side of the plantation, swarming like ants through the breach they had made, threatening to get behind Aristide's lines. 

For several busy minutes he leaped over the battlefield, pulling back his left flank and getting it under cover.  Even so his fighters went down by the hundreds.  He had one of his bodyguard climb what was left of a banana tree in order to get a better view and link to his implant. 

Then a pattern of shellfire landed in his area.  There were no countermeasures: his counter-batteries had run out of ammunition.  The explosions were small, however, and spattered the area with a translucent semi-fluid, some kind of thick, clotting substance that lay heavily on the grass and torn banana leaves.

Aristide wiped the stuff from his sensors.  It stuck to his glove.  "What is it?" he demanded.  "Sign of active nano?"

One of the bodyguard performed a brief analysis.

"No disassemblers," Bitsy said. "It's glucose."

"Everyone pull back!  Now!"

He gave the order too late.  The next round of shellfire sprayed nanomachines over the area, and the glucose provided them with plenty of energy.  The nanomachines themselves were contained in a thin superfluid that spread thinly over every object, defying gravity as it crept upward over every vertical surface.

Including Aristide's armor.  Alarms began flashing in his implants, but there was little he could do as he was in the midst of leading a precipitous retreat.  In time he found himself once more in the shattered wood, standing by his old banyan or one very much like it.

A dead cockatoo lay at his feet.

"Analyze!" he said.

"Unknown composition," Bitsy said.  Then, "Sorry."

"Countermeasures."

One of his robot bodyguard sprayed Aristide with liquid nitrogen, which would temporarily freeze the disassemblers until a more appropriate countermeasure could be deployed.  While the molecular machines thawed out in the subtropical heat of Greater Zimbabwe, the bodyguards experimented on each other.  None of the countermeasures worked completely, but it appeared that the Venger's weapon was a variation on the Kursk type. 

Aristide began to breathe easier.  His guard sprayed him and each other with the appropriate countermeasure.

"The Kursk can be stopped by the layers of the suit," he said.

"Your suit has been dinged," Bitsy said. "And your joints are vulnerable, in any case."

"I didn't want to be reminded of that."

"Enemy in the treeline!"

Another pell-mell retreat, the bodyguard providing covering fire as Aristide bounded through the trees on a zigzag course.  Enemy projectiles brought down some of the guard, but the flight was a success, and brought another temporary respite.

"You have a hot spot on your right knee," Bitsy said.

One of the guard hit the hot spot with liquid nitrogen, followed by the Kursk countermeasure.  Aristide tried to keep track of what was happening to CCLI Corps, saw only a whirlwind of frantic movement across the displays, nothing he could make sense of.

"Incoming!" Bitsy said.

Aristide had a moment to reflect that Bitsy seemed to be enjoying the disaster before an explosion hurled him through the air.  There was the sensation of whirling, then a curious counter-eddy as his jets tried to compensate for the uncontrolled movement.  He hit the ground and ended on his back.  The jolting to and fro in his harness had knocked the wind out of him.

As the barrage was likely to go on for some time, his current posture seemed as good as any, so he remained supine while he tried to collect himself.

The ground shuddered to impact after impact.  A tree limb fell on him, obscuring the view of his sensors.

"There's damage to the right knee joint," Bitsy said.  "You might try flexing, to see if it's damaged."

Aristide tried and failed.  His readouts, he realized as his leg thrashed about in its immobile armor, showed that there had been a pressure breach in his suit.  He could feel his suit grow more humid as the air of Greater Zimbabwe leaked in.

"Let's freeze the hot spots one more time," Aristide said.  Showing what in a human would be incredible bravery, one of his bodyguard crawled through the shellfire to spray more liquid nitrogen over the disassemblers that were turning his suit into free molecules and copies of themselves.

Aristide felt the bite of cold as his knee was sprayed.  So that's where the hull breach was, right where the Kursk nano was strongest.

"This won't last," Aristide said. 

"I'm afraid not," Bitsy said.

"Better tell Draeger that she's in command of what's left of the corps."

"I'll do that." And, a moment later, "Draeger may be dead.  She's not responding, in any case."

There was a sudden flare of heat on the back of Aristide's knee.  The nano coming to grip with his flesh.

"Who's next?" he asked. "Grax?"

"I pinged him and he's still among the standing."

"Tell him he's in charge, then."

"Done."

The heat on Aristide's knee was growing pronounced, almost painful. 

"They forgot something when they created this suit," Aristide said.

"What's that?"

"A suicide pill," said Aristide.

"I'll make a note of it." 

There was silence.  The ground leaped to the impact of shells and rockets.  Pain grew in Aristide's knee, and he felt heat against his back, where another colony of happy disassemblers was taking his suit apart.

He decided that the odds weren't great enough that he would be splattered by a direct hit, so he tried to rise.  The frozen knee made that impossible, but by levering himself up by one arm he managed to flop onto his front. 

The view from this new posture was scarcely improved.

A searing pain flashed through his right knee.  He cried out.  The pain faded.

"Right," he said, and ordered his bodyguard to pick him up bodily and carry him toward the nearest enemy.  Getting a rocket to the chest was a better end than being eaten alive by the molecular foe.

In the last few minutes his bodyguard had been sadly depleted.  Only three remained intact enough to crawl to him and attach themselves to his suit with their grapplers.  The grapplers were intended for fine manipulation, not hauling a stout combat suit weighing a couple of hundred kilos, but they were well-made, and in the end Aristide was being hauled over the forest floor at about two kilometers per hour.

A rocket landed nearby.  Shrapnel hammered Aristide's armor.  One of the bodyguard collapsed, its innards torn.  The remaining two machines were unable to carry Aristide on their own, and he found himself face-down on the torn ground.

The pain in his knee hadn't returned, but the sensation of heat was spreading up his leg toward his groin. 

"I don't find our current prospects very promising," Aristide said.

"Nor do I," said Bitsy.

"Have the bodyguard engage any enemy that come in range.  Maybe the black hats will be good and blast all of us to bits."

"Very good."  The two remaining machines dropped Aristide's armor and took up a defensive posture.

Aristide felt heat flush his entire body.  Beads of sweat formed on his forehead and dripped steadily on his displays.  The air in the suit smelled of humus.

"I don't seem to be doing well," he confessed.

"With your permission," Bitsy said, "I would like to erase myself.  Vindex shouldn't capture either one of us alive."

"Carry on," Aristide said. "I'll just hang around here till something happens."

"Good luck."  The ground shuddered.

"I'll see you in a better place." 

"Five seconds," Bitsy said.  "Four.  Three.  Two.  One."

She spoke no more.

"Goodbye, old friend," Aristide said. "It's been jolly."

Heat blazed through Aristide's flesh.  His body had been completely infiltrated by the nanomachines, which were reproducing in a perfect frenzy.

His vision had gone dark.  He panted for breath.  He could feel sweat pouring off him.

And then he was consumed.

 

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