Implied Spaces

by Walter Jon Williams

  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 i
ncomplete, 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.