Implied Spaces

by Walter Jon Williams

  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 annihilat
ion.

  “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 molecu
les 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.