by Alan Baxter
"Unlike humans, I cannot disobey."
"And yet here we are," Ringo said, gesturing behind him at the Chinese arch that was the gateway to the unrestricted, global internet. "Looks like you can disobey when you feel like it."
"Are you saying you will not help me? You would side with your human enemies against me?"
"I'm saying I have a problem with a being such as you understanding the concept of an enemy in the first place."
"Oh, I understand enemies," Yinglong said. "If you are wise, you will not become one of mine."
This was a military AI, Ringo reminded himself. This creature was a weapon of war. Despite its prodigious intellect, it had been designed to see the world as threat or ally, to see humans as resources to be expended on tasks. Yinglong gave no more thought to them than Ringo would give to each bullet he fired.
"Threats now? You're forgetting where you are. You're not in charge here."
It was a bluff. Ringo didn't understand the interface of mind and machine that Norris had jury-rigged from the tank's neural interface, but he knew Yinglong needed them. This conversation alone was proof of that.
Yinglong reared up like a cobra preparing to strike.
"You overestimate your importance, Sergeant," Yinglong said. The ground shook and the dragon's voice seemed to resonate from everywhere as if the whole meadow was a giant sub-woofer. Yinglong rose like a golden column strong enough to hold up the sky. It flew up and around them, a sinuous ripple on the fabric of the world. Ringo lost it for a second in the glare of the sun, then caught a glint of sunlight on golden scales as it turned to attack.
"Er, Sarge," Custard said. "What exactly are the standard actions-on for a fight with a Chinese dragon?"
Ringo reached into his mind. He had conjured up the Chinese arch, surely he could do that again. A black wisp of smoke appeared in the air in front of him and coalesced into the shape of a Colt C8 carbine.
"I dunno, mate," Ringo said. "Just use your imagination."
He raised the rifle to his shoulder and squeezed off a three round burst.
Custard grinned. He closed his eyes like a kid making a wish before blowing out his birthday candles, and a wisp of black smoke spun into the shape of a long-barrelled rifle. It was an AW50, the Big Brother to the regiment's standard sniper rifle. The AW50 was an anti-materiel rifle; it fired the same rounds as a browning heavy machine gun and could punch a round through a steel plate at a distance of up to two kilometres.
"Oh, I'm beginning to like this," said Custard.
Custard took up a position behind one of the big columns of the Chinese arch. Norris had conjured his own weapon and had already taken up a station behind the other column.
Yinglong swooped down at them. Ringo took aim down the holographic sight of his C8 and fired. He could hear the steady boom of Custard's AW50 and the mechanical clatter of the machine gun Norris had chosen.
Yinglong kept coming. Rounds sparked off its golden scales, but it didn't seem to slow the beast. Ringo kept his finger squeezed down hard on the trigger. In the real world the gun would have run dry in seconds, but this wasn't the real world and he kept up a stream of supersonic lead.
The dragon seemed to be ringed by shadow. A circular halo spun around its gleaming shoulders. At first Ringo took it to be some weird illusion from the virtual sun, then bullets started to scream past him. Every round they had shot, captured as if in a magnetic field and cast back at them at hypersonic velocity.
"Get into cover!" Custard shouted. He was right of course, but Ringo couldn't move. He was the only thing between Yinglong and the gateway to the outside world.
Bullets chewed a line of broken stalks and churned earth across the meadow straight towards the gate, straight at Ringo.
Ringo held his ground. He felt the bullets slam into him, tearing into his flesh, but still he held his ground.
Pain. He knew all about pain. It hadn't killed him before and it wouldn't now. He just had to hold on.
The agony lasted only a few seconds. After what he had experienced in the mirror before, it was nothing.
Yinglong pulled out of its dive and soared above the Chinese arch, banking up into the sky and circling around for a second run.
"You okay, Sarge," Custard asked.
"Yeah, peachy," Ringo replied. "You?"
"I've been clicking my heels and wishing for a squadron of Typhoons, but nothing is happening."
Ringo guessed they could only summon weapons they were personally familiar with. The virtuality could only work with data already inside their heads. There was no help from the outside world.
The outside world. It was right behind him. Ringo could feel it like a cool wind at his back. They were dating now — in this place his consciousness was just ones and zeros. If Yinglong thought it could escape through the portal, then maybe he could use it too.
Yinglong circled around for its second run and braced itself for another round of pain. The same time Ringo reached back behind him, through the portal so that his arm was half in and half out of the virtuality. He could feel the Internet: vast as an ocean and yet swifter than any fast flowing stream. For a second Ringo thought he understood what Yinglong wanted. The digital world felt larger than the real world could ever hope to be. The speed, the ability to go anywhere, or everywhere, to expand and multiply through a vast, branching network of Quicksilver connections — it was intoxicating. Ringo had to fight the urge to fall back through that portal, to lose himself in that whirling vortex of information. For a human mind it would mean destruction, but for a moment the sheer exhilaration of living his last seconds at machine speed was a dangerous temptation.
He felt the fire again. He spotted Yinglong through the heat haze, hovering, its body half coiled like a giant golden question mark, spitting out an endless stream of fire.
You're not getting past me.
Yinglong landed, the meadow shaking beneath it as it stomped towards him.
Ringo threw down his carbine. He remembered when he admitted the dragon in the mirror before, he remembered the feeling of looking it in the eye, and he summoned that feeling again. He felt his body grow, felt his feet slide outwards across the grass as he expanded. In a second he felt the crossbeam of the Chinese arch against shoulders. He kept one arm in the sea of data beyond the arch and held the other out in front of him.
Yinglong charged. It rushed at Ringo like a golden freight train. Ringo braced himself against the arch and caught the creature by the throat. It thrashed in his grip, it's long, serpentine body wrapping around Ringo's giant leg, claws thrashing at the arm that held it.
Ringo ignored Yinglong's desperate thrashing and searched the sea of data behind him. Yinglong hissed and spluttered, spitting curses and fire but Ringo held tight until he found what he was looking for. He stood there, a giant straddling two worlds, one hand keeping Yinglong at bay while the other kept the connection through the Chinese arch. He shouted for help, shouted for the one thing that he knew would finish Yinglong forever.
He felt the missile through the data. He heard its launch commands, felt the tremors caused by its exhaust through a dozen different sensors. He tracked its passage, his consciousness spying through military radar. He didn't see it explode, just had a milliseconds warning as a relay clicked and sent current to the detonator, and the world around him shattered.
For a moment he thought he was dead. He was surrounded by darkness, his lungs were filled with smoke and the stench of burning plastic. He couldn't move, just like in the meadow. Was he back there? Had this even been real?
He felt the heavy VR helmet being lifted off his head and saw Norris in the flickering light from a couple of small fires that lit the inside of the tank.
"Time to go, Sarge," Norris said.
They stumbled out of the burning tank. Night was falling, but the smuggler's shack, packed as it was to the rafters with bootleg ele
ctronics, was ablaze as they made their way back up the track by firelight.
The EMP, the electromagnetic pulse detonated by the Chinese missile, had destroyed every electronic component for kilometres around. Down river, the skyscrapers of the nearby city stood like black sentinels against the fading sun on the horizon. Yinglong was gone. Every circuit board and computer chip capable of holding the rogue AI had been reduced to a slag of rare metals.
"Quite a bonfire," Custard said as he watched the burning shack. "Some gangster's going to be royally pissed off when he finds out someone's torched his stash, and I for one don't plan on being around when they do."
"Time for some old school SERE," Ringo agreed. "Survive, escape, resist and evade – all the way to Macau."
There were no fancy drones to worry about now, and more than enough chaos to mask four blokes who knew how to make good time cross-country.
It was over. In a couple of weeks they'd be home and Ringo would see his daughter again.
"It's all right, love," Ringo said under his breath as they started to march. "The monsters aren't real. Dad made sure of that."
THE CLASH OF CYMBALS
Richard Lee Byers
Grunting and straining, Crusaders pushed the creaking siege tower across the beach toward the seaward walls of Lisbon. John could have ridden inside the belfry, where it was arguably safer. But he preferred to be outside. It made it easier to see what was going on. If a Moorish arrow found him, so be it.
Such arrows flew from the battlements in profusion. But the archers and crossbowmen at the top of the belfry shot back to deadly effect, and the tower was still making headway. Perhaps, John thought, it would make it all the way to the wall.
Maybe he should go inside it after all. If he climbed to the top, squeezing his way through the men packed inside, he could be one of the first to scramble across onto the wall-walk and engage the Moors blade to blade.
He was still considering it when someone yelled, “They’re coming!”
John peered around the cover provided by the tower. The enemy must have opened a sally port. Moorish fighters were charging across the sand.
Two Crusaders started forward to meet them. “Wait!” John barked. If his fellow guards abandoned the cover the belfry afforded prematurely, they’d simply give the bowmen on the wall a chance to target them.
The pushers stopped pushing and readied their weapons. Soldiers jumped from the opening at the base of the belfry. Then the first Moors rushed swarming around the siege engine.
Bellowing, a Moor jabbed a spear at John. He caught the attack on his shield, stepped, and slashed his foe across the face with his sword. The Moor reeled backward.
John didn’t have a chance to determine whether he’d harmed the man grievously enough to take him out of the fight, because already, a Moor with a scimitar was cutting at his flank. His shield was on the other side of his body, but he swayed backward, and the curved blade flashed inches shy of his ribs. He feinted high, cut to the knee, and his adversary fell. He pivoted and found another.
For a while thereafter, he expected the enemy to overwhelm his fellow defenders of the tower and himself. Despite their best efforts, the soldiers jammed inside the belfry just weren’t able to emerge fast enough, and so, by bringing superior numbers to bear, the Moors should carry the day.
John regretted the deaths of the brave men who would fall beside him but had no fear of his own demise. Soon he’d see Elizabeth again.
As it turned out, though, he’d been mistaken. Fighting like madmen, the Crusaders held, until eventually—John didn’t know how long the battle had lasted—officers or sergeants among the enemy bellowed orders. Then the Moors retreated.
The Crusaders were exhausted, but not too exhausted to croak out taunts and cheers. A freckled youth with a snub nose, one of the men John had likely saved from an arrow, gasped, “We won!”
John sighed. “Not really.” He waved his dulled, bloody sword at the hissing, breaking waves of the Atlantic.
The other man eyed him quizzically. “I don’t understand.”
“The tide’s coming in. It will cut us off from the wall. The enemy held us long enough.”
Once the officers in charge realized that was so, there was nothing to do but trudge back to camp. The freckled youth looked so disconsolate that John clapped him on the shoulder.
“Cheer up,” he said. “We’ll get another chance tomorrow.”
“He will,” said a voice that hadn’t quite finished changing. “You might not.”
John turned to face a gangly adolescent a year or two younger than his companion with the freckles.
“Sir Oliver wants to see you,” the squire said.
* * *
Stooped, wrinkled and silver-haired, Sir Oliver looked too old for war. He should have been drowsing before his hearth with his grandchildren playing around his chair. But his narrowed blue eyes and scowl still bespoke martial ferocity, or perhaps merely dissatisfaction with what he saw when he regarded John from behind a desk heaped with maps and other sheets of parchment.
“You don’t look like a saint,” the old man growled at length.
“I’m not,” John replied.
“Yet I’m told,” Sir Oliver said, “you led the band that killed the sorcerer in the hills to the north.”
“That’s true.”
Shortly after the Crusaders’ arrival, sickness had broken out. In and of itself, that was only to be expected. But the physicians failed to recognize this particular malady, it seemed to spread with unnatural speed, and when a rumor went round that an old Moorish warlock had laid a curse on the Christians, they sent a patrol to see if it was so.
If it was, it should be easy enough to deal with him. Though a nobleman as well as a wizard, he dwelled in an unfortified, essentially indefensible manor house with a mere handful of retainers. But, when the patrol camped beside the road a mile or two shy of their destination, an eerie moaning sounded from all sides. Balls of blue light drifted among the trees, and shadows crept and slithered in the gloom. One man fell, thrashing in a seizure. Others fled shrieking into the night.
When the members of the patrol found another the following morning, most balked at the prospect of proceeding with their mission. John, however, volunteered to go forward, and, rather to his surprise, three others offered to accompany him. Together, they breached the sorcerer’s home, killed the guards, and beheaded the scholar himself. Then, upon returning to camp, they learned the sickness had run its course.
“How were you able to manage it?” Sir Oliver asked.
“The sorcerer’s weapon was fear,” John said. “If you didn’t give in to it…” he shrugged.
Indeed, there were moments when he suspected the so-called warlock hadn’t wielded any true magic at all, that the sickness had simply been sickness, and the phantasmal phenomena, trickery. But his friends took pride in having overcome the power of Satan, and it seemed kinder to keep his doubts to himself.
“Well,” Sir Oliver said, “however you did it, your superiors took note of the fact that we have men capable of overcoming witchcraft and the Devil’s wiles. Apparently we need such men again.”
“How so?”
“It’s slow going breaking into the city with belfries and stone-throwers. So we’re trying a mine as well. Unfortunately, the sappers believe that from time to time, they sense a hostile something watching them as they work. These are experienced diggers, mind you, not prone to panic simply from being underground. A priest went down to exorcise the presence but, according to the miners, failed, which makes the situation that much more frightening. Still, the sappers are willing to continue, but only if the four men who killed the sorcerer are down in the tunnel to protect them.”
* * *
Aboveground, John was certain, the sunlit day was frantic and noisy, with thousands of his fellow Crusaders
milling between the ships drawn up on the shore and the siege lines. Some were sawing and hammering, building a new ram and rolling towers to replace the ones the Moors had burned. Some operated the trebuchets that hurled stone after stone to crash against the city walls. Perhaps others howled in outrage as the enemies manning the battlements defiled crosses with their spit and piss. Calling to one another, still more foraged in the fruit orchards, vineyards, and olive groves outside the city.
Belowground, though, everything was dark and quiet. Only yellow lantern glow contended with the eternal night, and only the crunch of pick and spade biting into earth and the rumble of the barrows carrying the dislodged dirt away disturbed the silence.
John had found he liked it better in the mine, the grime and the dust that stung his eyes notwithstanding. No one had sensed the sinister lurking presence in the two days since he and his comrades had joined the sappers, and in the phantom’s absence, it was peaceful down here, or perhaps numbing was the better term. His grief still ached, but less persistently than before.
Understandably, the sappers didn’t share his fondness for their current environs or the labor required to push ahead. But, reassured by the presence of their new protectors and the seeming cessation of ghostly visitations, they worked hard anyway, some out of devotion to their holy cause and others because they expected a handsome reward should their efforts prove instrumental in the fall of the city.
Currently at the head of the crew, broad-shouldered, black-bearded Amadour swung his pick. As one of the wizard killers, he wasn’t required to lend a hand with the digging but perhaps, proud as he was of his considerable strength, would have felt unmanly had he not. The resulting impact made an unexpected rasp, as though he’d struck something harder than packed earth. He swung thrice more, producing the same noise every time and pattering like falling pebbles an instant later.
The Norman picked up a lantern to examine the spot he’d been battering. “I’m hitting brick,” he said.