by Wil McCarthy
“Sorry to trouble you,” Bruno says to him, meaning it. “You don't owe me a thing. Quite the reverse: I'm responsible for all the misery you see around you.”
“Oh, piffle,” Sidney says, almost spitting the words. He looks utterly exhausted, but this flare of anger is enough to keep him going for a little while longer. “You haven't even been here. You think we can't fuck a world up all by ourselves? Listen, you, we're here for . . . for . . .”
“Closure,” says Brian.
“Right. Closure. And you're going to give it to us.”
Bruno blinks. “Are you here to assassinate me?” It's a strange concept; on some level it's exactly what he deserves, and yet he cannot allow it to happen. Not now, not yet.
But Sidney just rolls his eyes. “Oh, please. We're here because it puts some . . .”
“Meaning,” says Brian.
“Right. On all the fuffing time we've killed on this planette. Hiding out is not the same thing as actually turning the place over to a new . . .”
“Generation?” suggests Nick Valdi.
“No. A new paradigm. A new society. Free from all this debris. From all our broken dreams.” He points vaguely in the direction of Manassa.
Bruno eyes these three raggedy men carefully, seeing no deception in them, no weakness. They will fight, even if they cannot say exactly why.
“I understand,” he says, for he truly does. “Up there in the ruins is a fax machine which will get you back in fighting condition. But it's no substitute for rest, after a journey through the Stormlands. A little farther into the dunes, you'll find our camp. The sand is very soft there.”
But Sidney Lyman just laughs at that. “Your Majesty, do you think we just happened to run into a scouting patrol here? The enemy may not have figured out what you're up to, but they know you're up to something. There's about fifteen thousand robots on the march, and they'll be here, oh, any minute now.”
“Ah,” Bruno says, processing that. On the face of it, it's very bad news indeed. But how much does it really change? “Well, I suppose we can all rest when we're safely dead and buried. In the meantime, come with me. Quickly, if you please.”
By the time Bruno returns to the bronze tower, with Lyman and his men in tow, Radmer has already fed most of the Dolceti through the fax. They're standing around now, admiring each other in their battle armor, which Radmer has done up in bright, dolcet-berry yellow with a subtle metallic finish. Their blitterstaves are a shade of dully glowing crimson that complements the uniforms nicely.
At the sight of it Bruno feels yet another pang for the Queendom, whose sense of style—and ability to follow through on it!—was unmatched by any society before or after. On those terms, King Bruno had been an embarrassment to his people, who were forever beseeching him not to wear anything in public which had not first been approved by his wife, or one of her courtiers, or his own valet, or even Slappy Luzarre, who for one thousand years sold bananas from a wagon on the street outside the palace gates. But like any mathematician, Bruno could recognize beauty when he saw it, and he'd seen it everywhere in the Queendom. Here on Lune, even the Iridium Days had been drab by comparison.
Radmer himself is wearing reflective inviz, which is like regular inviz except that it's purely passive, illuminated only by ambient light and reflection. Consuming far less energy than a full stealthing cloak, it doesn't attempt to match the radiant brightness of sun or sky, and it leaves a clear, sunset-elongated shadow upon the dunes. His head and hands are also visible.
“What do you mean I'm a copy of my old self?” Mission Mother Mathy is demanding of his floating, disembodied head. “Did I die? Did that thing in there kill me and take my soul?”
“Will you calm down?” Radmer replies wearily. But not all that wearily, for he too is young again, and looks exactly like the Conrad Mursk who agreed, so long ago, to crush this moon for fun and profit.
“No one knows the fate of a human soul,” Bruno says, striding up, “when the body is destroyed and recopied. But such adventures were commonplace in the Queendom, and though we were vigilant—especially in the beginning!—for signs of spiritual decay, none were ever observed. The process is, to all tests and appearances, safe. And better than safe, for you've been rendered immorbid.”
“Oh, my, God,” Mathy says, horrified.
Hmm. Apparently these people are deathists. And why not, with only decayed, bitter Olders around to show what immorbidity was like? Well, no help for it. He says, not just to Mathy but to all of them, “Fear not, for though your bodies cannot grow old, they most certainly can be killed. And as we speak, there's a robot army marching through the eyewall that will gladly make it happen.”
Indeed, on the hills just this side of the eyewall, glints of light have begun to appear, reflecting the blurry red of the sunset behind the eyewall's other face. If they're undamaged by the storm, and move at the speed of household robots, they'll be here in twenty minutes. Perhaps less.
To Sidney and Brian and Nick he says, “Refresh yourselves quickly, in there.”
“Hello, sir,” they say to Radmer in passing.
“Hi,” he says back. “You shouldn't have come here.”
Then, looking out unhappily at the approaching glints, Radmer asks Bruno, “What of Highrock? Is Tillspar in enemy hands already?”
“I haven't heard. But this army apparently followed the southern route, bypassing the Divide. So there may yet be reason to hope.”
“For now. How many are coming? Are we enough to hold this site against them?”
“Perhaps,” Bruno says, though even with Queendom equipment he doubts it very much. The odds are just tilted too steeply in the enemy's favor. “But we may find greater advantage in moving onward.”
“A fighting retreat? I'll begin the weapons training immediately.”
“Do that, yes,” Bruno says, “But first there's something you should know. This machine here”—he waves a hand at the bronze tower-top sticking out of the sand—“is in contact with at least three collapsiters, somewhere in the lower Kuiper Belt, just above Neptune's orbit. A bit of Nescog survives!”
“How is that possible?” asks an incredulous Radmer. “We would have known, long ago.”
Before the Shattering, yes. Even before the Murdered Earth cracked and fell in itself and breathed a last puff of air from the lungs of its dying billions. Curses, mostly, with Bruno's name figuring prominently among them.
“Indeed we would,” Bruno agrees. “And something as complex and fragile as a collapsiter doesn't simply reconstitute itself. Perhaps the hand of God has intervened on our behalf, or perhaps the hand of Man, if Lune is not the last bastion of us after all. It hardly matters at this late hour, General. My point is simply that I can take us out of here. Swiftly and without a trace.”
“To where?” asks Radmer.
And here Bruno cannot help grinning, for there's nothing more just in this world than turning a villain's own dirty tricks against him. “The survival of a fax machine for this long without maintenance is surprising, but hardly incredible. It's use that wears them down. And the gates are just as durable, so it's reasonable to suppose they're intact. I'd be more surprised if they weren't.”
“So, what? We fax out and back? Use the speed-of-light delays as a kind of time bomb, and step out of the plate ten or twelve hours after we left?”
Impatiently, Bruno tries to run a hand through his hair, but bangs up against the dome of his helmet instead. “Listen, all right? Ours is not the only fax machine. We've assumed another all along. In Astaroth, yes? In the Glimmer King's own presumed fortress, somewhere in the vicinity of the south pole. It will take hours, yes, for our signal to travel to the outer system and back. But when it does, we can step right to the heart of this world's problems. And solve them.”
“Oh,” says Radmer. He seems stunned to blankness by that remark, but slowly he recovers himself, and finally matches Bruno's grin. “That sounds a bit dangerous, old man. Are you sure you're up to
the task?”
“As sure as the sun shines, my boy. I've penetrated a fearsome lair or two in my day. And I hadn't the Dolceti with me then, nor you, nor the element of surprise. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a three-thousand-year-old telecom network to fix.”
Alas, this proves more difficult than he'd assumed at first. The collapsiters are clearly pinging and responding to pings, but sorting through the fax machine's comm logs, he's baffled at first by the nonsense he finds there. He built the Nescog, and while the passage of time has bleached out the specific details of its comm protocol, he does at least recognize his own work when he sees it. And this is something . . . else.
This isn't Nescog at all, but some derivative coding system built upon it. When? By whom? Could it be the fabled Shadow Network of the Fatalist ghouls? A hundred gigatons of collapsium could not be hidden in the Old Solar System—every collapsiter was known and tracked—but a parasitic protocol running secretly in the margins . . . Well, it isn't impossible, but it still doesn't explain how dead collapsiters have turned back into live ones. And anyway something in him doubts that explanation. It fails Occam's Razor; it's too complex. Something else is going on.
Alas, the mystery will have to wait for another time; with a few minutes of study he's able to decipher the important features of the log file, and construct an access request that will race out ahead of their own corporeal images, logging them on to the mystery network just in time to be routed through it, and also scanning for additional gates and logging them on, involuntarily. A hostile takeover of the Glimmer King's fax. Or so he hopes; if the process fails, they'll bounce right back here again, to face the robot army.
“They're coming!” someone shouts down to him from outside.
Well, yes. That goes without saying. Of the fax he asks, “Does this transaction look valid to you?”
“I have never seen one like it, Sire,” the fax replies, from a speaker grown adjacent to its print plate. “But it appears to be a valid construction.”
“Then implement it, under full Royal Override.”
“Doing so.”
“Architect!” he shouts then through the open doorway. “We're ready! Start sending people through!”
But something's wrong; there's a rising din and clatter out there. The battle has begun, or rather resumed. Blast. He races outside, prepared for the worst, and sees pretty much what he expects: the site is overrun. Already there are dozens of robots down and dozens more swarming among the Dolceti, and there are hundreds pouring over the nearby dunes. Presumably thousands racing upward through the dune field, out of sight for the moment but not planning on staying that way for long.
“Radmer!” he shouts, blasting his voice over the loudspeakers. “Bordi! Get the Dolceti through the fax!”
“I'm not going in there,” someone protests, over the grunt and clatter of combat and the death screams of household robots.
“You're not staying here,” someone else remarks. And a third voice—Mathy's—adds, “I'm not going first, I'll tell you that much.”
Bruno pauses to smash down a pair of attackers, and then says, “General Radmer will go first. Then Sidney Lyman and his men, for they'll know better what to expect on the other side.” He pauses again to rescue a fallen comrade, then continues, “Next will go Natan and Zuq and Mathy, and all the rest of you, and”—he fires an energy blast at a nearby hilltop, scattering the robots there in a burst of sand and sundered wellstone, and sorely depleting his energy reserves once again—“and finally Bordi.”
“You're not going last,” Bordi says, while laying about him with the blitterstaff in decisive blindsight strokes. “Not if I have anything to say about it!”
“You do not,” Bruno answers, “for only I can seal the gates behind us, and prevent this army from pouring through in pursuit.”
“Good luck,” says Radmer, on his way down into the pit and through the doorway. Lyman and the other Olders follow behind, murmuring similar sentiments, and then the Dolceti are making their retreat, stepping backward into the pit while hundreds of robots swarm in after them. It's dicey for a few moments when the sheer weight of attackers thrusts Mathy and two other Dolceti away from the doorway. It fills with robots, which pour inside like a fluid. And then it's worse, when the three of them are lifted off their feet and hoisted into the air, faceup, struggling upon the upraised hands of dozens upon dozens of robots. Bruno does what he can, firing wirebombs into the fray at the rate of fifty per second, but his aim is hasty and there are just too many targets moving too quickly, and his charge and munitions are low. Mathy and the others don't know the power of their suits, their weapons. Of the several moves they could make right now, few are obvious to an untrained person.
Bitterly, Bruno makes an executive decision, and allows the robots to carry the three Dolceti away. He must concentrate on clearing that doorway, and holding it, or all these people will be lost, and their world along with them.
“Mathy!” someone shouts in tones of pained helplessness. And then, on the heels of that, “Stupid sow. Keep your feet!”
But the flood has taken them; they're out of sight now, out of mind, and Bruno is using every milligram of martial skill he can summon, to drive Bordi and the four remaining Dolceti forward through the impervium swarm, which gleams and flickers in the light of sunset.
Another Dolceti goes down and is swept away. Then another, and then two, and finally it's just Bruno and Bordi in the doorway, with shattered robots piling higher and higher around them, threatening to block the way. Bruno shouts, “Go! Quickly!”
The diamond crown is knocked off his head and spins away into the heaving robot stream. As Bordi falls back into the tower room, fighting his way through the robots still inside, Bruno is forced to acknowledge that he has never, in fact, faced a battle as dire as this. The attackers are not well armed or armored, but in such numbers there's little he can do to stop them. Soon enough his suit charge will be zero again, and like so many voracious termites they'll be carrying him away.
He's out of time, and he can't spare a glance to see whether Bordi has gotten through safely or not. To the walls he shouts, “Fax! Royal Lockout! Pass no objects save myself! Walls! Release all fields and power down permanently!”
“Acknowledged,” the fax replies calmly, unaware of His Majesty's peril and possibly incapable of understanding it. “Immediately, Sire,” say the walls, which go dark, reverting to blank wellstone. And then the sides of the sand pit slide inward, carrying live robots down with them and burying several. Bruno retreats inside.
And that's that: no one but he will ever use this place again, for travel or medicine or resupply. The Royal Lockouts and Overrides were built into the Queendom's wellstone at the deepest levels. Subverting them had always been possible, but insanely difficult. The sands will reclaim this place in minutes or hours, and since Bruno does not expect to pass this way again, the sands and the lockouts will remain. One more treasure of Lune consumed for the sake of this stupid war.
Along with the two human patterns still stored within it. He thinks of them suddenly: the final victims of the Queendom's demise. Should he wake them amid all this clamor? To die afresh, without the least understanding of why? No. Better to let them sleep. Better to worry about his own skin for a little while longer!
The trick, now, is to battle the rushing tide of sand and robots, to protect his front and his back without actually whacking the fax machine with his blitterstaff. Because that would kill it even for him.
There's a bad moment when the robots team up to high-low him again, tumbling him off his feet. He feels strong hands on his ankles, preparing to lift him, to carry him away! But with the wellcloth of his suit still active, he manages to call up a slippery exterior and wriggle free, leaping and sliding for the fax plate ahead of him. His momentum is sufficient—just barely!—to carry him through.
The plate crackles blue for a moment and then falls forever silent.
chapter twenty-four
in which the fortress of a
traveler is breached
Once through the gate, the first thing Bruno notices is absolute silence. There's no battle on this side, no scream and crash. The second thing is the trio of bright yellow Dolceti crowded in front of him: Bordi and Natan and Zuq. And since he's still slipping along the floor on his hands and knees, the third thing he notices is the tussle of bodies falling all around him like tenpins, their blindsight reflexes lacking the time or the space to operate.
“Oof,” says Zuq.
But the Olders, crowded just ahead in this narrow passageway, are still on their feet, poised at a corner and looking out.
“They don't see us,” Sidney Lyman is murmuring.
“They see,” Radmer corrects. “They don't react.”
“Excuse me,” Bruno says to the Dolceti. He wipes away the suit's slippery skin program and staggers to his feet, pleased to find himself still alive. Successfully teleported, yes, for the first time in millennia, and under circumstances far from ideal. He steps over the men while they're attempting, in the unfamiliar bulk of their armor, to rise. At the corner he taps Nick and Brian out of his way, and has a look.
The room is full of robots.
Specifically, it's full of unarmed robots, engaged in the task of filling buckets with sand. And filling smaller vials with measured amounts of other substances: black carbon and white, shiny metals, poured from the sort of long-beaked glass orbs. Finally, the vials are emptied into the buckets, which are placed on a slow-moving conveyor. The light is a sickly yellow-green, from phosphor-coated electric bulbs set in sconces along the walls. Like many on this world, the walls are interlocking blocks of cut stone. The whole scene looks like nothing so much as an ancient alchemist's workshop.
Presently, a pair of robots fetch one heavy bucket each, and begin walking toward the fax machine. With his staff at the ready, Bruno sidles out of the way, while Radmer and Sidney press themselves against the wall, turning their suits to full inviz. But indeed, these robots take no notice of their workshop's invaders, simply crowding around them on their way to the fax.