05. Children of Flux and Anchor (28 page)

The Fluxlords of the Garden might have been crazy, but they were also extremely good wizards. For a very long time the contest was a draw, with neither side gaining a clear advantage. A rider was dispatched back to the raider shield from one of the chief wizards, and soon after they saw raw Flux power flow out of the grid and reinforce the nearest side of the triangle. The combination gave that leg only slightly less power than the defending trio, and forced the defenders to commit most of their resources to block the assault. When that happened, the other two legs pressed forward, sensing weakness, and the shield began to lose its stability. Clearly there was no longer any way to support such a large shield, and the defenders were forced to contract it to better manage it. The shield shrunk, going in a good five kilometers all around, and the troops cheered and pushed forward into the exposed jungle-like foliage.

Both Sondra and Dell were having trouble viewing much of the action. While the void was intangible, the air flow carefully regulated and monitored, it was both visually and aurally quite dense. Both were forced to be closer than they actually would like being, although Sondra had been right. The raiders were not particularly concerned with an attack from the rear, shooting off only occasional random sweeps that were easily avoided.

The troops met no resistance coming in. The Fluxlords appeared to have withdrawn their people from the outer areas when the battle began and did not choose a face-to-face assault. Just because the shield was contracted, though, didn't mean that the master spell was affected. To do that, they would have to nail and defeat the Fluxlords themselves.

The Garden became a vicious trap. Trees came alive, their branches swinging like arms and knocking troops from their horses; vines and other innocent plants lashed out snake-like, picking off attacking troops and constricting until they squeezed the last breath out of them. It was no longer time for wizards; now the generals had to act.

A general retreat was sounded, which probably heartened the Fluxlords, but it was for a far different purpose. Matson's group had always known that the raiders possessed some sophisticated new laser-type weapons, and now these were deployed. The wizards now became support troops, keeping the pressure hard on the shield from all points so that the Fluxlords could not reconstitute or recreate what was being destroyed.

Lines of infantry now stood just beyond the Garden's edge, and on command they began firing into the growth from all available points. The void was lit with countless streams of violet-colored light, and where they struck the Garden growth smoldered and burned. "Somebody," Sondra noted with the detached admiration of the professional military, "really knows her stuff down there."

Soon a wall of flame and smoke was created and burned inward, creating huge, dark gashes in the soil. Within the Garden, plants writhed and slashed like trapped animals, but they died all the same.

Battles were not brief affairs, but once an attack commenced there was no rest for the offense until it was done or they withdrew. Giving the Fluxlords just an hour or two to recover themselves would possibly mean facing this whole thing all over again.

In front of a minor shield thrown up by the supporting wizard who protected them against the heat, the ground troops moved forward onto the scorched earth. Huge cracks began to appear in the scorched earth, trying to block their progress or even swallow them, but they were ready for it. Now, though, through some of the cracks closest to the shield, bubbling, molten rock seemed to rise to the surface and start flowing out. It was not, however, the
coup de grace
that it appeared to be, for to do that the Fluxlords had actually had to go in and alter their master spell. They had effectively surrendered control of the unshielded area to the offense, and Suzl at the projector took full advantage of it. She counter-spelled all along the affected radius, turning the molten rock to cool, smooth ground.

The advance had not been without cost. Fully ten percent of the offense had been killed, but the initial gain made victory much closer. No wizards had been lost, and now they were able to move up and take on the shield again in the same pattern as before.

Sondra and Dell began to take breaks, and to report back to Matson and Morgaine, frustrated by being unable to observe themselves what was happening. The Garden at the start had been roughly twenty-four by sixteen kilometers; after seventeen hours of assault, it had been reduced to a roughly circular area about six kilometers across, and the shield, while it held, was now mostly transparent, allowing the attackers to see inside and see what they faced. At this point, the defender was lost but might still hold a while and take an even greater toll. Of the five hundred or so attack troops at the start, there were about three hundred now.

Suzl had mostly used the projector to reinforce attack positions and to spell each of the wizards for a break so they would continue fresh and clear-headed. The Fluxlords, on the other hand, could not rest or relax for an instant. It was a test of endurance now; who was relieving Suzl, however, was not clear.

The attackers looked in on more thick Garden, but this time heavy with people. All the men and all the women looked alike, and none showed any really great concern for what was happening. They were, however, getting pretty crowded with all that brush, and the master spell was never designed to feed and water that many people in such a confined space. The more attention they required, and the more adjustments necessary, weakened the Fluxlords even more.

The Fluxlords, too, seemed to understand this, and decided on one last, desperate, all-out gamble. At this point they could have escaped, but that wasn't in their character. Their move was sudden, although not totally unexpected, and it relieved Sondra and Dell's minds a bit when it happened. Both had feared that these Fluxlords would destroy their people when they themselves faced defeat.

For those with the power, high above the garden there formed the outline of a head, a head with three faces. The center face was that of an old, stern, bearded patriarch; coming out of his left side was a young face, the Adam face, and out of his right the face of his Eve. Trailing from the head were enormous, thick bands of flowing energy, feeding the faces from the grid below, sucking up all the power that was available.

The shield suddenly vanished, and all power by the three was pushed with maximum force against just one of the attacking groups. The wizards from the other two groups could see what was happening, but each would take a couple of minutes to get into position to support the leg under assault; far too long to make any difference. After all these hours, this thing was going to be settled in about seventy seconds.

Suzl had been on the projector, with just two brief breaks, for the entire time. She was in agony; her whole body screamed for sexual release, and she looked somewhat monstrous there, totally turned on, both male organs extended. Yet she forced herself to think, forced that horrible pent-up tension into the grid by sheer force of will, knowing that only if she got the Fluxlords could she find relief. She swung into action, analyzing the lines of force feeding the head, and traced them down, doing a quick sweep until she localized one wizard and cut him off from the grid. Even as the troops on the near leg were being bowled over and in some cases caught and transformed by the fury of the Fluxlords' desperate attack, they were being weakened by a wizard they could not even see. The young Adam's face in the eerie hologram vanished.

Reduced by a third, their attack continued, and Suzl followed a second band down, swept the area, and to her surprise located a female wizard, who was also then neutralized. Only the bearded patriarch was too emotionally furious to be directly localized in this way, but now he alone was subject to the pressures of all the attacking wizards. The bearded face seemed to flicker, then lose definition, and finally turned into a furious whirlwind. With a start and a sudden realization that the old boy wasn't on the ground, but airborne, she tried an upward sweep and found where all the lines of force emerging from the grid converged and then tagged and disconnected him. He plummeted to the ground, but the other wizards caught him and brought him to a less-than-lethal stop, no longer a god nor even a wizard, except at their sufferance, but a mere mortal man.

Suzl did not wait for anything more. The Garden's master spell still held, but it now was merely an open spell, nothing more, with a force of will behind it, and even a junior wizard could take hold of it and modify or eliminate and replace it easily. Suzl now could think only of Ayesha.

Dell flew close to Sondra. "Well, that's it."

"Do you see any trace of Spirit's string?" Sondra asked him.

"No, I—yeah! There it is! She's in, now! Well I'll be damned! It worked!"

"You continue to observe," she told him. "I'll go back and report to Matson and Morgaine. Take care, though. They've got eight wizards down there along with the projector, four world-class at least, and now they don't have to all focus on one thing."

"They'll be too tired to care much," he shot back.

"You're tired too. Be careful or you'll wind up Morgaine's twin!"

Dell, however, was more fascinated than concerned with what was going on below. He'd never seen a Flux war before, and it was awesome to watch, although he decided he'd rather be a spectator than a participant. The death toll had been appalling, mostly on the side of the victors since the Fluxlords had chosen to the last to protect rather than commit their own people. Had they done so, particularly in that final onslaught, sending waves of humans out behind the force fields, all shooting, they would have certainly run right over the attacking troops and probably killed both the lead and adjutant wizards as well. Long ago, Matson had felled Coydt van Haas, the most powerful wizard ever known, with a shotgun—in Flux.

The primary wizards had withdrawn back into the raider shield, leaving mop-up to the backup wizards who'd once been some of Liberty's defenders. Wearing special binoculars, Dell saw that they
did
look like Morgaine, with subtle differences in coloring and the like, and they were all definitely much shorter. He could never remain still enough to get a real look at the big wizards, but he got enough to know that they were certainly all female but not Ayesha look-alikes. They were allies, not part of the group, and they were certainly old, seasoned veterans. This hadn't been any of their first Flux war.

The wizards basically turned off the master spell, leaving a featureless plain on which naked men and women, all looking somewhat bewildered but who were unnaturally passive, as far as the eye could see. Dell was shocked at the number so revealed. They weren't all alike, though; he could clearly see three spots where the grid was dark. One moved, and the darkness followed it. The wizards below could also see the positions, although they had a harder time of it, and they moved with some troops to wade through the mob on horseback and get the trio of defeated Fluxlords.

All three submitted without a fight, and allowed themselves to be bound and marched back to the raider compound. One looked just like all the Adams, another like all the Eves, but the third was a tired, feeble-looking old man with a full beard in a tattered and dirty robe that once had been white. He wondered who they had once been. A wizard and his two children, perhaps. Their powers were equal and well-matched, although the father had the will and had been the obvious driving force. Dell suspected that the old man was finished, but he wondered if the other two, freed from his domination, might not be turned. The amount of sheer power that would represent in the raider camp would be awesome. One could build a good, solid Fluxland; five had built a massive Anchor-like one like Liberty. In relative power, they now had between seven and ten down there.

It hadn't taken much to analyze the master spell and isolate some of its primary components. Clearly a master substitution spell was being hurriedly created now that they knew what they were dealing with and what they had. Although all were tired, there was no question that they couldn't afford to rest as yet. They had taken this huge number of people, all totally dependent on Fluxlords who could no longer help them, and they had to at least be provided with basic food, water, and a means of hygiene.

One of the big wizards came back out. Dell guessed that she'd taken the time to get a bite to eat and maybe a quick splash of water before finishing up the job. She wasn't about to waste much time with the business at hand, though. She conferred with all three of the raider wizards, then ordered all raider personnel out of the immediate area. With a shock, Dell saw that she was using some kind of device to talk into. He knew what it was—a two-way radio—having seen them in New Eden, but he'd never seen them used in Flux, nor had he realized before that it was possible to do so.

Now, with everyone not of the Garden out of range, as it were, all four wizards, aided by another on the projector— Dell could tell by the difference in strength that it wasn't Suzl—began to create a new Fluxland on the ruins of the old. He was fascinated. He had heard his mother tell of what the master program for New Eden had been like, but he himself had never seen a Fluxland created before.

It began with a single center square of the grid, right in the midst of the captive population. Then it spread, slowly at first, to all adjoining squares, then a bit faster to the squares that adjoined them, and so on, gaining size and speed as it went. It was clearly being fed in by the projector, and was merely managed and fine-tuned by the external wizards. As it grew, it drew energy from the grid and transformed it into matter, also transforming any matter on top according to a formula. Grass, trees, landforms— all formed outlines in energy and then solidified into reality. At first he couldn't see any changes in the Garden's population, and it took him a second or two to realize that the Eves had not changed, but that there were no more Adams where the program ran. Just Eves. He watched, wondering if they were simply killing them, but then he realized that they were being transformed. Everyone would be an Eve.