05. Children of Flux and Anchor (38 page)

"Matson! No!" Morgaine cried. "We need you here, not as some Fluxgirl!"

"If this doesn't work, I'm gonna be one anyway. I might as well see if I can take some of those bastards with me!"

The air was thick with orders and assorted comments.

"Don't try and undo that spell for now!" Tila warned. "It's full of traps on each one! I think if you tried to undo it now the spell would transmit to you!"

"Those bastards!" Suzl snarled. "They'll pay for this. They'll all pay dear for this!"

Twelve of the flying allies came close enough to give real push to the shield, and it moved slowly back, but it neither buckled nor broke. The bubble for the fifth projector, however, went quickly, and they picked up another projector. Now all five were available for sweeps if they could buckle and break that shield.

New Harmony's troops moved through, less a disciplined group than a huge mob of thousands out to shoot anything in a black uniform. For Matson, it was a unique way to ride into a shooting war: bare-breasted, wearing nothing but a bikini, gunbelt, and leather boots, a gun in each hand, shooting down bewildered and stunned rear troops. It was a grand experience.

Gabaye, Tokiabi, and two of the others had an idea and didn't wait to clear it with Suzl. Their large forms, monstrous hybrids of human and leathery bird or bat, would not support their weight in Anchor, but they still had shape and momentum on their side. "I wonder how thick that shield is!" Gabaye shouted.

"No more than a meter, from its consistency," Tokiabi responded.

"Then follow me, darlings! We're going to flank, too! Wide turn and real drag coming up!
Whee
!"

Matson had some problem, along with the other officers, in turning the horde back into Flux, but they did so with all possible speed. Just as they started on the Anchor apron they saw and heard the four monstrous forms come in and then circle around while dropping rapidly. It looked for a moment as if they weren't going to make it, but all four did, and it cheered the troops who now followed confidently back into Flux—this time on the
other
side of that shield.

The Liberty-New Eden forces knew when they entered, but the shock was still great and they were slow to react. Not that they could have done much. They now had four flying and two ground wizards on their side of the shield, while a dozen more pushed them back from the other side. The Fluxlords of Liberty panicked, and withdrew all their power to a shield around themselves, leaving the New Eden ground forces, their wizards, and their three projectors at the mercy of five projectors and close to forty enraged wizards. The projectors were plucked almost as quickly as they appeared, leaving only the ground forces for serious fighting. These could have been taken out by Flux power, but instead the wizards gave protection to the New Harmony troops on the ground, both those who had successfully flanked the shield and those now pouring in along the front.

Matson was finally wrong about something. Twenty-six hundred of New Eden's finest male specimens would
too
surrender to five thousand Flux-guarded and well-armed Fluxgirls.

Not knowing what was happening many kilometers away with the flanking maneuver, the two diversionary projector outbreaks had continued to enlarge and expand and even take some toll, but Suzl now had more than enough wizard force to press in on the Liberty shield and released the flyers to take care of the other two.

The assault on the Liberty shield was powerful and emotional. As the shield began to contract prior to buckling, a message was pulsed out asking for terms.

"You are in no position for terms," Suzl pulsed back to them. "Drop your shield and surrender to us now or we will squash you like the bugs you are. We respected your neutrality and you stabbed and gravely harmed us. You must answer for it. At the moment, with our power divided, we outnumber you four to one. That number will increase, as other business is finished, up to nine-to-one. Surrender and we will promise only to hear you out. The attack continues. We estimate you have about fifteen more minutes at most to live."

There wasn't much discussion inside. The shield went down and the five stood there, hands raised, offering no further resistance, knowing that anything would get them, at best, shot to pieces.

The big shock from the New Harmony side was that three of the five Fluxlords of Liberty were women.

Suzl did not want them in camp yet, but she surveyed the other parts of the line and felt that things were secure at the moment. They had killed or captured the cream of New Eden's relatively small crop of wizards, and they had eleven out of twelve projectors, if indeed there was a twelfth to get. It didn't matter. It would take New Eden half a year just to replace the hardware, and longer to train new wizards to properly use them. New Harmony did not intend to give them that time.

"Jodi!" Suzl called. "Right now I don't want this base fouled with them. Transmit me to them, projector and all."

"Are you sure? There's still some scattered resistance in that area and it's not void. It's trees and hills."

"Just do it. I'll be all right. We own that Fluxland now."

The five, held by wizards and guns, looked defeated and depressed, but they still managed to also be shocked when the area right in front of them suddenly shone with Flux, and Suzl and the projector materialized right in front of them.

These were defeated gods: people used to having their own way in all things and simply wishing for whatever they desired. This was a strange and humiliating spot for them, but they gazed up at the strange woman on the projector like petitioners at the throne of the queen. They still had their powers, having surrendered, and were thus potentially very dangerous, but it was this very thing that gave Suzl some sense of security. She would be speaking as first among equals, yet there was enough power around that if they tried anything they would die, and horribly. Gods fear death more than the mortals do, because with them it is not a foregone conclusion.

"I'm waiting for an explanation," said the electronic speaker in a voice so eerie and inhuman it sent chills up their backs. It was not the voice Suzl usually used; she'd been itching to try this one out at a suitable occasion.

The five wizards looked at each other and decided that one tall, slim, dark-haired woman would be the speaker for them all.

"It wasn't personal, it wasn't something we wanted to do," she began, searching for the words. "We were locked in an endless, no-win war with Hoghland. You know that. We were fending off revolts from within by associations of young wizard officers sick of the war, but Hoghland wouldn't settle, wouldn't even agree to a draw and some concessions on our part. It couldn't go on. A couple of weeks ago, New Eden made us an offer. They promised to deliver a cease-fire, an armistice, as mediators in the war. They also offered the support of their wizards and the new projectors they were developing to secure it. We know what they're like. We despised them. But with their huge armies, their Anchor base, their technology, they are a force to be feared."

"Go on."

"We knew what they planned for Flux. We also knew we couldn't stop them, not indefinitely. They made— promises. We had a population trained in Flux war backed by more wizards than they had. They had ambitions, but they needed us. In our own self-interest, it was easy to strike a deal."

"A deal condemning the rest of World, us included, to permanent slavery. Your half-million people, and your own lives, would be bought with the futures of forty-seven million others." Suzl paused a moment. "You make me sick. You say you hate them, yet I can't for the life of me see any difference between you and them when it comes down to the basics. Maybe they're a little better. They were raised to think what they're doing is right, that it's God's will. More injustice seems to be caused in the name of religion than the mercy and compassion the religions supposedly represent. Still, they have a culture and a cause. You know better. You'd let millions go down just to save your miserable necks and preserve a little of your power. All you Fluxlords make me sick. Scratch even the nicest of them and deep down you find a misshapen, egomaniacal, amoral monster."

Again she paused, her mind trying to keep her emotional revulsion down so she wouldn't become like them.

"I'm a monster," Suzl told them. "See me? Gross, misshapen, blind, forced to use an electronic voice. Lately I've been feeling sorry for myself, wallowing in self-pity. In a way, I suppose I should thank you. Thank you for re-teaching me a lesson I once knew well but seem to have forgotten. I can't see you, except as electronic representations, but I know you all have pretty outsides. All you Fluxlords do. Your bodies are as perfect as mine is gross and misshapen. Yet you are the monsters, not me. Not even most of those poor people in New Eden. That's what this power really does to you sooner or later. Body. Mind. Soul. Pick any two, but the third always is a monster. I think I prefer a monstrous body to a monstrous soul."

They not only didn't like the speech, but their ultimate tragedy, as Suzl well knew, was that they didn't really understand what she was saying. That was all right; she wasn't saying it for them, or her own people, either. She was talking to herself.

"May we know what you intend to do?" the Fluxlord asked nervously.

"I intend to conquer New Eden, then establish a strong, secure Fluxland, the largest and most powerful ever known, and develop my own ideas—I hope for a higher purpose than yours. Eventually, perhaps, the world will get my system, which is far better than New Eden's. As for you—I have a couple of thousand troops turned into the dumbest Fluxgirls I ever knew, and four wizards equally debilitated mentally. Those spells have traps on them. The five of you helped cause it. I expect you to undo those spells as much as can be done."

"But those aren't
our
spells!" another of the women cried. "We don't know how to get around those traps!"

"Well, break one and you can break them all. You're wizards. Try it. Those of you who succeed will keep your powers and perhaps join us in New Harmony. Those who fail—well, you will still have enough wits about you to prepare our meals and clean up after us."

They were nervous and indignant. "And if we refuse?"

"I really hope you will. We have copies of the master program, so we will eventually figure it out ourselves. Refuse, or even stall on this, and I promise you that not only will you be cut from Flux, your outsides will make me seem like the prettiest person around!"

A bullet
pinged
off the projector near Suzl, fired by a far-off sniper. She ignored it, but off a ways the sounds of many more guns could be heard.

"Beth!"

"Here, Suzl!"

"I think it's poetic justice that you and your sisters be in charge of this operation."

"Thank you. That will give us a great deal of pleasure. What do you want done with the New Eden prisoners?"

"I'd like to run their own damned program on them and send them home, but we can use trained soldiers even if they are a surrendering lot. Give them the modified Fluxgirl bodies we used on our troops. That'll take the resistance out of them. Make sure you also stamp their fannies, so we know who's ours and who came from where. Then get them interrogated and settled down. Once you run that Fluxgirl program, they're not going to run home."

"Got it!"

"Anybody seen Matson?"

"Got a real gash in her leg that's being tended, but otherwise O.K. Didn't even know she had it until she got down off her horse."

"Figures. Well, run a healing spell and get the old bastard back up to the headquarters tent. I also want Gabaye and Tokiabi up there—say, in an hour. We've won a bunch of battles, but we haven't won the war yet."

Between the mop-up, the re-establishment of defensive perimeters, and organizing and recreating the ground units, Matson hadn't had much time to rest. The body was now Sondra's once again; a command presence was again needed rather than a commoner-with-the-troops type, but that was the length of concessions.

Reconnaissance showed the truth of Matson's original geographical and demographic analysis.  New Eden had now deployed close to half a million men dug in and fortified along a great stretch of the border and was hastily preparing barbed wire, minefields, and other obstructions on the Anchor apron. The strongest areas were around Logh, of course. Along the stretches past the area, where it was all open country, guard posts within sight of each other had been established behind wire barricades but there was little in the way of troop depth. New Eden was, in effect, inviting the invaders in at that point, knowing that they would be drawn inland across broad stretches of very little, with long supply lines, and they could then be cut off from Flux and caught in a vise. Matson, of course, had no intention of invading there or anywhere else if it could be helped.

Gabaye had been understandably unwilling to part with the long-range-projectile programs, but she was more than willing to deliver the real thing by her own and Ming Tokiabi's efforts. Both Suzl and Matson expected this, of course, but were willing to live with it. These things launched to Flux targets were no more threatening than any other kind of weapon. If you knew they existed you could build an automatic shield against them and nab them before they got close enough to cause trouble. No, these were Anchor weapons, for use against Anchor, and New Eden was the biggest Anchor target of them all.

The things certainly didn't look like anything anyone had envisioned. Matson and others were used to the basic rocket, which was a long tube with a cone-shaped top that was then packed with gunpowder and could be used as they had used them or to launch fireworks in Anchor. They all understood how a rocket big enough and packed with enough explosive force might even be able to escape gravity, but nobody expected an oval-shaped vehicle with a flat bottom and eight utilitarian-looking seats inside.

"We don't know how it works, darlings, just how to work it. Isn't that the way things are these days?" Chua Gabaye told them. "Still, when you put the stock program module in that little bitty slot there, it takes off like a shot and winds up
way
out there, presumably where you told it to go. We don't know what makes it go, but it isn't Flux power. The engine—or whatever it is—is like nothing ever seen here, and everybody who sees it says it can't
possibly
do what it does—but it does. We've sent one all the way out in space and back again, but the landings still aren't what they should be."