Implied Spaces (31 page)

At which point everything changed. The enemy had made a breakthrough on the right, and Nordveit’s entire corps was shifted to attack the flank of the advancing rebel force. Nordveit was in the process of dictating the change in route when the enemy struck.

From ahead, bounding into the air from outside of effective detector range, came a horde of small, agile missiles. They went supersonic within seconds. The chaff-filled air, and the missiles’ own darting paths, made it difficult to detect them coming, but defensive machines nevertheless picked them up and began filling the air with charges of antimatter, while heavier weapons targeted the area from which the missiles had launched. Detonations filled the air overhead.

Aristide threw himself flat on the ground, and told his command to do likewise.

The last-ditch defenders, automated chain cannon, began their furious roar.

The oncoming missiles didn’t have single warheads, but were instead filled with tiny bomblets, knuckle-sized antimatter grenades. Even the missiles that were struck by defensive fire were very often able to scatter all or part of their cargo as they broke up over the target.

Aristide shut off his detectors before the bomblets fell, and so lay in darkness and felt the ground beneath him leap to a continuous roll of detonation. Pebbles and soil fell on his armor like rain.

The deadly drumroll came to an end, and Aristide cautiously turned on a sensor or two. A brown, dusty fog hung over the land.

“Status,” he said. “Now.”

“Checking,” said Bitsy, and then an instant later. “We got off light. Only two hundred twenty-eight machines are failing to report. Three hundred forty have suffered some kind of damage, and sixty-four of these are disabled completely. Corporal Kuan was killed by a direct hit.”

“Damn. Get everything up and moving.” Lurching to his feet he suited action to words.

“Bad news,” Bitsy said after a brief pause. “Colonel Nordveit has been killed. As the senior captain, you’re now in command of CCLI Corps.”

Aristide’s head reeled. “Better give me a status report. No—get them all moving first.
Then
a status report.”

The Screaming Cyborgs had fared the best of all during the brief bombardment, probably because Aristide had ordered them to hit the dirt whereas Nordveit, with true Nordic fatalism, hadn’t given the order to other elements of his command. CCLI Corps, Aristide discovered, consisted of slightly less than twenty-eight thousand warriors, not counting the reserve artillery brigades still outside the wormhole.

“I’d better talk to the division commanders,” he said.

They appeared on his displays: Draeger of the Designer Renegades, with her eyes the size of billiard balls, Malakpuri with his pointed beard, and Grax the Troll.

“Right now I don’t have a lot of information” Aristide told them. “So if you’ve got any critiques of Nordveit’s orders, or if you know anything that isn’t on the displays, you’d better tell me.”

The others knew no more than he did. He contacted his immediate superior, General Aziz commanding Forty-First Army, and received a download of the tactical disposition. There on the three-dimensional mapscape was the enemy breakthrough, expanding and flowing across country; here were friendly forces, dying, fleeing, or moving into position to contain the foe.

Aristide could find no fault with Nordveit’s orders save that they were incomplete, so he continued with the business of swinging the whole corps to the right.

Ahead was a line of low hills, and beyond it was the war. Aristide pushed his troops forward on the theory that the hills would provide some shelter behind which to shake his route columns into combat formations. He bounded ahead of the advance elements to the hills, and there he saw that the hills were not natural formations at all, but the debris of combat.

A titanic battle had been fought here, where formations of invaders had met formations of defenders and left nothing alive, nothing functioning. Trees, earth, and human habitations had been blasted and blackened; and tens of thousands of robot fighters and their human officers had fought here to the death. The hills were their remains: torn bodies, weapons, limbs, fragments of vehicles and spent ammunition. Little fires burned here and there. Shattered crystal glittered in the dim sun; broken antennae reached for the sky like fingers. Perhaps at the climax of the battle they had torn at each other with mechanical claws.

The husks of machines crunched beneath Aristide’s mechanical feet as he climbed the slope. He hoped there were no live human beings buried somewhere underneath.

Seen from the summit, the mechanical hills wound across the country like strands of seaweed left behind by the tide.

Standing atop the beaten, crumbling bits of metal and laminate, Aristide took a chill comfort from the fact that his own side seemed to have won this battle, and having beaten the enemy had advanced past this point.

He looked ahead toward the fight, and ordered small drone aircraft ahead to spy out the way. What these revealed was that enemy breakthrough was complete: there was no longer any organized force fighting the Venger’s legions.

He called up the dispositions of his own units, and saw that it would be nearly half an hour before they would all be in position to roll into the attack. That was too long a time—by then the enemy would have poured huge numbers of attackers into the breach.

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 annihilation.

“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.