"But they quit sending their young to you. Why? Had their young become unimportant to the Three?"
"No, they loved their young."
"If they loved their young, and they quit sending them to you, what were you doing that hurt them, made the Three want to protect their young from you?"
"That's not why they quit coming!"
"Then why did they?"
"Why did they?" the kids echoed. "Why did they?"
"They just did."
"You don't know why." Ray hit him with all he had.
Behind him the kids and surviving computer personalities hit just as hard. "You don't know. You don't know why."
"I don't need to know that. It isn't important," the President insisted.
"Then what you did wasn't important."
Jeff swung the laser drill off his shoulders and held it out to Lil. She had the spray can of plastic skin out. As she started to coat her hands with it, it sputtered. A dribble fell onto her palms, puddled, and did not grow.
"Lil, you can't drill with no protection."
"Looks like I got to," she said, spreading what she had, then reaching for the drill.
Jeff held on to it. "You can't."
"Son, I can damn well do what I want to. You and your girl get the explosives ready."
Jeff let go of the laser. Beside him, Annie tugged at his elbow. "Let's get the charges. We've got to make this fast. I can hear more people coming."
Lil drilled, her hands turning red, her teeth grit against the pain. As soon as Lil headed for a new hole, Jeff and Annie poured, set the detonator, and moved on. They had only four holes drilled when Lil set the laser down.
"Hurry up, kid. I can see the poor zombies. Let's blow this one and get out of here." Jeff did the last one, shooing Annie off as soon as the hole was patted down. Detonator set, he started running.
Lil, Annie, and the horses were hardly far enough away when Lil shouted "Fire in the hole!" Jeff threw himself down on the muddy ground as she flipped the switch.
The short fire line blew track and rocks high and wide. Two of the zombies took a rail in the gut, cutting them in half. One of those left standing looked familiar ... Vicky?
Jeff had no time to waste. He was up and running before the last rock fell. At the horses, he helped Lil up on the one unburdened horse; her hands were a bleeding pulp. "Ride wide of the road," she ordered. "There's bound to be a section of track that doesn't have too many zombies. We'll blow it."
"You can't drill," Jeff whispered. "I know. You drill the next holes."
Jeffs stomach lurched, terror flooded him. But Lil had said the words so quietly, so evenly, it seemed only fair. "I'll drill the one after that," Annie said.
Kat's wrist unit woke her to darkness and frost. A second night sleeping on the ground did little to help her exhaustion or aching body. The air was cold. "Crew, time to get up."
"It's dark. The box needs sunlight," Nikki whimpered.
"And it will get that light best and first from the top of a hill" Kat reminded everyone, including herself.
"Come on, crew," the copilot growled through a yawn, "Rhynia didn't die so we could sleep." That got the crew moving.
"The sun's going to catch the tip of that hill," Kat said, pointing at a grass-covered foothill rising a good thousand meters ahead of them. "We need to get to the top of it as fast as we can this morning."
"What about the nanos?" a crewman asked.
"As I said," Kat repeated slowly, "we need to get to the top as fast as we can." Folks were beyond tired, but the words sank in. They'd stayed to the river bottom yesterday, avoided land where the computer might have nanos lurking. If they waited for the sun to catch the river bottom and warm the box, the battle might be over before they struck another blow.
The copilot reached for the pole. "Well be going uphill, so shortest people up front, taller in back. Kat, you're shorter than Nikki. You take the lead."
Mary knelt beside Du, surveying the mayhem. The rioters had found no food in the dining hall. From a hundred meters away, they listened to the sound of smashing plates, overturning tables. Someone tried to batter a hole in the wall with a chair. "Stupid vandalism," Du growled. "Hope it makes them feel better."
"Looks like they're gonna make a go at the fabrication building." Mary pointed. The mob had thickened up there. Shoving, shouts drew more people, like bystanders to a fire.
"Chief Max here, Captain. Permission to use tear gas?"
"Granted, Chief. The wind is blowing toward the crowd."
"I know, ma'am" was punctuated by a pop as the first canister flew over the heads of the shield wall to fall twenty meters beyond. The rioters began to choke, scream, run.
"They don't know about gas or they'd try to throw it back." Du spoke from experience.
"Let us be grateful for small favors," Mary said.
"You're using those three buildings and their guards to draw the rioters away from us," Du observed, not exactly accusing Mary.
"There was no way the police would leave their families. If I'd ordered them here, I'd have had a mutiny on my hands." Mary breathed the words, tasted them, balanced her guilt against the hard reality beneath her logic. "The rioters go where they see people trying to stop them. We're just a darkened, empty building. They tried the mess hall, found nothing. Now they're looking." Mar}' eyed the eastern sky; the clouds showed no hint of color. "Kat is farther east, up where she is on north continent. I hope she gets daylight good and early."
Doc Isaacs studied the kids. He'd stabilized their temperatures at a hundred, hundred and one. They could survive this for a while. It was their pulse that scared him. It had been over a hundred for a good hour. He'd rigged them all with IVs, was feeding them water and glucose to keep them going. Should he add a drug to the mix, something to slow the heart?
Would it help? Would it wipe them out when they needed their last reserve?
Jerry huddled over them, wanting to do more, scared spitless even to try.
"You don't matter" came at Ray hard and sharp. "You are nothing compared to me. For two million years I have run this planet. I make the weather, I make mountains vanish. You have discovered one of my tools. Do you think that makes you equal to me? I could turn you off like you do a light."
"Maybe yesterday," Ray shot back, "but we outthought you. You've existed for two million years but done nothing with it. Two million years ago we huddled in cold caves, not even able to make fire, unable to say a word to each other. Today we leap stars. It was we who came to you where you squatted on your haunches, not even keeping what you already had."
"That is not true."
"You know you're lying to yourself." Ray was losing his temper. Maybe it was time to. "You wasted a million years, hunkered down against your own fear, afraid to ask a question that might show you didn't know everything. And you knew the questions were there. The Three were gone. Why? Had something you done destroyed them?"
"That's impossible," the President cut in. "I would never do anything to hurt the ones who made me."
"Not knowingly, not willingly, but by asking no questions, seeking no new knowledge, you could have. But you don't know, do you. I know a woman. Elie spent most of her life in university, like you. Unlike you, she asks questions. Her university teaches our young and asks questions, plumbing the depths of our ignorance and adding to the realm of our knowledge. We want to know. Before you can know, you have to admit you don't know something. Before you can grow in knowledge, you have to admit ignorance. And you can't do that, can you?"
Ray spoke the next words sharp and true, a sword cutting deep. "Your claim to know everything robbed the Three of any help you might have given them when they went into crisis." It was in; now he twisted it. "Did you doom them with your arrogant claim to knowledge you didn't have?"
"No!" came at Ray as a piercing screech, shaking him to the foundation of his soul.
"Yes." Behind him, the kids took up the echo. "You don't know what you're doing here?" Dancer joined in, followed by the surviving computer elements. "You didn't help the Three. You don't know why they quit coming? You don't know what happened to them? Did they grow beyond you or destroy themselves, or just come to nothing? You don't know?"
"Yes, I do!" the President shrieked so powerfully it threatened to shred every molecule in Ray's body.
And Ray saw the Three, so few, so pallid, such a shadow of what they had been. They came, they learned, they accepted what they were taught, and they went forth into the universe to do nothing, to add nothing to what their mothers and fathers to a thousand generations had given to them. And giving nothing in return, they became nothing.
"You would do that to my son, my daughter," Ray raged. "You would castrate them, rob them of the joy of discovery so you could live out your claim to know everything. You would rob these brothers and sisters of yours"-Ray indicated the surviving computer fragments with a wave-"of the chance of discovering what they could be, could become."
The heat of Ray's disgust exploded. "You pitiful, worthless leech. You've lived a million years on the dead bones, the corrupting flesh of a people brilliant enough to spin the highways between stars. You gave them nothing and destroyed them to feed your vanity.
"Die!" Ray screamed even as the President screamed it back.
The two locked in battle. Arms grappled arms. Head butted head. Ray kicked and gouged and bit. Every weapon he could find in the primal depths of his being he threw against the President. Battered by Ray and the kids and the enraged others, the President gave ground, slowly, grudgingly.
The President gave ground-and grew stronger. He drew on the desperation of a million wasted years, of vanity that allowed three sentient races to die rather than look within himself for their salvation. The President gathered himself and hurled all that he was and had ever been at them.
Ray's knees bent under the weight. He struggled to breathe beneath the vast corruption of the President. He fell back.
Ray had found the limit of his strength.
The President was more powerful.
* * *
Doctor Isaacs saw a spike hit every monitor he had on the Colonel and the kids in the exact same second. "What's going on?" he pleaded to the empty darkness.
"We'll lose the kids," the corpsman whimpered, "if this keeps up another-"
"Second," Jerry provided the answer. "Bring the kids out. Now!" he ordered. He grabbed Rose; the medic, Jon. They pulled them from the stone's face.
"No, we can't leave the Colonel! We can't stop now!" Rose screamed. Jon echoed her. It took two middies to pull David off, kicking and screaming. "I've got to go back. The Colonel needs me."
Jerry glanced over his shoulder. The Colonel's monitors were all in the red, farther into the red than Jerry thought possible. "You kids can't go back. Not and live."
"But the Colonel!" the three screamed.
"Has to fight this one on his own."
Kat ran, air burning in her lungs, her sprained ankle screaming with each step. The sun was just peeking over the horizon, forming diamonds in the dew on the box they carried. They were only a few hundred meters from the peak they'd been climbing for hours, it seemed.
Kat had started them off lighthearted, calling cadences she'd learned in boot camp to help them keep in step, avoid tramping on the heels of the person in front of them. It hadn't taken them long to come up with bawdy variations on the themes. It had almost seemed fun.
Then Kat felt the itching on the soles of her feet.
They were running now, gasping for breath. The hilltop was almost there. Kat tried to remember their next target. Taking one hand from the pole, she pulled her reader from her pocket. Fumbling it open, the reader fell from her grasp.
The others kept up the rush for the hilltop as she broke away to retrieve the reader. Its surface was rough. She felt pain as what had started to eat her reader turned from it to attack her hands instead. Quickly, Kat hastened to rejoin the group.
"What's wrong?" the copilot called as Kat came even with her. "You look white as a ... What's wrong with your hands? They're bleeding."
"Nanos, I guess." Kat ignored the pain as she looked over her targets. The sun glisten off the box. The mountains sparkled; ragged holes in the range told of yesterday's work. "That's target six, seven, eight, ten and eleven," Kat said, going down the front range. It didn't seem right. Six and seven were dinky. Eleven was massive, with three towering peaks shooting up side by side.
"Is that the right order?" the copilot asked. "Wasn't the Dean lying when he gave them to us?"
"Damn," Kat sighed. "They told us which ones were the Provo's and which the Pres's, but they didn't tell us anything about the order." Kat tapped her commlink, wincing at each touch. "Base, come in." Nothing happened. "Base, anyone there? Anybody?"
"Jerry here. That you, Kat?"
"Doc, we're not sure our targets are in the right order. We need to talk to the Colonel and the Dean again."
"No can do, Kat. The Colonel's deep into the machine, and if something doesn't happen real soon, he's dead."