Implied Spaces (32 page)

But the United Powers had failed to reckon with the Venger’s tapping the power of whole suns that he had created just for the purpose. Not only had this weapon eliminated millions of attackers at once, but it demonstrated that the Venger’s access to energy was essentially infinite.

If the Venger’s energy was infinite, then the energy of the United Powers, once they deployed the technology themselves, would be ten times infinite. But even that much, Aristide thought, wouldn’t be enough to overwhelm Vindex.

Which meant that the United Powers would adopt Plan B. Courtland wouldn’t be conquered, it would be destroyed, along with all its contents, the universes, the continents and seas, the animals and the people.

The people would be restored from backup. Eventually. The rest would be lost forever.

Vindex, Aristide thought, had to know what Plan B would be. He had to be ready for it.

And that was terrifying.

He ate more chocolate. He might as well finish it off: he’d have no use for it in a few hours’ time.

Drones informed Aristide of an attack forming to his front. Heavy weapons hammered the perimeter, destroying all but a handful of the fighters he’d left there. He called for his own artillery to disrupt the enemy attack before it got started, but only half the guns and rocket launchers had survived the trek through the wormhole, and these were being spare with their ammunition.

When the enemy came Aristide laid down as thorough a barrage as he could, and then the units he’d drawn back from the front line came forward over terrain that they knew perfectly, having already been over it twice. They met the enemy, and the long annihilation began.

Aristide remained with his back to the banyan tree. To expose himself would be to die, and though he supposed death was inevitable, he preferred to postpone it.

Aristide’s fighters hung on. The breakthrough, when it came, was on the left—the unit that CCLI Corps had originally been intended to support gave way. Aristide had to act quickly to keep his flank from being rolled up. In the turmoil and confusion it was difficult to pick which remote view to upload into his implant, and so in the end it was simpler to supervise the movement himself. For the first time in hours he left the banyan tree and leaped toward the crisis.

He dropped alongside his warriors into a ditch on the edge of what seemed to be the remains of a banana plantation—the trees, spaced at regular intervals, were broken, and the yellow fruit lay pulped on the ground. Active camouflage kept him from seeing much of either side in the visible spectrum, but infrared emissions revealed the Venger’s warriors on the other side of the plantation, swarming like ants through the breach they had made, threatening to get behind Aristide’s lines.

For several busy minutes he leaped over the battlefield, pulling back his left flank and getting it under cover. Even so his fighters went down by the hundreds. He had one of his bodyguard climb what was left of a banana tree in order to get a better view and link to his implant.

Then a pattern of shellfire landed in his area. There were no countermeasures: his counter-batteries had run out of ammunition. The explosions were small, however, and spattered the area with a translucent semi-fluid, some kind of thick, clotting substance that lay heavily on the grass and torn banana leaves.

Aristide wiped the stuff from his sensors. It stuck to his glove. “What is it?” he demanded. “Sign of active nano?”

One of the bodyguard performed a brief analysis.

“No disassemblers,” Bitsy said. “It’s glucose.”

“Everyone pull back! Now!”

He gave the order too late. The next round of shellfire sprayed nanomachines over the area, and the glucose provided them with plenty of energy. The nanomachines themselves were contained in a thin superfluid that spread thinly over every object, defying gravity as it crept upward over every vertical surface.

Including Aristide’s armor. Alarms began flashing in his implants, but there was little he could do as he was in the midst of leading a precipitous retreat. In time he found himself once more in the shattered wood, standing by his old banyan or one very much like it.

A dead cockatoo lay at his feet.

“Analyze!” he said.

“Unknown composition,” Bitsy said. Then, “Sorry.”

“Countermeasures.”

One of his robot bodyguard sprayed Aristide with liquid nitrogen, which would temporarily freeze the disassemblers until a more appropriate countermeasure could be deployed. While the molecular machines thawed out in the subtropical heat of Greater Zimbabwe, the bodyguards experimented on each other. None of the countermeasures worked completely, but it appeared that the Venger’s weapon was a variation on the Kursk type.

Aristide began to breathe easier. His guard sprayed him and each other with the appropriate countermeasure.

“The Kursk can be stopped by the layers of the suit,” he said.

“Your suit has been dinged,” Bitsy said. “And your joints are vulnerable, in any case.”

“I didn’t want to be reminded of that.”

“Enemy in the treeline!”

Another pell-mell retreat, the bodyguard providing covering fire as Aristide bounded through the trees on a zigzag course. Enemy projectiles brought down some of the guard, but the flight was a success, and brought another temporary respite.

“You have a hot spot on your right knee,” Bitsy said.

One of the guard hit the hot spot with liquid nitrogen, followed by the Kursk countermeasure. Aristide tried to keep track of what was happening to CCLI Corps, saw only a whirlwind of frantic movement across the displays, nothing he could make sense of.

“Incoming!” Bitsy said.

Aristide had a moment to reflect that Bitsy seemed to be enjoying the disaster before an explosion hurled him through the air. There was the sensation of whirling, then a curious counter-eddy as his jets tried to compensate for the uncontrolled movement. He hit the ground and ended on his back. The jolting to and fro in his harness had knocked the wind out of him.

As the barrage was likely to go on for some time, his current posture seemed as good as any, so he remained supine while he tried to collect himself.

The ground shuddered to impact after impact. A tree limb fell on him, obscuring the view of his sensors.

“There’s damage to the right knee joint,” Bitsy said. “You might try flexing, to see if it’s damaged.”

Aristide tried and failed. His readouts, he realized as his leg thrashed about in its immobile armor, showed that there had been a pressure breach in his suit. He could feel his suit grow more humid as the air of Greater Zimbabwe leaked in.

“Let’s freeze the hot spots one more time,” Aristide said. Showing what in a human would be incredible bravery, one of his bodyguard crawled through the shellfire to spray more liquid nitrogen over the disassemblers that were turning his suit into free molecules and copies of themselves.

Aristide felt the bite of cold as his knee was sprayed. So that’s where the hull breach was, right where the Kursk nano was strongest.

“This won’t last,” Aristide said.

“I’m afraid not,” Bitsy said.

“Better tell Draeger that she’s in command of what’s left of the corps.”

“I’ll do that.” And, a moment later, “Draeger may be dead. She’s not responding, in any case.”

There was a sudden flare of heat on the back of Aristide’s knee. The nano coming to grip with his flesh.

“Who’s next?” he asked. “Grax?”

“I pinged him and he’s still among the standing.”

“Tell him he’s in charge, then.”

“Done.”

The heat on Aristide’s knee was growing pronounced, almost painful.

“They forgot something when they created this suit,” Aristide said.

“What’s that?”

“A suicide pill,” said Aristide.

“I’ll make a note of it.”

There was silence. The ground leaped to the impact of shells and rockets. Pain grew in Aristide’s knee, and he felt heat against his back, where another colony of happy disassemblers was taking his suit apart.

He decided that the odds weren’t great enough that he would be splattered by a direct hit, so he tried to rise. The frozen knee made that impossible, but by levering himself up by one arm he managed to flop onto his front.

The view from this new posture was scarcely improved.

A searing pain flashed through his right knee. He cried out. The pain faded.

“Right,” he said, and ordered his bodyguard to pick him up bodily and carry him toward the nearest enemy. Getting a rocket to the chest was a better end than being eaten alive by the molecular foe.

In the last few minutes his bodyguard had been sadly depleted. Only three remained intact enough to crawl to him and attach themselves to his suit with their grapplers. The grapplers were intended for fine manipulation, not hauling a stout combat suit weighing a couple of hundred kilos, but they were well-made, and in the end Aristide was being hauled over the forest floor at about two kilometers per hour.

A rocket landed nearby. Shrapnel hammered Aristide’s armor. One of the bodyguard collapsed, its innards torn. The remaining two machines were unable to carry Aristide on their own, and he found himself face-down on the torn ground.

The pain in his knee hadn’t returned, but the sensation of heat was spreading up his leg toward his groin.

“I don’t find our current prospects very promising,” Aristide said.

“Nor do I,” said Bitsy.

“Have the bodyguard engage any enemy that come in range. Maybe the black hats will be good and blast all of us to bits.”

“Very good.” The two remaining machines dropped Aristide’s armor and took up a defensive posture.

Aristide felt heat flush his entire body. Beads of sweat formed on his forehead and dripped steadily on his displays. The air in the suit smelled of humus.

“I don’t seem to be doing well,” he confessed.

“With your permission,” Bitsy said, “I would like to erase myself. Vindex shouldn’t capture either one of us alive.”

“Carry on,” Aristide said. “I’ll just hang around here till something happens.”

“Good luck.” The ground shuddered.

“I’ll see you in a better place.”

“Five seconds,” Bitsy said. “Four. Three. Two. One.”

She spoke no more.

“Goodbye, old friend,” Aristide said. “It’s been jolly.”

Heat blazed through Aristide’s flesh. His body had been completely infiltrated by the nanomachines, which were reproducing in a perfect frenzy.

His vision had gone dark. He panted for breath. He could feel sweat pouring off him.

And then he was consumed.

17

There was a soft whirring, a breath of air on his cheek. From somewhere in his scrambled memories came the scent of violets. The scent faded.

“Damn it,” he said aloud. “I’ve survived over fifteen hundred years, and now the bastard’s killed me twice.”

He remembered the arcing fire coming down through the trees, the broken reef of dead machines lying in heaps. The microscopic machines burning through his body. Bitsy’s farewell.

But then he remembered that he shouldn’t remember anything like that. Not if this was a new incarnation. If he had been reloaded from his last backup, he wouldn’t have any memories of the invasion at all.

He opened his eyes. He sat at apparent ease in a leather armchair, one knee crossed over the other. His spider-silk suit was grey, with a subtle pinstripe, and fit him perfectly. The armchair was in a book-lined study, lit by a skylight through which came a clear, perfect north light.

Sitting in another chair and regarding him with polite attention was a man who seemed about nineteen, with a Navy blue blazer worn over a cream-colored turtleneck. Though his hair was short on the back and sides of his head, a mass of chestnut curls tumbled from the top of his head almost to his eyes. His eyes were grey. An oval onyx ring sat on one forefinger.

The whole arrangement had a perfect Victorian solidity to it that made Aristide suspicious at once.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked. “Captain Nemo?”

The other man smiled faintly. “Beyond devotion to an ideal,” he said, “there is little basis for comparison.”

Aristide tried to stand, and found that his body declined to obey his commands. He looked at the other figure.

“You’re my interrogator, I take it?”

The young-seeming man inclined his head. “I’d prefer to consider this a productive dialogue,” he said.

Aristide glanced about at the room and its furnishings. “This is a virtual room, I suppose.”

“Oh no. It’s real.” The man raised a hand to the shelves. “The books all exist. If your senses are keen enough, you can detect the scent of fine leather binding and the acetic acid smell of book paper decomposing.”

“That’s exactly the sort of detail that makes me want to think none of this is exists.”

“Oh.” The stranger seemed slightly taken aback. He considered a moment, then shrugged. “I suppose it doesn’t matter. Suffice it to say that the room was created by someone, for some purpose, and that you and I now inhabit it.”

“Where’s that whirring sound coming from?”

“There’s a humidifier behind you. The room is kept at an ideal humidity for preservation of book paper.”

“Is there a pot of violets somewhere behind me?”

The stranger looked at him curiously. “No. Why?”

“No reason.”

The young-looking man reached into his pocket and withdrew a cigaret case. “I’ve taken up any number of vile habits lately. Mind if I smoke?”

“I can’t stop you.”

The stranger looked at him from under his waterfall of curls.

“You could, actually. I would refrain out of courtesy to you.”

“I suppose,” Aristide mocked, quoting his interrogator, “it doesn’t matter.”

The young-looking man put the cigaret in his mouth, then lit it with a table lighter of carved white jade. Aristide wondered how many centuries it had been since he’d seen a table lighter.

The scent of tobacco stung his nostrils.

“The level of detail is really pretty good,” he said.

His companion gave him a severe look. “I admire the consistency of your skepticism,” he said, “but if you persist in viewing me as some kind of Cartesian Great Deceiver, it will not only make no difference in the long run, but will make our conversation damned tedious.” He gestured with his cigaret. “If we were in virtual, I wouldn’t have had to take control of your body. I could have let you run and jump and leap about to your heart’s content, secure as if you were in a padded cell.”