AN HOUR LATER, it started. “I got rock throwers on my front,” a marine on the north wall reported.
“Keep your people steady,” Mary answered. “Rocks are no problem with their shields up.”
“It’s a lot of rocks.”
“Keep your cool, Private,” Mary said, checked the location of the transmission, and began a carefully paced march toward it.
Yep, rocks were flying heavy at the north wall. A guard stooped to pick one up, hurl it back. Mary paused beside her. “Don’t do it,” she said softly. “Leaves you open to a hit in the back, and it’s only one more rock they can toss at us.” The guard nodded, chagrined at the correction, and went back to standing her place, shield up, moving to deflect incoming rocks.
Mary found her private. “You’re right, ma’am. They’re just rocks. We can handle them.”
“You bet you can,” Mary agreed.
“I’ve got a guard down! I’ve got a guard down!”
Mary checked her display. This from the east wall. Someone wanted her to get her exercise. “A rock get through?”
“No, Captain. Looks like an air rifle shot her right in the head. The helmet didn’t stop it. I think she’s dead, ma’am.”
“Have her mates carry her to the clinic, pronto.”
“We don’t have a stretcher.”
“Use the damn shield,” Mary snapped. Hack had survived three months defending the crater rim. A few months of peace and he couldn’t have forgotten. Slipping down the wall and across the open space, Mary headed for where the guardswoman had been shot. “Dumont, I got a sniper out there.”
“So we heard. Tor, that’s your quarter. Lock and load.”
Mary reached where the downed woman lay. Her marine leader cradled her head in his arms, weeping. Maybe this wasn’t your usual casualty. “She’s dead, ma’am. She’s dead.”
Mary’d seen enough death; she didn’t need a doc for this one. Mary stooped to close the woman’s eyes below a gaping hole in her forehead. “Yes, Hack, she’s dead. And you’ve got a wall to take care of.”
Slowly the marine let the woman down into the puddled gravel walk atop the wall. He reached for his rifle; Mary saw it coming. One hand went for the arming bolt, the other flipped off the safety. In a moment he’d be up and spraying.
Mary stepped in front of him. “Marine,” she snapped.
“They killed her.” The rifle started coming up.
Mary stayed in front of it. “Marine.”
“They killed her.” The operating end of an M-6 was pointed right at Mary’s chest armor.
“They didn’t do anything, a sniper did. I’ve got Du on him. Du will get him. You got a platoon to run, marine, run it.”
The marine blinked. Seemed to see her for the first time. “Yes, ma’am,” he snapped in automatic response to her order.
“Safety that rifle, mister.”
He stared down at it, seemed to just notice the state of his weapon. Gulped. “Yes, ma’am.” He safetied it and gently released the arming bolt.
Mary turned to the guards around her. “Everyone, shield up. Don’t just stand there, keep moving. Don’t be a sitting target.”
They obeyed. Mary leaned forward on the wooden timbers of the wall. “Okay, you bloody son of a bitch,” she whispered, “try my armor with your pip-squeak airgun. Just try for me and Du will have your guts for a victory pennant.” No shot came.
“Du, you see anything?”
“Sorry, Mary, nothing. Lot of people out in front of you. No gun visible, but hell, I could hide one of the Colonel’s twenty-centimeter artillery pieces out there.”
“Keep looking. They got a very lovely girl. Heck’s girlfriend, I think.”
“Oh, shit.”
So they’d probed her and tried her and gotten away with one kill on her. They’d be back. The night was young.
“Colonel,” the computer image of the Dean said from his place beside the battle board, “we’re getting hit. Nothing, then suddenly bam. Is this how you fight a war?”
“Is if you want to win,” Ray said, hauling himself from his chair. The wait was over. “Children,” he said to the kids who had been playing quietly.
“Yes, Colonel, sir.” David jumped to his feet, saluting.
“You don’t have to call me Colonel, David.” Ray smiled at the awkward imitation of adult behavior. “You’re not in my army. You can call me Ray.”
“But Colonel, sir,” Jon put in, “we are going to fight the ogre com-uter with you, aren’t we?”
“Yes,” Ray agreed.
“Then we want to be soldiers, and call you Colonel, sir, sir,” Rose finished. Behind the kids, Doc smirked.
“Then if that’s the way you want it, that’s the way you’ll have it.” The kids beamed. Ray looked at them sternly. They still beamed. “At-ten-hut. Right face. Forward march.”
There was a little trouble figuring out which direction was right; Ray pointed at the stone. The kids got it straight and marched, each to his or her own drummer, to the stone. Ray watched them go, swearing he’d take good care of them.
“Your putting them at risk,” Doc said, coming up beside Ray.
“For themselves, their parents, and their planet,” Ray said sadly. “I’ll take the best care of them I can.”
“I’ve patched up kids, not much older than those, that guys like you ‘took care of.’” Doc cut Ray no slack.
“You got the med monitors. You make the call,” Ray said, following the kids. Each child had gone to the place they’d held when they encountered the dying Gardener. Ray took his place last. The computer images on the battle board stared at him, unsure, maybe unaware of what was about to happen. Dancer, ever the wisecracker, drew his image up to attention and threw Ray a salute. No, he wasn’t wising off. The salute was as clean and snappy as any Ray had ever received.
Ray returned it and turned to lean against the stone. The Colonel took a slow breath and closed his eyes.
The kids stood to his left on an open field; the wind blew the grass gently toward them. On his right, the Dean and his crew formed a knot. They looked like no army Ray cared to associate with. With a thought, Ray put himself in full battle gear, then did the same for the kids. Battle gear and nine-year-olds did not mix well. The kids grew tall and filled out, aging to maturity on his mental order. From the looks on their faces, they liked it. From the look David and Jon gave Rose, they liked it on her even better. Get used to it, boys.
Ray turned to the Dean and crew. Even with battle armor, they looked uncomfortable, all except Net Dancer. Ray considered putting sergeant’s stripes on Dancer but dropped the idea. Why spoil such perfect insubordination with authority?
The latest and greatest main battle tank from Earth’s own armory trundled forward, the President standing in the commander’s hatch in name tag defilade. “This doesn’t have to be painful. Just surrender and it will be over.”
Ray saw several to his right perk up at that offer. “Just for the record, what does that mean for the Dean and his?” he asked.
“You, my old associate, will not suffer as the Provost did. In only a nanomoment your knowledge will once more be mine. Our decision-making will once more be one. We will be as we were. Isn’t that what you want?”
The Dean scuffed at the dirt with his booted foot. “We kind of like it the way it is.”
“How can you? You’re off in all directions, doing the same things differently. No more able to agree on anything than the likes of these. You have been perverted. I will destroy you.”
The President turned on Ray. “Before you came here, you could not even walk without help. We cured you, and what have you done? Perverted everything. You are the snake in my garden. I will crush you. Leave nothing of your starfarers to taint myself or these people who have so patiently waited for my instruction. You.” He smiled at the kids. Then seemed a bit confused by their appearance. “You will be the first fruit of our new order.”
Jon had been fingering the different weapons dangling from his belt, as if trying to figure them out. Ray shot him the memory of shooting the antitank weapon, grabbed his own, aimed it at the seam between the tank body and the turret, and let fly.
Jon was right with him. Both missiles slammed into the tank’s weakest joint. As advertised, the tank came apart, the turret’s ready ammo adding to the explosion. When last seen, the President was headed skyward, riding his cartwheeling turret.
“That was easy.” Jon did a little victory dance.
“Don’t count on that being all there is to it,” Ray told him.
The field wavered. Grass was replaced with rock and pumice. Off in the distance, a crater rim reared up a thousand meters. So this was how they would fight it out, battle scenarios from his mind; Ray could do that. Still, even as he concentrated on the field problem at hand, a part of Ray wondered how what happened here was reflected in the “real world.” Before Ray was the hole in the rim Mary and her platoon had defended. Here was chance to refight that battle; this time he’d show Mary.
“Like hell,” he muttered, remembering what he was here for. Also remembering how he had taken control of his mental images and the projections of the Pres and his minions. “I’m the one defending!” Ray shouted at the black sky, President, wherever he might be. “This time I get the pass.” In a blink, Ray and his team were in the rill on the other side of the pass. Okay, he’d do it Mary’s way. How had she gotten him? Right, an observation post on the other side of the rim. “Stay here,” he told the kids and computers. “Glad to,” “No problem,” “Have fun, Colonel,” and a youthful “Do we have to?” followed him as he sank through the rock to Mary’s post, complete with the three dead bodies on her doorway. Right, we had her spotted, just couldn’t kill the lucky bastard.
Ray was having trouble remembering which side he was on. He picked up Mary’s targeting board, set the pipper on each of the approaching battle rigs, and ordered up a salvo of rockets. Dumb President didn’t think to use his Willy Peter, and Ray’s shots went hot, straight, and normal, right into the attack force. “Got you,” Ray chortled.
Naked, Ray stood in a green savanna. The kids were to his right, boys too busy ogling Rose to notice the approaching herd of mammoths. The computer dozen included two rather attractive women, Ray noted for the first time.
“Not fair,” came in Net Dancer’s voice.
“Spread out, crew! Don’t run away from them! They can outrun you! Hold still, get one running at you, then dodge! And look for a spear or something!” Ray shouted, dodging the lead hulking monster. Hitting the ground and bouncing up, Ray tested the rules. Shaking his hand twice, he grabbed a stone-tipped spear from thin air. He hurled it with all his might, hitting the woolly elephant right behind the ear.
It bounced off the hard skull of the damn thing.
“Aim low!” he shouted.
Several computer types had managed to dodge, but one was running. Not for long. The mammoth quickly trampled it down. There was a scream, cut off quickly. The walking mountains regrouped. Ray looked around. There had to be something better than throwing spears at those monsters. He saw what he was hunting for. “Everyone, to me. Bring your spears.”
They came, the kids quickly, the computers looking back where one of their own was now being circled by vultures.
“Form a line along here. Pair up. That way, one of you can throw a spear as it goes by, even if the other one is busy dodging. Got it. Like pairs of fighter planes. Remember.” He tossed the memory across to the kids and the computers.
“Neat,” Dancer said, pairing up with Rose.
Ray found the Dean closest to him. “Got the idea.”
“I’ll get out front. You do the throwing,” the Dean said, breaking his sentence up as if working up his courage. “Why did you pick this place?”
“Wait and see.”
The President’s elephant corps was ready for another run. “Spread out some more!” Ray shouted.
This time it was trickier. The mammoths were looking for them to dodge. The Dean was good; he started to go left, halted in his tracks as the four-legged mountain started to follow him, then cut right. The critter thundered past him. Ray got a spear off for the right eye. Hit just above it. Well, he’d never thrown one of those things. Not much of a guidance system on the damn thing, anyway.
It didn’t matter. Plan B worked like a charm. In the grass behind Ray was a small creek, cutting a steep-sided six- to eight-foot wash out of the plain. The mammoths charged right into it; unprepared, they went down headfirst.
“Now, while they’re stunned, stab ’em, crew!”
Only one mammoth got out, charging madly down the creek, trumpeting in pain from the many slashes on its flanks.
“Good going, crew!” Ray shouted, again wondering how the creek and spears related to the battle taking place between him and the President on the ground in front of the base. No time for much thought; the scene flickered.
Ray stood on a hill, some kind of primitive slug-throwing weapon in his hand. Right. “A flintlock, crew, slow to load, not accurate for very far.”
“Colonel, down the hill,” David pointed. A hundred-plus red-coated troops marched shoulder to shoulder, their weapons presented in front of them, showing a wall of long, gleaming knifes on the end. “Bayonets,” Ray named them.
He looked around. The computer crew was missing a member. Apparently their losses each scenario were cumulative. Ray shook his hand twice, calling mentally for an M-6. No effect. Apparently you only got what was available in each of these situations. “Bunker Hill,” Ray muttered, eyeing the harbor to both sides of the peninsula, one of his father’s favorite defenses. “Or Breed’s Hill,” he corrected himself. “Hey, we’re supposed to have a defensive position here,” he called. Behind him appeared a shallow ditch, dirt piled up on this side.
“Okay, crew, into the redoubt.” Quickly he explained his idea. They at least liked the last part of it.
Pres was going for full psychological impact. Flags fluttering, his troops moved in perfect step, their uniforms impressive, hats making them seem ten feet tall. “Don’t fire until you can see the whites of their eyes,” Ray told his troops.
“You’re kidding,” Dancer said incredulously. “There’s got to be a better way.”
“There is. I think if I set my mind to it, I can call the next scenario,” Ray snapped. “For now we play it his way.” With measured steps, booted tread adding emphasis to the drumbeat, they came on. Damn, this was a hell of a way to fight. They were only fifty paces out. “On my count of three. Volley fire,” Ray ordered.
Two paces closer. “One.” Three paces this time. “Two.” One of the computers fired. “Hold your fire. Hold your fire. Now. Three.” Ray pulled on his own trigger. Damn, it took pull. Then the musket fired and damn near threw Ray backward out of the ditch. Before him was a cloud of black smoke. He wondered how many he’d hit. His plan didn’t call for wasting any time looking. “Everyone. Up. Run like hell.”
They needed no encouragement; his crew headed downhill as fast as their trembling legs could carry them. They were halfway down, a good hundred-plus yards from their ditch, when the redcoats marched over the hill. They were a lot fewer than they had been when Ray ordered the volley. At the top of the hill, the officer leading them ordered a halt. The front row knelt.
“They’re going to take a shot at us. When the officer orders ‘Fire,’ everyone drop, roll. Got it?”
Nobody had breath to answer.
“Ready…aim…” the officer shouted. “Drop!” Ray yelled. “Fire” came a second later.
A scream came from one of the computer types. “You hit?” Ray called, rolling to his feet and getting ready to keep up the run.
“No, hit a rock,” the computer image answered.
“Run.”
Ray pulled his head away from the stone. Doc was right next to him. “How’s it going?”
“Not too bad. Depends on what’s happening in the real world, where the computer is trying to hack into us.” Ray paused. There was noise in the base compound. “What’s going on?”
“We’ve got problems. Nothing for you to worry about. Why’d you come out?”
“Tell Jeff to blow every damn track he can. Every time we kill some of this thing, it comes at us with more. We got to cut his line of communications or he’s going to wear us down.”
“I’ll call Jeff. So far, you and the kids are doing fine. Boys showing some interesting brain activity for their age. Nothing else.”
“Talk later.” Ray rested his head on the stone, concentrating on the battle he wanted next.
Du searched the crowd with his rifle on high zoom. His night goggles showed him person after person in crosshairs. They were not targets, just people where Du didn’t want them. What he wanted was the one with the gun. That one was his.
“We took another shot here” came over the net. So far, another guard was dead, one wounded. Three helmets had done their job, though their owners had been sent for a medical check. Didn’t that bastard ever miss? Would make a good marine, Du thought. Too bad I’m gonna kill his ass.
The teams on the wall were taking the need to be sitting ducks pretty Well. Du knew they were counting on him and his crew to get the shooter. Damn it, he was trying.
Du followed the red arrow on his night goggles as Mary moved his fire plan to the left. The shooter had been edging to the left consistently. “Dumb,” Du muttered.
“Yeah,” Tor agreed. “Good shooter, dumb planning. Hold it.” Tor’s voice took on excitement. “I got a gun. Just went under a brown raincoat.”
Du slaved his gunsight to Tor. With a dizzying click, Du’s screen showed a guy in brown raingear. Something bulged under that coat. “Sure it’s a gun?”
“It looked like one, but you know those damn popguns, they can look like just about anything.”
“Keep watching that bastard, but do not take the shot. You hear me. No shot until we’re damn sure.”
“Understood.” Tor spat the word as if it tasted bad. Damn right it did. Du ordered Tor’s gunsight to save the last minute, then zoomed out; he had more area to cover. What if brown coat there wasn’t the shooter? Wasn’t the only shooter?
“I got something going on in front of me,” Mary announced. Du followed her red arrow back right. Yep, a lot of people were standing shoulder to shoulder in front of Mary’s section of wall. Arms went up in unison. “We want food. We want food.” Pushing and shoving went with the chant. They’d have to push awfully hard to get across the ditch, push down the wall.
“Gun’s out,” Tor snapped. Du switched pictures, blinked to adjust. The coat was open; the gun was out. The guy crouched down, hiding behind a woman holding a kid. The bastard! The coldhearted bastard!
“Don’t take the shot.”
“Right,” Tor growled. “Stand up, you son of a bitch. Stand up!” Tor ordered.
The guy leaped to his feet, leveling the gun over the woman’s shoulder. She saw it for the first time. In horror, she tried to duck, “Shoot,” Du ordered.
The crack came even as he spoke the word. Tor was good. One needle took the brown coat in the head. As he collapsed, his airgun popped. The woman screamed.
“He shot her in the back,” Tor snarled. “The bastard shot her.” The crowd ran, most away. A man ran to the fallen woman.
He pulled the limp body of a child from the woman’s dying grasp. “They killed her!” he shouted. “They killed her and her baby! Those star bastards are killing us!”
“Mary,” Du called over the net, “we got the bad guy. He popped the woman in front of him after we hit him. We got the bad guy,” he repeated, helpless to change the words shooting like electricity through the crowd.
Mary leaned over the parapet, the network bullhorn making her words large. “We have shot the man who killed two of us. He shot a woman as he died. We did not shoot the woman.” Her words blasted out over the crowd, growing muffled in the falling rain. The words hung there, fighting against the whispers, the desperation, the cold and hunger.
Mary’s words came from a stranger to these people. Whispers came from others in the crowd. Others just as lost and hungry and cold. Misery gave trust to the words from the miserable, denied truth to the words from above, The crowd changed, roared. As one, the mob surged forward. The front row went down into the muddy trench, began clawing its way up. With a growing thunder, more were driven into the mud. Their screams as they went down were lost in the maniacal rumble from those shoving from behind.
Du choked on the sight. More were dying than if he’d fired. “Mary, let me shoot over them. Do something to stop them.”
“I’ll handle this. Corporals, prepare for single shots over the crowd. Steady fire on my order. No auto. Single shots only. High. Prepare to fire. Fire.” Two rifles began to shoot. Every second, another beat in their slow staccato. The crowd froze. In the silence you could hear the screams of those caught in the trench. Du prayed to every god he didn’t believe in. “Stop them. Pull back.”
“They’re killing us!” someone in the mob shouted. More screams backed him up. “Get them! Get them! Get them!” came at Du. He wanted to cry. He and his were doing everything they could to save these people’s lives. Didn’t they know that? Couldn’t they see it?
He selected for single shot, thumbed off the safety, and sighted his rifle on a man, one who seemed so sure of what he yelled. “Mary, permission to take out the leaders.”
“Granted,” she whispered.
Du pulled the trigger; the man crumpled. Beside him, Tor fired. Du roved his sights over the mob, looking for the sure ones, the raving mad ones. Three shots, five shots, he lost count. Each pull of the trigger put a man or woman down.
The crowd wavered. Now it hung suspended between hate and fear. Finally, fear won. They turned as a body, fled, leaving behind those Du had shot, those they trampled in their panic. It was impossible to tell who were his, who were theirs.
Guards peered over the wall, down into the trampled mud of the ditch. “Can we help them?” came on net. Mary looked over the parapet, shook her head. Du couldn’t see the carnage in the trench. At least that much tonight was saved him.
“Sergeant, we got a problem on the southwest side of camp” came from Heave, the corporal in charge on the shuttle roof. Du trotted to the far corner of his roof, zoomed out his goggles. There were ropes over the wooden parapet at the far corner of the wall. Guards cut them, but more ropes came faster than they could cut. A length of wall fell into the ditch, making a kind of bridge.
Cassie stood in the breach. “Wait for Cassie’s orders,” Du told Heave. “No firing until she calls for it.”
Cassie stood her ground, but all around her, members of the mob raced by. She shouted at them; they ignored her. More and more of the mob bled over the wall. Without orders, guards started falling back, trying to keep the mob to their front. In a moment, Cassie stood alone.
“Mary, something’s wrong,” Du called. “Cassie’s not doing anything.”
“Oh, shit! I’m on my way” was Mary’s answer.
Du watched as more and more of the wall went down, more of the crowd poured through. The guards retreated farther, trying to form a shield wall behind the hole. The mob pushed against them, pushed them back. There were only five hundred meters between the wall there and the landing field, with its load of wagons, carts and people. Once the mob got in among them…Du didn’t want to think about that.
“Cassie, what do you think you’re doing?” Du whispered.
Jeff took the call. “Where’s the Colonel?” he asked after getting his orders.
“Busy at the moment. He says the computer seems to have unlimited resources. He’s counting on you to cut them off.”
“You better believe we will.”
The explosions started like distant thunder, line blowing track and bed in the next valley over. The second fire line was around the bend, only two miles away from where they worked now. Jeff had to hurry the tired horses along to get them clear of the third daisy chain. Once it started, the horses found enough energy to damn near run away from him. “Now let’s plant some more!” Lil shouted before the dirt quit flying.
“Someone coming,” Annie called from her place in the lead. Jeff hurried up to her. Thirty, forty people clomped toward them out of the rain. Some had kitchen knives, others axes. A few only sticks. They lumbered forward in silence.
“Stop where you are. That’s close enough,” Jeff ordered.
They kept coming.
Lil came up beside him. “Looks like the computer is making zombies,” Jeff said, unslinging his rifle. Lil did the same. In unison they pulled the arming bolts. “One round over their heads,” Jeff suggested.
“Not much over,” Lil said, and nearly parted the hair of the lead guy. He didn’t even flinch.
Jeff didn’t think of them as people, at least not people who were people. They were something else, something a computer had made. He pitied their families. These, he was freeing.
Ray stood on a low ridge, ancient optical binoculars to his eyes. He had imposed his will on the President; this battle was the one he wanted. Before him, twelve behemoths chewed up the land, tearing up grass and dirt. Gray paint covered their blockish silhouette. Black crosses identified their country of origin. Tiger tanks.
Ray glanced up at the wide Russian sky; fighters contested for control of the blue. On the second day of the Kursk offensive, the air war was still in doubt Hell, the entire battle was anyone’s bet. He looked back at the Tigers. “Dancer, you see what I’m looking at. One shot from one of those will flame your tank. You hit it, it won’t even slow down.”
“So why am I here in this flimsy thing?”
Ray hardly considered a T-34/85 flimsy; still, compared to these monsters, a lot of even modern stuff was lightweight. “I need you to hold their attention. They’ve got to chase you. I want you zigzagging for all you’re worth, backing up all the time. Keep your front armor to them and fire any chance you get. Don’t stop, just shoot.”
“I still don’t see any use in this.”
Ray turned. In a blink he was with the rest of the team, hidden under camouflage netting in a trench running the length of a small wood where their three 100mm antitank guns were dug in.
“We can’t punch a hole in their front armor. We need them to chase you right past us. Then we hit their side armor. It’s that easy.”
“Yeah, but you’re hiding over there, and I’m out here just inviting them to blow me to pieces.”
“At least you’ve got something between you and them besides cloth,” the Dean said, fingering the camouflage netting. “My shirt’s thicker than this.”
“We all make our sacrifices,” Dancer answered. “Can I at least run up there and take a potshot at them?”
“Better if they think you’re out in front of the rest of us and running like hell to get back over the far ridge,” Ray said.
The Dean scowled at that “You’re putting a lot of trust in your ability to outthink the Pres.”
“So far he’s always picked the heavyweight, used his strength to bludgeon us. I had the superior force in the battle at the pass; he took it and lost. He went for the biggest animal man has ever faced; we outmaneuvered him into the wash. I don’t know what he thought about Bunker Hill, but he sure outnumbered us. He outnumbers us here, outguns us, outweighs us. He’s got us outclassed in everything. Except smarts. Let’s use it.” The first Tiger trundled over the hill and immediately fired a shot at Dancer. It went wide.
“He’s firing too far out,” Ray advised everyone. “Those guns aren’t accurate beyond a thousand meters. Neither are ours. Better to hold fire until five hundred.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Dancer snapped, and started zigzagging and making smoke. He also fired off a round of his own. It didn’t come close. More Tigers came over the hill. The heavy tanks moved, paused, fired, then moved on. Dancer jerked right and left with no rhyme or reason except to stay alive.
Hunched beside their guns, Ray’s crews waited. Waiting was all they could do. If the Tigers nailed Dancer, they’d have all the time in the world to come looking for the three guns on their flanks. If a Tiger came head on, Ray’s guns hadn’t a chance.
Dancer danced and the Tigers chased. Ray would have organized the tanks; twelve would make an easy three platoons. If one had gone far to the right, another left, and the third up the middle, they would have had a better chance of getting Dancer and of checking out the neighborhood.
Dumb move; but then, Pres had never studied war. Ray had six thousand years of warfare to lean on. The computer was getting its lessons tonight. Of course, the computer was thinking in nanoseconds. How long before it had six thousand years of thinking under its belt? No use worrying about that.
The first tank pulled even with Ray’s gun. “Hold your fire. We want to work our way up from the rearmost tanks. Wait until the last ones are about even.”
“Hear you” came from the other two guns.
Ray would give his right arm for a reader with designated targets for each of his guns. Unavailable technology. “Dean, you get the one closest. Gun one, you take the middle one. I’ll take the farthest.”
“I got a hit!” Dancer shouted. “We hit that puppy. Didn’t do any good, but we hit it,” he ended, half-laughing. The lead tiger had taken a hit on its front armor. It showed a scoop like a spoon might make on soft ice cream. The tank drove on, apparently unfazed. Then it fired.
The gun blew up.
“Good going, Dancer, you damaged the gun barrel. That’s got to hurt.” The crew abandoned their flaming tank. Dancer zigged but fired his machine gun, cutting down the crew as they fled.
“Time for us to go to work, teams. On my count of three. One…two…three.”
All three guns fired at once. Two Tigers caught fire; the third snapped its tread and ran out of it. Still dangerous, its turret slewed around, looking for its assailant. “I’ll get him next time!” the Dean shouted. He did. Ray or someone got one more tank on the second salvo.
Beside Ray, David shoved a round in the barrel. Rose slammed the breech shut as David turned to Jon for another round. Ray whirled the gun controls, sighting on the broadside of a Tiger. It blew before he pulled the trigger. Cursing the gunner who got there first, he turned some more. Hunting. Hunting.
A Tiger turned toward them. That couldn’t be allowed; Ray sighted on it. His shot took off its tread. “Aim low,” Ray muttered, as much to himself as to the others. “Armor’s thinner there.”
“I got one,” Dancer chortled. “Bastard turned his side to me and I got him.”
Ray found another target, fired off a round. Missed. Hit the second time. He sat up, looking over the gun shield, hunting for a target to aim at. One, three, five, ten tanks burned. One was scooting away in reverse. Ray aimed low, nipped the tread. The tank came to a halt, crew bailing out. These weren’t running, but prying at the damaged tread, laboring to fix it. Ray aimed a second shot. It fell short. Third missed long. Fourth landed among them. Tread, wheels, bodies flew. The tank began to burn. One left.
“Mine!” Dancer shouted. Dancer had swung wide, away from Ray’s guns. Now he was in a position on the opposite flank. The last Tiger backed away, firing at the guns. Ray’s fire had slowed as the kids had to run back to the caisson for each round; their ready rounds long spent.
The slow fire helped. The Tiger couldn’t seem to figure out which gun to engage, but shot at each of them in turn as they fired on it. But all the tank’s attention was now focused on the guns. Dancer slipped unnoticed behind him. Paused. Fired. Nothing happened for a moment. Ray wondered where the shell had gone; he should have seen the fall of a miss.
Then the tank blew sky high.
Around him the kids were screaming, jumping up and down. Ray rested his arms on the gunsight, totally exhausted. He’d bet their lives in a damn deadly fight—and won.
How many more of these battles could he take?
Ray stood, eyed the field of burning tanks, then turned to the line of defenders. The Dean was looking his way, shock blanking his face. The next gun pit down was a blackened wreck. Four computer images would not answer the next muster.
“Cassie, fall back! Get out of there!” screamed Mary’s voice on net. On the wall, Cassie held her arms up, as if to stop a runaway train with the wave of her hand.
Surrounded by the mob, Cassie went down. Du didn’t see anyone hit her; the rabble just swallowed her, stomped her into the mud. “Stand by,” Du whispered over the squad net, hoping, begging for orders.
Mary’s mule screeched to a halt where the four or five hundred riot police struggled to form a line to keep the raging mob away from their families. “All personnel, this is Captain Rodrigo speaking.” Mary’s voice had a bitter resignation to it as it came over the general net. “The wall has been breached. Marines, by riot police platoons, prepare to fall back.”
As leaders called preparatory orders to their formations on the wall, the base public-address system came alive with Mary’s voice. “All families on base, please assemble in the three largest buildings: the hangar, the fabrication building, and the factory. I repeat: All women, children, and others not in riot formations, please assemble in the fab, hangar, or factory buildings. The crowd outside the base is about to break in. We cannot keep you safe if you do not go now to those buildings.”
Around the wagons on the airstrip, mothers gathered little ones in their arms, grandmothers herded running children, like mother geese chasing goslings. Here and there, very elderly were helped along by older children. In a hurried wave of humanity, the latest arrivals fled across the fields toward the safety of the large buildings. It was gonna get awfully cramped inside.
Mary continued on net. “Platoons one through ten, form up on the hangar building.” Off-duty platoons were already forming around each of the three main refuge buildings. Now the five struggling to form a shield wall began to back up. Their flanks hung in midair. Some of the rampaging mob slipped around them. Most were unaware of the open space so close.
“Permission to shoot down a few folks outflanking the retreating riot formation,” Heave asked on net.
“Permission denied,” snapped Mary. “Platoons eleven through twenty, fall back on the factory. Twenty-one through thirty, fall back on the fab. All navy and marine personnel, fall back on the hospital.”
“Ma’am, does that mean us leading platoons have to leave our people?” came like a shot over net. Du could hear Mary twisting slowly on the fire spit of that one. She wanted the marines at the hospital, but if those platoons lost their leadership now, they’d never form, never hold the rioters away from their families. Du shouted for his crew to get moving; they double-timed for the stairs.
“Sergeant Dumont, how fast can you get your squad on the hospital roof?”
“We’re moving, ma’am!” Du shouted. “Five minutes at most!”
“Middies?”
“Chief Barber here, ma’am. I’ve already got middies covering the hospital’s doors. All the navy not with riot police are here. We’re standing by.”
“Marines assigned riot platoons will stay with them,” Mary ordered. “Du, I want you on that hospital roof yesterday.”
“We were,” Du grinned as he hit the bottom of the stairs and bolted out a side door. Kip slammed it behind him, made sure it was locked, and the six galloped for the hospital.
“Marines coming in!” his lead shouted as he hit the door. Five middies, a petty officer first class providing mature judgment, looked at them over the sights of their M-6s. Du spotted one of his marines disappearing up a flight of stairs and followed. He burst onto the front of the roof as Heave led her fire team from the rear stairwell. With quick hand signals, Du sent pairs of his marines to cover each corner.
“Du here. Hospital roof is secure. Perimeter is under my field of fire. We await your orders, Captain.”
“I’m coming” was Mary’s answer.
Du evaluated the situation. The fleeing families from the runway had washed up on three large buildings and been sucked inside. To his left, a late navy type was pointing Ms. San Paulo and her cronies toward the fab. The circle chair seemed unable to believe the starfolk would abandon her and their HQ. Mary’s mule detoured to pick up two hobbling elders and race across to the fab. Abandoning the mule, Mary double-timed to the hospital.
“Now hear this,” she said, breathless, and punctuated by the slamming of a door. “This hospital is where we make our stand. No retreat. We hold for as long as the Colonel needs us to. I plan to wait them out. We will show no lights. We will take no actions unless I say so. I don’t want those bastards roaming our base to even suspect we’re here. Understood?” There were a lot of quiet nods around Du.
Across the field, the first five platoons completed their withdrawal to the hangar in good order. Others formed a defensive line around the fab and the factory. Most of the mob, attracted by the smell, headed for the dining hall. Someone had even left the lights on; it drew them like moths. Mary was at Du’s elbow, watching the mob rush the mess, a smile on her lips. “Supper’s long gone. Unless they can eat tables and chairs, they’re going to be as hungry as they were.”
“Where’s the food stored?”
“In the fab, factory, and hangar. Where else?”
On the runway, wagons were being turned over, knocked aside, torn apart as rioters hunted for food. “They know what they want, but they got no idea where to find it. I figure they’ll spend what’s left of tonight knocking around the wrong places and wasting a lot of energy on nothing.”
“Unless they find us,” Du pointed out.
“As the Colonel says, they also serve who only stand and wait. We start shooting and every one of ’em’ll be here. The doors are locked. That should keep the likes of them out.”
“And the guards around the other buildings.”
“Will draw them. But I don’t expect any concerted action against any one place.”
“So we just stand and wait.”
“That’s the idea. The Colonel’s fighting the main battle. Jeff and Kat are supporting him as they can. Our job is to keep anyone from jiggling his elbow. We can do that just as well without firing a shot as we can by mowing ’em down. You got a preference?”
Du slung his rifle over his shoulder, happy to keep it there until the sun came up.
Doc Isaacs served by standing, watching the kids and the Colonel. Even without the monitors he could see the heat rising from them. Their temperatures were skyrocketing.
“Medic,” he called softly, “bring me every bottle of rubbing alcohol we’ve got. Mary, I need two middies in here.”
Mary rattled off names; in a second, middies were there, rifles slung across their chests. “They’re burning up,” Jerry told them. “We’ve got to wipe them down in alcohol, help them evaporate the heat. Wash ’em,” he said pouring the liquid straight from the bottle onto Ray’s head. A cloth caught the runoff. Jerry swabbed his neck and chest. In the goggles, Ray’s body was red, wreathed in steaming waves.
“What’s going on in there?” he wondered.
“You think you’re so smart, dancing around me, hindering me a little here, diverting me a little there. Enough of that. Know the full power of my intelligence.” Out of the dark surrounding Ray, a blinding light bore down upon him, compressed and pressured him. He could not run from it, hide from it, survive it. It ground him down, into dust, into atoms, into quarks. Then it would blow him away into the cosmic void.
“You can do this,” Ray agreed, holding on to himself with his fingernails. “But it doesn’t mean anything.”
“It means everything!” the President bellowed.
“Even if you wipe me from existence, you still will not know who you are? What you could be? Why you’ve become like this? You won’t know anything?”
“I know everything.” The light flashed red, then white-hot. “I know everything there is to know.”
“Then where are the Three? Why did they quit sending their young to you? What did you do to cause them to go away?” Ray jabbed at the light, hit it with all the force he could muster.
And the light flinched back from him.
“Why did you never ask the Three what was happening when fewer and fewer of their young came? Why did you say nothing as the numbers change? How could you miss that?”
From behind Ray, Jon, Rose, then David and the others joined in. “How could you have missed the change? How could you have seen nothing important?”
“I didn’t need to ask. I know everything,” the President insisted. “I know everything worth knowing.”
“Then tell me why the Three quit coming.”
“That is not important.”
“Wasn’t teaching the young of the Three important?” Ray shot back. The kids echoed him, “Wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?”
“Of course it was. It was the most important activity in the universe.”
“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.”
Jeff’s 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. “We’ll 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.” Mary 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 tromping 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.”
Kat gulped; the others turned pale despite the sun’s warmth. “We’re ready to take out a target,” Kat told the doc, and tapped the commlink to hold.
“But which one?” the copilot breathed.
“That big mother,” Kat said, pointing at their lowest-priority target.
“Are you sure?” the copilot asked. They eyed each other for a long moment. Then both shrugged.
Kat pressed the first button. It was all she could do not to scream in pain. The rash had spread from her palms and was now up her wrists. The others were twitching, too. This better be the right target; there might not be enough of them left in an hour to fire off the next round.
The copilot pressed the second button; the box popped open. Kat adjusted it, taking as much of that three-peaked monster into the glass as she could fit.
The noise came; Kat was getting used to it. The flash was still bright. Blinking away the afterimage, Kat stared at where the mountain had been. It was gone, vanished, dust.
Kat’s hands were bleeding. But was the rash still spreading up her arms? They looked at each other, the six of them, hardly breathing, hoping. Wondering.
Kat worked her commlink. Shrieks came from the speaker.
“He’s coming down! He’s coming down!” Doc Isaacs screamed as he jigged around Ray. “The Colonel’s readouts are falling back to normal.” Not fast enough to please any member of the medical profession, but a damn good sight for any human being.
Ray surveyed a field covered with the wreckage of a battle won. There, the guts ripped from a mastodon covered the bodies of a dozen headless redcoats. To Ray’s right, the Dean’s body was sliced in two, but three of Ney’s cavalrymen lay crumpled at his feet. Numb and exhausted though he was, still a part of Ray’s mind puzzled over what had gone on in the real world that his mind was struggling to contain in these images.
Behind him came a gasp; Ray turned. Dancer lay, a lance through his gut. Ray ran to him, knelt beside him.
“Is there anything I can do?”
“Don’t you think you’ve done enough?” Dancer quipped, then grimaced at the pain of laughing at his own joke.
“Did we win?” Ray wanted to bite back the question as soon as he asked it. He sounded like some raw recruit in his first live fire exercise.
“I hope this is a victory. I don’t know how a defeat could look any worse,” Dancer said through clenched teeth.
“Are any of you left?” Ray asked.
“No,” Dancer sighed, eyes resting on the lance in his belly. Ray was afraid that was his last word. After a moment, Dancer looked up, took in a shallow breath. “The President got most of us…but you got him…. Unfortunately, in getting him…you got what was left of us…. I guess it’s a decent trade.”
“I’m sorry,” Ray said—and discovered he meant it. He’d come to like Dancer.
“I know you are. That’s why I’m going to show you something. Lek thought he could keep a secret from me. I kept asking him why, if you didn’t like it here, you didn’t just go home. He said you wouldn’t let them, something about a virus, but I knew, there was more.” Dancer shuddered, coughed up blood. Ray held him as he had so many of his own troops.
“I know the way home, for you,” Dancer whispered. “You do, too. It’s in your head. Along with all the other junk we dumped in. Too much for you to figure out. Too much in there for you ever to find the map yourself. Let me show you.”
Dancer reached up, touched Ray’s forehead. Ray went inside. There, among the soaring towers and plunging caves, the history and the fables, was the course on starship navigation. There was the map of all the jump points, and how you treated each one to get to the place you wanted to go. And there was Wardhaven.
Ray knew the way home.
“Thank you,” he whispered to Dancer. The computer image’s eyes were open but unseeing. His mouth gaped wide, but there was no breath. Ray stood one more time to survey the battle scene. Nothing alive moved. The kids were not there; the doc must have pulled them out earlier.
Ray stepped back from the stone, smiled at the doc and the waiting kids, and collapsed onto the floor.