“Which means I’ve been able to use both Orpheus and the beds to winter over. Doing it with Orph is incredibly exhausting for both of us. If I was able to use only denner hibernation, we wouldn’t have been able to just randomly jump through time the way we’re doing. Like I said, that’s what makes this plan possible. And, I mean I can’t be positive, but this”—he gestured at the mechanical carnage—“sure looks like it’s working.”
Bots had fought bots here: networked Toby machines versus locked-down marauders from Evayne’s ships. Hers had been on a search-and-sweep of the local town, breaking into houses and reading IDs off the cicada beds. Evayne had human troops doing the same thing, but Toby didn’t go near them—and, so far at least, Evayne hadn’t harmed any of the helpless Thisbe citizens whose homes she was invading.
“I was expecting a tug-of-war,” he said. Orpheus and Wrecks were waiting at the edge of the burnt ground, and Toby’s denner sniffed dubiously at Toby’s pant cuffs as the humans met them. He and Corva shouldered their packs and waded back into the tangled brush.
“I thought we’d both be issuing orders to the lockstep system. She’d command it to do one thing, I’d tell it no, she’d say yes. I was expecting a game of global Whac-A-Mole, but it hasn’t worked out like that.”
“Whack-a-what?”
“But it sort of has,” he went on, oblivious. “Better, really. I wake up a whole town, Evayne freaks out and sends her people to find out if it’s an army group assembling. Random beds come awake all over the planet, and she can see that in the interface but not who it is who’s waked up. She never knows whether one of them might be me, so she has to send somebody to investigate each and every one. Which takes fuel and people—and means she has to have people awake all the time. But I can sleep for years if I want.”
He’d expected that he would have to manually wake people, because if he scheduled wake-ups ahead of time, Evayne could find them in the interface (though not who they were) and investigate before they woke, or just reset them. Toby’s plan had involved being awake more than sleeping. As it turned out, that hadn’t been necessary. He had Evayne’s forces dancing to his tune all over the planet, which freed him to mess with her in other ways.
Corva shook her head. “Sooner or later she’s going to start killing people. She’s gonna call your bluff. What are you going to do then?”
“If she pisses me off, I’ll wake the whole damned planet. She knows that.” He could tell she was far from satisfied by that answer, so he said, “How’s the story end? There’re a bunch of possible ways:
“If I wasn’t Toby, but let’s say some pretender who’d convinced the local government I was the messiah, then Evayne would have waited until most of the planet was wintering over. Thisbe just doesn’t have the resources to replace all the McGonigal cicada beds in time. So she’d be able to dig in, take out the military’s installations, and threaten whole cities with destruction unless they turned me over. That was your brother’s nightmare ending to the story.
“But if I really am Toby McGonigal, then I can have the whole planet up and running before she can get herself established. Then we have enough force to put up a good fight, maybe even win. In that case, the outcome’s not certain—and that means there’d probably be a pitched battle. I might die, you might die, but probably Evayne would lose. If she survived, she’d end up our prisoner. And with her as our hostage, the road to Destrier’s wide-open.
“That’s Halen’s dream version.”
“That’s the one you agreed to,” she pointed out.
“Corva, a lot of people die in that case, and me … I end up just like Evayne, locked into playing my role in a myth I didn’t invent. It sucks, I was never going to do that, and I’m sorry I had to let you think I would.”
“Okay,” she said with a slight smile.
“The thing is, this thing about me being able to override her commands changes the story. But for this twist on it to work, I had to make sure she committed herself now, when she doesn’t have that extra force. I had to lure her in.
“So when she arrived, the planet was wintering over. She thought it was safe to come out of orbit, so she set some ships down by the capital and headed in with a big force to wake up the government and throw down her ultimatum. A force of soldiers was waiting there—the ones who hadn’t been using McGonigal beds. There was a confrontation, but I’m sure the Thisbe soldiers were confused and demoralized at that point. They figured I’d betrayed them. So they were facing each other tensely in the middle of the Grand Plaza when one of Evayne’s aides came running up to her. I wasn’t there, by the way; I watched it all later on the security footage. Couldn’t quite make out the expression on her face, though, when her people told her that McGonigal beds all over the planet starting to wake up—including other army bases.
“If I’d wakened the whole planet, we’d have been in Version Two of the story again—a pitched battle. But it wasn’t like that. There were just enough Thisbe military awake now to keep Evayne from safely leaving the planet. Also enough to put up a good defense if she tried some stunt like threatening to wipe out a town.”
“Wait—but why?”
“It was a message from me to her.”
“Yes, but why? What did you think she was going to do?”
“Exactly what she did do. I know Evayne. If you dangle something just out of her reach, she’ll keep jumping at it until she collapses. She’s always been like that, but who knows it aside from me and Peter? In forty years, nobody’s ever done this to her. She’s probably totally forgotten that this is her vulnerability. So I made myself the bait, and said, ‘Here I am, come get me.’”
“You set the rules of the game! If she breaks them by escalating—”
“Then I escalate, too. If she hurts anyone, I wake the bombers, the mechs, and missile battalions. She could play a different game, but only by denying her essential nature—”
Corva reached out and gave Toby a hard shove. As he stumbled, she shouted, “That’s crazy dangerous! She could swoop in and catch us at any time! Then what?”
He laughed. “Then I lose everything. But only me.”
“And me, you jerk. You dragged me into this.”
“Are you saying you thought you were safe when you came with me?”
“Well, no, but—”
“Evayne may know about denners, but she doesn’t know we have Orpheus and Wrecks. She suspects I’m using non-McGonigal beds; some models don’t have to report their status to the lockstep network. I know she thinks this because she’s got her people scouring the planet looking for those beds. She rousts anybody who’s in one and then destroys it. Meanwhile, she’s watching the network. Any McGonigal bed that’s activated—either waking up or going under—could be me. So she has to investigate. And that’s sapping her strength. Even worse: it’s using up time.”
“Are you saying,” and now she was shouting, “that there’re thousands of people out there who’ve had their beds destroyed? That they’re stranded in realtime?”
He shook his head. “You know the lockstep laws. They can use any available bed if they can’t get to their own. Although the other thing Evayne’s doing is disabling all the empty McGonigal beds she can find, to deny me a resting place. She’s got enough for the refugees—but she thinks she can tighten the noose around me this way.”
A little calmer, Corva nodded to the denners. “Except we don’t need the beds.”