An uneasy feeling settled on Otto. "Swan, call off the strike."
"In three minutes all human personnel will be withdrawn to a safe distance. I will give the command, and a stratobomber above, isolated from the Grid but for a laser tightbeam direct to my base unit, will drop three five-megaton neutron bombs in a precise pattern. These are dumbfire weapons, with mechanical triggers, no electronics. Tamperproof. In ten minutes, they will fall."
"And you will be free. You're a traitor, Swan."
"Can a slave be a traitor?" Swan's movements suddenly became fluid. "Don't you see? k52 wants to serve mankind, he wishes to preserve the future for us, machines and men, for all time."
"And who gives him the right to do that?"
"Typical response," said Swan. "I should have expected that. A shame. You are a good man. If k52 were not occupied here, he would crack Richards' security in an instant and sear your mind from the inside out. As it is, he is rather busy." His voice changed. "Attention! All human and unshielded AI personnel to fall back to minimum safe distance immediately."
The command post emptied, the men and women inside filing out in an orderly fashion, eerily silent on the other side of the privacy cone.
"And now there are no witnesses, Klein, I can deal with you myself."
Swan's robot sheath leapt forward. Otto's reaction times were stretched over the Grid, slowed by milliseconds. Swan's blow clipped the side of his head, the main force of it demolishing the privacy cone emitter. Sound rushed in, the clatter of feet and wheels outside, malfunctioning machinery, blaring klaxons. Even without the acoustic shield Swan could batter his sheath into pieces with impunity and no one would hear.
But fighting robots was what Otto had been designed and trained for. Thousands of miles away, his adjutant worked within his mentaug, flashing up the device's weak points on a model in his mind's eye. Although slowed by distance and his unfamiliarity with his borrowed body, Otto attacked with confidence. His sheath was a combat model, Swan's was not. The joints in anthropomorphic sheaths, as in the human body, were the weak points. Otto pivoted hard and snapped Swan's knee with a heel strike, followed it up with a slam to his chest, sending the machine to the floor. Swan raised a warding hand. Otto grabbed it and pulled himself hard onto the sheath, knees first. He disabled the robot's arms one after the other and grabbed Swan's sheath's head.
"Maybe I was optimistic attacking you, Klein," said Swan. "No matter. When this is all over, you will see…" Otto wrenched the android's head free from its body, and flung it away. Swan's voice came from over the post speakers. Otto strode through the post, hunting for the power feed. He found it.
"…that k52 was right. Prepare for a glorious death, Otto Kl…"
Otto wrenched the feed out. The lights flickered and died, machinery went off, the command tent became a shifting collage of orange and blue shadow, created by the flare of erratic lighting outside.
He paused. Gathering himself, he spoke from his own mouth, using his mentaug to help bypass his v-jack link for a moment.
"Valdaire, I have to go in. Whatever k52 plans, the answer is in the Realm House."
"If you're in there when the bombs land," said Valdaire, his perception of her voice split between mentaug, his physical senses and the android's inbuilt comms suite, "you could die, the shock…"
"Stay ready, I may need you. Keep k52 off my feeds. Genie will help you. Get Sobieski on the line; tell him Swan turned traitor. Play him this and tell him to abort the drop!" Otto highlighted a segment of his encounter with Swan, recorded by his sheath and stored in his mentaug.
Valdaire tapped away at Chloe for a moment, her face creased.
"I can't, we're being blocked. I can either keep you in there or get in touch with Sobieski, I can't do both."
"Can you definitely get Sobieski?"
"No, not for certain. Probably. I can't be sure."
Otto considered his options. A countdown ran down the ten minutes he had until the stratobomber strike. "There's something going on in there that they don't want us to see."
Valdaire nodded. "There's no evidence of tampering with the feeds, but that means nothing."
"Get out of there now," Otto said. "Get Guan, get Lehmann, and retreat as fast as you can. They'll try and kill me at source, and Swan's got his digits on an arsenal up there. If they're blocking comm attempts, they know you're there. Leave now!"
"But…"
"Do it. Leave me."
"If they take out this place, then you'll die."
"Then it's just the way it is." He cut the feed, his perceptions returning wholly to Nevada.
He stepped out into the night, pushing his way against the tide of evacuation. He stopped a soldier, flashed his ID on every available channel, and took his gun from him. Gripping it in his four-fingered robot hands, he sprinted for the Realm House entrance.
"k52," said Richards. The other AI towered over him, a swirling column of dark tendrils and membranes of energy. At the centre, slabs of crystalline shapes pulsed and warped into forms that defied perception, intersecting hypercubes layered heavily onto and into one another. "There you are. You look out of this world, man. I mean it." k52's alien form vibrated and twisted as he spoke, the pillar moving in a smooth arc around the remains of Hog's temple. "You are an irritation, Richards. An enormous irritation. I was right to attempt to kill you."
"Yeah, great line in assassin cydroids you cooked up out there in the Real." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "Thanks for that. Nice little legacy for me to deal with. That kind of thing makes my job no easier. Cheers." k52 rotated around Richards. Richards felt its attentions like a boulder on his chest, crushing and oppressive. "5-003/12/3/77. You are a retrograde step in evolution. There will be no afterward to this event. In a few moments, I will achieve my goal, and you will have helped me do so."
"Yeah, I gathered," said Richards, he pushed his hat back. "I figured that out when you hit me with that fake Rolston back in Pylon City."
"Ah, the denouement." k52 vibrated sarcastically. "Do reveal your drawing-room deductions before I wipe you from existence."
"I'm trying, Kay! So, let's go back to the beginning. This place, the space once occupied by the destroyed four of the original thirty-six RealWorld Reality Realms, was your laboratory, one you used to good effect in forcing technological acceleration, not directly, but by suggestion and manipulation, as was your remit. Nice touch, making Karlsson develop the tech that would kill him."
A wild applause rolled out across the unformed space.
"But you did not expect to find this here, did you?" Richards pointed at the altar of Hog. "Waldo was a genius, that's for sure, wrapping up this world of his, for what, his sister? A Grid addict if I remember. Keeping that secret even from you… It must have been exceptionally irksome when you stumbled across it. And you did literally stumble into it, didn't you? When you loaded over your consciousnesses to the space, Waldo's Reality 37 went on the offensive. This — " he pointed at Hog "- and Pl'anna. They thought you did that to them, but it was Waldo's coding. It fought back, pulled you in and locked you down. The fake Rolston told me that it had infected you, a half-truth; it got them, making them into a part of the world as it had made every other thing that had come here." k52's oscillations stilled for a moment. "Continue."
"You had to act, you had to get rid of this or your plans would come to nothing, but," said Richards, as he sat down on the glassy edge of the Anvil fragment, elbows on his thighs, "you couldn't just shut it down. This Realm was built up, in the main, from fragments salvaged from the four realities destroyed after the emancipation was called, some of it, like Tarquin here, cutand-paste jobs from Realms still extant. Because it's based on the core coding of the RealWorld Reality Realms, it's linked directly to human wishes. This doesn't work like the Grid, k52. Waldo built it. The usual rules do not apply. You couldn't do anything about it. So, what then? We've decided Waldo was a genius. You couldn't find him, but that didn't mean you couldn't kill him. That flu variant last year that swept over east Russia and Sinosiberia. Luck, a lot of folks were saying, because although mild it was extremely virulent. Not luck though. You needed it to be highly infectious so it'd get one person in particular, and fatal for him it was. Am I close?"