“Hello, sir,” they say to Radmer in passing.
“Hi,” he says back. “You shouldn’t have come here.”
Then, looking out unhappily at the approaching glints, Radmer asks Bruno, “What of Highrock? Is Tillspar in enemy hands already?”
“I haven’t heard. But this army apparently followed the southern route, bypassing the Divide. So there may yet be reason to hope.”
“For now. How many are coming? Are we enough to hold this site against them?”
“Perhaps,” Bruno says, though even with Queendom equipment he doubts it very much. The odds are just tilted too steeply in the enemy’s favor. “But we may find greater advantage in moving onward.”
“A fighting retreat? I’ll begin the weapons training immediately.”
“Do that, yes,” Bruno says, “But first there’s something you should know. This machine here”—he waves a hand at the bronze tower-top sticking out of the sand—“is in contact with at least three collapsiters, somewhere in the lower Kuiper Belt, just above Neptune’s orbit. A bit of Nescog survives!”
“How is that possible?” asks an incredulous Radmer. “We would have known, long ago.”
Before the Shattering, yes. Even before the Murdered Earth cracked and fell in itself and breathed a last puff of air from the lungs of its dying billions. Curses, mostly, with Bruno’s name figuring prominently among them.
“Indeed we would,” Bruno agrees. “And something as complex and fragile as a collapsiter doesn’t simply reconstitute itself. Perhaps the hand of God has intervened on our behalf, or perhaps the hand of Man, if Lune is not the last bastion of us after all. It hardly matters at this late hour, General. My point is simply that I can take us out of here. Swiftly and without a trace.”
“To where?” asks Radmer.
And here Bruno cannot help grinning, for there’s nothing more just in this world than turning a villain’s own dirty tricks against him. “The survival of a fax machine for this long without maintenance is surprising, but hardly incredible. It’s use that wears them down. And the gates are just as durable, so it’s reasonable to suppose they’re intact. I’d be more surprised if they weren’t.”
“So, what? We fax out and back? Use the speed-of-light delays as a kind of time bomb, and step out of the plate ten or twelve hours after we left?”
Impatiently, Bruno tries to run a hand through his hair, but bangs up against the dome of his helmet instead. “Listen, all right? Ours is not the only fax machine. We’ve assumed another all along. In Astaroth, yes? In the Glimmer King’s own presumed fortress, somewhere in the vicinity of the south pole. It will take hours, yes, for our signal to travel to the outer system and back. But when it does, we can step right to the heart of this world’s problems. And solve them.”
“Oh,” says Radmer. He seems stunned to blankness by that remark, but slowly he recovers himself, and finally matches Bruno’s grin. “That sounds a bit dangerous, old man. Are you sure you’re up to the task?”
“As sure as the sun shines, my boy. I’ve penetrated a fearsome lair or two in my day. And I hadn’t the Dolceti with me then, nor you, nor the element of surprise. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a three-thousand-year-old telecom network to fix.”
Alas, this proves more difficult than he’d assumed at first. The collapsiters are clearly pinging and responding to pings, but sorting through the fax machine’s comm logs, he’s baffled at first by the nonsense he finds there. He built the Nescog, and while the passage of time has bleached out the specific details of its comm protocol, he does at least recognize his own work when he sees it. And this is something… else.
This isn’t Nescog at all, but some derivative coding system built upon it. When? By whom? Could it be the fabled Shadow Network of the Fatalist ghouls? A hundred gigatons of collapsium could not be hidden in the Old Solar System—every collapsiter was known and tracked—but a parasitic protocol running secretly in the margins… Well, it isn’t impossible, but it still doesn’t explain how dead collapsiters have turned back into live ones. And anyway something in him doubts that explanation. It fails Occam’s Razor; it’s too complex. Something else is going on.
Alas, the mystery will have to wait for another time; with a few minutes of study he’s able to decipher the important features of the log file, and construct an access request that will race out ahead of their own corporeal images, logging them on to the mystery network just in time to be routed through it, and also scanning for additional gates and logging them on, involuntarily. A hostile takeover of the Glimmer King’s fax. Or so he hopes; if the process fails, they’ll bounce right back here again, to face the robot army.
“They’re coming!” someone shouts down to him from outside.
Well, yes. That goes without saying. Of the fax he asks, “Does this transaction look valid to you?”
“I have never seen one like it, Sire,” the fax replies, from a speaker grown adjacent to its print plate. “But it appears to be a valid construction.”
“Then implement it, under full Royal Override.”
“Doing so.”
“Architect!” he shouts then through the open doorway. “We’re ready! Start sending people through!”
But something’s wrong; there’s a rising din and clatter out there. The battle has begun, or rather resumed. Blast. He races outside, prepared for the worst, and sees pretty much what he expects: the site is overrun. Already there are dozens of robots down and dozens more swarming among the Dolceti, and there are hundreds pouring over the nearby dunes. Presumably thousands racing upward through the dune field, out of sight for the moment but not planning on staying that way for long.
“Radmer!” he shouts, blasting his voice over the loudspeakers. “Bordi! Get the Dolceti through the fax!”
“I’m not going in there,” someone protests, over the grunt and clatter of combat and the death screams of household robots.
“You’re not staying here,” someone else remarks. And a third voice—Mathy’s—adds, “I’m not going first, I’ll tell you that much.”
Bruno pauses to smash down a pair of attackers, and then says, “General Radmer will go first. Then Sidney Lyman and his men, for they’ll know better what to expect on the other side.” He pauses again to rescue a fallen comrade, then continues, “Next will go Natan and Zuq and Mathy, and all the rest of you, and”—he fires an energy blast at a nearby hilltop, scattering the robots there in a burst of sand and sundered wellstone, and sorely depleting his energy reserves once again—“and finally Bordi.”
“You’re not going last,” Bordi says, while laying about him with the blitterstaff in decisive blindsight strokes. “Not if I have anything to say about it!”
“You do not,” Bruno answers, “for only I can seal the gates behind us, and prevent this army from pouring through in pursuit.”
“Good luck,” says Radmer, on his way down into the pit and through the doorway. Lyman and the other Olders follow behind, murmuring similar sentiments, and then the Dolceti are making their retreat, stepping backward into the pit while hundreds of robots swarm in after them. It’s dicey for a few moments when the sheer weight of attackers thrusts Mathy and two other Dolceti away from the doorway. It fills with robots, which pour inside like a fluid. And then it’s worse, when the three of them are lifted off their feet and hoisted into the air, faceup, struggling upon the upraised hands of dozens upon dozens of robots. Bruno does what he can, firing wirebombs into the fray at the rate of fifty per second, but his aim is hasty and there are just too many targets moving too quickly, and his charge and munitions are low. Mathy and the others don’t know the power of their suits, their weapons. Of the several moves they could make right now, few are obvious to an untrained person.