Grand Junction (84 page)

Tactical superiority is on their side, thinks Yuri. First, the configuration of the land: they are on higher ground than their assailants. It is a rule hundreds of thousands of years old, dating back to when primitive men attacked mammoths from the edges of pits where the animals had become trapped.

Second, the sun is at their backs. An even older rule, going back to the very earliest predatory animals. A double sun formed by the luminosity of the Ark and stretching to join that of the Vessel under construction inside its globe of golden fire. A double sun that will never set.

And finally, organization. The rule created by the Mankind from between the two Falls, the Mankind who made machinery into its
metaphysics
. On one side, Johnson Belfond and his generals command twenty-five compact brigades composed of five hundred infantrymen, as well as several groups of assault vehicles. It truly is an army.

On the other side, Sheriff Langlois has arranged his defenders into two lines: the first, unmoving, is formed of fifteen squadrons of HMV militia with twelve men each, crouched in shooting position at the crest of the hill. It is the last remnant of the Guard.

The second line of defenders is mobile, made up of the county police patrols remaining on Earth to uphold the Law of Bronze one last time, around thirty men and women, partners who know one another well, can move fast, know the Territory and its traps by heart. They are guerillas.

They can operate on foot or in their patrol cars.

The pairs of partners will operate autonomously, each determining its own function, maximizing its own effectiveness, doing its best. Each acting so as to be as deadly as possible.

They will be outnumbered a hundred to one.

This will truly be the last of all battles. The war of all wars.

This is how the Legend tells it.

The pairs form with the speed of a natural occurrence, like the mutation of a virus or the coming of an earthquake. An event that happens only when all the preliminary conditions it requires are already in place.

The two Frenchmen, Lecerf and Schutzberg. Sheriff Langlois with his main deputy, Slade Vernier, plus the dog Balthazar. Erwin Slovak and Scot Montrose. Bob Chamberlain and Fernand Claymore. Mary-Ann Beaulieu and Alex La Varende. Antonio Villalobos and Jane Delorette. Patrick Doyle, the Nova Scotian, with a mixed-blood from Manitoba named Lewis Duchenal. Virgil Fermont, the man who repaired the androids’ orbiter, with Cyril Clarke, a young recruit from the militia. And all the others, in their night-blue uniforms, their heads encircled by the gray halos of their Canadian Mounted Police–model hats. They don’t even belong to this century.

Yuri and Campbell have asked the sheriff’s permission to form a special team with Francisco Alpini, the soldier-monk from the Vatican, the last monk from a world where the Church itself was crucified.

“We’ll form a trinomial,” Campbell said. “It’s no less stable than a double structure—in geometry, at least.”

Langlois does not hesitate to allow the change in procedure. The Law is what counts. The Law they will uphold to the end.

“I don’t care, Campbell. Kill as many as you can, for as long as you can. That’s all I ask of you.”

This is exactly the kind of wish Campbell can fulfill better than anyone in the world.

Five days and five nights—which really form just a single, long, very long day, illuminated by the forming artificial star.

The War of All Wars.

That is what the Legend will call it.

Five days, five nights, one single
daynight
. But two coevolving realities.

There again is the question: How to narrate such a split event; how to describe two realities placed side by side and yet several infinities apart?

How to tell the story of what happens during each minute on the battlefield, what ushers in a true reunification of men with all the infinities they carry within them, what occurs in the sky above these same men who are killing and dying, as they have done all their lives, but now for the very last time?

The Legend retains only snippets. Bits and pieces of the machine. Traces, painstakingly collected. It is built, like everything that survives in the Territory, by using other forms of life. The Legend is a kind of autopsy.

The autopsy of an entire world.

The first day of combat is nothing but a long, thundering powder storm. This is what the Legend will call it: the Day of Powder. The Anome’s armies attempt several frontal assaults, which are all repulsed from the top of the Ridge. Langlois’ men run from one side to the other, sealing off the breaches, defending weak points, supporting a squadron in distress, counterattacking in places poorly defended by the enemy.
Hit and run
.

Yuri and Campbell are well trained; they did this an eternity ago, somewhere on a rocky plateau in Chaudière-Appalaches. They have done this all their lives.

Anyone who has not seen or heard the simultaneous firing of fifteen thousand guns, who has never seen or heard the noise, so ferociously organic, of war machines, cannot imagine what the Day of Powder was like.

In this twenty-four hour
daynight
alone, before the following dawn, Yuri and Campbell kill dozens of men. More than a hundred, very probably. When they snatch a brief pause, the sky is nothing more than an immense metastructure of light-matter in the process of being assembled; and at their feet, where once the buildings of the cosmodrome and the Hotel Laika stood, and Nexus Road, and Monolith Hills, all the way to the avenues in the north of the city, thousands of men are disappearing in the neoecology, disappearing in a vast pool of blood, the terminal simulation of organic liquids, which in turn melts into the mud of the immortal
world for which they are fighting and dying en masse. But Yuri and Campbell, like all the others, know that they are not really dying; the neoecology will recycle them in the great Anomian network, into barely different forms, recloning their destroyed organs, reindividuating their “persons” through the numeric collective of neohumanity.

Yuri and Campbell, and the other Guardians, know they will eventually be overwhelmed by sheer numbers. “Killing” their opponents will only postpone the inevitable. But this is the very last mission of the Law of the Territory: postponing the inevitable means gaining time. Gaining the time necessary for the Construction of the Vessel. After the antigravitational takeoff of the Vessel, the Territory-within-the-Territory will be protected once more. What counts is that at least one armed man can hold out until then.

Then, the Sanctuary will close again. The ontological vortex-border will be reestablished against the rest of the world. Against all of Anomanity, the immortality of the biological network, the permanently recycled Post-World.

So they have to kill a lot of them, for as long as they can, like the sheriff said. They have to kill as many of them as they can. Even though—and especially because—they are immortal.

The Legend says that the acts of heroism are countless on this Day of Guns, as it will come to be called. They will say everything is covered by the cloud of gunpowder that rises from the Ridge and from the north of the city of Grand Junction. They will say that all the extraordinary actions taken on this day are indistinguishable from one another. The Guardians of the Territory are careful to respect one of the most basic rules of the Law of Bronze: an isolated man is a weak man. A weak man is a man who can die. In a battle, a man who can die is a man who will die.

The same rule, put differently, explains that if there are two of you your chances for survival are not multiplied by two, but by at least two squared. One of the fundamental commandments when you are fighting in a state of numeric inferiority is to use tactical science to reverse the terms of the equation in a local sense. Your numeric inferiority is
global
. On the other hand, on the scale of several dozen or hundred men, in a very precise part of the operations theater, you can act so as to be more numerous and thus, momentarily, more powerful.

You have to strike fast, strike hard, strike deep.

Then repeat the maneuver in another part of the battlefield. Just as fast, just as hard, just as deep.

Hit and run
.

You are playing with space and time. You are endlessly moving, laterally and in-depth, obliquely, in waves; always acting on the weakest link, always at the most unpredictable time and in the most unforeseeable way. You force your adversary to run along a constantly changing front line, one whose metamorphoses you control. You break the enemy units into scattered groups, and you eliminate those groups one by one.

It is like a huge rodeo amid the thunder of the war machine. The very last machine, and the very first.

Small groups of county police target, isolate, and lure Anomian units into the various traps manned by the militia squadrons, which exterminate them in minutes while the same tactic is repeated at the other side of the front line. Sometimes a direct attack is organized against a very precise objective—a stock of munitions, a command post, a garage of automobiles. Strike. Disappear.
Hit and run
.

And at the center, the hard nucleus aims unceasing fire against all those, motorized or not, who try to scale the mesa.

The Day of Powder ends. The fourth day of the Construction of the Vessel dawns over the Territory. The Day of Incorporation.

The Legend will say that this is the moment when the new body of Link de Nova appears in the sky. The Legend will say that the Guardians of the Territory themselves are stupefied.

Link’s body is in the process of engulfing the hangar in which all his music was once produced. The Metal Machine Music in action, the Metal Machine Music becoming the very structure of the Light that sings Infinity. The hangar, a structure of hyperlight, transforms with the speed of an organ in formation. Into something else. Something that is infinitely
other
.

Something that can hardly be seen, but which, paradoxically, occupies the entire field of vision. Something that cannot be understood, but which consumes every last bit of cognition.

Something outrageously alive.

The Legend will call the twenty-four-hour stretch that follows the Day of Traps. It is the Day of the Men of the Territory. It is their day.

It is the great
daynight
of Yuri, and Campbell, and Francisco Alpini. Never have they killed so many men in so little time.

The Territory is alive in them. They are machines of the Territory. They are living traps: camouflage, ambushes, diversions, illusions, disinformation, surprise attacks, commando operations. It is their specialty. On foot and at the wheel of their Ford Super Duty, they torment the
flanks and isolated rear guards, luring entire companies into the traps manned by one or two militia squadrons, positioned in such a way as to inflict as much damage as possible in a minimum amount of time.

Sheriff Langlois wants to use the vanguard tactically. He redistributes his troops, saying: “They’ve lost a lot of men in their direct attacks on the Ridge. They’re trying to get around the obstacle. We need to wait for them in the right places and kill them. Kill as many as we can.”

The Law of Bronze is implacable. It will stay that way until the very last second.

Campbell adds: “We should especially try to get their officers and section leaders. Even in the form of a multicloned biological network, they need the organization necessary in every war, even this last one,
especially
this last one.
The chain of command
. That’s what we, the county cops, have to break.”

We, the cops
. Yuri barely blinks. They have become county cops. Just like the soldier-monk. All they are missing are the uniforms, but, Yuri realizes, they have been wearing those for a long time in their heads.

They are Territory Men. They are living traps. They are cops without uniforms—the most formidable kind of all.

So they kill. Even more than they did the day before.

Yuri and Campbell have patiently briefed the sheriff’s men on the right way to set their traps, like a machine interconnecting secret devices dedicated to death.

Welcome to the Territory. If your attack is going very well, it’s an ambush
.

The Anomians cannot see that their attack is going
too well
. They cannot understand that their attack is going so well because they have just entered
Ambush Territory
. They will realize it only at the moment when the Territory decides they can.

Kill the unit commanders. As many of them as possible. Kill the section leaders, especially the experienced ones. To kill a man is to kill two men at once—that is, who he is and who he might become.

Belfond and his commanders follow up their massive frontal attacks with a series of penetration and assault operations on the wings. Two mistakes in a row. Attacking the enemy’s strong point. Then scattering your forces while you still have a numerical advantage.

The best trap, Campbell often says, is the one built by the very person who falls into it.

The Day of Traps. The Day of Territory Machines. They are like the poisonous plants reincarnated.

They are winning, because they are gaining what there is to be gained. Time. The time necessary for the Construction of the Vessel. They will die—all of them, probably, but they will win the battle for time. They will win the very last war.

When twenty-four hours have passed, at the end of this Day of Traps, the sheriff sums up the operation so far.