To Crush the Moon (27 page)

“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.

Bitterly, Bruno makes an executive decision, and allows the robots to carry the three Dolceti away. He must concentrate on clearing that doorway, and holding it, or
all
these people will be lost, and their world along with them.

“Mathy!” someone shouts in tones of pained helplessness. And then, on the heels of that, “Stupid sow. Keep your feet!”

But the flood has taken them; they're out of sight now, out of mind, and Bruno is using every milligram of martial skill he can summon, to drive Bordi and the four remaining Dolceti forward through the impervium swarm, which gleams and flickers in the light of sunset.

Another Dolceti goes down and is swept away. Then another, and then two, and finally it's just Bruno and Bordi in the doorway, with shattered robots piling higher and higher around them, threatening to block the way. Bruno shouts, “Go! Quickly!”

The diamond crown is knocked off his head and spins away into the heaving robot stream. As Bordi falls back into the tower room, fighting his way through the robots still inside, Bruno is forced to acknowledge that he has never, in fact, faced a battle as dire as this. The attackers are not well armed or armored, but in such numbers there's little he can do to stop them. Soon enough his suit charge will be zero again, and like so many voracious termites they'll be carrying
him
away.

He's out of time, and he can't spare a glance to see whether Bordi has gotten through safely or not. To the walls he shouts, “Fax! Royal Lockout! Pass no objects save myself! Walls! Release all fields and power down permanently!”

“Acknowledged,” the fax replies calmly, unaware of His Majesty's peril and possibly incapable of understanding it. “Immediately, Sire,” say the walls, which go dark, reverting to blank wellstone. And then the sides of the sand pit slide inward, carrying live robots down with them and burying several. Bruno retreats inside.

And that's that: no one but he will ever use this place again, for travel or medicine or resupply. The Royal Lockouts and Overrides were built into the Queendom's wellstone at the deepest levels. Subverting them had always been possible, but insanely difficult. The sands will reclaim this place in minutes or hours, and since Bruno does not expect to pass this way again, the sands and the lockouts will remain. One more treasure of Lune consumed for the sake of this stupid war.

Along with the two human patterns still stored within it. He thinks of them suddenly: the final victims of the Queendom's demise. Should he wake them amid all this clamor? To die afresh, without the least understanding of why? No. Better to let them sleep. Better to worry about his own skin for a little while longer!

The trick, now, is to battle the rushing tide of sand and robots, to protect his front and his back without actually whacking the fax machine with his blitterstaff. Because that would kill it even for him.

There's a bad moment when the robots team up to high-low him again, tumbling him off his feet. He feels strong hands on his ankles, preparing to lift him, to carry him away! But with the wellcloth of his suit still active, he manages to call up a slippery exterior and wriggle free, leaping and sliding for the fax plate ahead of him. His momentum is sufficient—just barely!—to carry him through.

The plate crackles blue for a moment and then falls forever silent.

chapter twenty-four

in which the fortress of a
traveler is breached

Once through the gate, the first thing Bruno
notices is absolute silence. There's no battle on this side, no scream and crash. The second thing is the trio of bright yellow Dolceti crowded in front of him: Bordi and Natan and Zuq. And since he's still slipping along the floor on his hands and knees, the third thing he notices is the tussle of bodies falling all around him like tenpins, their blindsight reflexes lacking the time or the space to operate.

“Oof,” says Zuq.

But the Olders, crowded just ahead in this narrow passageway, are still on their feet, poised at a corner and looking out.

“They don't see us,” Sidney Lyman is murmuring.

“They see,” Radmer corrects. “They don't react.”

“Excuse me,” Bruno says to the Dolceti. He wipes away the suit's slippery skin program and staggers to his feet, pleased to find himself still alive. Successfully teleported, yes, for the first time in millennia, and under circumstances far from ideal. He steps over the men while they're attempting, in the unfamiliar bulk of their armor, to rise. At the corner he taps Nick and Brian out of his way, and has a look.

The room is full of robots.

Specifically, it's full of unarmed robots, engaged in the task of filling buckets with sand. And filling smaller vials with measured amounts of other substances: black carbon and white, shiny metals, poured from the sort of long-beaked glass orbs. Finally, the vials are emptied into the buckets, which are placed on a slow-moving conveyor. The light is a sickly yellow-green, from phosphor-coated electric bulbs set in sconces along the walls. Like many on this world, the walls are interlocking blocks of cut stone. The whole scene looks like nothing so much as an ancient alchemist's workshop.

Presently, a pair of robots fetch one heavy bucket each, and begin walking toward the fax machine. With his staff at the ready, Bruno sidles out of the way, while Radmer and Sidney press themselves against the wall, turning their suits to full inviz. But indeed, these robots take no notice of their workshop's invaders, simply crowding around them on their way to the fax.

Then the buckets are hurled right through the print plate, which crackles and sputters in accepting them. From the ozone smell alone, Bruno can tell this machine is on its last legs, relying heavily on error correction to smooth over its many burned-out faxels. Under other circumstances, this might be disturbing; how much damage and drift did they all incur, in printing themselves through that used-up old plate? But under
these
circumstances, it hardly matters.

Presently, the plate crackles again and a shiny new robot emerges, carrying perfect copies of the hurled-in buckets. It isn't gleaming mirror-bright, though, or anyway most of it isn't. Instead, its impervium hull is surrounded—except on the joints and sensory pits—by an outer layer of glassy ceramic painted in green and brown camouflage spots. Once free of the fax, it steps around the Dolceti and follows its shinier brothers out into the workshop, where another robot hands it a rifle—not a sword but a
rifle
, with a bayonet fixed at the business end. And then it walks out through an open archway and vanishes down a corridor.

“Well,” says Radmer, “here, as promised, is the source of all our trouble. They seem to be printing one every three minutes. That's what, twenty-four hundred robots per Luner day? More than enough for the task at hand.”

“It's not the source,” says Bordi, eyeing the print plate with superstitious awe. “This is just a clever tool. The
source
is the Glimmer King himself.”

“True,” Radmer admits.

To which Bruno says, “We shall deal with him soon enough.”

He pulls a wellstone sketchplate—a proper one this time!—out of his pocket, and begins programming sensor algorithms. He can't simply interrogate the walls, for the walls are merely stone. But he can analyze the sound waves reflecting and refracting through the building's corridors. He can measure cosmic radiation and its secondary cascades to gauge the amount and type of material between floor and sky. He can measure heat and vibration, light and magnetic fields. He can even, given enough time, image the neutrino absorption of the structure and build a literal image in three dimensions. That process could take months, though, so he leaves it running in the background and forgets about it. Even without it, a crude sketch of the building begins, slowly, to emerge.

Meanwhile, though, two more robots have been printed, issued rifles, and sent on their way.

“They've given up on swords,” Zuq observes.

“Worse than that,” says Bruno, “they've developed a blit-resistant outer shell, insulating and nonprogrammable. Look at this, it's glass. Tempered, reinforced, camouflage-painted glass. We'll need to crack through it before the blitterstaves can do their work. Which is troubling, because it means they've been analyzing the battle in Shanru.”

“Their first real defeat,” says Radmer. “Their work has gotten more difficult as they've moved northward, but they've just thrown more hardware at it. They've never needed to shift tactics before.”

“Well, they're clearly capable of it; we've only been away for ten hours, and already they're responding. Surprise is not entirely ours, though they don't seem to expect us
here
.”

“Right,” says Bordi. “So let's move. Let's finish this while we can. They've seized samples of this armor”—he pinches his own shoulder for emphasis—“and you can bet they'll soon be wrapping
that
around their soldiers. I'd give it a day or two at the very most.”

“Indeed,” says Bruno. “An excellent point. Astaroth's military expenditures clearly need to be capped.” That said, he heads back toward the fax machine with purposeful strides and raps its print plate hard with the butt of his staff. The effect is immediate; it flickers, coughs out a cloud of glittering dust, and then darkens and fades like the eyes of a dying beast.

Still another Queendom treasure removed from the game board that is Lune. It's a cultural apocalypse and a damned shame, but Bruno can see no other way forward. The past is not quite dead, and that's the problem.

Unfortunately, while the arrival of back-door intruders didn't raise any alarms, the interruption of power through the fax machine does. Almost immediately, electric bells are ringing throughout the fortress, and the only clear advantage is that this fills in a lot of echo data on Bruno's map. He's seen a fortress or two in his day, and a fair number of palaces, and he knows a throne room when he sees one. And if this king is not on his throne—which seems unlikely, given all that Bruno knows of his character—then he may well be in the apartments behind them, or in one of the hidey-holes nearby.

Bruno gestures and points, then calls out over the clattering bells, “Look for the Glimmer King one floor up, and thirty meters
that
way. I shall lead.”

“No,” says Radmer. “No way. Men, kindly surround him. Protect him with your lives. Let's get him there in one piece!”

And with that, their luck has officially run dry; a sea of glass-skinned robotic troopers pours through the workshop's entrance, with rifles aimed and triggers already halfway pulled. Unsynchronized chemical explosions fire up and down the line, hurling projectiles at the suited Olders and Dolceti.

They really can slap bullets in flight,
Bruno sees with wonder, watching Zuq and Bordi—with movements almost too quick to follow—knock away one projectile each. The Olders, for their part, favor a quieter strategy of simply staying out of the firing arcs. It's like every rifle has a laser beam projecting out of it, showing where its bullets will strike; Radmer and Sidney and the others simply watch these invisible beams and calmly step around them, mostly with very small movements. But it's not enough. Bruno sees right away that both methods will be overwhelmed by the sheer number of guns and bullets in play.

And it's worse than that, for the projectiles are no mere bullets of lead, but needle-sharp cones of some material sandwich that's both charged and highly magnetic. On impact, they pierce a little way into the wellcloth armor and then let go their charge in spiraling bursts. It's a crude attack as such things go, but it
will
damage wellstone fibers. Enough hits like that and the suits will develop dead spots, through which these darts should eventually penetrate. And the robots' rate of fire is impressive; in the first five seconds of the engagement Bruno himself—at the protected center—is struck by ten or twenty.

Still, once the initial shock has worn off the Olders and Dolceti are on the offensive again, pressing forward with blitterstaves, with wirebombs and laser light. The new robots aren't
that
tough, and they wither and crumple under the attack. Which is, in its own way, a bad thing for the human side, because it saves the robots the trouble of moving out of the way when they're out of ammunition. Those bayonets are cute, but against two centimeters of live wellcloth they're of little use. Bullets are the real danger here, and the hail of them continues. By the time the men are out in the corridor and striking for a stairwell up ahead, their suits are already showing signs of wear.

The darts must have some poison upon them as well, for on the stairs themselves, Bruno watches one penetrate Sidney Lyman's armor. Lyman flinches and gasps and then crumples to his knees, and is grabbed and hoisted and carried up and away by strong robot hands. There are enemies both behind them and in front, and at the top of the stairs it's Nick Valdi who yelps and collapses and tumbles backward into certain doom. And then in another hallway it's Natan's turn, and his end is uglier than the others, for it involves a spray of bright arterial blood on the inside of his helmet dome. Bruno watches it all through his rearview mirrors, and mourns.

But next they're at the entrance to the throne room and fighting their way inside, dodging and slapping a storm of projectiles. Bruno even swats one aside himself, feeling the buzz of its approach and reacting without thought.

And then they're in. Glass windows look out on a set of low hills, illuminated by evening twilight, and if this truly is the south pole, locked in permanent shadow, then it's always evening here. Or else—Bruno hardly dares to think it—it's always morning. Each moment beginning the world afresh.

The throne itself is a predictably gaudy affair of golden arms and lion's feet and a great sunburst disc spreading out behind. But there's no Glimmer King in it, just another robot. Or is it?

Amid the broken bodies of a dozen determined attackers, Brian Romset, the last of Lyman's Olders, goes down in a mess of his own guts and hacked-off limbs. But Bruno scarcely notices; his eyes are on that throne. On the robot on that throne. The robot which has no iron box welded to the side of its head, but rather a crown of gold soldered round its brow. The robot whose scratched, worn, battered hull bespeaks long years of wear and tear, and something more, for ordinary robots never show that kind of damage pattern.

Indeed, it's the clear fingerprint of an emancipated 'bot, left to find its own way in the world. And there is something chillingly familiar about this one, about the tilt of its head and the lazy dangle of its arms. Bruno's worst fear—his prime suspicion—has proven out.

“Hugo!” he cries to the figure on the throne. “Stop this, I beseech you. Royal Override: stand down and await instructions!”

And just like that, the defending robots are frozen in their tracks. Zuq takes the opportunity to smash another one down with a blow to its exposed armpit, but he sees Bruno's glare, and does nothing further. Which is good, because Bruno knows full well that his overrides have no power over this seated creature. He has merely intrigued it.

“Hugo,” he says, stepping toward the throne in a daze of sorrow.

But with its blank, mouthless face the robot answers, “Why do you . . . call us that, Father? Do you not recognize us?”

Bruno pauses, while hope and fear war within him. “Bascal?”

“Don't be a fool,” says Radmer beside him. “What is this thing? Where is the King of Barnard, who has written so much villainy across our landscape?”

The robot's laughter is cool, unfriendly, more than a little unhinged. Its face is turned exactly toward Bruno, ignoring Radmer, ignoring everything. “You needn't act so . . . shocked, Father. Our condition—my condition—did not arise by accident. Or had you . . . forgotten?”

Indeed, Bruno had not. That lapse of judgment—a desecration of all that human beings hold dear—is woven deeply through the tatters of his conscience. Pouring a copy of his tyrant son into the
only
copy of his pet robot!

“This
is
the King of Barnard,” Bruno says, amazed at the weight of his sin now that it confronts him face-to-face. Poor Lune, to suffer so greatly for his mistakes! “Parts of him, anyway.”

He'd known it was a bad idea even at the time, but he was very curious to see what would happen. And he'd missed his Poet Prince, yes, the last link to his old life. He'd longed to speak with that boy again, if only for an hour, a minute, a
word
. Memories can be edited! There was some etiological and mnemonic and engrammatic surgery involved, far more elegant than a simple cut and meld. The approach was sound and carefully—if hastily—reasoned.

But Bruno was no surgeon, and the road to hell is paved with careful plans. The effort had been furtive because it would find no support if revealed. He had no friends or relations left; he worked alone, in secret, as far from the ashes of civilization as
Boat Gods
' fuel supply could safely carry him. Which wasn't far. And the result had been more horrific than even a pessimist would predict; he'd shut the monster down barely five minutes into the experiment.

“You have proved yourself unworthy of even my . . . disdain,” it had told him, with halting but vehement passion. “Beware, for I'm incapable of fear.” It had said other things, too, of a vile and personal nature. And the worst of it was that it
sounded
exactly like Bascal. It
moved
exactly like Hugo. It was the perfect synthesis of the two, and the conversation had begun well enough, with prancing bows and twirls and snippets of spontaneous verse. “Ah, to exist! To have a . . . form to which the soul might cling! A clever . . . thing, and sorely missed.”