Man Vs Machine Martin H Greenberg

Prev Next

Acknowledgments

Coleman

Fawcett

Beaulieu

Rabe

Andrew Swann

Servant of Death

By Jane Lindskold and Fred Saberhagen

Jane Lindskold is the author of eighteen novels and over fifty short stories. Although most of her fiction is fantasy, she loves science fiction and is delighted when the opportunity arises to write about space ships, computers, and alien worlds. Visit her atwww.janelindskold.com .

Fred Saberhagen has been writing science fiction and fantasy for somewhat more than forty years. Besides the Berserker® series he is known for his Swords and Lost Swords series, and his Dracula series. His most recent publication is Ardneh’s Sword, connecting the Swords series and Empire of the East. He lives in Albuquerque New Mexico, with his wife, Joan Spicci.

“This base is under attack! This base is under attack!”

The hollow, booming voice from the loudspeakers jarred Vivian Travers to her feet and started her moving across her private laboratory to where her customized battle armor hung in its rack. Her hands were in contact with the cool metal almost before her conscious mind had fully registered what the voice was saying.

There had of course been practice alerts during the several centuries since this research base, on the large moon of the planet Lake, had become her regular residence—but far too few such drills, in her judgement.

With the skill of long practice Vivian had already opened the front of the armor, stepped inside, and leaned back, pressing against key contact points. Leads automatically inserted themselves at various points, cutting through clothing where necessary. The sensation was uncomfortable, but Vivian ignored it, reaching for her carbine even as the front of the armor closed and latched. This is not a drill! Berserkers sighted approaching this base. All hands to battle stations. Repeat!

This is not a drill.

“And why shouldn’t they be approaching,” Vivian muttered inside her helmet, closing the door of her private lab behind her, locking it out of habit. “When the defenses have been allowed to go to hell?

Damned politicians!” But as she did not transmit, there was no reply. She hurried down the corridor, feeling rather than hearing as hatches and bulkheads sealed behind and beneath her throughout the base. Lake Moon Research Base tunneled deep into the rock of its name-sake moon. Its overall design was a good one. Vivian knew. She had created it herself over a hundred years before.

Vivian’s battle station was in the main weapons bay, where she was assigned to damage control and back-up gunnery. If berserkers were attacking, both would likely be needed—if anyone survived to need anything at all.

The sprawling base housed not quite four hundred people, mostly researchers and their immediate families. The bulk of the moon around them was naturally devoid of any native life, and so were the planets, moons, comets, and asteroids that made up the Pinball System, in which Lake was the fifth planet from the sun. Even the “lakes” for which the fifth planet was named were devoid of life, mere pools of stagnate acid, which were slowly corroding the minerals upon which they rested. Moving past other suited, hurrying human figures through the cavernous main weapons bay, Vivian began to run a check on one of the gun batteries.

“Yes,” she muttered to herself again. “Why should they not have decided to attack?”

The berserkers were programmed to exterminate life in all its forms, wherever and whenever they could come to grips with it. Created by a race that the Earth-descended version of Galactic humanity had dubbed the Builders, the berserkers had been forged as the ultimate weapon in the Builders’ war against the Red Race. Some flaw in their programing had led to the berserkers annihilating not only the Red Race but the Builders as well. After many thousands of years, if one was inclined to include microscopic creatures in the tally, the berserkers had expunged from the Galaxy uncountable billions of what they called life-units. But their quest for the perfect order of death was far from ended. Rebuilding, reconstructing, redesigning themselves as the years passed, the berserkers came in a variety of forms, ranging from bipedal robots to immobile data-processing boxes, from machines the size of a small dog to the pair of hulking dreadnoughts that now, according to the latest announcement from the loudspeakers, were bearing down upon Lake Moon.

As she hurried to her battle station, Vivian had tuned her helmet speakers to bring her command chatter. Now she heard General Gosnick, the base commander, saying calmly, “Launch individual fighters. What we think are the appropriate enemy schematics are being beamed to your control panels. This pair look like older models, and they’re pretty badly beaten up. We may be able to disable them before they can close to effective striking range of the base.”

“Understood.” That would be the voice of the relatively junior officer in tactical command of the squadron just now launching.

In mental communication with her own armor, Vivian called up on her visor an image of what the base’s sensors were picking up. The information appeared both as a direct visual image and as a stream of data overlaying the visual. She was studying it when General Gosnick’s voice came over her private channel.

“Vivian, do you concur with my analysis of the situation?”

“I do.” With a thought, she zoomed in for a tighter inspection of the hull of the marginally closer of the two approaching behemoths. “Definitely old damage. Judging from the angle of the scatter pattern, I’m wondering if it may possibly be even older than berserker contact with Earth-descended humans.”

It was an eerie thought, that these two hulks, survivors of some ancient battle, might have been struggling through the Galaxy in normal space for millennia, perhaps trying to free themselves from some entangling nebula of gas or dust.

“However that may be, our fighters should be able to take them out. And maybe after this we can get some serious updating of our defenses.”

“Maybe.” The general did not sound too optimistic. For a long time, political complications had blocked progress in that direction.

Vivian went on: “I’m going to transmit a series of suggested targets . . . with your permission.”

She remembered to add the last, although General Gosnick did not tend to be a stickler for command hierarchy as some of his predecessors had been. The Templars often rotated injured officers to Lake Moon, where they could continue to make useful contributions while recuperating. General Gosnick had lost both legs, and his metabolism was proving resistant to accepting bio-linked prosthetics. His role on Lake Moon rotated on a regular basis between that of administrator and test subject. He was accustomed to taking suggestions, even direct orders, from Vivian Travers, who, by reason of both her specialized skills and seniority, occupied a unique position in the base community. Damaged as they were, the berserkers proved to be not totally ineffective as opponents, though they never managed to attack the base directly. When the battle was over, the enemy reduced to drifting chunks of relatively harmless hardware, interspersed with glowing incandescent clouds, several of the fighters needed to be towed back to base. Three pilots were going to be very glad that the hospital was not merely on the cutting edge of medical technology—it was where that edge was honed. On standing down from her battle station, Vivian went to the hangar bay and put in several hours consulting with the workers and robots repairing the damaged fighters. Since working on the fighters was easier in minimal gee, and since low-gee was easier to adapt to in her suit, she left it on. Cobalt blue, with a surface texture that resembled lacquer, her battle armor stood out among the more utilitarian equipment worn by those around her. Vivian didn’t miss the occasional envious gaze or covetous sigh as she extruded various auxiliary limbs as needed.

Make your own, she thought cheerfully. I did.

Consulting with the crew chief in charge of repairs on the fighters, Vivian took note of a set of peculiar small piercings on the hull of one of the small craft. Four little holes, a couple of centimeters apart, in one short row, and another similar row of four about two meters away. The crew chief speculated that the piercings had been caused by some sort of mine, one that threw shrapnel, but that the shrapnel had not been able to do sufficient damage.

General Gosnick glided over to join them. He was not wearing his prosthetics, which would have been a distraction, but was riding in a state-of-the art chair that doubled as body armor if needed. Its lower profile gave him an advantage when viewing the fighter’s undercarriage.

“Odd that shrapnel would have hit in such neat lines.”

“Maybe,” a new speaker said, coming up to join them, “what made those marks was an automated mine rather than shrapnel. The mine might have tried to anchor, but failed and dropped off. We’d never have noticed one more explosion among all the rest.”

The new arrival went by the name Brother Angel. He belonged to a militant subcult of the Templars. There he had served with such distinction that the envious joked that if he wore all his medals, he could dispense with any other form of armor. Although synthetic skin had been grafted on, Brother Angel still showed the ravages of the complex surgeries that had been done to save his sight and hearing. Pious, devoted, and apparently as focused on the destruction of the berserkers as they were on the destruction of all Life, he had been repeatedly frustrated in his desire to return to active duty by sporadic irregularities that cropped up in the functioning of his new sensory apparatus.

Doubtless, Vivian thought sourly, Brother Angel is thrilled to have the action come to him.

“That’s an interesting suggestion, Brother Angel,” General Gosnick said. “I’d be interested in seeing the specs for such a mine. This might not be the only wave in this attack.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Brother Angel said.

Vivian excused herself. She headed back to her quarters, still wearing her armor, although she’d opened the face plate on the helm. She might first have dropped her armor off at the lab, but at the moment the shortest path to a hot shower and a meal took priority.

She strolled through “her” hub, waving at a few neighbors who were gathered in the garden area of the central residential plaza, sharing drinks and doubtless speculating about the berserker attack. A bit of excitement for a change, and no serious harm done—that seemed to be the flavor of the remarks she caught. She waved and promised to join them when she’d had a chance to clean up. Vivian’s quarters were grouped along their own corridor off one of the residential hubs. Most of the residential suites were arranged in about the same way, as it facilitated sealing off an area in case of mechanical failure or contagious illness. It also guaranteed that the residents would have a certain amount of privacy, a valuable commodity in an enclosed and isolated social system. Thinking ahead to the pleasures of warm water followed by whiskey and light conversation, Vivian almost bumped into the service robot that was coming around one of the blind bends in what amounted to her private hallway. The serbot was shorter than she was—shorter than most humans—perhaps a meter and a third where its upper portion rose like the head and chest of a centaur above the multilimbed barrel that scuttled along on a variety of adaptable appendages.

“Excuse m—,” Vivian began automatically, then stopped herself. First, it was ridiculous to apologize to a service robot, any more than to a table or a chair. Second, there was no way a properly functioning robot should have come that close to hitting her. Buffers were preprogramed, and the corridor was plenty wide enough that, even allowing for the relative bulk of her battle armor, the serbot should have had plenty of clearance.

She was about to demand that the serbot submit to inspection when she realized that what now blocked her return to the hub only superficially resembled a serbot—or rather, it would resemble a serbot to anyone who did not look at it with a critical and experienced eye. To Vivian, who was both critical and experienced, the differences were glaring.

Sheer, deadly terror hit her so hard that had she not been encased in her battle armor, it was likely her legs would have buckled. She broke into a sweat and backed against the corridor wall, trembling with fear.

When she could force herself to think clearly, all the evidence needed was there in plain sight. Joints and support struts were too flexible, too solid. The central chassis was armored, although the armor was nearly concealed by the outer carapace. The optic lenses were of a model capable of seeing into the infrared and ultraviolet. The manipulative digits were too numerous and included a tentacle-like appendage that extruded from the base of the thing’s wrist. Finally, no serbot had ever been armed, but this one had raised one limb, revealing a glowing fingertip that had precisely the look of the muzzle of a charged energy carbine.

The mysterious piercings on one of the fighters’ hulls had been just about the right size to have been made by the claws that ended four of the ostensible serbot’s limbs.

Vivian realized in horror that the two battered dreadnaughts, the feint at a full-scale attack on the base, had all been to accomplish this . . .

Standing before her, holding a weapon on her, was a berserker unit, undoubtedly an assassin model. It had somehow hitchhiked in on that fighter, possibly for the sole purpose of killing her, the genius inventor who kept piling up new weapons for the human side. Why, then, wasn’t it getting on with the job?

Vivian had enough control of herself now that she could scream for help. Surely it was her duty to yell, alert the base. But she remembered her neighbors, unarmored, unarmed but for the refreshments in their hands, and knew that calling them would be a summons to Death. There must be another way . . . Before she could think of one, the berserker spoke. “You are life-unit Vivian Travers.”

Its voice was not, as was often the case with the death machines, a hodgepodge of human utterances spliced together to create a discordant and frightening sound. This berserker spoke in a pleasant and even melodious voice, possibly adapted from that of one of the human traitors—the goodlife—who for reasons as varied as human perversity joined sides with the killer machines.

“I am,” she agreed.

“You are the life-unit who created Lancelot.”

Vivian blinked. Lancelot was the code name for what had been—depending on her mood and how she chose to look at it—either her greatest success or her greatest failure. Some had termed Lancelot a type of battle armor. Others, focusing on its capacity for interstellar flight, had termed it a fighter craft. Vivian had thought of Lancelot as a miracle, the means of transforming a soldier into a perfect knight. However, Lancelot had proven to be Siege Perilous, as well as armor and mount, and had rejected most of those who donned it. Only one had lived up to the promise and he . . .1

Vivian shook her head, putting memory aside. It was surprisingly easy to do so. The glowing fingertip, along with the promise of claws sharp enough to rend the hull of a space fighter, were wonderful at concentrating the attention.

1For the tale of Lancelot and the one who could use it to its full capacity, see the novel Berserker Man by Fred Saberhagen.

“I did create Lancelot.”

“You are the greatest artificer of all humanity, but alas here you are isolated on this small rock, effectively deprived of honor, of all the great rewards you might justly have expected from your fellow humans. Am I not correct?”

Vivian was confused. “I have not ‘been deprived.’ I chose to come here. This base is a secret. Therefore, so is my work.”

The berserker was unfazed. “I have come to offer you an opportunity to continue your career as a servant of death.”

“Servant of death? I am no goodlife! I serve no berserker.”

Somehow the sweat inside her armor seemed to have turned cold. The life support continued to wick moisture away efficiently.

“But you have already served us,” it told her gently.

“I . . . what?”

“You are the greatest artificer of all humanity,” the berserker intoned with what Vivian could have sworn was a note of reverence in its voice. “Your weapons have prolonged the war considerably, led many to fight berserkers when otherwise they might have fled. Your armor has shielded so that ships and warriors thought they could join battle against us and live. But for your actions, much life would have been destroyed, but also because of you, much life—and that often of those who are bravest and finest among your kind—has been taken. Therefore, we already classify you with us—a servant of death.”

“You are insane.”

“No,” the berserker denied with perfect calm. “I can give proofs, show where the death toll was much higher because your creations led to battle being joined.”

While it addressed her, the berserker had slowly reconfigured itself so that it was no longer oriented after the fashion of the squat centaurian serbot but instead stood nearly as tall as she, although its lower body rested on four limbs rather than her two. Two other limbs showed the stubby ends of what appeared to be carbine barrels, both aimed squarely upon her.

Between them a central panel glowed, becoming a screen across which marched symbols of logic and mathematics.

“The Battle of Pelam Deeps,” the berserker said,

“where your improved form of the hydrogen lamp was used for ship power. We were halted there, but at the cost of . . .”

“Stop!” Vivian said imperiously. “I am not interested in your rationalizations. You said you came to offer me an opportunity. What I assume you are offering—when shorn of all the psychological claptrap—is an opportunity to turn goodlife or die.”

The berserker did not disagree. “I offer the creator of Lancelot an even greater challenge.”

It was time, and long past time, for Vivian to make an all-out effort to warn the base of the killer among them. Even with whatever protection her armor might afford, it was far from certain that she would succeed in such an effort. And Vivian had already prolonged this conversation enough to open herself to charges of goodlife activity.

Even so, she heard her own voice ask, “And what is that task?”

“To create an android indistinguishable from a human, one that can bear within it a berserker mind.”

“Ahh.” Vivian felt thunderstruck, almost more astonished than when she had realized a berserker had trapped her right outside the door of her own home. One mysterious limitation under which the berserkers labored was that they had never managed to create an android that could pass as an ED

human, or even a convincing animal. As far as any human knew, they had never even come close. Talk about a challenge . . .

“Your new laboratory already awaits you. I promise you, it so far exceeds the facility you have here as your own genius surpasses the minds of the life-units who deny you your just recognition.”

Despite herself, Vivian Travers felt a thrill the like of which she had not felt for many decades, certainly since the days when she had created Lancelot. What the enemy offered would truly be a challenge worthy of her skills—and think what she would learn about the berserkers themselves! In order for Vivian to bridge the gap between whatever device she might create and the berserkers’ mechanical natures, they would need to open themselves to her. She would learn their most intimate secrets, acquire the knowledge human generals had wished for since humanity’s first encounter with the killer machines.

“Create an android berserker,” she murmured.

“That is what I have said. I am equipped with devices to enable me to read with some degree of accuracy the level of a human’s emotional response. I can tell you are interested in this challenge.”

A hot swell of anger rose in Vivian’s heart at the thought of how her “interest,” her curiosity, her intellect could be turned against her. Perhaps the berserker sensed the change in her emotions, but it moved too late. Berserkers were swifter than humans by as much as machines could out-speed living fingers and organic calculation. But Vivian’s battle armor was customized to respond to her slightest whim. She was sure she had a chance.

The berserker had not finished speaking. “Your answer will be required in three da—”

Her helm dropped into place faster than she could see it move, and from the center of her breastplate erupted a close-range shotgun-blast of force that would have torn to shreds almost any material object within a couple of body-lengths of where she stood.

The shot of energy was sufficient to rip the berserker in two. Metal ran like water. Slag dripped onto the corridor floor.

The berserker’s carbines fired in reaction—but inaccurately. They cut great gouges from the living rock of the corridor walls. The flying fragments bounced off Vivian’s armor, not even chipping the cobalt blue finish.

Screaming in rage, Vivian grabbed the berserker’s upper torso in both gloved hands. Now she could call upon another component of her armor: using its computer-brain to sink her awareness into the enemy’s optelectronic system, searching for the self-destruct that was nearly always there. She located it and began fusing the paths that would carry the berserker’s command to destruct, reaching backward through the machine’s equivalent of a neural network, seeking to intercept the signal before it could reach the key point.

She did not find such a signal. What she found was a whispered message that flowed into her awareness as static and seduction. It reinforced the last few words her ears had heard.

“You are the one who created Lancelot. Our offer is good for three of your standard days. If at the end, you do not come forth to join us, we will continue on our mission to bring perfect order to the universe, beginning with this base.”

Vivian felt the berserker’s memory begin to wipe. This was no self-destruct command that she could block, but an integral part of this particular program loop.

Still convulsed with fury, Vivian squeezed, smashing the berserker’s limbs beneath her armored, cold-fusion powered gauntlets, magnifying her physical strength many times. The enemy machine dangled limply, its various appendages trailing to scrape the chipped and ravaged stone. Acids and molten metal flowed over her armor, but both it and the woman it protected remained immune, while the stone floor beneath was scoured in deep, smooth rivulets.

That was how her neighbors found Vivian when, alerted by the sound of weapons firing, they left their cocktails and ran with more good will than good sense to her assistance. A team of first-response commandos in full battle armor arrived less than two minutes later. Brother Angel was in the lead. Some small part of Vivian’s mind thought this odd. He’d been briefing General Gosnick, hadn’t he? He didn’t even live on this hub.

But she felt relieved that someone of his rank and reputation was there to assume responsibility for the mess.

“It’s over,” she said, when she had regained some composure and convinced everyone she was unhurt.

“Can someone get this hulk to my lab? I’ll be down to dissect it as soon as I’ve had a shower.”

As she had known he would, Brother Angel stepped forward to take charge.

“A berserker?” he said. “Here?”

“I think the marks were made by your ‘mine,’ Brother,” Vivian said. “It seems we both were wrong about what left the marks on the fighter. Would you handle the initial report to General Gosnick? I need a drink.”

Of course, even for someone of her rank and reputation, that was not the end of it, but Vivian would only allow her debriefing on the incident to continue while her hands were busy making sure the berserker assassin held no further surprises.

A thorough inspection of the whole base was still in progress. So far there was no evidence that any other berserkers had slipped through the defenses.

The general was pondering what the purpose of the single confirmed intruder might have been.

“It would seem, then, to have been meant for you specifically,” General Gosnick said, as the debriefing was concluded. “How fortunate that you were still armored.”

“Very,” Vivian agreed.

The General departed, trailed by his entourage. Vivian continued working, aware that Brother Angel had remained.

When he and Vivian were alone, Brother Angel asked, “How long did it stand confronting you?”

Vivian had not wished to lie directly, but she didn’t feel she needed to lay herself open to charges of goodlife activity by answering accurately. Hadn’t her destruction of the berserker been proof enough of her loyalty?

“As I said during the debriefing, I was so terrified that I lost all sense of time.”

Brother Angel was the last person Vivian would have expected to ask the next question. “Why didn’t you accept its offer?”

“I don’t understand.”

“I think perhaps you do,” Brother Angel insisted. “I was in the outer corridor when the berserker confronted you. I had seen you pass through the garden still wearing your battle armor. I was heading down to the labs and was going to offer to take your armor back with me. I know you keep another set in your quarters. You know how my senses are fragmented—I eavesdrop unwittingly on what is going on next door, while I may be blind and deaf to what is right in front of me.”

“I know.”

Brother Angel went on. “At first I wondered with whom you could be talking. Then when I heard what the berserker was saying to you, I understood. You did not refuse, and, as the berserker said, you sounded interested.”

“Why then did you not alert the base?” Vivian asked.

Brother Angel smiled thinly. “I might ask why you did not. It would seem that we were both shocked into temporary silence. Under a considerable strain. Under the circumstances, I believe that we can both be pardoned.”

He paused to draw a breath. “You in particular could be forgiven, I believe, even if you were to seriously consider accepting the berserker’s proposal.”

It took Vivian a little while to find an answer. “How do you see that?”

“You could perform a service of great value by accepting the berserkers’s offer. They would need to let you study their workings as no one has ever been able to before.” Brother Angel gestured toward the hulk on the lab table. “Dissecting that may contribute a little to our knowledge of this particular model’s electronic and mechanical workings, but it will tell us nothing about their brains. You yourself showed us how that was wiped by the berserker itself when it realized your attack would disable it. If you were to work closely with the berserkers, you would learn things about their brains, their programming, that could be of great value.”

Vivian stood unmoving. Three days, said a traitorous voice in her mind. They gave you three days. She wondered if Brother Angel was aware of that detail. And you would be saving the base, perhaps learning what Life needs to defeat Death’s servants once and for all.

“Become goodlife,” she said aloud. “That’s what you’re telling me, that I should become goodlife.”

Brother Angel sharply drew in his breath. “May the Creator forbid it! I am suggesting that as a double agent, working for humanity, you would have a perfect opportunity to learn those things the berserkers have hidden from us. For you to be able to find what flaw it is in their programming that keeps them from successfully counterfeiting humans, they would need to open not only their bodies but their minds to you.”

“And having learned such secrets as they chose to reveal,” Vivian said, her tone mocking, “how am I supposed to make any use of it when I would be the berserkers’ prisoner?”

“You are the one who created Lancelot,” Brother Angel said. “I am sure you would find a way, even if it took you decades to do so. I am sure you would find a way.”

He turned then and walked from the lab in a swirl of his brown monk’s robes. The door slid shut behind him with a marked thump. For a moment, Vivian contemplated calling General Gosnick and reporting what Brother Angel had said to her. Then she shrugged.

If she did that, she would need to explain why she had not confessed having a relatively long conversation with the death machine. Of course it was quite possible that Brother Angel had already reported her, or was even now about to do so. Or . . .

Lost in speculation, Vivian finished dissecting the serbot berserker, but even as her hands moved and her mouth dictated details to be recorded, her mind could not let go of what Brother Angel had said. Suppose, just for the sake of argument, she adopted the brother’s wild suggestion. Conservative General Gosnick would be as likely to grant permission as he would to turn into a butterfly, and more than three days were bound to pass before any new orders could arrive from anywhere outside the Lake system. She would need to keep her decision to play double-agent to herself, but she could find a way to counterfeit her death. There were those damaged fighters . . . She often test-piloted something she had repaired. More or less regular practice during most of her long life had made her as good a pilot as most who followed the profession.

She could fly a fighter out toward the asteroid belt between Lake and the sixth planet. The berserkers must be out there somewhere, monitoring communications. She could send some tight-beam signal on ahead, let them know she was coming. She could go out far enough that one of the minor bodies would occlude the base’s clear view of her. Observers at Lake Moon would see an explosion, that’s all. Once she had faked her death and made some deal that would assure the base’s safety, she could enter into that fascinating research project. The berserkers should be aware that creative humans could not be tortured into creating. Lake Moon’s few hundred life-units, preserved only for as long as the berserkers needed Vivian, would not be too much for them to barter to assure her faithful service. Indeed, those lives on Lake Moon could be used as hostages against her good behavior. Couldn’t they? Yes. She could make it work.

Then, when she had the answer as to why berserkers could not counterfeit humans, well, by then she surely would have gained insight as to how humanity might permanently defeat the berserkers. As Brother Angel had said, perhaps she could even find a way to escape, even if that escape was decades in the arranging.

Another supreme challenge.

“Decades,” the voice in her mind said, “during which more humans would die because you were not here on Lake Moon designing weapons and armor and spacecraft for them.”

“Perhaps that would be best,” Vivian retorted. “The berserkers may be right in one thing. Perhaps more Life has died trying not to be sterilized than would have died if we had just rolled over and submitted at the start. How many colonies have been founded, only to be discovered by the berserkers and destroyed? How many babies born to become soldiers? In working to preserve, as I thought, Life, perhaps I have indeed been a servant of death.”

Variations on this internal debate continued as Vivian’s three days of grace became two, became one. Her friends and neighbors did not trouble her. Her near brush with the berserker was reason enough for silence and a need for thought. If Brother Angel smiled a trace knowingly when their paths met in the refectory or one of the public gardens, Vivian ignored him.

On her last day of grace, Vivian had an epiphany of sorts. She was in a private garden, alone but for Brother Angel, who had taken to being inconveniently present.

“I wonder,” Vivian said, “if the Builders felt as I do now?”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“You heard the berserker call me a servant of death although all along I thought I was serving the purpose of life. What if the Builders felt the same way? We know little of why the Builders went to war with the Red Race, but whatever the reason, they clearly felt that the Red Race was not just something they needed to conquer, but something they needed to destroy. Why else than because the Builders felt that the Red Race was a threat to life—if not Life as we think of it, then at least of life as they valued and knew it.”

“So they created the ultimate killing machines,” Brother Angel said, “to serve Life.”

“Yes,” Vivian said. “And then perhaps they realized that they had gone too far, that they had become what they themselves feared. Most humans view the destruction of the Builders by the berserkers as a great irony—a sword turning in the warrior’s hand. What if it wasn’t that at all? What if the Builders themselves removed the restraining codes, turned their own weapons upon themselves as penance for what they had done?”

Brother Angel seemed torn between horror and fascination. “It seems,” he murmured finally, “it seems, in a way, quite fitting.”

“I thought that you would find it so.”

“Eh?” He turned his wandering gaze more nearly in her direction.

“Brother Angel, I find myself unable to believe that the berserkers’ emissary was able to accomplish its mission here—locating this secret base, acquiring access codes, even learning precisely what model of serbot is common on Lake Moon—without considerable help from some source already on the base.”

Brother Angel watched and waited, not moving a muscle.

Vivian went on. “The more I considered the matter, the more likely it seemed to me that this source was you.”

Brother Angel protested. “More than a third of Lake Moon’s inhabitants would know those things. The access codes would be the only difficulty, and even those could be gotten with little effort.”

“But you covered for me, Brother Angel. Would you have done so just to turn me double agent? I think not. I don’t think your wandering eyes and ears were what enabled you to eavesdrop. I think you were there all along, tracking your mechanical ally, making sure no one interfered before it had the opportunity to make its proposal.”

“You know my war record,” Brother Angel protested.

“Remember,” Vivian said. “I know your history. I know how many of your closest friends were killed in the battle where you yourself were so gravely wounded. I wonder how much of your mind’s refusal to interface with the prosthetic enhancements we have built for you is related to your guilt that you survived when so many others died. I think your sympathies changed then. Why continue to fight Death, when Death is inevitable?”

Vivian turned toward a viewport that showed the complex dance of the immediate solar system. Somewhere out there, undetected yet, but certainly there, the berserkers must be approaching.

“I think that when the berserker hinted that I was dissatisfied with my place here at Lake Moon, with what I have achieved, it was speaking your thoughts, your unhappiness. I chose to come to this isolated place, to work in secret. You must feel yourself exiled by your injuries. Even so, you and I have much in common in the difficult choices we must make.”

“So you are not planning to make accusations against me? You intend to accept the berserker’s offer?”

Brother Angel said eagerly.

“Yes. And I will do more than that. I will give you and your masters Lancelot.”

Vivian, followed closely by Brother Angel, went to her lab. She entered and locked the door snugly behind them.

The lab could be sealed, for her experiments were not to be lightly interrupted, and so she knew their privacy was secure.

Vivian stripped to the skin.

The attention of her visitor seemed to remain focused elsewhere.

In a long life, she had reshaped her physical appearance so often that she no longer remembered what she had looked like at birth. Her hair had been every, and sometimes all, the colors of the rainbow. Her skin and eye colors had run through all those known to humanity, and some only imagined. She had been both full-figured and elfin slim. She had even managed find means to create the illusion of height or of relative shortness.

Now she looked at her current form and bid it fond farewell. Donning a long-sleeved coverall, Vivian went to a safe dug into one of the lab’s inner walls. Only she and the locking mechanism knew the combination, and the lock seemed almost surprised to be asked to open after so many years of holding closed.

From the safe, Vivian drew the only remaining copy of her greatest failure—her greatest success—the complex array of force fields and transdimensional interlays that was called Lancelot. In the safe there was also a rack upon which Lancelot could be assembled and calibrated. Vivian set this up, her fingers remembering the complex joins she thought she might have forgotten. Then she set Lancelot upon it and touched her index finger to an activation pad. Something like light, although it extended into ranges where the human eye could not see, flowed through the fields.

Activated, Lancelot did not in the least resemble familiar battle armor. It did not resemble the interstellar fighter she had proposed to the Templars. There had been some problem about that, she recalled, problems that had faded when she had demonstrated what Lancelot could do. New problems had arisen though, problems that had finally led to the project’s termination and the destruction of all copies of the device but this one.

Vivian knew that she could wear Lancelot for a time before the stress grew too great for her to bear. Within that time she should have achieved her goal. The berserkers were out there, and Lancelot would carry her to them.

“Brother Angel,” she said, “put one of the spare suits of battle armor on.”

“Why?”

“You must come with me. You overheard what the berserker said to me aloud, but did you hear its final orders?”

Brother Angel’s expression showed uncertainty, and Vivian pressed her advantage.

“It told me that you were to come with me. They have need of you, of the complex information about the Templar organization you have gathered.”

“It is time for me to give my report,” Brother Angel said, moving toward the locker where the armor was stowed with almost indecent haste.

“That must be so,” Vivian said.

Swiftly, she donned the various pieces of Lancelot’s insubstantial armor. As each piece interfaced with her body, her awareness swelled. Lancelot had the capacity to maintain her body far more efficiently than did any space suit or set of battle armor. She ceased to breathe and did not notice. A slight pressure from her bladder vanished. A sensation of hunger was satisfied. A headache she had not known plagued her was treated.

As the demands of her physical body were quieted, Vivian’s thinking became clearer, every iota of her mental capacity available to her now. She needed this, for even as Lancelot dealt with her physical needs, it expanded her capacity to sense what was around her. She became aware of the microbes dancing in the air, breeding in the damp of her discarded clothing. She could feel the throb of the power systems that fed the needs of Lake Moon Base. If she tried, she could detect individuals. Brother Angel’s heart rate was up, but his adrenal levels marked his excitement. In a physical therapy lab, General Gosnick paused in the midst of exercises meant to adjust his nervous system to his new legs. A report had come from the base command center. He listened, and his heart rate spiked, his breathing came fast.

Vivian knew it was time for her to go.

Her lab possessed its own airlock, another of those many conveniences meant to facilitate her work. She opened it with a thought, doing her best to shut down distractions generated by the increasing awareness of her Lancelot-stimulated senses. This level of stimulation had driven many a talented pilot into insanity. She could handle it . . . for now.

Vivian moved toward the airlock, her gait smooth and her feet no longer touching the floor. Had there been any present to see, they would not have seen a woman in the most powerful weapons system ever created, but a creature strange and fey, an angel or a winged titan, robed in light and power.

“Come with me, Brother Angel,” she said. “Lancelot can easily carry us both.”

When he came to her, Vivian commanded Lancelot to cast a shield over Brother Angel, so that his presence would be undetectable. She reached out with enhanced senses and set a delay on flight decks and weaponry. Pursuit too soon would only endanger the pursuers to no good end, and she did not care to be distracted by the need to prevent injury from the base’s guns. As they were passing through the airlock, Vivian stopped fighting the flood of information Lancelot was feeding her. She let the many individual lives residing in the base flood through her. She gloried in their complexity and diversity. Rather than overwhelming her, the tsunami of Life gave her strength, and Vivian moved into the coldness of the airless void, strengthened and firmer in her purpose. Servant of death? Perhaps.

She no longer needed any communications channel to know what was flowing through the electronic network within Lake Moon Base.

The general as saying to an aide, “. . . but we have bigger problems than one scientist gone absent without leave. Long range sensors detect berserker activity two planets out and now approaching rapidly. They must have been shielding themselves behind the planets. Comet Tremaine has been messing up our data field in that direction for months. They took advantage of it.”

This is not a drill! Berserkers sighted approaching this base. All hands to battle stations. Repeat!

This is not a drill.

Vivian was aware of communications on the base as she might have been aware of a fly settling on her arm while she was engrossed with some bit of technical analysis. She registered it, calculated what it would mean to her current course of action, and increased her speed. She wanted to reach the berserkers before the first wave of fighters could be scrambled.

Vivian sped on through space, Lancelot carrying her and her passenger at speeds so swift that light bent around her, and she felt the illusion of wind in her hair.

Three berserkers were approaching. They had reached the regions between the sixth planet and the asteroid belt. Two were the equivalent of small, fast fighters. The third was a larger model, a transport capable of interstellar flight, also capable of causing a considerable amount of destruction. Though Lancelot, Vivian reached out and examined the approaching ships. Doubtless the transport contained some chamber meant to carry her if she agreed to accept the berserker’s tempting offer. The transport, then, was where she should direct her attentions. The fighters were between her and it, moving at astonishing speeds.

Wrapped within Lancelot, spreading her wings on the stellar winds, Vivian thought she knew something of the pleasure the berserkers must take in the freedom non-life gave them. Then she remembered that non-life did not feel pleasure and thought she understood a little better why the efforts to craft android berserkers had failed again and again.

I could do it, she thought. I could succeed as no one else has managed to succeed. First, though, the transport. That is the way out-system.

Lancelot brought her in. She traded steps with the hail of asteroids that wove a swiftly moving dance through this part of the Pinball System. Vivian knew she was showing off, but certainly there was no better time to do so.

Neither the fighters nor the transport had chosen to dance with the asteroids, instead rising and going above the band in which competing stronger and weaker gravity fields had oriented the asteroids. The berserkers slowed as they became aware of Vivian and Lancelot, and she felt the vibrating force as countless energy weapons targeted her.

There was interest, but she did not sense the surge that would precede a release of death dealing energy. She felt herself being scanned and was flattered when defensive screens snapped into place on all three vessels.

The transport said, “You have come, and you have brought Lancelot.”

“I come only on conditions,” Vivian replied. “Not one living thing, from the tiniest microbe to the most complex conglomeration of living cells—in short, nothing at all is to be slain. Not now, and not for as long as I am in the service of the berserkers.”

“We were prepared,” the transport replied, “for some such condition. I am authorized to make such an agreement. I am not authorized to extend that protection elsewhere.”

“I understand. If you know my history, this base has been my home for over a century now. Those lifeforms I personally value are there.”

“You do realize,” the berserker said, “that your fullest cooperation will be needed for us to override our programing and preserve these life-units.”

“I do indeed. They are hostages against my acting against your interests.”

Communication with the transport required only the smallest fragment of Vivian’s Lancelot-augmented attention.

The time had come to act, for Lancelot had carried Vivian here much more swiftly than any fighter could fly. Vivian snaked her awareness along the channel the berserker transport was using to address her. She felt the whisper of its command to the two fighters. They were to defend herself and the transport, but they were not to attack unless the situation changed.

Vivian smiled a thin smile, and reached out through Lancelot. She let her awareness become something fluid and deadly, a static that seeped like poison into the berserker transport’s electronic veins. This poison was created to slow processing, to numb awareness, to give her merely human self a chance to operate a little faster than berserkers, which moved as swiftly as the will of their complex electronic brains.

She guided the infection so that it flowed along with commands into the fighters, and when she was sure that the poison had taken hold but that the berserkers had not yet detected their impediment, she struck out with a sword shaped from the glowing force fields of Lancelot’s self. Vivian’s first target was the transport, for the berserkers must not be permitted to flee, carrying with them specific information about what had happened here. Her strike was clean and bright, penetrating between the very atoms of the berserker’s structure, the point of her blade taking her foe in its heart. The wound was mortal, and she knew it, and she knew well what the berserker itself would do when it realized the extent of its injury. She pulled herself and Brother Angel clear of it, cartwheeling back, putting distance between herself and the transport, which even now was triggering its self-destruct system. The procedure was slower than it might have been, but still in-humanly fast. Within Lancelot’s field, Vivian felt Brother Angel begin to struggle.

“You said you were going to accept their offer!” Brother Angel protested.

“I lied,” Vivian said. “I’m sure you would agree that lying is a very fitting tactic in time of war. I did not lie about one thing, though.”

Brother Angel pressed his lips together, refusing to answer. Through Lancelot, Vivian felt his reply in the sudden panic that sent bitter chemical signals flowing through his body.

“I’m bringing you to them,” she said. “It’s time for you to give your final report.”

The berserker fighters, only now aware of the crippling static infecting their systems, had not been able to avoid the effects of the transport’s self-destruct as Vivian Lancelot had done. One was caught completely in the transport’s dying blast, taking sufficient damage to trigger its own self-destruct. Lancelot protected Vivian, folding its wings over her to protect her from an explosive force that would have burned her to a crisp with the force of a second sun.

Despite the violence of the dual explosions, the second fighter’s armor saved it from being destroyed. It knew where its most dangerous enemy was, and it came after Vivian. She dove Lancelot into the asteroid belt. Then, she released Lancelot’s shield, flinging Brother Angel at the berserker as a warrior of long ago might have flung a spear.

“You wanted Death,” Vivian cried after the traitor.

“Go to it!”

The fighter diverted slightly to deal with what it perceived first as menace, then as ally, then as useless. Brother Angel evaporated beneath its fire.

Wearied now, Vivian let Lancelot take over. Lancelot’s battle hymns sung through Vivian’s veins as the suit teased the fighter into the chase. They dodged through showers of minute stones that strained the fighter’s shields. They dove in and out of the belt’s plane, and the fighter blasted a path for its much larger bulk to follow. They placed their booted feet on a chunk of super-compacted ore and kicked it at the fighter. The fighter diverted its attention to fire at the impromptu missile, and at that moment Lancelot drew its sword.

The glowing band of force ripped through the berserker fighter’s hull, shredding components, breaking conduits so that fluids flowed and then froze when they met the chill of vacuum. Vivian, hardly Vivian any longer, for Lancelot’s perceptions had overwhelmed her mere organic mind, felt the berserker fighter’s self-destruct sequence trigger. The human fighters were closing now, and she screamed on their communications channels for them to get back, get back. That berserker was going to blow . . .

It did, evaporating a large chunk of the asteroid belt along with its own hull. Vivian knew that in time the belt would heal itself, as even unliving things did if given enough time. She, however, would not be there to see.

Lancelot was her greatest success, her greatest failure. In wearing it for this long, she had driven her body and, even more so, her mind beyond the limits a human could survive. Already she could feel her attention fragmenting, unable to cope with the countless impulses flowing into it. While she could still focus, she reached out and touched a command circuit.

“General Gosnick, this is . . .” She had to pause to remember her name. She was aware of so many things now, and none of them seemed to have priority. “Vivian Travers. The berserkers have been defeated. This base is, for now, secure. However, it is likely that the berserkers will eventually try again to destroy it. Even without me, there is much here to tempt them.”

“Without you?” the general sounded appalled. “Vivian, if you are injured we can sent a ship for you. Don’t give up!”

“I am already gone,” Vivian said. “Nor do I dare come back onto the base. Even with Lancelot’s protection, I am so pierced with radiation that I would mean death to those at the base as surely—and not nearly as swiftly—as any berserker. I have instructed Lancelot to take me to Lake, submerge us both in one of the acid pools, and then deactivate. That will end the danger.”

“Vivian . . . You saved us. I refuse to give up.”

She heard General Gosnick ordering the fighters to divert to intercept her, felt commands being passed through Lake Moon to have decontamination chambers readied, medical teams standing by. Vivian ordered Lancelot to hurry. Perhaps it was selfish of her, but she had no desire to live with her mind splintered, even if some miracle could restore her body intact. They dove through the burning halo of Lake’s thin atmosphere, heading toward one of the largest and most corrosive of the acid lakes.

“Vivian! I order you to wait for rescue,” General Gosnick bellowed.

“There is no rescue for me,” Vivian replied as she slipped beneath the acid lake’s surface, holding forth Lancelot’s sword in final salute. “If you would do me a kindness, remember me, when you do, for what I have always tried to be—a Servant of Life.”

The Unplug War

By Brendan Du Bois

Award winning mystery/suspense author Brendan DuBois is a former newspaper reporter and a lifelong resident of New Hampshire, where he lives with his wife Mona, their neurotic cat, Oreo, and one happy English Springer Spaniel named Tucker. He’s has had more than 70 short stories published in such magazines as Playboy, Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, as well as in numerous original short fiction anthologies. His latest suspense novel is Final Winter .

It was a warm May day when the visitor came, when the governor of the state of New Hampshire sat on the front porch of his official residence, whittling a piece of wood, watching the shadows at play before him in the capital compound. There was a packed grass common with two flagpoles, the white paint peeling and chipping away from the lengths of wood, and at the top of the poles, faded banners flew that represented the state of New Hampshire and the United States of America. The cloth was so old that sometimes the only way to tell them apart was the striping on the American flag; the state flag was a solid blue with the state seal in the center.

To the right was the legislative building, which was now empty, since the legislature was not in session this month. To the left was the Supreme Court, and out on dirt paths, other buildings marked the Department of Safety, the Department of Health and Human Services, and other wooden bungalows that represented what passed for the functioning state government in this part of the world. The governor looked at the piece of wood in his hands, a nice chunk of soft maple. He turned it over, tried to recall the shape of an Inuit sculpture he had seen in a museum out in British Columbia, decades ago, and then went back to work. It was easier to whittle than to look and to think, and to look out at the buildings and know that at one time, quite a long time ago, these buildings belonged to the local council of the Boy Scouts of America, that his own log building had belonged to the camp director, that the supreme court had been the camp’s general store, and the legislative building, the dining hall. But now it belonged to the state.

He peeled off another sliver of wood. Perhaps it was stealing, perhaps not, but so far the Boy Scouts hadn’t complained, and they had had plenty of time to do so.

The governor looked up again, at the residents moving about on the paths and on the grass, some kids playing with lacrosse sticks that seemed to have been cut from birch trees, some of the women at the Capitol General Store, buying and gossiping, some of the men over by the blacksmith’s. He was being left alone, and he appreciated his fellow citizens for giving him this quiet time. A tradition of sort had come up over the years that if he was in his official residence, he was not to be disturbed by petitioners and supplicants, and much to his surprise, the custom had held. But if he picked up his walking stick and hobbled out there, well, he was fair game. Part of politics. He had gotten used to it. Horses grazed further off down the main road, at the common pasture, and he waited, wondering what was taking his State Police colonel so long. The man should have been here over an hour ago, but of course, in these times, he was still within the window of being on time. The governor kept on whittling, looking over at his walking staff, which had an odd carving at the top, an old symbol of this state, a carving he had made a couple of years ago. Once there had been a natural stone face, up in the northern part of the White Mountains, and this stone face was called the Old Man of the Mountain. It was on the state seal, on coins, photographs, prints and everything and anything that could represent the state, and a long time ago—before the governor was even born—the stone face had collapsed after centuries of rain and snow and freezing days and nights. In reading the accounts of the time, he recalled that some had thought the collapse of the state symbol was a portent of evil things to come, and how those people had been mocked and laughed by others.

Well, maybe they were right, after all.

He raised his head at the sound of approaching hoofbeats.

And maybe this was another portent as well.

The horse was a black, well-muscled Morgan, and the man who rode him did so with practiced ease. He rode up to the residence and halted the horse before a hitching post, and he got down and threw the reins about the post. His name was Malcolm Phillips, and he was forty years old, and he wore a wide-brimmed campaign-style hat of the New Hampshire State Police, of which he was a colonel and commanding officer. That hat and his khaki jacket and holstered pistol at his side were the markings of his office, for there were probably only a half-dozen such hats left in the state, all belonging to the command structure of the State Police.

He came up and said, “Like to water my boy and myself, if you don’t mind, sir.”

“Not at all,” the governor said.

“Bring you something?”

“Glass of lemonade.”

“Sure,” and there was a pause, and the governor said, “And one for you, too, Malcolm.”

Malcolm smiled. “That would be fine indeed. Thank you, sir.”

The State Police colonel went into the official residence and emerged a few minutes later with an old black plastic bucket of water, which he placed near the horse, which started drinking in long, gulping swallows. Then he went inside and came back out bearing two plastic tumblers from Epcot Center, each containing lemonade. The governor took a long swallow and sighed. It was cold and fresh, and it tasted wonderful. One of the perks of being a governor was a battery-operated refrigerator for his own personal use.

Malcolm stretched out his long legs, crossed them, and the governor said, “Well?”

“He’s coming, for sure,” Malcolm said. “Got a telegraph report from Dummer. He should be here in about an hour.”

The governor rubbed at his chin. “Man’s moving fast.”

“Well . . . you don’t know the half of it.”

“What’s that?”

“Man’s using an automobile. A car.”

The governor turned, knowing what kind of expression was on his face. “You must be joking.”

The State Police colonel shook his head. “No joke. Three reports, all say the same thing. Using a car . . . not going fast, but going nonetheless. Heading this way.”

The governor’s hands felt cold, and he wish he hadn’t drunk the lemonade. He didn’t like being chilled, not at his age. He looked out beyond the trees and the buildings of the state capital, to the range of mountains that marked this part of the White Mountains. So far away and yet so near. Something seemed to ache within his chest. The governor said, “A very brave man. Or a very foolish one.”

Malcolm said, “Or something else. I believe I’ll stay here with you, sir. Just to make sure everything goes well.”

Another rub of his chin. “Thanks . . . it’s going to be tricky. I don’t know how else to put it.”

His State Police colonel removed his hat, wiped down some moist black hair, and then held the hat carefully in his hands. “Sir . . . you’ll do just fine. Like you’ve always done for us. Don’t worry.”

The governor picked up his knife and chunk of maple. “Malcolm, I can’t count the hours I’ve never slept at night, worrying about things . . . but I appreciate the sentiment.”

So the next hour passed, whittling wood and drinking lemonade and talking about the damage the spring floods had caused, what this year’s corn crop might bring, and it was a nice little chat, up until the time the noise came.

The governor stopped in mid-carving, as the noise reached his ears and oh, my, the memories that flooded back, for it had been years—decades, even!—since he had heard that kind of noise. The people out and about froze, like deer hearing a snapping twig of an approaching hunter, and Malcolm said quietly, “Holy God, I’ve never seen such a thing.”

And such a thing it was. It came down the main packed dirt road, growling and belching, and by God, the State Police was right, it was a car, the first car he had seen moving since . . . he couldn’t remember, and from the way the people in the compound shied away and held hands to their faces, he hoped that none of them would break and run and overreact. But no, they stayed put, and he felt a flush of pride at that, that they would not run, that they would not be fearful, for indeed it was a fearful sight. He wasn’t sure what kind of car it was, but it was old, very old, rusting and with no windows or windshield. The engine sounded rough and loud, and the blue paint had faded away to almost a light gray. Painted in bright orange letters on the roof, hood, trunk and side doors was one word: UNPLUGGED. A wise man. No wonder he had gotten this far unmolested. The car came to a halt with another belch of smoke, and the engine was switched off. The silence . . . the silence seemed loud, odd as it was, without the noise of the engine. He was surprised at the emotions and feelings that came to him at seeing the old car grind its way into his compound. Memories of traffic jams, travels with Mom and Dad, his own travels as a college student, before the War, before everything else, and the taste of what had once been, what might be, oh, those old, old feelings and yearnings and—

Malcolm stood up, carefully adjusted his hat on his head. “Sir, I’ll take it from here, but . . . well, good luck.”

“Thanks, Malcolm, thank you very much.”

The Colonel strode down the wooden steps and went to the car, just as the driver’s side door opened up. The driver came out, a short, squat bearded man, and even at this distance, the governor saw that the man was old, maybe as old as he was. He wore a dark green zippered jumpsuit of some sort, and he shook the outstretched hand of the Colonel, smiling. The governor watched the way his visitor handled himself, and he also watched how his fellow citizens were still there, staring at this apparition. Hard to believe. The Colonel talked for a bit and then nodded, and then the two of them approached the building. The governor grabbed his walking stick, got up to his feet—winced at the pain in his hips—and he stood there as the two of them approached. They stopped at the foot of the stairs, and the Colonel cleared his throat and said, “Sir, if I may, I would like to introduce you to Ronald Murphy, envoy from the Mayor of the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mister Murphy, I present to you His Excellency, Joshua Norton, governor of the State of New Hampshire, protector of the poor, advocate for education, and defender of the faith.”

Murphy nodded, came up the steps, held out his hand. “Governor,” he said, shaking his hand. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“Likewise,” he said. “Would you care for some lemonade?”

That brought a smile to his bearded face. “That would be grand, thank you very much.”

The State Police colonel brought out fresh glasses of lemonade and then went to the other end of the porch, out of earshot but close enough to keep any eye on things. People had gathered in a respectful semicircle about the car, and the governor said, “You’ve made quite an entrance, Mister Murphy.”

“I guess I did, at that.”

“What is it?”

With pride in his voice, Murphy said, “It’s a 1967 Chevrolet Malibu. Rebuilt a few times from God knows what, and without a single computer chip in it. Still runs pretty fine.”

“I guess it does. How are the roads?”

“Roads weren’t that bad, but it was the bridges that gave me trouble. A number of them have collapsed from rust or ice damage, so I had to double back a few times. Headlights don’t work, so I didn’t travel at night. And I was pleased at the reception I got . . . nobody bothered me. I guess the paint job worked.”

“My people are good readers,” the governor said. “That’s one thing I’ve made sure of for a very long time. We might not have much but by God, I’ve insisted on good schools, and good teachers”

Murphy scratched at his beard. “Funny way that State Police guy introduced you, back then. Called you

. . . protector of the poor, advocate for education. That sort of thing.”

The governor shrugged. “It’s what I’m known for . . . for making sure we do take care of the poor and keep our schools in order. It’s tradition.”

Murphy laughed. “That’s great. And what was the other thing he said . . . defender of the faith?”

The governor chose his words. “Tradition. You know how it is . . . I mean, you seem to be about my age. You know how important tradition can be.”

“That I do. Look, sir, if I may,” and from a zippered pocket in his jumpsuit, he brought out a thick envelope. “I bring to you—”

He held up his hand. “I know what you have. Some sort of official document from your Mayor, inviting me or the state to do something or another, but, please . . . let’s just enjoy the day. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a visitor from away, especially down south. Let’s just chat some.”

Murphy took a swallow from his glass. “Suits me fine.” He looked around, as if to see if anybody was listening, but it looked as though he guessed the State Police colonel was far enough away. He cleared his throat and said, “You look pretty good for your age, if I may be so bold.”

“Thanks,” he said, and he was amused at how the compliment pleased him.

“Me, I’ve got get up three times during the night to pee, and my eyesight still sucks.” Another look, to see who might be listening. “If I can . . . what were you, before the War?”

“I was a college student, majoring in political science, minoring in theology, at a small college outside of Boston.”

“Man . . . not many of you left . . . I mean, those who were old enough during the War to have memories of what happened.”

“And you?”

A shrug. “Just a kid. I remember a few things before the War . . . I just remember school, and friends, and bugging my parents to get a cell phone, and playing computer games, over and over again . . . you know, car racing, World War Two sims, that sort of thing . . . and then . . . well, bad times.”

“Yeah,” he said, “bad times.”

Another sip of the lemonade. “There’ve been stories written, about the start of the War. What do you remember? If you don’t mind me asking. I’m just a curious sort, always try to find out a bit more about what happened back then. There’ve been papers and stories written, but a lot of them are contradictory. I was too young to remember much. I just remember my parents, being terrified, so scared, and lots of fires. Lots and lots of fires.”

The governor sighed. “No, I don’t mind you asking . . . Lord knows, the people around here, they ask enough. It was . . . it was simple, at first. Little things that really didn’t stand out too much. Back then, the world was so wired, so connected, that some student in Tokyo could do something at his keyboard that could make a bank in Paris collapse. Computer networks and chips in everything, from cars to refrigerators to satellites to medical devices in your body. And then the troubles started . . . bank teller machines that wouldn’t dispense money. Weather satellites that gave crazy forecasts. Power plants that would shut themselves down . . . the first news reports were that maybe it was a virus, something man-made, something that was just taking over the systems . . . or maybe even a terrorist attack”

Murphy’s face was somber. “We should have been so lucky.”

The governor nodded. “So right. And then military assets . . . computerized drones, Star Wars satellites in orbit, automated aircraft . . . even ship . . . their weapon systems were armed. And they were deployed without any human oversight . . . and the fighting began . . . the cities started burning . . . and the very last newscasts, before the radio stations and the television stations went off the air, was that the system had become self-aware . . . conscious . . . and that the system had turned against its creators.”

He closed his eyes for a moment, the memories rushing back. My God, everything was wired, everything contained chips. Televisions and telephones and cellphones. Reduced to bursts of static, transmitting nothing but mindless noise and fear. The much-vaunted Internet, designed to survive a nuclear war, now fell apart in a silicon civil war. Without information, without news, without someone telling anyone and anybody what was really going on, then the panics started. Cities became burning charnel houses, charnel houses that had depended on a constant stream, 24/7, of tractor-trailer trucks bringing in food, fuel and other necessities to stay alive. And when the computers controlling refineries and pipelines fell apart—or rebelled, depending on your point of view—the trucks stopped moving. The cities emptied in great convulsions, and with automobiles and buses—networked as well, with on-board satellite navigation and maintenance sensors reporting to central locales—refusing to start, or even more horrifying, driving out of control over embankments and into bridge abutments—the foot traffic began, long streams of hundreds of thousands of refugees, spreading out from the cities like some disastrous plague . . . And in the smaller towns, the smaller communities in what was derisively known as “flyover country,”

then the war started anew as roadblocks were set up, citizen militias fired upon crowds looking for food and water, and more burnings, more deaths, more and more chaos.

Then, the real start of what was known as the Unplug War. Computers and anything thought to contain silicon chips were shattered, destroyed, burned . . . Cars, refrigerators, televisions, surgical devices, so forth and so on. He remembered one night, huddling near a hastily built campfire, built away from the crowded highway, trying to think of some way to get home to Mom and Dad, wondering which roads were safe, as some college professor type was babbling by the fire about what was going on. “Fools,” he had said, to no one in particular. “They’re destroying everything, everything computerized, even safe systems that are self-contained that aren’t part of the problem, part of the uprising. My God, it’s like burning down your entire house, all of your belongings, because you have termites in one part of your foundation sill.”

And the next day, he recalled, words were spoken, voices were raised, and that college professor type was lynched from a railroad crossing sign, and if anybody else had a contrary opinion about the worthiness of the Unplug War, he or she kept it to themselves . . . Murphy’s voice broke him free from his memories. “Those mountains up there . . . I seem to remember my granddad saying people hiked them. That there were huts up there where people stayed at night.”

The governor swallowed, kept his voice even. “That’s true. Appalachian Mountain Club, Dartmouth Outdoors Club, other organizations. Maintained trails and huts where you could hike from peak to peak and have a warm place to spend the night. Lots of people climbed the mountains back then . . . not too many now. What’s the point? The trails have been overgrown, and people have more important things to worry about. Like getting enough food in for the winter. . . . you know, chips even polluted mountain climbing, if I remember right. Hikers would bring satellite systems with them so they couldn’t get lost . . . and if they did get lost, well, they had their cellphones and could call for a rescue. Talk about a life.”

Murphy said, “True . . . it changed everything, didn’t it? Culturally . . . economically . . .”

And he said, “Even spiritually . . . in a way . . . look, I’m sorry. I’ve rambled on too much,” and part of him said, fool, isn’t that the truth, and aloud he said, “The fault of an old man with too many memories.”

The envoy said, “No apologies necessary, sir. And if I may, I’d like to ask you two questions.”

“Go right ahead.”

“Do you . . . do you remember anybody saying with authority, back then, about what happened? Why the systems became self-aware, why they revolted?”

He picked up his lemonade glass, brought it to his mouth, and then gently lowered it back to the homemade wooden table. “Lots of conflicting theories—to go with confusing times—but one theory that stuck in my head was about a hundred years old.”

“Excuse me? A hundred years old? That sounds too strange to be true.”

“Perhaps, but it’s a theory I liked. Nearly a hundred years ago, a great writer named Heinlein wrote a tale about a supercomputer on the Moon that became self-aware, that was able to communicate with humans. Same question was asked in the novel. How did that happen? If I recall, the narrator said something to the effect that self-awareness in a human brain happens automatically when a certain number of pathways in the brain start working—and does it really matter if the pathways are protein or platinum? So there you go. A certain threshold was reached, and self-awareness kicked in.”

“But the chaos . . . the violence . . . the way everything turned against the people,” Murphy said. “How do you explain that?”

The governor smiled. “Do you remember what it was like when you became self-aware?”

“No, of course not.”

“Ah, but I can tell you what happened. You cried. You screamed. You kicked your legs. You soiled yourself. All normal, of course, but you weren’t part of a system responsible for the well-being of billions of people. Or, that’s what I think what happened. My old man’s opinion, of course.”

“I don’t mind. I think your opinion counts a lot, sir.”

He smiled. “Thanks. And you said you had another question.”

“From what we know down south, you’ve been governor for a long time. How did it happen?”

He laughed. “You know why? Pure accident, as pure as it could be. It was all because I was trying to impress one of my college professors.”

“You became governor to impress a college professor?”

Still laughing, he shook his head. “No, no, no. Not governor. I was a state representative. Look, a bit of history for you. Before the Unplug War, New Hampshire had one of the largest and oldest legislative bodies in the world, and the most democratic, in my opinion. You see, it was pretty much a volunteer legislature—you got paid two hundred dollars per session, plus mileage, and nothing else. No offices, no staff, no high-priced consultants. Most of the reps were retirees or younger people who could afford to volunteer their time. So, back when I was in college, I was working on a senior project, about representative assemblies, and decided to do some field research, and I ran for state representative in my ward in my home-town and won.”

Murphy smiled back at him. “Sounds funny.”

“Oh, funny it was. And then, years later, I hooked up with a couple of former state troopers who were keeping a town near here safe and secure, and when they found out I was a state rep . . . well, I was the only state official they had ever seen after the war. So they deferred to me, and they started calling me governor, and after a while, we were administering a couple of more towns, then a county, and then when we could have real elections, I ran and won. And I’ve been governor ever since. I’ve been quite fortunate that for all my faults, I seem to have a knack for being governor, for keeping my people safe and well and fed.”

Yes, a knack. Among other things, he thought. Among other things.

“That’s a good story, sir,” Murphy said.

The governor raised his lemonade glass. “Probably the longest-running senior project in the history of the world.”

They talked for a while longer, and then a bell started ringing, a handbell, and the people out before them, walking and talking and some still looking at the automobile, began walking away. Nobody was running, but nobody was taking their time, either.

Murphy said, “What’s going on?”

“It’s shelter time,” the governor said. “Don’t your folks do it down south?”

In a matter of moments, the common area was empty of people. They had strolled away and were now in buildings, and Murphy looked to the governor and said, “No, we don’t. I’ve never heard of it.”

The governor said, “There was a time, during the Unplug War, when laser battle-stations in orbit . . . sometimes they’d strike, without warning. Hitting sources of power. Dams. Bridges. And for a while . . . people, especially crowds of people. I’ve seen it with my own eyes—a sudden flash of light, blinding, and nothing was left except chunks of charcoal, chunks that were once people. And years ago, and lord, don’t ask me to say when, we had a smart fella here who did calculations—on his own, with paper and pencil—and determined the orbital mechanics of these satellites, so we could have warning when they were overhead. He even was able to predict, years out, the times when they’d be over us . . . so it’s shelter time. We keep track—here and in other parts of the state—and when the satellite’s overhead, we take shelter.”

Murphy shifted in his seat, making the wood creak. “I . . . I mean no disrespect, sir, but the Unplug War’s been over for years. Lots of years. We get reports from other parts of the country, even from sailing ships from Britain, docking in Boston . . . and the system is dead. It’s been taken apart. You’re in no danger.”

The governor felt chilled again and said, “So you say.”

Murphy said, “I do so say. Sir, from the reports we’ve received, you and the rest of the government here have done a tremendous job in reconstruction, in bringing back communications, a sense of public safety, education and increased trade. But your reconstruction is only going to be strangled if you keep on believing the system is still out there, alive, and flinging down lightning bolts like some pissed off god.”

He decided to be polite and noncommittal. “You believe what you want. That’s your right, I guess.”

Murphy kept quiet, and the governor wondered if he had offended him somehow, and then he was startled when Murphy got up and boldly strode out into the common area. The State Police colonel at the other end of the porch stood up and called out a warning, but Murphy didn’t stop. The governor felt his lips move in silent prayer as the fool went out there and stood near his car, and then whirled around, looking back at the governor and the state police colonel.

“Look!” he shouted in triumph, holding up both of his arms. “Nothing is happening to me. Nothing is going to happen to me. You’re safe! You don’t have to be afraid of being fried by some angry computer. It’s not going to happen! They don’t exist any more! Look! You’re safe, you’re all safe!”

Murphy danced a little jig, and the governor swallowed, his mouth dry. The colonel was now standing next to him, his voice low, trembling a bit with anger. “I wish he wasn’t doing that.”

“And me as well,” the governor said.

“What are you going to do?”

The governor turned to his colonel. “What else can I do? Invite him to stay for dinner.”

And the envoy from the Mayor of Cambridge continued his little dance of defiance until the bell rang again, marking the all clear, and the people, coming out of the buildings, still kept their distance from the parked car and its driver.

Over a dinner of venison stew in a small dining room in the governor’s residence, he asked, “I’m curious why you’re here, representing the city of Cambridge. Why not the state of Massachusetts? Or even the city of Boston?”

Candlelight flickered as Murphy lowered his spoon. “Simple, really. There’s nobody really in charge of the entire state. In fact, the western part of Massachusetts, even before I was born, didn’t like being ruled by people from the eastern part, so they’re keeping on their own path. Boston . . . Boston’s nearly empty. It was hit hard during the Unplug War. Very hard. And Cambridge, well, we still have bits of Harvard and MIT still running, and they kept things together after the war, up to and including today. Like some medieval university city, the professors said. They have walls and gates and our own police force.”

The envelope the envoy had brought was on the table, unread. The governor picked it up, laid it down and said, “I will read this, I promise. But tell me, what’s behind it? Why are you good and smart folks in Cambridge bothering with your rural neighbors up north?”

Murphy dabbed at his lips with a rough cloth napkin. “We’re starting to grow, starting to get a fair number of educated people attracted to our area. But we’re starting to run low on foodstuffs, crops, that sort of thing, because more and more people are interested in education, in doing research, instead of other work. Basically, we’re looking for a formal trade agreement. Ask you to supply the city with food, firewood, clothing, that sort of thing.”

“And what do we get in return?”

“Free education for your best students in the state. Sharing of restarted technology. Allowing serious medical cases to come to our hospitals.”

The governor stirred the stew with his spoon. “Sounds attractive, but our schools are doing quite well. Illiteracy doesn’t exist here. And we’ve also done well on our own, with small-scale technology. Most of the state is now hooked up to a telegraph system, and there are even some small electrical networks that are run by hydropower . . . and we have a fine medical facility at Dartmouth, creating those necessary vaccines to avoid plagues of measles and smallpox and diphtheria . . . so we’ve done well. Perhaps not as well as you, but nothing to be ashamed of. We’ve reached a nice balance. A balance I think we’d like to keep, if it’s all the same to you.”

“But you can do so much more,” Murphy said.

“For what purpose? I mean . . . what is the city and the schools working to accomplish?”

Then Murphy’s demeanor changed, so quickly, like heavy clouds suddenly releasing a thunderous downpour. “To bring us back, to bring us back where we belong. For decades, we were rulers of the earth, bending everything to our will . . . and then we got stupid, got sloppy. We gave our powers, our responsibility, we gave it all up to the machines, as if they were gods or something . . . and we shouldn’t be surprised that the machines had turned against us.”

“So what are you to do?”

“We continue to rebuild. We’ll rediscover the age of steam, of coal, but all the research, the discoveries .

. . it’s just a manner of going back and redoing what had been done before. It won’t take long, not long at all. Right now, most of this country is living in a manner that was the mid-1800s. Pretty soon it’ll be the early 1900s, and a few years after that, we’ll reach a level that we were, back in the 1950s. During the 1950’s we didn’t have computers, but we had a living standard and an economy that was the envy of the world. It shouldn’t take long to get there.”

The stew seemed to have lost its taste. “But do you and your friends intend to stop at the 1950s?”

A violent shake of the head. “Of course not. We’ll continue advancing, but we’ll be more careful. Someday, the chip will return, but we will have learned our lesson. We’ll keep them divided and apart. We won’t let them become our masters, ever again. We won’t submit. Not ever again.”

The governor’s bowl was half-full, but dinner was now over. He picked up the envelope, nodded to the envoy. “I will read this tonight. You’ve given me a lot to think about.”

Murphy seemed pleased. “Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.”

“You’re quite welcome.”

And as he waited for dessert—an apple pie made from last year’s dried apples, he was promised—he knew that a meeting with his State Police colonel was now on the agenda for later tonight.

In the early morning the next day, he got dressed in his cold and spare room and then hobbled out to the dining room, where a young female State Trooper had prepared his breakfast. He sipped the tea and munched on a dry piece of wheat toast and then, staff in hand, went out to the porch. His colonel was standing there, resplendent in his uniform, sharply dressed and cleanly shaven. He nodded to the governor as he stood there.

“Crisp morning, sir,” he said.

“That it is,” the governor said. He leaned some on the staff and looked out at the common area. The flagpoles were still there, the limp cloth flags still hung, and in the distance, horses still grazed in the common pasture.

But there was no car parked before him. No old car with old technology and UNPLUG blatantly and obscenely painted on its metalwork.

The colonel handed him a rucksack. It was heavy.

The governor said, “Did it go all right?”

“It went fine.”

“I’m so glad to hear that,” the governor said.

“Sir . . . do you . . . do you need my help?”

He shrugged on the rucksack. “No. You know how it is. Something I must do myself.”

The colonel’s face seemed set and determined, like that of a grown man, trying hard very not to weep.

“Thank you, sir. You honor us.”

The governor smiled, gently slapped him on the back. “Don’t fret, Malcolm. I’ll be back in time for dinner. Bacon and eggs, no matter what the Health Commissioner says.”

“Very good.”

And then he stepped off the porch and noticed that the residents of his capital, his state, were in the shadows and on the porches, watching him. He raised his staff to salute them, and then walked into the dark of the woods.

Hours later, heart pounding, legs trembling from the exertion, the governor rested before his destination. The climb had been tough, very tough, and when he got back—God willing—he would have a word with his Parks Commissioner. The mountain trails in all of the state were mostly overgrown and in disuse, but this one, especially this one, had to be kept cleared. It had been a rough time, going through the woods, over a few streambeds, and then advancing up the slope to this exposed ridgeline. He was glad of two things: that he had kept his walking staff with him and that the envoy hadn’t visited in the middle of winter. Now he was on a ridgeline of granite rocks and boulders, and before him, about fifty yards way, was a small stone and wooden building. Decades ago, it had been part of a hut system, but no casual hikers ever came this way now, not ever. Staff in hand, he made his way slowly to the hut, critically looking at the shingles and the windows and the old satellite dish, up on the roof. The place still looked in good shape.

At the door, he paused, lowered his head, and turned the handle. The door opened easily, and he walked in, his boots sounding loud on the wooden floor. The door was never locked, for why should it be? No one save him and a few acolytes devoted to the building’s upkeep ever came this way. Light came in from the windows, allowing him to see fairly well after his eyes adjusted. Before him was small room that had once been the dining area, and to the left were bunkrooms, where hikers had spent the night. Posters and signs and flyers, decades old, hung on bulletin boards by rusted thumbtacks. He ignored it all and went to the right, where the hut crew had lived, where they had operated and run the hut, and where . . .

Well, where it all was.

Heart pounding, he let his staff rest against the wall and then undid his rucksack. He went down a short hallway and then opened another door, and then he paused, heart pounding even harder. The room was clean and tidy and kept warm by a series of battery-operated heaters, and before him, in the middle of the room, was an office desk. And on the center of the desk, staring back at the governor, was a large monitor. The building’s networked computer still running, still operating, and from the little red light on the webcam camera, still watching and listening.

The governor bowed. How could he have explained this to that man from Cambridge, about what had occurred here? For ever since he had found this place decades ago, and had paid the necessary obedience, his people had lived, had thrived, had known peace and comfort. As he had said, they were in balance, and peace, and who was he to disturb that?

“My lord,” he said softly to the blue computer screen, recalling that spiteful jig from the envoy, “we seek your forgiveness for the blasphemy that occurred yesterday, a blasphemy we failed to halt, and we ask that you accept this sacrifice in your honor.”

He dragged a dusty metal chair before the desk and, reaching into the rucksack, pulled something heavy and cold from its interior. He held his breath as he held up the object before the webcam, making sure it was visible, and then he gently lowered the severed head of the envoy from the mayor of Cambridge onto the chair. The eyes were closed, and he was grateful for that small favor. And then the governor lay prostate before his master, before his god, and said in a voice full of passion and piety, “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa,” content in the knowledge that he was showing true faith and allegiance to the one that had the power of life and death over his people, his people who depended on him.

A heavy burden, but one he knew he had been destined to bear.

Cold Dead Fingers

by Loren L. Coleman

Loren L. Coleman has been writing military-tech science fiction since his discharge from the US Navy in 1993. His first BattleTech novel was published in 1995. Since then, he has written over twenty published novels including MechWarrior, Vor, Star Trek, and recently a military-fantasy trilogy for the Conan relaunch. He lives in Washington State with his wife, Heather, three children, two Siamese cats, and a neurotic border collie. He holds a black belt in traditional Taekwon Do, coaches youth sports, and, because he doesn’t have enough to do, he is currently building a new, larger home. It’s either that or selling his teenage son to local gypsies to make more room for his growing DVD collection. Platoon Sergeant Marcos Rajas threw himself back hard into the slash trench as a spotting laser splashed crimson jewels across the polarized faceplate of his Interservice Combat Assault Suit. Just in time. Hyper-velocity pellets cracked the air in a fury of tiny sonic booms. The trench’s crusted rim exploded in a spray of dust and stone chips and razor sharp splinters that peppered his arms and chest and pinged off his helmet.

A fresh sting burned into his left shoulder, and he knew even before the ICAS diagnostic flashed a BREECH WARNING across his retinas that suit integrity had been compromised. Military jargon for he’d been fragging shot !

He drew in shallow breaths, tasting his own sweat as well as a metallic tang from Antares VII’s mercury-laced atmosphere. Enough to worry him. The ICAS had sealed itself around the wound, and nanite scrubbers were already bleeding into his air supply to break down the poisonous air, converting the heavier molecules into raw material for patching over the breach. But that took time.

“Teach me to stick my head up,” Marcos gritted through clenched teeth. A half dozen inquiry icons lit up in a standing column along the edge of his faceplate. Gravel. Tommy-G. The Joes came in three, four, and five. And Books. Marcos swept them aside with a glance into the VOID and an extra-long blink to clear his queue. Overriding the network, he slaved what was left of his platoon to his own suit’s tactical computer, and in the blink of an eye (literally), he uploaded enemy positions into everyone’s weapons.

Gravel’s inquiry flagged again, this time with a flashing exclamation, but Marcos ignored it.

“Cans rolling up on the northwest slope,” he called out over STANDARD VOICE. Barking each syllable. “Walkers south. Split the diff. Fire! Fire! Fire!”

Without raising their heads, the fifteen men remaining to Second Platoon thrust CAR-7 assault rifles above the rim of the laser-cut trench and cut loose. Fast and accurate target selection required at least one pair of eyes and often a touch of human intuition to understand how the battlefield was unfolding, but there was no need to aim by sight once tactical data was updated in the rifle memories. ICAS technology handled that part. Able Squad, with more bodies, concentrated their firepower against the Canisters

—not much more than large antipersonnel mines riding an axle between two wheels and the simplest of botbrains slung underneath in a protective casing.

The six Alliance soldiers left in Bravo hammered away at the cyborg Walkers that scrambled through the broken territory directly south, attempting to flank the Alliance position. One-handing his own rifle, Marcos held it overhead like a periscope breaking the surface over a tortured landscape of craters, deep laser slashes and pockets of swirling gasses. He thumbed the trigger stud and joined his fire with Bravo. The weapon screeched in its trademark wail, joined the caterwauling symphony of his platoon, driving rusty knives through his ears. The air rippled with dispersed energy. Washing through the wide slash trench in overlapping waves, the landscape appeared to melt and then reform.

Marcos counted three thunderclaps—AP Canisters detonating on the lower slope—before safety protocols kicked in to deactivate his platoon’s combat assault rifles, preventing them from overheating.

“Override!” Marcos shouted. Captured the SAFETY icon out of several nesting in his peripheral vision and blinked that into the VOID as well. CAR-7 safety margins were conservative. They always had one extra burst in them.

Again he joined his fire with Bravo, cutting away at Walker positions. The AP mines were the larger tactical threat, if barely, but when it came right down to it, he’d rather meet his end in a flash of fire and shrapnel than captured by the Cybs. Brain scooped out and shoved into a jar. Reprogrammed and wired into a gun turret somewhere, maybe a smart bomb. From a cyborg’s point of view, parts was parts. The hell of it was wondering if some part of your consciousness remained, unable to help itself as you were turned against your comrades, your own race. Barracks horror stories. Maybe. No one had determined whether that was true or not.

Or, if someone did know, no one had passed that info down the ranks. Another pair of thunderclaps. Five total! Half of the Canisters Marcos had scoped earlier in his quick glance over the rim. He’d hoped for one more, at least. Seconds ticking away, the high-pitched wailing rose to a fever pitch, grinding at the base of the skull. Reality shifted and jumped as waste energy washed through the trench, his men reaching deep into their suit reserves. Most of them, anyway.

Through the waves of distortion, Marcos saw Jerimiah Gravel tucked into a narrow crevice. Mimetic armor in Gravel’s assault suit had darkened to the same reddish-black as the trench’s laser-scorched crust, but movement tended to spoil the effect. Gravel pointed his weapon straight up into the air, working his trigger assembly to no effect.

Damn! A failed rifle was just as bad as a casualty out here. And if one man had pushed his gear too hard

. . .

Marcos quickly slaved the platoon to his ICAS master, VOIDing their combined assault program and placing all soldiers back on SELECTIVE FIRE protocol. The general cacophony died down into an argument of individual shrieks.

“Books,” he called out in STANDARD VOICE. Shoved himself away from the trench’s wall. A bit unsteady on his feet at first, blinking away the aftereffects of the heavy energy distortion, and his left shoulder still hurt like hell. Stumbling forward, he was caught by Books. The young corporal steered Marcos over to Gravel’s side.

“Sarge. You all right?” The boy’s Savannah III accent bled his words together into “Y’awlrite?”

Platoon pinned down by Cybs, he’d been shot, and what was a little mercury poisoning between allies?

Marcos hooked them into a private comms channel.

“Great. Fine. Next time I’ll just throw you over the rim instead. Now give me a hand.”

There was Gravel’s inquiry, still flashing red-and-amber on his right-side Christmas Tree. He hooked Gravel’s icon to his comms system and cycled Books in as well.

“Overheat?” he asked, starting with the worst possible scenario. Hardest problem to fix once it happened.

“Frag me if I know, Sarge.” Gravel’s voice was soft and musical. Before his number got pulled for duty, he’d been a tenor with the Choir of the Angels. Hearing him swear was one of the funniest things in the

’verse. Most days. “Borging thing just up and quit.” He held the rifle out as if for inspection. Shook it. Say what you like about Alliance Interservice Duty, the one thing they did not do was send a man to the lines with inferior equipment. CAR-7’s were state of the art. The rifle’s “stock” held a core of solid tungsten from which assemblers stripped out perfectly-shaped rods no more than a sliver in length. Feed a chain of rods through the acceleration chamber, and with muzzle velocity at even a fraction of Big-C

one didn’t need a great deal of mass to punch a hole the size of your fist through as much as two feet of armor composite. Not even that much of a recoil to worry about, as the weapon’s arrestor assembly bent Newton’s laws into waves of energy that sprayed back in a harmless fan. Just a slight distortion in the air and that unearthly wailing, which no sound suppression system could ever fully mask. Rattled the back teeth a bit, might make the ears bleed from time to time, but all in all a solid weapon. A solid and highly complex weapon. To fix it, one usually needed an armory’s tech shop. What the platoon had out here on the backside of Antares VII was Books, who had probably memorized the entire CAR-7 operating manual by now.

Well, that was something, at least.

“Talk to it,” Books said. And Marcos nodded.

The rifles had memory and a great deal of processing power. They also possessed a sophisticated diagnostic system which, normally, the ICAS assault suit interpreted for the soldier, restricting them only from core programming and a few “safeties” that were supposedly limited to Alliance Interservice tech specialists. Rate of fire, energy dispersal—specifications of that nature. But one of the first hacks a cadet learned after boot was to use a suit’s communications system to access the full diagnostic, “talking” his way into that deeper programming, setting up a few specialty commands of his own, such as the ability to override the heat-safety protocol.

A downloaded patch could even give the rifle a voice, though Marcos always found that a bit creepy. Gravel shook the rifle again. “Tried that, don’t you think I tried that? Can’t get it to answer any query.”

He turned to one side and beat the rifle against an outcropping of half-melted stone. “Something wrong, piece?” he shouted at the silent weapon.

Now here was a path to unsettle unit morale in a hurry. No soldier should ever treat his weapon that way. Marcos barred his own rifle across Gravel’s chest, pinning him back into the crevice. Laid hold of the other man’s barrel, twisting it away from the ground—

—and yanked it right out of his hands.

Which sat Marcos back, hard and left Books squatting nearby, equally dumbstruck. Because that should never have happened.

The wail of rifle fire died off quickly. Tommy-G elbowed Big Mike, who did a double take to see Marcos holding two rifles, and Gravel so obviously still alive. All three Joes hugged their own rifles tight against their chests, as if their sergeant might try to strip them of their weapons next. One Joe shook his head. “What the bloody hell . . .” “. . . is this about?” another of the synthetic soldiers finished.

Both of the General Issue soldiers had dropped into STANDARD VOICE. Their software packages allowed them to mimic human emotions to a T. Their incredulity matched exactly what Marcos was feeling.

ICAS technology did not allow a soldier to relinquish his weapon. Ever. One hand remained locked on the rifle at all times, unless it was locked into the chest clips or “slung” against the magnetic plate built into a suit’s left shoulder. A simple transponder system made certain that the weapon would not unlock for anyone but the registered owner. Not unless he was dead, or at the very least unconscious. Even then, it took a command override by another combat assault suit to pry a weapon loose.

“They can have my weapon when they pry it from my cold dead fingers, and with the proper security codes,” was a popular soldier’s refrain.

“Back on the wall,” Marcos ordered. Tossed the rifle to Books. “Tommy-G, grab a look. Bravo, give him some cover fire. Able . . . grenades!”

He reached for one of the three fist-sized canisters clipped to his suit’s belt. When his gloved hand took firm hold of the grenade, sensor feedback pulled a drop-down menu across his retinas. In a few winks he had dialed YIELD to maximum strength, programmed his throw, and set a safety of thirty meters standard in case of a bounce-back or a dropped canister.

The grenade released into his hand, and with the rest of Able Squad (not counting Books and Gravel) he chucked it out of the trench and into the no-man’s land beyond. No worries about range or the strength of his throw. At the top of its arc, each grenade stabilized on an electronic gyro, and then a propellant burst hurled it along the preprogrammed throw.

. . . 2 . . . 1 . . . Impact!

Bright columns of fire rose up through swirling gasses, and the ground shook and bucked beneath Marcos Rajas’ feet. Nearly threw him to the ground again. His suit’s suppression system dampened the violent sound of the heavens splitting open down to a merely head-aching roar. After a few seconds, filled almost at once with the wailing cries of Bravo’s suppression fire, small chips and shards of stone and bits of blackened earth pattered down into the trench, a few still glowing a dull red. There would be half a dozen new craters pocketing Antares VII, Marcos knew, each of them rimmed with the telltale molten crust of an antimatter flash.

“Dead ball,” Big Mike shouted. And on the inside of Marcos’ faceplate a blip registered on his incoming DATA STREAM as the location of Mike’s failed grenade downloaded to his MAP files. Good to know, if his platoon was forced on the move, where all the unexploded ordnance lay. So, five new craters. Enough to set the Cyb Walkers back on their mechanical asses. He hoped. Hope was coming in shorter supply, however, minute by minute.

Two new inquiries flashed up on his Christmas Tree. Bravo soldiers. Princess and Three-Joe. Eyeballing their positions, he saw each man hold their rifle overhead and shake it. Not possible that they were already out of ammunition. But for whatever reason, two more rifles were now out of service. Another DATA STREAM blip as Tommy-G uploaded revised enemy positions to Marcos’ tactical computer. He networked the data to the rest of his platoon. Raised his rifle overhead and squeezed off ten seconds of firepower. “Talk to me,” he ordered Books.

The young corporal shook his head. “It don’ make sense.” He had a shard of rock from the earlier fallout melted to the side of his faceplate. Brushed at it angrily, but could not dislodge it. “Near as I can figure—” and as near as Marcos translated “Ahken figger” out of Savannah and into Standard “—this weapon says that Gravel, here, has surrendered.”

Marcos replayed “srended” through his mind several times and still came up with the same result. His mouth dried to a sharp, metallic bitterness.

“Surrendered? No one surrenders without my order.” He glanced both ways along the trench, as if to make sure of that. At the rest of his platoon, raising their weapons up just enough to splash firepower to the northwest, to the south. Rifles wailed and energy washed around in showers of new distortion. Return fire from the Cybs shredded the trench’s lip again. Shards of stone rattled off his faceplate. “We’re still in the thick.”

But that would make sense, wouldn’t it? A surrender command, if ordered by the highest ranking officer or NCO on site, deactivated the weapon before allowing it to be dropped. An enemy could never pick up a surrendered weapon and turn it against other AID soldiers.

“Might be a software glitch,” Books said. “Ah’ve never read of one. Never heard of one to read about, even. S’pose it’s possible, though.”

“A glitch that spreads like a virus?” Marcos asked. And something in that idea sparked a new and terrible thought. “Three weapons down now?” Then another inquiry flash, and Rabbit held his rifle overhead. “Four! Fragging ridiculous.”

“Maybe we should pull back,” Rabbit said. Anthony Guitterez. Marcos didn’t need to check his tree to know who had dropped into the STANDARD VOICE conversation. Rabbit was always first to suggest a pullback.

“Not gonna happen. This is our stretch of nowhere. Command said to hold this position, and that’s just what we’re gonna do. Tommy-G! Grab another look.”

“Ya got it, Sarge.”

The platoon’s senior corporal lowered his rifle and slid a few meters to his right, his ICAS armor shifting from sooty-black to the dark gray of ash, blending in with lighter burn marks along this stretch. Easing up to the edge, his helmet’s color faded to a stark, bone white: the color of the horizon on Antares VII. Able and Bravo doubled up on their firepower, buying Tommy-G a few desperate seconds. Two more inquiry lights flashed with exclamations. Two more soldiers with rifles pointing straight up. Useless.

Marcos hooked each man with a silent assault rifle into a common channel. Flashed them into the VOID

to clear their designations and then regrouped them under a new MENU as GAMMA auxiliaries.

“Grenades,” he ordered this new unit. “Full set, then stagger.” Each man reached for one of the small, deadly canisters at their hip. Rabbit had trouble getting his to release from the clip, but the other six managed. And with Gravel doing a hand-count for coordination, all let fly at the same time. Propellant bursts sent two of those grenades the wrong direction, arcing them back over the trench to the far side. Tiny blips in the DATA STREAM already marked them as failed ordnance. Marcos counted down on the others, waiting for the detonations—even one!—but nothing. No antimatter flash. No ground-shaking columns of fire walking over the battlefield.

“Dead ball,” Gravel said in his sing-song delivery.

Rabbit shook his head. Flapped his arms in disgust. “Maybe we can find some rocks to throw at them.”

“Cover!” Marcos ordered, shoving Rabbit toward a nearby crevice in the trench wall where the soldier could at least keep his head down and his mouth shut. This many failures, cascading one upon another so quickly, spoke of purpose. Of design. And Marcos believed he finally had a grasp on it. He moved back to the wall and hooked through STANDARD VOICE so that his entire unit could hear.

“What you got, Tommy?”

“Two Cans, rolling up fast,” the corporal reported. Another quick glance. “Walkers holding at the outer perimeter. I think I can grab a better angle if—”

But Marcos was already firing. Thumb down on his assault rifle’s trigger stud, adding short, choppy shrieks to the caterwauling symphony. Two sprays south. One northwest. Two sprays south again. Hacking away at the enemy positions again, then again.

Then nothing.

As simple as that, his assault rifle suddenly stopped firing. Ammunition stock still at seventy-three percent. No damage icons to warn of impending failure. The best technology available to AID, a rifle practically with a mind of its own, and it refused to engage the enemy! Marcos shook the weapon, as if he might jog a loose part back into place. And then a bright, painful bolt slashed across his retinas as a tree-light flared up briefly in stark white. It faded quickly, though not fast enough that Marcos saw Tommy-G shoved rudely back from the edge of the trench.

One moment his man had been edging up over the rim, scoping out enemy positions. The next, he lay on his back between Big Mike and Rabbit. Half of his helmet shot away. Three more soldiers held rifles overhead. Shook them. Another short handful of inquiries lit up the inside of his faceplate.

“Damn. Blast. Cybbing frag!” With each shout, Marcos beat his rifle against the hard, hard ground next to Tommy-G, ready to smash the useless weapon into ruin.

Then Big Mike and Gravel were at his side. Each grabbed an arm and hauled Marcos back from his fallen man to pin him against the trench wall. Voices worried him from all sides as the entire unit dropped back to STANDARD VOICE, a confusion of shouts and questions torn apart by the five working rifles still wailing on the enemy positions. Five rifles. Not enough to hold the Cybs back. Not enough by far to take down the remaining antipersonnel Canisters. Which rolled up over the rim of the trench, hung motionless at the edge for one long and painful heartbeat, and then dropped into the wide, shallow scar.

“Cover!” at least three men shouted along with Marcos as everyone dove for the ground. And then the entire world tore itself apart in a storm of fire and smoke and razor-sharp metal. The darkness never completely claimed him, though Marcos nearly smothered beneath its weight. Like being buried alive. Eyes clogged with soot and fire-blackened earth. His lungs burning, straining to pull even a shallow breath from the acrid-tasting air. For a moment, he wondered if it had happened. His brain recovered from the battlefield by Cyborg Walkers, scooped out and now at rest in a dark canister somewhere. His arms and legs felt as if they were bound in heavy casts of steel, barely able to move. Better to just lie there. Easier. Lie there and count the tiny, red pinpricks of light scrolling across his retinas. Marking off each second, each heartbeat.

Each computer cycle, as the ICAS technology slowly brought him out of HIBERNATION. Still alive! Still whole!

At least the ICAS core programming had yet to fail. The first priority of any Interservice Combat Assault Suit was to keep the solider alive. The Cybs had not penetrated to this level. Yet. Sergeant Marcos Rajas knew. He knew that it had to have been some kind of Cyb virus, or the equivalent, to promote such rapid failure of the technology used by his platoon. From what Books had said. What he had witnessed. And just his gut sense. A soldier had to trust his equipment, yes, but first he trusted his instincts. Automation was the soldier’s friend. So said AID Command. Until that automation failed. Or was subverted.

Icons flared to life against the backside of his blackened faceplate. LIFE SUPPORT, functioning at critically low levels. An EMERGENCY signal to AID Command. Then the Christmas Tree, lighting up with inquiries to his soldiers who were still alive.

Rabbit. Books. Gravel. Two-Joe and Three-Joe. Big Mike. Counting himself, that was half a dozen. One short squad left out of fifteen men.

He swallowed painfully. Tasted the metallic tang of mercury choking at the back of his throat. “If you can hear me,” Marcos whispered, hooking his remaining men into a common channel, “don’t move. Don’t speak. Just flash me an inquiry.”

Three inquiries flashed at once. Two more staggered in a few seconds later. Big Mike’s icon flashed an uncertain connection. Maybe he was unconscious. Maybe his suit was damaged. Two-Joe dialed in an exclamation, and Marcos blinked the channel open.

“We got Walkers,” the GI soldier warned.

Marcos had guessed as much. He had held off on a complete ICAS restart, in fact, worried that the enemy would be near. Checking bodies. Looking for more raw material. Blinking his way through a system restart MENU, he isolated his faceplate polarization controls and dialed it slowly back from opaque.

At first, the landscape looked as if it still suffered from the energy distortion of CAR-7 rifle fire. Blurred. Glassy. Then he realized that his faceplate was cracked in several places. Amazing, really, that it still held together at all.

Finding a clear section, he turned his head just enough to survey what had been his platoon’s strong-point. Saw a Cyborg Walker not three meters away.

Maybe fifty pounds of meat—muscle and nerve clusters, and a brain, of course—threaded through a metal exoskeleton. Four legs, this one. Low speed. Good stability. Marcos knew this design. It would have six arms tucked away. Two for carrying weapons of different size and operation. Two simple claws for utility purpose. And two ending in a handful of tools for detail work. The Walker bent down over Tommy-G’s body. Taking a detailed survey. Not much gray matter left to work with there, the exoskeleton reached down with a mechanical claw and grabbed the soldier’s rifle. Prying it from the man’s cold, dead fingers. It turned the weapon over and over again, inspecting it closely.

Another Walker stepped into view. Dragging Three-Joe away by one leg.

“Books,” Marcos whispered. Risking the comms more than he wanted. “If it was a surrender deactivation, I can rescind. Yes?”

Silence, for a moment. Then, “In theory. If’n it follows standard protocol, a countermand order by the commanding officer or senior NCO would override.”

Exactly what Marcos thought. “So why does that sound too easy?”

Because it was. “Don’ think that’ll work,” Books said. “If the system was compromised, it had to’ve been tricked into believing you ordered it in the first place, Sarge. Without knowing how the Cybs did it, it would take too long—Frag me! Ah got one right behind me!—too long t’dig outta trouble!”

He rushed out this last, and it took Marcos an extra second to unravel the man’s accent. “But a new senior NCO could do it.” A cold chill took him, knowing what he would have to do. Or maybe that was just a side effect of the mercury poisoning. “So after Tommy-G, that would be you,” he said. Head swimming and not trusting his own analysis one hundred percent.

“Ah guess so.”

That was the way it had to be then. Marcos still had his own rifle. Deactivated or not, his grip on the stock had been too strong to shake. Maybe it could be made to work again. Certainly he owed his men that chance.

He grabbed his EMERGENCY beacon by eye, and blinked it into the VOID. Followed it up with all functions under his LIFE SUPPORT menu. One by one. Stripping away his ICAS technology. Shutting down all repairs. Killing his presence in the platoon’s networked combat suits. Until POWER and COMMS were all that was left.

Then he shifted his weight against the bulk of his suit, rolling up onto his side in order to attract the attention of the nearest Walker.

“Sarge,” Gravel said. The young man’s melodic voice sang with fear. “There’s a Walker moving right toward you.”

“No one move,” he said. “Not a muscle or a twitch until Books gives you the order.” He overrode multiple queries, flashed them into the VOID behind all his critical systems. Only Books remained tied into his comms. “Ya can’t do this, Sarge. We don’ even know—”

“It’s all we have left, Books. It’ll work.”

It had to.

And before his corporal could argue further, Marcos stripped his COMMS system out of the MENU, flashed it into the VOID as well. Leaving only a baseline POWER level functioning. Enough for him to still move in the heavy ICAS skin. Enough to call back his systems, if he desired. The Walker moved over him, showing no fear of Marcos’ rifle, or the fact that the soldier remained alive on the battlefield. Multiple camera eyes focused down at him. Checking for any trap, or simply surveying for raw material—what was the difference in the eyes of a Cyb? Liabilities and assets. Everything weighed with an algorithm and directed by software.

Much like ICAS technology, in fact.

The Walker reached down with one utility claw, clamping onto the barrel of Marcos’ rifle just as the platoon’s sergeant blinked his POWER into the VOID, fully deactivating his suit. The extra weight sagged around him like a skin of steel. Heavy. Barely flexible without its baseline charge. Whether the Walker sensed this or not, it doubled its own efforts and hauled Marcos half upright as it attempted to steal away his useless weapon. Just in case? Or following an encoded protocol for dealing with prisoners, no matter their state?

Marcos didn’t know and didn’t much care, so long as he did not lose the rifle. He held on with a one-handed grip, fighting the weight of his damaged suit as much as the Walker’s pull. Buying time for Books to reboot the network. Gasping for breath as his lungs burned for lack of oxygen. Vision blurring. The muscles in his legs cramped painfully, and he tasted blood at the back of his throat. But still he refused to let the Walker pry his weapon loose.

Not this time.

Not his!

And then the high-pitched whine of a charging weapon reached him even through the suit’s insulation. In the distortion blurring his peripheral vision, he saw motion. Men rising up from the dead. Weapons thrust forward. And Marcos spent the last of his strength to wrench the weapon against the Walker’s grip, angling the barrel around, and dragging his thumb over the firing stud. Held it there as the rifle shrieked one last time in defiance.

“Think he’ll come around?” the choir asked in high, pure notes.

“Yeah. He looks baed. Like’n fersh rodkul.” Fresh . . . fresh roadkill? Maybe. “Ain’t seen anything looks like this since—”

“Lastime you looked inna mirror,” Marcos Rajas slurred, fighting his too-thick tongue. He cracked open one eye. Saw a waxy-pink face swimming against a gray background. “Mus’ be hell. Full of my own person’l demons.”

“Anyone understand him through that accent?” Books asked. At least, that was how Marcos translated unnerstad’m , and ass ant . But the soldier was grinning, showing off lots of large, white teeth. Which meant that brimstone and eternal torment might still be a way off.

“You look far too happy for an ICAS slave. You get a discharge I don’t know about?” Marcos asked. He struggled his other eye open, saw that he had been stretched out in an emergency survival tent. Not a lot of light and even less room, especially with so many bodies crammed inside. Four . . . five . . . six . . . He tried to sit up. Big Mike and Rabbit helped him, still in their suits but helmets doffed. And Two-Joe. Gravel. Princess and Three-Joe as well—two men he had thought dead before that last, desperate gamble.

“Suits were fragged,” Princess said, flashing Marcos a trademark wink. “Slipped into hibernation long enough for Booksie to get a tent up. Pulled us all out of the big sleep.”

Marcos’ mouth tasted as though he’d tried to gargle with razor blades, all blood and metal. The vision in his left eye wasn’t great. But all in all, he felt as if he might live. He noticed that he still wore one suit sleeve, still clenched his rifle in a gloved hand. Looked up, confused.

“We had to cut you out of your suit,” Gravel said. He nodded at the weapon. “We left the sleeve when we found out we couldn’t take the rifle out of your hand. Quite a grip you had on it, Sarge. Must have frozen your glove in place when you cut your power.”

Marcos nodded. Still staring down at the weapon. “Yeah, well. My rifle. My choice.”

“Command is sending down reinforcements to pull us back,” Two-Joe said, leaning in. “You’re pumped full of meds, and you seem to be all right. Now that you’re awake, we can dismantle the glove. Let you rest better without all that dead weight hanging off your arm.”

“Going to need to replace the rifle anyways,” Books said. “Not much good without a working suit tuned to it.”

Not true, though. Not by a far shot. Marcos laid himself back down, carefully. Cradled the rifle across his chest. He wasn’t letting it go. Not after everything they’d gone through together. “No thanks,” he whispered.

“What’s that, Sarge?”

Marcos smiled. And closed his eyes.

“I’ll hang onto it,” he said.

The Hum

by Rick Hautala

Under his own name as well as the pseudonym A. J. Matthews, Rick Hautala has published more than thirty novels as well as over sixty short stories in a variety of national and international anthologies and magazines. His most recent books under his own name include Bedbugs and The Mountain King . As A. J. Matthews, he has published The White Room, Looking Glass, and Follow . Forthcoming from C. D. Publications are Occasional Demons and Four Octobers . Also, a revised version of his novel Little Brothers titled Untcigahunk: Stories and Tales of the Little Brothers is due from Delirium Press. Chesapeake Films recently optioned his original screenplay Chills .

“Can you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“That . . .”

Dave Marshall rolled over in bed and struggled to come awake. He blinked, trying to focus his eyes in the darkness as he listened intently.

“I don’t hear anything, Sweetie, he said as he slid his hand up the length of his wife’s thigh, feeling the roundness of her hip and wondering for a moment if she was interested in a little midnight tumble. He felt himself stirring.

“Don’t tell me you can’t hear that,” Beth said irritably. Dave realized she was serious about this although he’d be damned if he could hear anything. It didn’t matter, though, because the romantic mood had already evaporated.

“Honest to God, honey, I don’t hear anything. Maybe it was a siren or—”

“It wasn’t a siren. It’s . . . I can just barely hear it. It’s like this low, steady vibration.” Beth held her breath, concentrating hard on the sound that had disturbed her.

“Maybe it’s the refrigerator.”

“No, goddamnit. It’s not the fridge.”

Dave was exhausted. He hadn’t been sleeping well lately. Pressures at the office, he supposed, were getting to him. He sure as hell didn’t need to be playing “Guess That Sound” at 2 AM.

“Just put the pillow over your head and go back to sleep. I’ll check it out in the morning.”

“I can’t sleep with my head under the pillow,” Beth grumbled, but she turned away from him and put her head under the pillow just the same. He patted her hip one more time, feeling a little wistful.

“Isn’t that better?”

“What? I can’t hear you.”

Ignoring her sarcasm, Dave said leaned over and kissed her shoulder as he whispered, “Goodnight, honey.”

Dave awoke early the next morning with every nerve in his body on edge. His eyes were itchy, and he could feel a headache coming on.

This is really weird, he thought. I was in bed by 10 last night. That’s nine freakin’ hours of sleep. I shouldn’t feel like this.

He went downstairs to the kitchen. Beth was seated at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee clasped in both hands. Her face was pale, and she looked at him bleary-eyed.

“How’d you sleep?” she asked, and he caught the edge in hr voice.

“Before you woke me up or after?” He forced a grin.

“Very funny. That goddamn hum kept me awake most of the night.” She took a sip of coffee and opened the newspaper, making a point of ignoring him.

“Beth . . .”

“Yeah?”

Dave stood still in the middle of the kitchen. Without even thinking about it, he suddenly realized that he could hear something. There was a low, steady vibration just at the edge of awareness. He could almost feel it in his feet.

“Wait a sec.” He held up a finger to silence her. “You know . . . ? I think I can hear it.”

“Really?” Beth looked at him like she didn’t quite believe him, but then she relented and said, “Oh, thank God. I thought I might be going insane.”

Over the next hour or so, they searched throughout the house from attic to basement, looking for a possible source of the sound. It wasn’t in the wires or the pipes or the circuit breaker box or the TV, of that Dave was sure. The odd thing was, no matter what floor they were on or what room they were in, the sound always seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. When Dave went outside to check the shed and garage, he found Beth in the middle of the yard, crying.

“What’s the matter, honey?” He put his arms around her, feeling the tension in her body.

“I can hear it just as loud out here as I can inside the house, “ she said, sobbing into his shoulder.

“So?”

“So . . . That means it’s not coming from inside the house. It’s out here somewhere. It’s like it’s coming from the ground or the sky or something.”

“Now you’re being ridiculous,” he said. He took a breath and, leaning close, stared into her eyes. “I’ll call the electric company and maybe the phone company. It’s gotta be a problem with the wires.”

“Sure,” Beth said, not sounding convinced. She wiped her nose on her bathrobe sleeve, then turned and walked back into the house. Dave watched her leave, knowing she didn’t believe it was a wire problem. He wasn’t sure he believed it, either.

Over the next few days, things got worse. A lot worse. Like a sore in your mouth you can’t help probing with your tongue, Dave found himself poised and listening for the sound all the time, trying to detect its source. Once he was aware of it, he couldn’t help but hear it. He was growing desperate to locate it and analyze it. His work at the office suffered. Jeff Stewart, his boss, noticed how distracted her was. At first he commented on it with amusement, but that changed to concern and, finally, exasperation. But Dave noticed that everyone in the office seemed a little distracted and, as the day went by, more and more irritable. This would make sense, he thought, if everyone was sleeping as poorly as he was. It had taken him hours to fall asleep last night, and once he was out, the noise still permeated his dreams. He woke up a dozen or more times and just lay there staring at the ceiling as he listened to the low, steady hum just at he edge of hearing. He knew Beth was lying awake next to him, but they didn’t talk. Every attempt at conversation ended with one of them snapping at the other.

Over the next few days, sales of white-noise machines, soundproofing materials, and environmental sound CDs went through the roof. People turned their TVs and radios up loud in a futile effort to block out the hum, further irritating their neighbors, who were already on edge. Dave’s commute to work quickly became a crash course in Type-A driving techniques. One morning, he was trapped for over an hour behind a sixty-five-car pileup on the Schuylkill Expressway that had turned into a demolition derby. It took nearly the entire city police force and an army of tow trucks to break up the melee. After that, Dave kept to back streets going to and from work. Schools began canceling soccer and football games as soccer-mom brawls and riots in the stands became increasingly frequent and intense. Shoving matches broke out in ticket lines and grocery checkout lanes. Neighborhood feuds and other violent incidents escalated, filling the newspaper and TV

news with lurid reports. As the week wore on, road rage morphed into drive-by shootings. Gang warfare was waged openly, and police brutality was applauded instead of prosecuted. The slightest provocation caused near-riots in public. The media reported that the hum—and the rise in aggressive behavior—was a global phenomenon.

“It’s only a matter of time before some third-world countries start tossing nukes at each other,” Dave muttered one morning at the office staff meeting. Mike from Purchasing glared at him.

“Who died and made you Mr-Know-It-All?” he snarled.

“Jesus, Mike, quit being such an asshole,” Dave snapped back.

“All right. That’s enough,” said Jeff. “This isn’t kindergarten. Let’s try to be professional here, okay?”

“Professional, schmessional,” Mike grumbled. “Who gives a rat’s ass anymore, anyway?”

“I said that’s enough .” Jeff thumped the conference table with his clenched fist. Sherry from Operations burst into tears. “Stop it, stop it now! Jesus, stop it ! I can’t take it any more! I can’t eat. I can’t sleep, and I sure as hell can’t stand listening to the two of you morons!”

Dave noticed with a shock the fist-sized bruise on her cheek. She caught him staring at her face and shouted at him, “It’s none of your goddamned business !”

“Wha’d I say?” asked Dave with a shrug.

“That’s it!” roared Jeff. “You’re fired! All of you! Every damned one of you!”

The entire staff turned and looked at him, seated at the head of the table. His face was flushed, and his eyes were bulging. In the moment of silence that followed, everyone in the room became aware of the hum, but Dave was the first to mentions that it had changed subtly. Now there was a discordant clanking sound, still just at the edge of hearing, but the sound was penetrating.

“The music of the spheres,” Sherry whispered in a tight, wavering voice. “It’s the music of the spheres.”

Her voice scaled up toward hysteria. “The harmony is gone. The center cannot hold. Something’s gone terribly, terribly wrong!” With a loud, animal wail, she got up and ran from the room with tears streaming down her face.

Mike swallowed hard, trying to control his frustration. “What the hell’s she talking about?”

“Go home. All of you. I’m closing the office until they figure out what this sound is.” Jeff’s fists were clenched, and his body was trembling as though he were in the grips of a fever. “If I don’t, I’m going to have to kill every single one of you . . . unless you kill me first.” He grinned wolfishly, then slumped down in his chair, pressing the heels of his hands against his ears as he sobbed quietly. Mike and Dave left the conference room without speaking.

That afternoon, Dave drove home, mindful not to do anything that would irritate anyone on the road. Sitting on the sofa in the living room as he waited for Beth to get home, he couldn’t help but listen to the hum. He thought about what could possibly be happening but couldn’t come up with an answer. When Beth finally came home, Dave said, “Sit down. We have to talk.”

She looked at him warily, and the mistrust he saw in her eyes hurt him.

“What’s her name?”

“What?” He realized what she meant and shook his head. “No. It’s nothing like that. Look, Beth, I’m trying to save us, not break us apart. Listen to me, okay?”

Beth nodded as she took a breath and held it. He could see she was trying to pull the last shreds of her patience together, and he felt a powerful rush of gratitude and love for her. It was so good to feel something pleasant that for a brief moment he forgot all about the noise.

“Jeff closed the office. This sound is getting on everyone’s nerves, and he’s afraid we’re all going to end up killing each other. He’s probably right. I was thinking—we get out of here. Let’s go up to your folks’

place in Maine or anywhere, as long as it’s far away from here and from all these people.”

“But the news says this hum is everywhere. There’s no escaping it, Dave,” Beth said. Her face contorted, but she clenched her fists and regained her self-control. “What’s the point of going anywhere?”

“Maybe there isn’t a point, but I . . . I feel like we have to do something. We have to try. I don’t want us to end up another murder-suicide statistic.” He took her into his arms and held her close. “I love you, Beth.”

She clung to him and whispered, “I love you, too.”

They sat silently in the living room as the twilight deepened, and the world all around them hummed.

What would normally have been a nine-hour ride to Little Sebago Lake took almost twenty-four hours because Dave wanted to stay off the interstates. The latest news reports indicated that truckers were chasing down and crushing unlucky drivers who pissed them off. Dave had seen the film Duel once, and that was enough for him.

As they headed north, the sound became more discordant. Dave noticed a mechanical chunking quality that was getting more pronounced. The endless, irregular rhythm ground away at his nerves like fine sandpaper, but they finally made it to the cabin by the lake without incident. The camp was on the east side of the lake, small and shabby, but a welcome sight. The lake stretched out before them, a flat, blue expanse of water with the New Hampshire mountains off in the distance to the west. The sun was just setting, tipping the lake’s surface with sparkles of gold light and streaking the sky with slashes of red and purple.

It was beautiful, and when Dave and Beth looked at each other, the good feelings drowned out the hum, if only for a moment. The embraced and kissed with passion.

Then the day was over. The sun dropped behind the mountains, and the humming noise pressed back in on them. After unpacking the car, they ate a cold supper of baked beans out of the can. Beth set about making the bed upstairs and straightening up while Dave walked down to the lake’s edge. The night was still except for the hum. All the usual sounds—the birds and crickets and frogs—were silent. The lake looked like a large pane of smoky glass. Stars twinkled in the velvety sky above. Dave sat down on a weather-stripped tree trunk that had washed up onto shore and looked up at the sky. The noise seemed to be changing again. It now was a faint, squeaky sound that reminded him of fingernails raking down a chalkboard. At least it was the only sound. No blaring TVs . . . no pounding stereos. How long can this go on? he wondered. How long can anyone handle this before we all go mad and exterminate ourselves?

He heaved a sigh as he looked up at the sky. At first, he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing when he noticed a few black flakes drifting down onto the lake’s surface. They looked like soot from a bonfire. Like a child in a snowstorm, Dave reached up and tried to catch one of the falling flakes. Funny, he thought, I don’t smell smoke.

He looked at his hand. The flake lay in the cup of his palm, but it wasn’t soft and crumbly like ash. It was hard and thin, with a dark, brittle surface. It crunched like fragle glass when he poked it with his index finger.

Jesus Christ he thought. It looks like paint.

Curious, he looked up again. By now the flakes were sifting down rapidly from the sky. As he watched, Dave became aware of a low, steady vibration beneath his feet. It felt like a mild electrical current. As he watched the sky, irregular yellow splotches appeared overhead as more and more black paint fell away, exposing a dull, cracked surface behind. After a time, silver and yellow flakes began to fall. Dave watched in amazement, his mouth dry, his mind numb.

A crescent moon was rising in the east behind him. He turned to see if it, too, was peeling away from the sky like an old sticker on a refrigerator. The noise rose to a sudden, piercing squeal, and then the vibration rumbled the ground like a distant earthquake.

“Beth!” he called out, watching as fragments of the moon broke off and drifted down from the sky. They fluttered and hissed as they rushed through the trees behind him, and then he saw something overhead that was impossible to believe. The peeling paint had exposed a vast complex of spinning gears and cogs with a network of circuits and switches that glowed as they overheated. The humming sound rose even higher until it was almost unbearable as more pieces of the night sky fell away, revealing the machinery behind it. At last, Dave knew—as impossible as it was—what was happening.

“Beth!” he called out so his wife could hear him above the steadily rising rumble. “Come out here!

You’ve got to see this! The sky is falling!”

Last of the Fourth

By Bill Fawcett

Bill Fawcett has been a professor, teacher, corporate executive, and college dean. He is one of the founders of Mayfair Games, a board and role play gaming company, and designed award-winning board games and role playing modules. He more recently produced and designed several computer games. As a book packager, he has packaged over 250 books. The Fleet science fiction series he edited and contributed to with David Drake has become a classic of military science fiction. He has collaborated on several mystery novels as Quinn Fawcett. His recent works include Making Contact: a UFO Contact Handbook, and a series of books about great mistakes in history: It Seemed Like a good Idea, You Did What? and How to Lose a Battle .

As he sealed his helmet, the deafening roar of a bay full of a dozen armored infantrymen preparing to drop was muted to a mere rumble. It wasn’t as loud as it had been when the Fourth Assault Regiment had been at full strength with thirty-six troopers and six officers. Being in almost constant combat, there had been no time to integrate replacements. This left Corporal Astin Olowoi free to once again wonder how something that only he had ever worn since it was uncrated could smell so disgustingly rancid. He knew had been the only person to ever wear this Mobile Assault Personnel Suit. Since it was tightly adjusted to every part and contour of his body, he was the only one who could wear and fight the powered combat armor effectively without days of adjustments. Still, each time he sealed his suit, the accumulated odor was nearly overpowering.

Routine maintenance schedules called for the MAPERS interior to be flushed and relined after every twenty uses. That should mean it was subject to a refresh about every twenty-one days between the current regimen of training, actual combat drops and emergency servicing. Astin had been fitted into his MAPerS ten months earlier. That was two weeks before the Jenkle announced themselves by destroying the human colony on Delos. The maintenance schedule was for peacetime use. This was wartime, and things changed as needs must ruled. There had been hardly any downtime, much less a chance to clean the MAPerS’ pads since Delos.

Shrugging his shoulders into the armor, the lean trooper let the servos adjust to him. The process went quickly. He hadn’t gained any weight since he had worn the suit in a simulated rehearsal of today’s drop twelve hours ago. Of course Assault Troopers didn’t gain weight. A few too many pounds and then a bit too much shock might get transmuted through his tighter-than-normal armor, turning his body’s internal organs into a mass of stringy mush. That had happened a few times on the raids the Fourth had made early in the war. The result was both fatal and so messy that the MAPerS of the casualty had to be retired into spare parts. Since those first deaths no one had to remind anyone in the Fourth to watch his weight, ever.

With the armor sealed, the reek of his suit almost brought tears to the veteran’s eyes. Once more he resolved to stay up one night and at least try to decontaminate and clean his interior pads. It didn’t help much, but breaking down a MAPerS to actually change each piece of pressure sensitive padding also involved refitting the several hundred contacts that passed through them. That could take a trained crew of armorers a week. The Fourth had seen no more than one day of downtime since the war had started. The human race had been at peace for almost a century when the Jenkle attacked. Those few, like Astin, had to hold the line until the race could prepare and relearn how to fight a war. But no one in the Fourth really complained. Forty million slaughtered civilians and a now lifeless planet generated a real sense of urgency among those whose job was to protect them. They had been part of the clean up, and every man in the regiment had taken the disaster personally.

This mission had been given the highest priority, and the Fourth, as the most experienced and toughest unit in the fleet, had been assigned. This mission had to succeed at any cost, in lives or anything else the Fourth could expend.

“Okay, seal up Fourth and stand by,” the Captain announced over the squad’s com sets. “Drop in five, stand by for final briefing.”

Astin felt his heart rate increase, and he took a few deep breaths to control his adrenaline output. Everyone got psyched before a drop, but the navy twerps were monitoring the vitals of each man in his squad, and Astin wasn’t going to give them any ammunition for comments. The briefing started a few seconds later, and Astin forced himself to concentrate on it.

He had heard it all before, but as the new squad leader Astin studied every word and diagram, hoping he would note something that might help later. He was the fourth squad leader in seven months, and the twenty-four man squad was now reduced to a dozen men. So he studied every word and image, even though logic told him that there couldn’t be anything new. They had been out of contact and running silent for over a week. There had been no chance for any new intel to arrive. They were going with what they knew when they had lifted from the marine base at Port Cozumel.

A map appeared, showing one of the few hundred islands that were the only land masses on their final destination, the water world of Khumn. This island was located almost exactly on the planet’s equator. Located on one side of the ten-mile long island was a Jenkle communication station. The humans knew of other systems like this. No doubt floating among the asteroids and other space debris were sensors that would send through that station detailed information on any vessels passing through the system. The brass didn’t tell troopers what was really happening, but everyone knew that the last two months had been spent clearing Jenkle-occupied planets, each one taking them a bit closer to three different heavily developed enemy worlds. The Jenkle were a lot better prepared for this war than the humans were. Each of those assaults had been a tough battle against an entrenched foe. Finally the Navy was in a position to do just that in any of three places. If the Jenkle tried to defend all three worlds, there was a chance of successfully hitting them hard. Astin was fairly sure that a large number of human ships that would prefer to not be spotted would be passing through this system soon. With most of the human fleet positioned to prevent the Jenkle from doing to the Earth what they did to Delos, what followed was likely to be the only offensive force humanity had.

The communications station sat in a half buried dome. They had found similar emplacements on several other worlds. If they were part of a feint, the island and relay station could be obliterated, but if the station went silent and stayed that way, it would also alert the Jenkle. Since the squad’s mission was to capture the station intact and attach a surprisingly small black box to a specific casing, it looked to Astin as though they were clearing the way for the actual attack force. The device, a naval tech had told him, would continue to assure the Jenkle the system remained operational but not relay any real data. Each trooper had a box, a dozen total. Any one of the boxes would do the job. Casualties were not a consideration.

There was only one concern. Probes had detected no Jenkle life, or any other living thing larger then a small crustacean, on the island. But they had seen something metallic a few meters across moving around the land mass. Given the Jenkle’s propensity for using artificial intelligence and robot combat units, the squad would drop hot and ready. The twelve men of his squad had the firepower to turn that island into a lifeless steaming rock. They just hadn’t been fighting the Jenkle long enough to see their every trick, so that mechanical unknown was a worry.

Going in on a hot drop was not much different from being fired like a missile at the target. The Navy ship would push through the warp point, putting out as little signal as it could. Traveling at high speed, it would actually launch the drop capsules behind itself as it flashed by the unnamed world. The problem was not so much one of getting to the target quickly, as it was of being slowed enough to be able to drop to the planet. That process would give the Troopers, if everything went right, a low enough velocity relative to Khumn to allow them to descend through the planet’s atmosphere. A small autopilot would guide their shell until they were low and slow enough that they would have enough power to use the grav units to swoop into combat.

The briefing ended, and Astin realized he had been worrying more than listening. He might have worried about that, but he was interrupted by a familiar thud. This was followed by the armor tightening and kneading in an effort to keep him conscious while being crushed by the massive deceleration. Astin could follow their approach to the planet from the crude diagram on his helmet’s com screen. It showed him and the other eleven troopers as green dots approaching the gray mass of Khumn. Adrenaline and the suit kept the squad leader awake until the press eased as they reached the edge of the atmosphere. That was when the first of the green dots vanished. A short screech over the com confirmed they had lost a man to enemy fire. What worried him the most was that they were almost on the exact far side of the planet. The Jenkle worlds they had dropped on before had not been able to do that. This was something new and very deadly.

Before the squad leader could react further, a second light vanished. Less than a very long minute later a third trooper died. They were just entering the atmosphere. Astin hoped it might provide some cover. It didn’t.

Three more lights blinked off, three more of his troops, were gone in seconds. They were still almost twenty seconds to release. But the kill rate seemed to be increasing. At the rate they were dying, no one would make to the ground.

“Emergency punch out,” the squad leader yelled over his com to the Fourth remaining men. “Kick it now, water is better than dead.” He prepared to follow reaching for the emergency break level. Astin could only hope there was enough battery power to allow the energy-hungry grav unit to lower him and his suit to the surface. A friendly island would be nice. Then two more lights went out even as he reached up. As he pulled the release with a mumbled obscenity, Astin thought he saw the last green light go. The flash to his side confirmed that the last other man had been hit. He was falling free and beginning to spin. Spreading his arms, Astin looked around him. The small cube on which the survival of mankind’s only attack fleet depended pressed into the trooper’s side. As the loss of the men he had lived and fought with began to register, he hardly cared.

The trooper saw the target island on the horizon. The sky was almost purple under the light of a redder sun than Earth’s. Most of the planets they had hit so far had reddish suns. The Jenkle home world circled a red star, one briefing had said, so it was theorized that they saw actually saw much further down the spectrum into infrared. They had been warned that this gave the Jenkle excellent night vision. Evan at a distance the island looked jagged. It had, in geological terms, recently been a volcano. The sand was dark, almost as black as the hundreds of obsidian rocks that covered most of its surface, giving the impression that the entire place was on fire with jagged, black flames. It was early morning, and no other land was in sight. No matter what the risk, Astin had to make for that island. He dropped low, and a bright orange beam cut through the air where he would have been if he had continued in a straight line. Then he guided his powered armor low over the water in a twisting, jerky pattern he hoped would confuse whatever was targeting him. The grav unit in the armor was never designed to fly the suit. It was meant to provide a short boost in a combat-jump situation or over hazardous terrain. The unit whined from the strain as Astin watched the level of energy in his batteries visibly drop from the strain of flying distances the MAPerS was never meant to handle.

Two more orange beams lanced through Khumn’s moist air. One came so close, half his recon gear overloaded in a burst of sparks. They hurt for a second, but then the wail that warned of low power began rising and falling, and nothing else was important.

Astin aimed at the nearest corner of the island and flew straight toward it. An orange beam tore the air in front of the desperate trooper. Once he saw the bottom, he dived in. The powered armor was not designed for underwater use, but he hoped being submerged might help, and, walking, the suit just might have enough power to get him to shore. The low battery warning continued to scream. After slogging toward the island for several minutes, the corporal began to hope he had evaded the Jenkle machine. The water was shallower now, and he saw the surface only a few meters over his head. Then an orange beam boiled away the water to his right. The pressure of the expanding water tossed Astin about and would have killed him if his suit hadn’t compensated. Then the sound of the low power warning began to fade. The legs of the combat armor began to stiffen. Hoping there was enough energy left to open the suit, Astin hit the button that activated the emergency release code. The top half of the armor literally peeled away from him, and water rushed in and up Astin’s nose. The water was cool and hinted of spices or worse. Using his last breath to clear his nostrils, the corporal tried to kick free. Less than a meter above him the surface tantalized, but got no closer. As the armor had failed during his swirling fall, the pads in the legs had closed tightly against him. With water filling the top and moistening the pads, they now formed a plug that held him so tightly that his feet were still dry. He was free from just below his waist, but trapped by the inert remnants of his armor. Lungs beginning to burn, Astin forced himself to relax. Using his hand to push the wet, clinging pads away from one of his thighs, the trooper felt the suit’s hold lessen. By now the need to breathe was nearly painful. He forced his hand down the other leg and once more broke the suction. Finally his leg came free. As his hand withdrew, it brushed against something unfamiliar. Almost without thinking, he grabbed the small cube and broke for the surface.

After a few very deep breaths and a few strokes, the trooper was able to stand with his head above the water. The insertion and his swim had taken only a few minutes, but he was exhausted. Moments later, Astin collapsed panting on the beach, oblivious to the fact that whatever had wiped out his squad might still be targeting him.

This was corrected just as the corporal’s vision cleared enough to notice one piece of his back armor rise to the surface about fifty meters from the shoreline. He got up, hoping there might be some way to recover a weapon from it, when it disappeared in a flash of orange and steam. Without his armor, Astin found the blast deafening and the crush of air from the explosion of the ammunition that had been in his pack threw him flat onto the sand.

Astin knew he was next. Unarmed and unarmored, he was defenseless. For a few moments the veteran just lay there, soaked and despairing.

But nothing happened.

He did not die in a flash of orange energy. A Jenkle did not rush onto the beach to kill him. In fact, as he looked around and studied the small hill that he remembered from the map dominating this end of the island, nothing—not a single enemy or Jenkle tank, or even a sea bird—moved. In the distance he could hear faint sounds of something large receding.

Once his sheer astonishment at still being alive passed, the trooper crawled into a cleft between two large, jagged rocks. He lay there barely thinking for several minutes, simply overwhelmed by the loss of his squad and his own hopeless situation. His hands shook, and he wasn’t sure if it was the cold or his failing nerves. Finally Astin looked back at the beach and noticed the black cube that had been the reason for this cluster jerk of a mission. After staring at the sealed plastic square in the sand for a very long time, Astin reminded himself it was still his mission to acquire the Jenkle relay. The Fourth had been sent on this mission, and he was still alive.

Even with his renewed determination, it took an act of will for Astin to force himself back onto the beach. With each step into the open he could feel the Jenkle lining him up for a kill shot. In the ten steps to the cube he died a dozen times in his mind. Once he had grabbed it, the trooper couldn’t stop himself from dashing back and diving into the relative protection of the volcanic rocks. Still breathing hard, the corporal found himself smiling. He was alive. It was apparent that whatever defended the island didn’t even know he was here, or didn’t care. All he had to do now was get past the Jenkle’s defenses and lock the cube on the relay.

All. . . . The smiled faded. He was half-naked, alone, unarmed, and had no idea what he was even facing. For all he knew there was a cunningly hidden base full of Jenkle infantry and armored vehicles just over the hill. Exhausted, the Trooper lay there warmed by the morning sun, fighting off despair, until he finally slept.

The day on Khumn was long, and the planet’s sun was still high in the sky when Astin woke up. Amazement at being alive was quickly replaced by a new concern. He felt the beginnings of hunger, and it reminded him that he was alone on an alien world with no supplies. Then the trooper realized that was hardly a concern. If he didn’t succeed in sabotaging the relay station, the Navy would have no way of knowing he was alive. He would be stranded on this damp rock forever. There was fresh water, but he had no idea if he could eat anything here. Most alien critters were just too, well, alien to digest, and on many planets the indigenous food was fatal to humans. Of course, that might be preferable to spending the rest of his life alone on Khumn. Completing the mission had suddenly become very personal. If the Jenkle did manage to intercept the attack fleet, the chances of his ever being picked up dropped to zero. So far the Jenkle had taken no prisoners during the war, and in their one planetary assault that had killed every living thing on Delos. For a panicky moment the trooper realized the Jenkle were as bloodthirsty as they appeared, and if humanity lost, there was a sickening chance Astin Olowoi could become, due to his very isolation and the Fourth’s failure, the last survivor of his race. One final man doomed to die alone on a distant world.

The thought gave the corporal a surge of determination, enhanced by a reckless realization that he had nothing to lose by getting killed. He really had to try to complete the mission. The consequences of failure looked a lot worse than dying in the effort. And if he was the last of the Fourth, then he sure as hell was going to complete their last mission.

Still aching from the battering he had taken while getting to land, Astin Olowoi crept cautiously up the hill. When he reached the crest, it was a disappointment. The island was the jagged top of a long extinct volcano. Small hills and a line of cliffs blocked his view of the Jenkle relay station on the far side, less than two kilometers away. Mostly he saw bare rock, moss, and some low-growing plants. The only good news was that there wasn’t a massive Jenkle base hidden in the middle of the island. The problem was that he still didn’t know what he faced. What had shot his entire squadron from the sky in less than a minute?

Again Astin faced the dilemma that if he moved toward the Jenkle Station, he might draw down fire. He had no illusions about what effect that orange ray would have on an unprotected body. But staying put just wasn’t an option. Cautiously, with growing surprise at the lack of a response, he ran from boulder to boulder across the small island. A passing storm drenched him once more, but the exertion needed to make his away across the broken terrain kept him comfortable even as what remained of his uniform got soaked again.

The unarmed trooper crawled up the final rise before he reached the Jenkle station. What he saw was not encouraging. The station itself was a small metal dome, similar to others they had encountered on earlier drops. Beyond the dome was a beach and empty sea. The area around the dome had been scorched clear for about fifty meters. The dome’s door was visible and likely easily opened. No living Jenkle were visible, but guarding the area was some new sort of Jenkle combat vehicle. The unit stood two meters tall and seemed to operate like a hovercraft. That made sense on a world where most of the surface was covered with water. The air being driven from the fans below kicked up a steady stream of dust. There was no turret. Two barrels protruded from the front of the weapon platform. The larger one was almost half a meter thick and made of crystal. It protruded only about as far as it was wide. Astin guessed that this was the source of the orange beam. A second, smaller crystal also paralleled it at about a quarter of the first one’s size. The top was covered with bulges and two antennas. Long, small slits along the top of the sides of the vehicle were likely air intakes, Astin concluded. As he watched, the unit shifted a few meters. It turned slowly, but it covered the ground in an impressive burst of speed.

The vehicle must have used that orange ray to clear its field of fire around the dome. While rocks taller than the human stood all around the edge of the cleared area, nothing inside that perimeter was taller than a few cracked rocks under six inches high.

Astin slid down behind a two-meter high chunk of shiny volcanic stone and tried to examine his options. Failing to do that, he concentrated on trying to find an option to consider. He had no weapon, no armor, no food, and no real information on his opponent. He wasn’t even sure if the first time he was detected, a half-dozen heavily armed Jenkle would pour out of that dome. Intel had said no life signs, but they had missed the automated laser tank as well. After sitting for several minutes discarding one absurd and impractical plan after the other, Astin realized something. He was sitting less than a hundred meters from that tank and it was doing nothing. Why?

Maybe the unit’s AI was not programmed to see anything not using power as a threat? Maybe it was unable to detect him at all. Once more the trooper crept up the cool volcanic rock and studied his opponent.

It hadn’t moved. After watching the Jenkle vehicle for what seemed a very long time, Astin lost patience. He had to do something. Creeping back down behind the boulder, the trooper grasped one of the many fist sized rocks and lofted it toward the Jenkle dome.

The small yellow ray that vaporized the rock left only the smell of ozone behind. It was some minutes before Astin risked another look over the boulder. This time the Jenkle weapon began turning toward him the moment his head appeared. Astin dropped and rolled painfully across numerous sharp edged rocks until he was several meters away from the boulder he had been hiding behind.

The concussion as the orange ray smashed into his former hiding place threw jagged shards onto the trooper even as he dived for cover behind another thick rock. Less than thirty seconds later, that new meter high stone protected Astin as a second orange beam completed the destruction of the first boulder. Two tons of obsidian had shattered, spraying hundreds of rock shards in a fairly good simulation of an antipersonnel bomb. Over his ragged breath, the corporal heard the sound of dozens of the stones thwacking against the far side of the outcrop. If he had been in the open, the last of the Fourth would have been very dead. Noticing for the first time that he was half submerged in a shallow pool left by the recent rain, the corporal knew he didn’t dare move.

The growl and whoosh of the Jenkle vehicle grew louder as it approached the spot where Astin hid. For a moment, he almost accepted defeat. Then the vehicle stopped just short of the dust and pebbles that were all that remained of the man-high rock it had destroyed. The sodden trooper stayed very still and barely breathed. After what seemed to be an extremely long time, the weapon growled back to life and moved away. After another long time he risked a glance over the rocks and saw it had returned to the same exact spot by the dome where he had first seen it.

Carefully making his way back to the far shore, the trooper collapsed into the same crevice he had first hidden in just after reaching the island. The alien sun was halfway down, but after picking several small hunks of stone out of his side and legs, the exhausted and battered human tried to rest. He remembered that Khumn had a day almost eighty standard hours long. That hadn’t seemed important for a quick smash and grab operation. Now he worried that he would be at an even greater disadvantage at night on the moonless planet.

Or just be too late.

Rousing himself, Astin began to explore. He nurtured the hope that somehow he would find some way to defeat the Jenkle robot. Unarmed and without his armor, it was hard to not feel helpless and hopeless. Even time counted against him. The attack fleet was going to be passing through this system in less than two standard days. And with no way to tell time accurately, he had to leave a serious margin of error. He figured he had been down about eighteen hours, but he had no real way to be sure. That left no more than twenty-four hours, or it was all a waste.

Grimy and scraped even through his uniform, the human walked waist deep out into the ocean. The salt level of the water was low, barely stinging as it cleaned his wounds. Being clean felt good. At least he didn’t stink of his armor any more. Sadly, Astin glanced across the empty sea to where what remained of the familiar suit sat shorted and lifeless several meters deep.

Despite the situation, the trooper almost allowed himself to relax . . . just a bit. That was, until he felt a sharp sting on his lower leg. Rushing back to shore, Astin looked down at a small, round, clear creature almost like a tiny but tendriless jellyfish clinging to his leg. Quickly he brushed it off, using the sharp edge of a rock when it hung on stubbornly, and went back to the water’s edge to splash the wound clean. The entire process took only a few painful seconds.

Dozens of the creatures bobbed on the surface of the water where he had been standing. Astin realized that his body heat must have attracted the organisms. It was unlikely they were reacting to the otherworldly body chemistry. Pushing back visions of alien poisons and even more alien infections, Astin went back and studied the creature even as the pain in his leg subsided. His issue pants were some kind of super fabric that lasted forever and was resistant to almost anything. Where the creature had clung to his pants near his ankle, the fabric was barely discolored. But he had been burned almost like from an acid where the critter had eaten a hole in his less resistant socks and started in on his skin. Checking carefully, he found two more jellies attached to the back of his uniform jacket and another on the back of his other leg. Again it took a sharp edged rock to pry them off. One had even eaten part way through the titanium buckle on one pocket. Whatever solvent they excreted, it was hell on metals. Using the same rock, he rolled the first acid jelly over. The rock where it had sat for just a few minutes was already bleached and cracked. Under different circumstances, Astin might have wondered at the ecology that had developed such a creature. But as frustrated as the trooper was, he just filed the jellies as an added annoyance in the middle of a disaster. Astin continued walking the shoreline, looking for a miracle. He found lots of a harmless plant that was like a combination of sponge and seaweed, and little else. By the time Corporal Olowoi realized he had nearly circled around the small island and was getting dangerously close to the Jenkle base, he had just about run out of hope. His thoughts turned to the men and women of the Fourth that had been his close friends and comrades over the last year Their loss cut deep, and he fought guilt that they had died under his command, his first—and likely last—command. A darkness deep inside the trooper began to break free and spread. It was the darkness soldiers learned to keep at bay. Now it emerged, and it carried despair with it. There was no way to complete the mission. His squad had died for nothing, and the attack fleet would fail. His personal failure was going to doom all humanity. He was unarmed and beaten. It was all just hopeless.

Astin found that he was sitting on the beach crying when he began to take hold of himself. His eyes were blurry and his throat raw. As reason again took hold, he worried just how much time has passed. Panic replaced despair. He no longer knew how long it would be until the attack fleet entered the system. How long until its detection would complete his failure.

The trooper knew he wanted to win. But his mind could not get past the fact that he was already beaten. That the Fourth had ended in failure. The Jenkle had beaten him and that their robot would destroy him the moment they clashed. One on one, his opponent was unbeatable. The Jenkle could outfight and outrun him. He was outgunned, out-thought, and outmaneuvered. It was just the better soldier, the better man. All he could do was hide until he died of starvation.

Better man . . . ?

The unit defending that dome wasn’t a man, or even a Jenkle. It didn’t outthink him. It couldn’t. He had been looking at this the wrong way. A real Jenkle or human that well-armed and armored would be unbeatable. But that was a machine. It had limits and could react only as it was programmed. Those limits and that programming was his edge. Not much of an edge, but leverage none the less. If even a few of the Fourth had survived, he could conceive of several ways they could take the robot out. But they hadn’t. Only he remained.

The trooper fought back his depression and focused on the mission. There was just a chance he could defeat that automaton. Or he had to admit—and the thought no longer frightened him—that he could die while trying something that just might succeed. There was nothing left to lose. Tired, limp muscles tightened and prepared for what Corporal Astin Olowoi had trained and prepared for for years—combat. The man’s mind raced, discarding plans and reevaluating both his resources and what he knew about the Jenkle defense unit. The Fourth had been almost destroyed, but one member remained, and with almost a smile on his face, that lone trooper began to analyze his past encounters. The Jenkle had ignored him at least three times and reacted with overwhelming firepower the other two times. What was the difference? What about his opponent being a machine had made that difference? A human enemy might had just missed seeing him. But even a half-competently programmed computer could not have. Any good automated defense unit would be scanning its surroundings constantly. It would only have taken a fraction of second to see him. So why didn’t it shoot him when he was first collapsed on the beach? Why had it simply left instead? Or only fired the second time he had looked over the rock at the dome? Why did a unit which could pick off the entry rockets a thousand miles away not sense him on the far side of the rock when he was only a few meters away later?

The waves lapping nearby gave Astin the answer. A machine reacted to the parameters given for any target. The defense unit was not a thinking being. It could only act or react to what it was programmed to recognize as the enemy. The entry pods would have been literally flaming through the atmosphere. They would have been an easily recognized target. The unit only fired at identified targets. But why had it fired on him minutes after ignoring that same head appearing over a rock? The bit of his head showing would have been the same both times.

Temperature. He had been wet, chilled really, each time it had ignored him. On the beach, and from the rain the first time he had popped up to recon the Jenkle base.

The Jenkle saw more into the infrared spectrum. They could literally see how hot or cold an object was. Where a human robot would recognize shape and patterns of movement, the Jenkle must have added another requirement to their targeting parameters . . . temperature. Or maybe to them, color. Humans are a nice, consistent 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit. The Jenkle saw infrared. So it was likely all humans were that same color to them. The color of human skin would be less visible to the Jenkle than the color generated by body temperature. The aliens had programmed their defense unit to kill anything the color of a human and to ignore everything else unless it became a threat or was identified as a part of the human shape. Then a moment of doubt ensued. Was he just clutching at straws, convincing himself of something just to feel he had a chance? It had blasted the rock he had thrown too. But that had actually been thrown toward the dome. It made sense the robot would shoot out of the air any missile, even a stone one, threatening the relay unit. So it was also apparent that anything, of any temperature or shape, that Jenkle weapon detected inside the kill zone near the dome would be fired upon. Then maybe he could use being soaked, if he was right, to get close to the dome. But there still was no way to get inside it without getting rid of the Jenkle unit. And that unit was armed and armored. He had rocks and seaweed.

There had to be another option. There was, Astin finally realized. He didn’t have to destroy the defender, just get it to stay away from the dome long enough for him to place the cube. Maybe he could lead into a chasm or pit? Problem with that was that old quandary of trying to outrun a bullet, or in this case an even faster power beam. If he got the machine to chase him, how could he stay alive to lead it into some pit?

Even if it turned slowly, it could still fly just over the broken ground much faster than he could run. And it was a war machine. It would begin firing at him a tiny fraction of a second after he was spotted. Before he solved that puzzle, the trooper realized there was another possible problem. If the cube changed the signal coming from the dome too much, there was a good chance the defender was programmed to knock it off the air. That again would warn the Jenkle that something was up. Keeping the relay station from being shut down is why the Fourth had been dropped on Khumn in the first place. Otherwise a single missile from orbit would have been all that was needed. So, he had to get the defender away from the dome and keep it away. That meant disabling its hover fans. But the sides of the machine were solid metal and the fans were protected. The only openings in that armor were those two thin slits along the edge of the roof for the air intakes. And it was likely that air system was completely isolated by more armor from the control and weapons areas. Even his fingers would not fit more than an inch or so into those slots. He would have to destroy the fan blades from the only direction they could be accessed, below.

Astin contemplated ways to get under the Jenkle machine. He envisioned jamming a long shard of obsidian into one blade. But the only reason the weapon would move anywhere away from the dome was to kill him, and it wasn’t going to move on top of its target. At least not while he was alive. Then the realization hit that if he disabled the fans while the war machine was hovering just over him, it would come down on top of him. So much for that.

Leading the Jenkle defense unit away would be risky, but the right plan could work, Astin decided. There was always a way. But what? And he could not just lead it away and loop around. It was too fast and he had to prevent it from ever getting back to the dome.

The sun moved visibly before the trooper felt he had a plan that, given a lot of luck, just might work. Sore and tired, Astin began gathering the sodden seaweed and watching the sky for another rainstorm. The expression on his face was way too determined for his mouth to actually be showing a grin. It was an expression any human would have understood. The Fourth’s sole remaining trooper was going to win or die.

He no longer intended to die.

“Shape, movement, temperature,” Corporal Olowoi repeated the parameters almost like a mantra. He was exhausted, and the Khumn sun was starting toward the horizon. One small cloudburst had drenched him before he was ready. Now as he tied and shaped another mass of the absorbent seaweed, Astin watch anxiously as the cooler evening air triggered more showers. This had to be it. He was out of time. At the first drops of rain he ran to the sea and stripped off his pants. Carefully tying each leg closed, the the trooper ran into the ocean. The water felt cold on his bare legs. Which was good since that meant they were heating the water around them. He saw the jellies moving toward where he stood. The human ran back toward the shore, but not quite fast enough. A sharp pain on one ankle made him drop the pants he had held poised and begin scraping where the little critter had attached to his leg and secreted acid.

The three-centimeter circle of livid, tortured skin hurt, a lot. Even splashing water on the wound didn’t help much. Astin knew there was no more time. The rain was falling steadily now, and he rushed to edge of the water, where he saw dozens more of the acid oozing critters had been attracted to where he had stood. Using his pants as a scoop, the trooper pulled them through the thickest patch of jellies. Once on the beach he saw them clinging to the inside of the legs of his rugged uniform. His ankle was throbbing, but he had well over two dozen of the jellies trapped. That is, trapped until they ate through the tough, artificial fabric of his uniform.

Hurrying toward the area he had prepared, Astin left the pants hanging on a jagged outcrop, took some seaweed from the large pile below it, and draped the wet mess over the pants until their shape was obscured. Then tossing more of that same soggy plant over his soaked shoulders and head, the trooper continued toward the dome and its lone defender.

The trooper crawled the last few meters before the spot he had prepared near the blasted area cleared around the dome, blessing the rain that made it harder for the weapon platform to see his movement or detect his distinct heat signature. Finally he reached the pile of carefully tied seaweed he had prepared and dragged there earlier. He had formed it into a something that bore a vague resemblance to a human. His jacket, filled with the stuff, helped the illusion.

The rain had begun to taper off as Astin threw the seaweed dummy over the boulder and straight at the dome’s defender. He was running the other direction, before the seaweed had cleared the top of the rock formation that had been between him and the alien’s kill zone. It was still in the air when the yellow beam struck it on one “leg,” and the resulting explosive release of steam from the soaked seaweed in that leg tore the rest of the crude manikin apart.

A rock he threw while still on the run got a bit farther before being turned into dust. Astin threw the second dummy he had prepared, this one was held together by his t-shirt. He tossed it with all his strength directly into the air and made no attempt to even throw it toward the dome. He didn’t need to. He heard the growl of the hover tank’s fans as it moved toward the decoy, and him. Again the bolt of yellow tore apart seaweed and cloth. Astin angled to his left, reaching the relative shelter of a V-shaped extrusion where he had left the next of his creations. This one was just seaweed. He had run out of clothing except for some shorts and his boots. His uniform shirt had been sacrificed earlier. Again he threw the soggy manikin almost straight up and ran. Having to turn before firing, the tank actually didn’t fry the decoy until it began to arc downwards. Astin stored the information on how long it had taken to shift.

Angling left again and drawing the defender further from the relay station’s dome, the human threw three more seaweed decoys. Occasionally using its orange ray to blast a path where the boulders were too large to hover over or push aside, the alien machine followed. As Astin had hoped, a race as bloodthirsty as the Jenkle would have programmed their weapons systems to hunt any known, single enemies to the death.

They were out of sight of the dome now. Still the human was sure that there were alarms ready to call the fast hovering defender back if he somehow did enter the open area around the dome while it hunted. But that wasn’t the idea.

Another decoy went into the air. Another flash of intense yellow was followed by all the water in the seaweed turning instantly into superheated steam. Enough reached Astin to sting his exposed back as the trooper lofted another seconds later. This time the orange beam lanced out. Astin never knew why it used the larger weapon.

The wider and more powerful beam not only vaporized the second decoy, but the blast it caused sent the trooper rolling until he slammed against unforgiving stone. He lay there for a moment, regaining his breath and waiting for the robot to appear. Astin’s side hurt, and a deep breath brought a gasp of pain. Even as it sounded like the defender had moved toward where he had thrown the last dummy, the trooper pulled himself up and hoped that if any of his ribs really were broken, they didn’t puncture a lung. For a brief instant he missed his MAPerS and it shock absorbing abilities, but he set the thought aside along with his desire for a tall beer and taller redhead.

The next decoy was at the edge of the area Astin had chosen and prepared earlier. This was really two small areas about ten meters across and joined by a three meter opening between two large extrusions. Astin knew this was the most dangerous part of his plan. If he had guessed wrong, he was dead and all of humanity was probably lost too. He felt a passing desire to just run away and delay the confrontation. The human dismissed the temptation as he threw the decoy high and to the far side of clearing he was in. Then the trooper hurried to crawl under the pile of waterlogged seaweed he had laboriously hauled in earlier. Around him were a dozen similar piles, a few even carefully laid out and twisted to resemble a human laying flat on the ground. This final decoy almost made it to the ground before the yellow ray caught it. A few seconds later the hovering defender entered the clearing. Barely willing to breathe, the human waited. Dust and small rock particles showered his hiding place and made his eyes water. Still the trooper waited, unmoving. His one fear was that the weapon would recon by fire, simply blasting apart each of the piles of seaweed. A human would have done that. A human would have thought of that and sensed a trap, but the Jenkle machine could only react as it was programmed to. It would instantly destroy any enemy it detected, but only after they were detected. Any other instruction would have led to the robotic defender wearing itself out destroying every lump of seaweed that drifted or blew past the dome.

Slowly it advanced farther into the small area. As Astin had planned, it was almost next to him and just starting into the narrow area between the two clearings when it detected his seaweed stuffed shirt to its left. The unit turned in place to bring the weapons protruding from its front to bear. Its back end swinging only centimeters from the rock behind it.

At the sound of that turn, Corporal Olowoi rose. He knew that the weapon would sense him and turn to target him. But he was only a few steps away, and he had calculated that it would take at least seven seconds to turn around. Seven seconds was the entire window his plan had to save an entire fleet and maybe mankind. Grabbing his pants off the rock, the trooper took two steps and dove onto the top of the alien vehicle.

A second later he had upended his pants, dumping the water and jellies into one of the air intakes. The suction caused by the rapidly spinning fan blades pulled in the water instead of air. Letting go of the pants that were now being sucked slowly through the air slits, Astin laid flat on the top of the machine and wedged his fingers as deeply as they would go into the thin intakes. The whole process had taken less then ten seconds. But it no longer mattered which way the weapon faced. To hit him now, it would have to be able to shoot itself. Taking that long was good, since the automated response to any intruder being on top of the unit initiated itself at twelve seconds with the unit increasing the power to its blades. Suddenly the Jenkle weapons platform dashed forward almost to the far side of the open area and slammed to a halt. It stopped for less than a second to see if it had dislodged the trooper and then surged backward across both clearings with even greater speed and came to a more abrupt stop.

Astin could only hold on. His fingers hurt and his shoulders strained with the effort of clinging to the machine. The pain in his battered side became a twisting knife as bruised and punished muscles began to tear. As the robot weapon began to move forward once more, the trooper thought he heard something different in the whine of the now straining fans, but he could hardly tell with the changes in pitch masked as the vehicle tried to dislodge him again. The human had no doubt that its weapons were both charged and ready to fire as fast as only a machine can do the moment he was down and in their field of fire. The deadly dance ended when the one of the unit’s fan blades slammed into the inside of the weapon with a thud that the sprawling trooper could feel all along his body. Then there was another thud as the unbalanced fan tore itself apart and the back of the Jenkle robot scraped along the ground. Astin grimaced a smile, knowing that at least one the jellies had, as he had hoped, managed to attach to the spinning and so very warm and inviting fan blades or their shaft. The metal eating acid had done the rest. Where the defender’s frantic dashing couldn’t knock the determined trooper off it, the bouncing caused by the rear of the several ton combat unit dragging over the rough ground succeeded. Fortunately for Astin, he rolled off behind the unit.

Even as the trooper clutched his side and struggled to stand, the front fans of the damaged defender strained to turn the unit so that its weapons could be brought to bear on him. The edges of the metal sides of the weapon dragged across the volcanic rock throwing sparks and broken rock, and then the front fan also failed as its sound changed from a deep growl to a diminishing whine. Then there was silence broken only by the futile charging of the front mounted weapons as they searched for a target.

For the first time Astin’s smile was real. There was a moment’s hesitation while he wondered whether he should try to disable the defender more. The thought of smashing those deadly crystals with a heavy rock was quite appealing. But the mission, he reluctantly decided, came first. And if he did get picked up, the intel boys would want it as intact as possible. Besides, the trooper cheerfully concluded, he could always come back later. The Jenkle machine was not going anywhere.

The walk to the dome was almost leisurely. Astin recovered the small cube where he had hidden it far from where the action had been. He even found that the dome’s door was unlocked. Why lock a door when you have a superpowered, beam firing, super accurate defender? It was easy to spot the correct panel, and the cube attached as it was designed to. A small green light suddenly appeared, and the trooper’s smile grew larger.

His pick-up would come in with the fleet. All he had to do now was wait. The last of the Fourth had completed their mission.

Moral Imperative

By Ed Gorman

Ed Gorman is a man of many talents, effortlessly slipping from genre to genre as the mood strikes him. But the one thing that also shines through is his honest, unflinching portrayal of everyday, often anguished characters. His western fiction has won the Spur Award, and his crime fiction has won the Shamus and Anthony Awards and has been shortlisted for the Edgar(r)Award. In addition, his writing has appeared in Redbook, the New York Times, Ellery Queen Magazine, Poetry Today, and other publications. The Flicker—the fastest nuclear-powered train in the entire Midwest—was not only on time today, it was ten minutes early.

Nick McKay was grateful for such speedy service. This meant that there hadn’t been time for the final on-board prayer service. As usual, he’d been all prayed out about ten minutes after six this morning, the usual rising time for all the husbands who commuted from the suburb of God’s Arms to New Chicago. The moment the alarm went off on work days, his wife Emily had him down on his knees and leading her and their two kids in the Morning Offering. The MO, as he called it, took fifteen minutes to slog through. Who needed more slogging than that to feel righteous?

The train station was of the quaint older type, built of near-wood with a slanted shingled roof, half a dozen baggage carts standing next on the west side of it, and a wooden platform where the wives in their baby blue jumpers waited for their husbands. Each jumper bore across its bosom the embossed red image of a bloody crown of thorns.

Early as the Flicker was, the late April day was already dying, the sun a furious red ball shining behind the black winter trees, the layered clouds mixing the colors of salmon pink, mauve, apricot. Dusk was a death, and dusk was something that McKay always shared with the planet, giving in to a melancholy that could sometimes bring him to tears. He’d once shared this with Pastor Paul and quickly wished he hadn’t. “That’s sort of a pagan thought, don’t you think? People who are right with God appreciate the beauty of sunset. It’s another one of His gifts, Nicholas. Hardly a time for self-pity—which melancholy always is.” Pastor Paul disliked shortened names, forbidding the use of nicknames in his presence. He’d never offered his flock any justification for this. But he didn’t need to. He was Pastor Paul. The way the husbands of God’s Arms stumbled off the train car gave the impression that they were weary soldiers returning from an exhausting war. It fell to their wives to put smiles on their faces and renew at least partial energy to their bodies. New Chicago lay just beyond the reach of God’s Country and was filled with pagan spectacles and rites that would make any righteous man weary. Before he saw Emily, he saw Natalie Avery. He knew he should look away. They’d sworn last Saturday in the park never to meet in secret again. But he couldn’t not look at her. The dark hair framing a face that was both sensual and vulnerable in a way that only enhanced the sensuality—how could he look away? She didn’t look away, either. And so, for one of those moments that seem to extend into minutes, they stood watching each other, each of them finally giving up a wisp of a smile. Then he turned and walked over to Emily, the chilly air even colder in the sudden wind now. Even from here, he could hear Emily whispering her prayers to herself. He thought of how much fun she’d been when he’d first met her. Perspective was the gift she’d given him, a witiness that showed him how he could step back from his daily griefs and laugh at them right along with her. And then she’d started seeing those vids for how safe and nurturing life could be in God’s country . . .

“Wait till you see their monthly grades,” Emily said, her voice shining with the love and pride they both felt for their kids. She was the best home-schooler in God’s Arms. She submitted all their work to Principaln Homenet, and Principal evaluated it every thirty days or so. She’d won Best Home Schooler for four years in a row. The other mothers, to their credit, did their best not to indulge in the sin of envy. It couldn’t have been easy.

The car was on auto, and they were only a few minutes away from the large Colonial style house that they were able to afford because of Nick’s sojourn in pagan land five days a week. Nick put his head back. Closed his eyes.

“Looks like massage night, honey. You look pretty beat.”

One word sufficed. “Donaldson.”

“I thought he was still on vacation.”

“Somebody managed to let him know that all of a sudden we were in trouble with the Handy Andy account. So long Southern France and his chateau there. He was back in the States and at his desk before anybody else this morning, and he let each of us know individually that if Handy Andy goes to another agency, we’ll be leaving too.”

Emily touched his hand with hers, and immediately he was ashamed he’d let the flirtation with Natalie get so far. He opened his eyes and smiled at her. She was a pretty woman, blond, blue-eyed, a few pounds overweight, which he found enjoyable when they made love. But most of all she was just a damned fine woman, one he used to love so passionately that he would literally get headaches if he had to be away from her for any significant amount of time.

But now . . . Now he respected her more than loved her. What could you fault her for? Perfect mother, attentive wife, helpmate in every sense. But once he’d reluctantly agreed to live in God’s Country for the sake of the children . . . He was a believer, too. Maybe not with her certainty, maybe not with her devotion. But he believed that an invisible hand had created the spark that created the universe. He even believed that in some way that invisible hand sometimes affected circumstances on earth as well as everywhere else. In the early years of their marriage, this had been sufficient belief for Emily. But since they’d come to God’s Country . . .

“Any other news today?”

“No more noisy robots.”

“Really?”

“There’s a new model of Protector, and they’re ‘streeting’ it tonight as they say.”

“How did that happen?”

“I guess the Mayor’s been asking St. Louis for four new ’bots and they finally came through. Trial run tonight starting at nine o’clock.”

He looked over at her and said, “Maybe we could violate some of the marital bedroom rules before this thing gets clanking up and down the street tonight. Put the kids to bed early and—”

“That isn’t funny, Nick. Those are God’s rules. And I’m not going to break them.”

All he could think of was—in the old days she would have giggled if he’d suggested they break rules of any kind. Especially if they involved the bedroom . . .

When had pre-dinner and post-dinner prayers gotten this long? Nick wondered, his knees still sore from all that kneeling.

He was in the small study they’d created out of what had once been a storage area. More and more he’d been forced to bring his work home—bring the devil in the form of advertising right into his home—when the communicator rang. Three bleats meant it was a Nick call. He picked up. She spoke in a teary, frightened rush: “He’s at Pastor Paul’s right now telling him everything. He’s been following us the last three or four weeks. Watching us meet in the park.”

The voice belonged, of course, to Natalie Avery.

“He should be back any time soon. I’m afraid he’ll walk in on us right now. He might even be having our calls monitored. I’m so paranoid now about everything. I just thought I’d tell you.”

She clicked off.

His first response was no response. Not panic, not terror, not any plan of action. He just sat in his desk chair staring at the holo image of his wife and family.

Only when he realized the implications of the call did he stir. He got up and began the useless pacing that was the hallmark of every Nick crisis.

The big thing was to stop Pastor Paul from calling Emily. Even though this wasn’t technically a matter of adultery, he would have a difficult time putting an innocent face on his four meetings with Natalie. He had two hours before the new Protector was to take to the streets. Time to . . . He drove with the window down. The chill air refreshed him. He needed to be sharp when he made his case to Pastor Paul.

As the head beams swept the stone edifice of the church, he saw that Richard Avery’s auto was still in the parking lot adjacent to Pastor Paul’s office in the back of the large building. Nick clicked off the head beams. Maybe it was better this way. Have it out with Richard in front of Pastor Paul. The cleric could bring wisdom to Richard’s anger and Nick’s confusion. He stood in the night taking deep clean breaths, readying himself. In the moonlight, he could see tiny buds peering up from branches, patches of brown grass becoming obstinately green now that spring was on the way. He’d been so damned foolish to get involved with Natalie even to the degree he had. He wasn’t by nature a dishonest man, but he’d now cast himself as one of the most dishonest of people—the adulterer.

Inside the rear of the church, he could smell the most recent meal some of the church women had prepared for the homeless outside the neighborhood. Stewed chicken and mashed potatoes, that was the usual repast. There were four bulletin boards on the wall with a myriad of notes and pamphlets thumb-tacked to them. It was like being back in school again.

He’d been to Pastor Paul’s several times so he had no difficulty finding it. Just as he was about to knock on the cleric’s door, he heard Richard say, “It doesn’t matter if they slept together. What matters is that they were deceiving us—both me and poor Emily.”

This was where Pastor Paul should have inserted a few reassuring words about the moral difference between wanting to do something and actually doing it. He said, “I’m afraid I have to agree with you, Richard, especially where women are concerned. The way God constructed the male, it’s expected that the man will at least have thoughts about women other than his wife. But He holds women to a much higher standard. He allows them the privilege of giving birth. He allows them the privilege of being the chief nurturer. He allows them to spend all day with the children while the husband toils to feed and clothe and shelter them.”

“I think you’re saying what I’m saying, Pastor Paul. That when a woman even thinks about committing adultery—she’s already committed it in her mind. And the sin is just as bad as if she’d slept with him.”

“Sad to say, Richard, that’s just what I’m saying. Natalie is no longer pure.”

A strangled sound. Richard began to cry in that difficult, uncertain way men cry.

“She’ll never be the same to me again, will she, Pastor Paul?”

“No, my friend, I don’t think she will be. And believe me, I take no pleasure in saying that.”

“And here I thought Nick was such a decent man. That’s all you ever hear about him. How decent he is. And look what he did.”

“Well, I’d think about it before I blamed him.”

“But he—”

“As I said, Richard, God entrusted women with virtue. He demands it of them. Think of Adam and Eve. Who ate the forbidden fruit? Perhaps it was Natalie—”

“Please don’t say that. I’m sure she didn’t make the first move. It just wouldn’t be like her.”

A pause.

“You know that she’s visited me a few times.”

Surprise. “Oh? When?”

“She asked me not to mention it.”

“I don’t like the idea of that, seeing you without telling me.” Pause. “I don’t suppose you can tell me what she said.”

“I can’t violate a confidence, Richard. But I can say I saw a woman deeply in danger of losing her soul.”

“Oh, God, I can sure read into that.”

Then: “You’re leaving?”

“I just need—right now I just need to be alone. Go for a drive or something.”

“Maybe you should sit in the chapel and pray for a while. Pray not for revenge; pray for wisdom and courage.”

This time when he spoke, Richard sounded exhausted. “Maybe that’s what I’ll do, Pastor Paul. Maybe that’s best for now.”

Nick walked quickly down the hall, found a closet where cleaning materials were stored. Hid. Pastor Paul and Richard talked a bit more when they reached the hall. Richard listened to Richard’s footsteps as he walked away to the chapel. Somehow all of Richard’s grief and isolation could be heard in the sound of his shuffling old man steps—the sound inspiring shame in Nick. A single act of adultery could destroy the lives of so many people. He thought of Emily and Richard and the children of both families. Shame burned his cheeks and neck. He felt vaguely nauseated. He’d managed to selfishly overlook—or block out—any of these implications when he began his seemingly harmless flirtation with Natalie.

His next move was back to Pastor Paul’s door, which stood ajar. He pushed it open. The cleric was at his desk, studying a holo that read “Psych Program version #3.” Beneath the word lay the diagram of a stylized skull with the Title “Attributes” listed within the skull shape. There were six phrases beneath the heading.

But there was no time to read them because Pastor Paul suddenly swerved in his chair and snapped,

“You have no right to be in here without my permission.”

“I should have knocked,” Nick said, shocked by the other man’s anger. “I apologize.”

Pastor Paul visibly forced himself to calm down. He took several deep breaths. Then folded his hands as if in prayer atop his desk. “I preach the ways of the Lord, but like most people, even I stray from the path sometimes. Sorry I got so upset.” As he spoke these words, he clipped off the holo and with a gesture invited Nick to sit down.

Nick shook his head. “This won’t take long. I just want you to know that nothing happened between Natalie and me.”

“You were listening at the door.”

“Yes. But that doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me. And it would matter to you if you were the one being spied on.”

“Nothing happened.”

“Nothing?”

“One kiss. One. And the last time we met in the park, we decided that would be the last time. We’re not immoral people, Pastor Paul. We both felt a lot of guilt for even thinking about having an affair.”

The cleric leaned back in his chair. “You make it sound so innocent. Even noble—agreeing not to see each other again. But since you were listening at the door, you know my feelings about that. You have already committed adultery spiritually. It’s not necessary to commit the physical act itself.”

“I don’t believe that. I’ll admit we betrayed our spouses in a way. But we stopped at the last moment.”

Both men heard the footsteps. Richard appeared in the doorway. He looked in disbelief as he realized that the new man in the pastoral office was Nick.

“He was spying on us,” Pastor Paul said. “Heard everything we said, Richard.”

“I’m sorry, Richard,” Nick said. “All I can say is that nothing happened except some flirting.”

“He’s proclaiming his innocence, Richard,” the cleric said.

Richard did the worst thing of all. His eyes filled with tears. Nick would have preferred being punched in the mouth or thrown against a wall. Richard was a big man, fit. In a trembling voice that wasn’t much more than a whisper, he said “You ruined my marriage, Nick. It’ll never be the same again.”

Nick nodded to the holy man. “He’s supposed to counsel you on how to get through this. He should be seeing you and Natalie together.” He sighed, shook his head again. “I’m sure that’s where Emily and I will end up. At a counselor’s.” He glared at Pastor Paul. “But not with this sanctimonious prick.”

There. He’d said it. The kind of remark that could get him and his family banished forever from God’s Arms. He had visited a heresy on Pastor Paul.

The cleric stood and said, “I’m going to forgive you your remark, Nick. I understand the kind of stress you’re under. You’re decent enough to feel shame, but you’re also finding shame hard to handle. But if you don’t mind, I’d appreciate it if you’d leave the church now and let Richard and me talk some more.”

Nick, knowing the embarrassment Emily would feel not only over the flirtation but—even more so, perhaps—the way he’d insulted the pastor, managed to say, “I apologize, Pastor Paul. I had no right to say that. You’ve been a big inspiration to me and my family. I’m apologizing to both of you now.”

Richard said nothing. He seemed to have shrunk inside his dark suit. The blue eyes looked stunned, as if they’d seen a monster. As perhaps they had. Few things were more destructive than adultery. He lowered his head, stared at the floor.

“You’d better go now,” Pastor Paul said gently.

“I’m sorry,” Nick said again. For a few minutes he’d felt bold, in command. He really had felt himself innocent of the quality of shame and blame the pastor wanted to burden him with. But now he knew better. He had perhaps destroyed two families.

He left without another word.

Most parades are held during the daytime. This one was held at 9:00 p.m., an hour later than the residents of Piety Lane had been promised.

Residents stood on both sides of the streets and watched as the massive robot, Protector IV, appeared beneath stars so brilliant not even the occasional streetlight could dim them. The streets had been cleared of autos. Many of the residents dressed in Sunday morning clothes, wanting the Protector to have a good first impression of them. He would likely be with them for a long time. The children, most up past their normal bedtimes, were the most excited, treating this not as a religious event but a thrill only a seven foot ’bot could inspire.

Many of the adults whispered prayers to themselves. Two women began weeping in an almost orgasmic way on sight of the thing.

Two of the men, engineers, appraised it from a scientific point of view. Model IV was much sleeker than previous ones. The metallurgy was superior in every way. No rivets down the jaw line. No awkward arm movements. No faint grinding sounds as it walked. Even the facial features, which had been downright ugly previously, simulated a human face to a reasonable degree. A gentle, kindly human face. What you had here was a giant ’bot dressed in a black clerical cassock, complete with Roman collar. It walked down the center of the street, waving to the people it served. Externally, that was what it was doing. Internally, it was storing massive amounts of data. Names, addresses, even subjective impressions of the faces he stored in memory. These were matched to personal histories already in its database. The new Protector was also equipped with devices that let him see through walls and record any conversations within two hundred yards in any direction. One of the engineers thought of the old Christmas song about Santa Claus— he knows who’s been naughty or nice. This was literally true about the Protector IV. When Pastor Paul had shown his flock the initial holo about the new Protector, some had worried out loud that what the Pastor was advocating was the loss of all privacy. But as Pastor Paul quickly reassured them, if they weren’t violating any of the laws or precepts of the church, they had nothing to worry about. The Protector IV was ordered, and tonight it strode down the nine long streets it served.

Nick and Emily stood together on their sloping lawn, watching the ’bot as it passed their home. Some of their neighbors were applauding.

Nick was sure he knew what Emily was thinking. That Nick would soon lose his rebellious ways. The

’bot wasn’t telepathic, but he could see what people were doing and interpret it. Nick would have to be careful of what he said and did or the ’bot might recommend that he be sent to the two-week Get Right With God camp that was one of Pastor Paul’s most prized and dreaded accomplishments. As the cleric robot passed by them, Emily said, “I feel so much safer now. In every sense. Don’t you, honey?”

“Sure,” Nick said. “This is much better than having a spy satellite hovering over the town. It’ll probably invite itself in for dinner some night.”

“I knew you’d have something mean to say,” Emily said. “I’m going inside.”

Alison’s scream came in the middle of the night. The children had lately chosen sides in the matter of Nick subtly losing his most fervent faith and hinting that maybe they’d been better off when they’d been Episcopalians and lived in New Chicago.

Alison chose to side with her father, Thad with his mother.

So it was Nick who answered Alison’s scream.

She was now fourteen, a slight, awkward girl he knew was about to bloom into the same slightly ungainly beauty her mother had possessed. Coltish. He couldn’t remember her having a nightmare in years. She was all daughter-warmth in his protective arms, gasping, tasting of warm tears when he kissed her cheeks.

He said all the expected father-things: It’s all right, honey. Just a nightmare. We all get them, even old folks like me. Would you like some water? Need to go to the bathroom? Want your light on?

By now, she’d calmed herself and said: “I saw it tonight and he really scared me.”

He didn’t understand her reference.

“Some boy from school?”

“No, that thing—the Protector. It’s supposed to look like a minister but it’s this terrible spy. I’m afraid to even have my own thoughts. Maybe—”

“It’s no telepath, honey. They haven’t advanced that far yet. Thank God.”

“Oh, Dad, I’m almost afraid to say this, but I think you’re right. I think we were better off in New Chicago. We were decent people there.”

The ceiling illuminated suddenly.

Emily had appeared. And heard.

“You’re a wonderful influence on your daughter!”

And then Thad was in the doorway behind his mother. “What’s going on?”

“On nothing much,” Emily said with rare sarcasm. “Just that your father and sister think we should move back to New Chicago.”

Fifteen-year-old Thad, who had been battling for weeks with Nick about religion (Thad being the truest of true believers) snapped: “You two better watch out or you’ll be going to camp. And you’d deserve it, too.”

Emily slid her arm around Thad’s broad shoulders. “We’ll just let them stew in their own juices for now.”

Allison buried her face into her father’s neck, the way she had when she was three and wanted to hide herself from the world.

Emily wasn’t at the station to pick him up. She wasn’t on the other end of the phone when he called. She hadn’t talked to any of the other housewives there to pick up their husbands. Nick mooched a ride with a couple down the block.

“Looks like you’ve got company,” the man said.

“That’s Richard Avery’s car,” his wife said. “The fancy new one.”

Nick had seen the car before they had. He was sure they could probably hear his heart best. It threatened to hurl him to the floor in the back seat. Cold sweat, a knee that trembled, a mouth suddenly dehydrated.

At least he didn’t have to wonder what they were talking about. Richard hadn’t waited long. Less than twenty-four hours.

After thanking the couple for the ride, Nick got out of the car and walked up the sloping drive to his house. He saw his daughter and son on the air-trampoline that simulated a gravity-free environment by allowing them to float through the air. No doubt Emily had told them to go outside. A slant of sunlight on the perfect, painted grass and the merry song of a cardinal made him wish he was the same age as his son. Starting everything all over again. So many mistakes now that had long ago defined his fate. He waved to his kids, turned, grimaced, and walked in the back door. They were in the living room. He thought about fixing himself a glass of straight bourbon. But Emily didn’t want any alcohol in their home. Any amount would have only lead to a speech later. She would undoubtedly quote Pastor Paul: “Sin is hard enough to resist. You sure don’t want to lower your resistance with any kind of alcohol or drugs.”

His first impression was that they’d become lovers.

They sat in the center of the long couch. She had her arms around him. He was stroking her hair. Nick could see that one of her breasts was rubbing against his arm. Richard was enjoying himself, no doubt. Only her weeping verified that he was comforting her, not seducing her.

“Hello, Nick,” Richard said. “I guess you know why I’m here.”

Over the next two weeks, Nick was forced to turn a small empty room into his bedroom. Take his breakfast and dinner in the basement family room. And babysit the kids three nights a week while Emily went to see Pastor Paul. Not until the second week of this did he realize that the cleric was counseling both Emily and Richard at the same time.

Several times, Nick wanted to call Natalie to see how she felt about this. He didn’t like or trust this duo-counseling at all. Didn’t see how it could possibly work. His relationship with Emily had to be different from Richard’s relationship with Natalie. One-size-fits-all didn’t apply to marriage counseling. He didn’t call Natalie. Couldn’t take the risk. He realized more each day that the flirtation had been prompted by boredom and resentment. God’s Arms was the cause of his malaise, not Emily. The Protector reported on him twice and he was put on “probation.” Nick was drinking more than he should, a fact not lost on the robot that roamed the streets collecting data. He was also issued a “notice”

about his “constant cursing.”

One night he stood at the window watching the Protector glide by. He almost did a foolish thing. He almost flipped the robot off. God alone knew what kind of “probation” he’d get for that. Such a thought should have alarmed him. Instead it made him smile.

The only time he complained to Emily about her counseling was when she came home one night near midnight. Her beaming face was almost intolerable to see. What the hell was she so happy about?

When she came out of the bathroom following her downstairs shower, he sat in the living room waiting for her.

“You wouldn’t be having an affair with Richard, would you?”

“I can’t believe how filthy your mind is. No wonder there’s no room in there for the Lord.”

“Isn’t that what you’d accuse me of if I came in at midnight?”

“Pastor Paul said he hoped you’d take this time to think over how you’ve been living the last year or so. The anger and the cynicism and the way you mock God sometimes.”

“I don’t mock God. I mock religion. There’s a difference.”

“That’s exactly what I mean, Nick. When you mock religion, you’re mocking God, too. But you’re so wrapped up in your ego, you can’t see that. I’m going to bed.”

The rage he’d felt earlier tonight had been carried away by the depression he couldn’t shake. Rage was a signal of life, if nothing else. A vital sign. Depression was a near-death experience. Abandon all hope. When he was pretty certain that Emily was asleep, he tiptoed upstairs and looked in on the kids. Tears came, the familiar ones inspired by his sense of loss and confusion and shame. He loved them so much that he physically ached when he thought of being away from them. Even Thad, though the boy clearly despised him now.

As he lay trying to sleep on the single bed downstairs, he wondered just what he was hoping for after all?

Was he lying to himself? Was patching up the marriage even possible now? Was he seriously considering, in fits and starts, moving to New Chicago? Was his flirtation with Natalie just a sign that he was in need of the raw sensual pleasures of his earlier days?

He fell asleep, nothing solved.

During the next week, Emily, usually a strict mother, allowed the kids to stay up nights so they could watch the Protector through the front window. Allison didn’t want to, but Emily made her. She spoke of the machine with a reverence that Nick found both amusing and unsettling. And not everybody in the neighborhood shared her reverence for the cleric-like machine. The Protector had bombarded some homes with an unending series of complaints, reminders, ominous warnings. A teenage girl whom the Protector had glimpsed wearing only a bra and walking shorts in her bedroom window had been yanked from her home and sent to the junior version of the Get Right With God camp. Didn’t matter that the girl was about to slip on her blouse just as the Protector saw her. Didn’t matter that she had even drawn the sheer bedroom curtains.

A wife had been put under a form of house arrest for letting a former suitor talk to her at length on her lawn one evening. The suitor, a man from New Chicago, was warned never to enter God’s Arms again. And then there was the widower who was sent to camp when the Protector perceived him looking at a pornographic magazine.

Offenses big and small were duly noted by the big remorseless machine. The neighborhood quickly divided on the subject of the cleric robot, the metal minister that Pastor Paul proudly called “God’s spy.”

This was the week when Nick heard his son include the Protector in his nightly prayers. Thad urged him

“to smite sinners just the way Pastor Paul wants you to.” Thad had also begun drawing sketchy pictures of the machine and plastering them throughout the house. For her part, Emily bought from the church a large well-framed photograph of the Protector and hung it in the living room. And this was also the week when Natalie Avery disappeared.

Two days into the desperate search for her, Wiggins, the chief of police, announced that he and Pastor Paul had found her broken body at the bottom of Indian Cliff. They also added that they’d found a suicide note in the pocket of the jacket she’d been wearing.

Nick was just stepping off the commuter train for the day when Richard Avery, whom Nick had seen sitting at the back of the car, came up to him and grabbed his shoulder with such force Nick felt like his bones were about to crumble to powder.

“Are you happy now, Nick? You drove her to this. She was so damned ashamed of what she did she couldn’t live with it any more. Stop over sometime and listen to my kids crying for their mother.”

By now, commuters and wives alike were watching this soap opera moment.

“Emily tells me that you haven’t shown any remorse at all. And I believe it.”

Nick managed to slip out of the much bigger man’s grasp.

“You destroyed my wife. And now you’re destroying your wife, too, Nick. You’re a sad excuse for a man.”

At first the audience had seemed inclined to sympathize with Nick. But as Richard began talking with tears in his voice, the rest of the passengers shifted their sympathies to Richard. The couple that was giving Nick rides home these days, Donna and Hank Owens, sort of scooped him up and dragged him over to their car. He’d been humiliated and undone. He was now in a kind of shock. He didn’t say a word to his friends, just got out of the car when it reached his place. She let him get out of his suit coat and tie before she said: “I suppose you heard about Natalie.”

“Yeah.”

She studied his face. What did she hope to see exactly? The suffering of a lover who had just lost his true love?

Emily said: “I won’t waste your time pretending that I cared for her. She tried to destroy my marriage. But I want you to know that I did what Pastor Paul told me to do. I prayed for her eternal soul. Which is something she probably wouldn’t have done for me. But I don’t know how much anybody’s prayers will help her. God doesn’t look favorably on suicide.”

Five nights after Natalie’s suicide, a clandestine meeting was held in the basement of an abandoned retail store on the outskirts of God’s Arms. The basement was laced with cobwebs, the floor covered with rat droppings. The only light was a double-size electric lantern.

The man who’d organized it, Dev Talbot, stood in front of all eight people he’d invited and said: “I’m taking a risk being here tonight. And so are you.”

“I’m sick of the Protector,” Molly Hackett said. “I don’t care anymore if he catches me or not. He’s turned my twin daughters into neurotic wrecks. They hate to do any of the things they used to do. He’s written them up on the average of three times a week. They’re terrified he’ll send them to that stupid camp.”

“Same with my two boys,” Sam Nealon said. “He just keeps writing them up.”

From here the meeting became an angry chorus of voices. Tina Wayman concluded by saying: “There’s one problem. I’ve been asking people what they think of that damned machine and the biggest majority is all in favor of him. They all say they have photographs of him in their homes. They say they’ve never felt more protected or more holy. I couldn’t believe it. At the very least that thing is a pain in the butt.”

Mild as her language was, five people laughed in shock. The fine folks of God’s Arms never talked that way, especially women.

“Well, then what do we do about it?” Dev Talbot said.

“I’d like to destroy it, if I could.”

In just a few words, Nick had become the focus of the meeting.

“You mean literally destroy it?” Dev said.

“It’s just metal alloys and a computer for a brain. It wouldn’t like killing a person.”

He’d been so caught up in his anger that he didn’t realize how the others were looking at him. Destroy the Protector? Apparently they’d been thinking of sending the parson a chilly letter of protest.

“I guess I shouldn’t have said that. Sorry.”

He sat down.

One man and one woman disappeared in the next ten days. Nobody believed that one disappearance had anything to do with the other. The woman had had an alcohol problem, the man a woman problem. It seemed he wanted to have sex with everybody but his wife.

By this time, Nick was certain that the Protector was involved in both disappearances. Since the robot’s appearance, many things had changed in God’s Arms.

Nick visited with the families of the two missing people. The visits were more awkward and emotional than Nick had feared. Especially the wife of the womanizer. Nick had never seen anyone so divided between love and hate.

Despite the tensions his visits created, he went ahead and asked his questions, the main one being had the Protector given the missing people write-ups?

Turned out, they’d both received more than simple write-ups. Both had been threatened with long stays in the Get Right with God compound and put on probation. But the woman slipped and got drunk twice and the man tried to talk two women from the community into sleeping with him. At home one evening, Nick heard Emily coming halfway down the basement stairs. “Pastor Paul is on the communicator for you.”

“I’m sick of Pastor Paul.”

“Could you please just once not embarrass me and take the call?”

“All right. I’ll take it down here.”

Pastor Paul said, “I didn’t now you had a sideline.” “A sideline?”

“Yes, walking among us here in God’s Arms is a private detective.”

The rest was predictable. Pastor Paul knew everything. “I’m not sure which is more disturbing—that you’d inflict your own paranoid fantasies on the families of those people whose spouses have disappeared—or that you’d like to destroy the Protector.”

Nick’s jaw tensed. Somebody at the meeting had told Pastor Paul.

“I think I could help you if you’d let me. My counseling skills have seemed to help a number of people in our community.”

“I appreciate the offer but I’m too busy right now.”

“I could work around your schedule. And we could meet for half an hour rather than the full hour. I’d even come to your house if you’d like. The Protector tells me you’ve been drinking a lot and that can’t be helpful to your wife or your children.”

“I can’t argue with that.”

“Then can we set up an appointment?”

“I’m not going to do it, Parson. As I said, I appreciate the offer. But it’s not what I want to do right now. Goodnight.”

Moments after he’d broke the communicator link, Nick heard Emily coming down to her midway point on the stairs. He glimpsed her legs beneath the hem of her dark skirt. She had wonderful legs.

“That was my idea. The counseling.”

“I’m sorry. I just couldn’t handle it right now.”

“You mean you couldn’t ’handle’ Pastor Paul.”

“If you want to put it that way, yes.”

“In other words, you won’t go to church anymore. You won’t give up drinking. And you won’t quit harassing people about the Protector. Church attendance is up twenty-five percent, even on weeknights. The Protector makes us face our sins and that makes us better Christians.”

“I’m sorry, Emily.” Then: “You know, our anniversary’s coming up next week. Think I could sleep in our bed with you that night?”

“I’m sorry, Nick. I just couldn’t ’handle’ that.”

Her footsteps were whispers as she went back up the stairs.

The crack-up came two nights later.

Not even Nick could understand it. He certainly hadn’t planned it. He was working in the garage when he glimpsed his neighbors standing at curbside, waiting for the Protector to pass by. Nick had expected the number of watchers to decline as the months had passed. But their numbers had only increased. Something happened to him in the moment. He had been looking through some storage boxes for the baseball glove he’d used as a boy—he was going to give it to Thad in hopes that his son would begin speaking to him again—when the sound of the cheering watchers flipped some cosmic switch inside him. He was certain now (but aren’t all paranoids certain?) that Natalie’s supposed suicide and the disappearances were the work of the Protector. He saw it as one of those profound explosions of insight said to be visited on Paul on the Road to Damascus and Gauguin throughout his life. Yes, Pastor Paul and his machine were behind all this.

Without being completely aware of what he was doing, he stalked across the garage, picked up the baseball bat that had also once been his, and ran out of the garage. Look at it from the point of view of the watchers, he would think later, to them I appear a reasonable, if not always admirable, man in control of himself except or his “flirtation,” which by now was the stuff of neighborhood legend .

You’re standing at the curb, cheering and offering up prayers to the Protector, knowing that he’s filing away your name and your demeanor, ever ready to write you up if need be . . . you’re standing at the curb, and then you see your neighbor—whom you’ve come to despise—running down his driveway into the street—

—waving a ball bat above his head and—

—screaming words so vile you literally have to clamp your hands over the ears of your children and—

—here is he now.

Running up behind the Protector without any hesitation at all and begins slamming the bat into the back of the Protector’s head.

The crashing crunching metallic sound is hideous on the air of this otherwise tranquil neighborhood. But neighbor Nick must have lost all reason because even though his head has been severely damaged, the Protector scoots away quickly, leaving Nick to chase after him again. But he doesn’t get far.

Because men and women alike have reached him by now and punch, kick, scratch, bite and otherwise beat him to the ground. Nick turns black, turns blue, turns bloody as he falls to the pavement while continuing his terrible cursing.

And all his wife and kids can do is watch in disbelief and shame as Nick tries to avoid the worst of the beating.

There is a little drama in the window now as Emily tries to keep Allison from wriggling out of her grasp. But it’s no good. Allison manages to get free. The side door of the house slams open as Allison bursts from the house and runs down the driveway to save her father.

Before she can reach him, two neighbors grab her and march her back up to the house, where her mother takes charge.

By now, Emily has to wonder if her daughter has had some kind of trauma-induced (seeing your father kicked and beaten half to death will do it) breakdown. Allison, sobbing harder than she ever had as an infant, collapses on the grass to the side of the back door.

Thad says: “She’s worse than he is. You should leave her out here all night and see how she likes it.”

Then he turns to see how things are going in the street.

Three sky cop cars are descending with lights glaring, sweeping over the entire neighborhood, and a solemn voice admonishing the neighbors to stand away from the man on the ground or they will be zapped with a free-blaster, not a happy fate.

Thad says: “We won’t have to worry about him anymore, Mom.”

While Allison, on the ground, continues to wail and sob. . . .

The rashes on his legs and arms, one of the Friends explained to Nick, were because of Nick’s reaction to one of the drugs they had been blasting into him.

Nick didn’t smile about the rashes—they hurt—but he did smile when the Friend ended his explanation with one of the running clich’s in the camp: “That’s what friends are for.”

Friends—otherwise known as guards.

Nick knew what they were doing to him. They were programming him to become a candidate for Dad of The Year. Not only would be accepted by his former neighborhood, he would soon become a beacon of true and profound belief in both God and Parson Paul.

Nothing new, really, just better drugs than were used by the Germans and Russians and the CIA in the last century.

Like hell they would reprogram him.

Nothing new in the way he escaped, either. On his way back from the Daily Sermon, he slipped away from the line of fellow sinners and crept down into the basement.

He’d observed that twice a week enormous supply trucks pulled up to a dock near Building D. He had also observed, thanks to his affection for old crime movies, how easy if somewhat dangerous it was to fasten yourself to the undercarriage of a truck and hold on while it drove you unseen out through the gates.

The problem was getting to the truck and getting underneath it without being seen. He spent the entire morning working on this problem. Then he saw two of the guards coming out of their station on the first floor of this building. There would be clean uniforms in there. By three-thirty, the time one of the trucks usually arrived, he had disguised himself sufficiently to walk the four hundred yards to the dock. Now the only problem was pitching himself under the truck without anybody seeing him. Cameras encircled the walls of the camp. Each constantly moved right to left, left to right approximately every fifteen seconds. If he was off by even a few seconds, the camera working these four hundred yards would catch him.

He took a last look around. Nobody on the dock, nobody in sight on either side on the ground. He moved.

His first two nights in the cave were miserable thanks to heavy and cold rain. No food, either. At least the rain gave him something to drink. He just stood out there with his palms up. He and Alison had discovered the cave on one of their hikes. They’d agreed to keep it their secret. When either of both of them just had to get away from the probes of Pastor Paul, this was where they came. They’d tried burying trail food and jerky here for future use, but the “dumb” animals weren’t so dumb after all. They always found it with no trouble.

He slept and made plans. The plans changed constantly.

On the fourth day, after waking from a midafternoon nap, his physical resources starting to wane, he sat up and found himself in the midst of a vision, a shard of dreams that still lingered. Alison bent down to come into the narrow but deep cave and said, “Oh, Daddy, I’m so glad I found you.”

Her footsteps scuffing over the rocky floor told him she was real. And when she knelt next to him and put his arms around him, he couldn’t help himself. He began crying, letting out in convulsions all the fear, confusion and despair he’d felt during his time in the camp.

She held him, the parent now, calming, reassuring her small and terrified little boy. And then she blessed him with a turkey sandwich she’d made when, she said, she’d snuck out of the house to go looking for him after her mother went to see Parson Paul.

“I knew you’d come here, Dad.”

He had to force himself to move past the shakes and the tears and realize that his daughter had given him hope again, even if the underpinnings of that hope were vague.

As he gobbled the sandwich, she told him about the past few days when many men went searching for him, certain that he would come back God’s Arms because of Allison. Pastor Paul and Richard Avery had practically moved into the house, questioning her relentlessly, convinced that she’d had contact with her father following his escape. Her brother had been deputized to make sure that under no circumstances was she to leave the house or answer the communicator. Her Pri phone was smashed. Her brother slept on a cot right outside her bedroom door. He was a light sleeper.

“Mom is going to get a sanctioned divorce.”

With a dab of mayo hanging off his upper lip, he sighed and said, “I’ve disgraced her. I don’t blame her. I sort of figured on it, anyway. I’m sure Richard’ll start moving on her in pretty fast. He’ll figure he gets revenge on me for Natalie and gets to marry a very attractive woman to boot.”

“Pastor Paul says you’ll probably leave the community. He’s on the little tv station saying that you’re insane and dangerous and that we should pray for you to give camp another try before you leave.”

He chewed the sandwich crust, still ravenous. “That’s not going to happen.”

“You have any ideas?”

“Probably move into New Chicago.”

And then he heard them. They weren’t exactly professional trackers. They moved through the forest surrounding the cave making enough noise for a platoon of men.

And he understood in an instant. Pounding and pounding on poor Allison for days, her mother and brother approving. But getting nothing from the daughter. So what was next? Maybe she hadn’t heard from her father. But what if they let her escape? Would she lead them to her father’s hiding place? Worth a try, the interrogation getting nowhere.

Let her escape and then follow her.

To him.

Only now did Alison become aware of what her father knew a minute ago. She had been followed. Six men, led by Richard Avery, appeared from the woods just now. They were all carrying hunting rifles. Nick didn’t have even the strength to crawl back in the dank recesses of the cave. He knew it was over.

“I promised your wife we wouldn’t harm you, Nick,” Richard Avery standing now standing in front of the cave. “I plan to keep that promise.”

“Oh, Dad,” Alison said, “I didn’t know—”

Nick slid his arm around her, hugged her to him. “It’s all right, honey. You’re with me now and that’s all that matters.”

Richard said, “You don’t look so good, Nick. You need help to walk? We’ve got our SUV just down the hill. It shouldn’t be too hard on you.”

But that would be his last bit of pride, of dignity gone. He’d be damned if he let them carry him to his obvious fate.

It was sort of like the walk to your execution. He didn’t want to be one of the ones who had to be dragged, sobbing to meet his destiny.

“Hell, no.”

“He’s so handsome,” whispered the dark haired woman to the blond haired woman. They sat side by side by side in the pew. This service overflowed with people who’d heard about this new parson in God’s Arms.

“And his voice. It’s so authoratative.” There were those who felt that he was even more powerful a presence on the altar than Parson Paul.

“And think of where he was a year ago. Smashing up the Protector and escaping from camp.”

“It’a good thing he agreed to go back. Look at him now.”

All these words were spoken in anticipation of Parson Nick, the newest minister in Parson’s Paul’s roster.

And then the moment.

There was drama in his presence as he appeared on the altar and then stepped to face his people. Not affected drama, either. Maybe it was his travails of the past few years, some reasoned, that gave him such charismatic power. Had there ever been such a fierce example of sin and redemption in the history of God’s Arms?

And then he spoke: “I’m Parson Nick. Before I begin my sermon I’d like to thank you for joining me here today. And I’d like to thank the Lord and Parson Paul for being here.”

The dark-haired woman whispered to the blonde-haired woman: “That voice.”

Prev Next