Implied Spaces (29 page)

The result was stalemate, with the battle fought more between satellites and anti-satellite weapons than between the great platforms themselves.

It was hoped that the invasion would break the deadlock. Forty million attackers would swarm onto Courtland’s dorsal surface, seize the wormhole gates, and try to hold against the inevitable counterattack.

Were forty million enough? Aristide wondered. It had been calculated that more invaders would simply get in one another’s way. But how many of the forty million would survive the journey to Courtland?

Stars whirled in Aristide’s display as the transport took evasive action. Without sound, the war had a curiously flat quality. Not surprising, considering that the images were being transmitted by a camera in, literally, another universe.

His craft maneuvered through a scene of primal violence, of gamma-ray lasers pumped by matter-antimatter reactions, of lances looping on tails of fire to deliver fatal kinetic punches to the heart of an enemy, sheaves of robot-guided interceptors burning in single-minded fury for the foe, mines that unleashed sprays of bomblets; of antiproton charges turning matter into tortured, lethal bursts of angry, high-energy photons.

Courtland’s convex dorsal surface, ahead, was lit by a continuous, shifting cloud of light, as the lethality proceeded in utter silence.

“How are we doing?” Aristide asked.

Bitsy’s voice sounded in his ear.

“Not badly at all. The Venger’s defenses should be pretty well beaten down by the time your unit arrives.”

Bitsy’s body remained on Topaz, there being in the invasion fleet no call for a small cat, but her personality had been uploaded to the AI on Aristide’s combat suit. Tecmessa remained behind as well, as Aristide didn’t want the magic broadsword captured by the enemy in the likely event that the United Powers were defeated.

Aristide’s craft soared past the enormous, gently curving rim of Courtland itself. Its razor-thin outline stretched as far as the visual sensor could see, and reflected the dull red cloud that masked the sun. The Powers, at the beginning of the invasion, had spread the opaque cloud between Courtland and Sol, to inhibit the efficiency of Courtland’s solar collectors. The cloud couldn’t actually block solar radiation—it wasn’t a solid wall—but it shifted the radiation toward infrared, a spectrum where Courtland’s collectors would be less productive.

The rim flashed by in an instant. Aristide was now on Courtland’s dark side, and the only light was provided by starshine and the furnace-fire of combat. The battle ahead seemed to be dying down, which Aristide took to be a good sign.

Still, the vehicle jerked and looped and danced as it avoided real or anticipated fire. Sensors recorded successive waves of gamma rays, pions, and energetic neutrons, particle refugees fleeing the annihilation of matter.

“The first wave is coming in to land,” Bitsy said.

“What’s their casualty rate?”

“Thirty-two percent.”

Not bad, he thought, for a first wave. They were intended to do little more than absorb the brunt of the Venger’s defenses and secure the landing areas for the second and subsequent waves, who with any luck would arrive with enough of their forces intact to be able to retake the wormhole gates.

Aristide saw, amid a host of flares, the trail of an interceptor looping through the firmament. Decoys sped shining into the night. The interceptor neared.

For the first time Aristide felt a degree of suspense. He clenched his teeth. The vast paws on his combat suit turned into fists.

Energy flared, a fiery sea of white that turned, as the sensors cooked, to a sea of nothing-at-all. The feed had gone dead.

“Six minutes,” Bitsy said.

“The ship’s still alive?”

“Oh yes. As are you, by the way.”

Time passed. Suspense hummed through Aristide’s nerves. It was worse, without the video feed. Trapped with one’s own imagination was much worse.

”Five minutes. Task Force Ivan reports that our landing zone is secure.”

“Good for us,” Aristide managed. Nothing he had done, or could do, had altered his chance of survival by the slightest amount. This part of the war was completely automated. Computer minds calculated danger and reacted to it far faster than a human.

“We’re decelerating now. Good thing you’re not outside—you’d be flat as a strip of tin.”

There were four inhabited pocket universes anchored to Courtland, each with anywhere between four and fourteen billion inhabitants, all of whom were by now presumed willing to give their all for Vindex. Though one of these, New Qom, had been founded as a religious reservation with a low technology base, presumably this situation had been altered with the conversion to the faith of the Venger, and the mullahs were now probably as formidably armed as anyone else.

In addition to the four known enemy pockets, there was at least one more, the one designed originally as a wormhole factory and now used as an antimatter generator. To capture this, or to collapse its wormhole and divorce the pocket universe from reality, would be a major strike against Courtland’s power.

The United Powers didn’t know where this pocket universe was located. Photo reconnaissance had shown any number of new structures on Courtland’s dark side, but no one could tell what these structures concealed. They could hold pocket universes, warehouse war machines, store supplies, or exist simply as decoys.

Most of them, in any case, were now wreckage. The invading fleet had plenty of ammunition to spare: anything suspicious was given a thorough working-over. By now Courtland would be riddled with hot, glowing craters, many of which would have melted clean through the thin computational structure and revealed glimpses of the red-hearted cloud that loomed between Courtland and the sun.

“Two minutes.”

“Systems check for all personnel.”

There. He’d given his first order of the battle.

Heads-up displays flashed on the suit’s visor. Everything seemed to be in order. Aristide moved his arms, twisted at the waist, shuffled his feet. The combat suit’s movements integrated perfectly with his own.

”One minute.”

Data from his unit began to flood Aristide’s displays. His division was intact and one hundred percent functional.

He looked at the system’s clock. Thirty seconds. Twenty. Ten. Five.

One
.

Antimatter reactions sent power surging to the controls of the wormhole gate, and the wormhole expanded.

Suddenly there were stars overhead, and the endless flat plain of Courtland stretched all around. Half a million soldiers began moving in unison, still controlled by computer, brief spurts of their maneuvering jets taking them out of their little pocket and onto the enemy platform.

All around him, Aristide’s command was taking up positions. A phalanx of twenty robots, his personal bodyguard, jetted into formation around him. They were models of deadly efficiency, flattish ovoids capable of travel by rocket or on wheels, equipped with a kind of superstructure that held close-range weapons and a battery of sensors. They looked like mantises made out of composite armor.

No engagements among Aristide’s troops were reported. The battlefield seemed quiet.

Behind him, huge automated battle machines, artillery and armored vehicles, began to pour out of the wormhole.

Aristide felt his confidence increase. In the carrier he had been nothing but a helpless target. Now, free and in command, he felt he was gaining a grip on his own fate.

His unit constituted a full division, fourteen thousand fighters in all. In early industrial times, this would have been the command of a major general. As only a couple hundred of his soldiers were actual human beings, the rest being one or another sort of automaton, the military had advanced Aristide only as far as the rank of captain.

Aristide triggered the channel he used to communicate with higher authority.

“Reporting to Colonel Nordveit. The Screaming Cyborg Division is in position and awaiting orders. There is no opposition. Casualties are nil.”

“Very good. Stand by.” The answering voice belonged to the general’s AI.

The plan called for Aristide’s division to be in reserve for the first part of the engagement. Aristide made minute adjustments in his deployments and otherwise stood ready.

But for these warriors in their current incarnations, this was a one-way mission.

The division had taken its place in a busy part of Courtland’s surface. Between two of the pocket universes, the area was full of tracks and tubes for travel between the pocket universes of Pamphylia and Greater Zimbabwe, with cradles for the ships that carried their commerce away, and the maintenance facilities and terminals for those ships. Enormous cranes stood high against the starfield, standing above the rubble of the facilities.

A red light popped up on Aristide’s display. He called up more data.

“Nano disassemblers active in the area,” Bitsy confirmed.

“Send out an alert,” Aristide said.

“Done.”

“Do we have a reading on the type?”

“We’re working on that.”

Nano disassemblers had been anticipated by military planners, of course. In practice there were only a limited number of ways to disassemble matter on the molecular level, and it was hoped that all of these had been anticipated. The armor on Aristide’s suit, for example, attempted to defeat the disassemblers in two ways. The inner layers were as smooth as nanotechnology could make them, crystals latticed so closely together that it was hoped disassemblers would be unable to get a grip on anything. The outer layers provided a more active defense, and contained a number of hooks and grapples designed to seize a disassembler and try to jam its mechanism, like trying to cram a foam-filled beach ball into the jaws of an attacking crocodile.

If these didn’t work, there were more active ways of discouraging the disassemblers, which in any case were expected to be fairly inefficient on Courtland’s dark side, away from the solar energy that would provide their power.

The principle threat from molecular technology was believed to be in assemblers, not disassemblers, because they could alter the immediate environment in drastic ways. No one wanted to walk on a pleasant green lawn that had converted itself to nitrocellulose.

“The disassembler is of the Kyoto type,” Bitsy said. “Our equipment is largely proof against it, but we can deploy a Type C countermeasure if we desire.”

Aristide considered this. “Colonel Nordveit hasn’t ordered countermeasures.”

“No.”

Aristide thought aloud. “The Kyoto type is fairly basic, and Vindex has to know we’d anticipate it.”

“That’s a fair supposition.”

“Let’s assume it was deployed to test our capabilities. Ignore it unless we start seeing hot spots in the environment.”

“Shall I send an order to that effect?”

“Yes.”

Aristide felt restless after his time in the dull, small, functional pocket universe, and he moved off on an inspection tour of the area. Movements of Aristide’s body were measured by biofeedback sensors and analyzed by an onboard intelligence that converted them into motion on the part of the suit. Although Courtland possessed one-seventh Earth’s gravity—and here near the center of the disk, Aristide could actually stand more or less upright, as opposed to leaning at an angle toward the center of mass—in practice the suit moved with bursts of its jets, and the walking motion remained an illusion of Aristide’s neuromuscular system.

As he walked he tried not to think about the tiny machines that were trying to eat their way through the soles of his boots and kill him.

Aristide inspected a tube transport—abandoned, its glassy roof shattered some distance up the line—and a ground-to-air missile battery that had been melted into Courtland’s massively parallel, massively quantum surface. Because the surface was so obviously artificial it was difficult not to feel anxious about attack from below, the local equivalent of orcs boiling up from their tunnels, and Aristide had to remind himself that Courtland was too thin to support any kind of underground transport system.

Colonel Nordveit’s voice came on the command channel.

“Stand by. We’re going to open the worlds in ten seconds.”

Aristide ghosted to where he had a clear line of sight, and widened his artificial point of view so that he could look toward Pamphylia and Greater Zimbabwe simultaneously. He ran a mental countdown in his head.

He was ready for the most amazing piece of destruction he’d ever seen.

Over his head, the engine flares of ships, moving purposefully against the starfield, swirled in great whirlpools, as if they, too, wished to watch the worlds open.

He saw the flashes first, as engineers detonated the special shaped charges that destroyed the structures built over the wormholes. Lances of energy stabbed down from above, carrying charges of antimatter that wiped out every piece of matter between the wormhole and the environment—in this case, the vacuum.

A fountain followed, a great geyser of ice crystals rushing out of Pamphylia and Greater Zimbabwe as the atmospheres of the pocket universes began to pour out of the wormholes.

No one outside of the immediate area of the wormholes was in any kind of jeopardy. So vast was the volume of air in the pockets that the wormholes could vent for weeks before the pressure inside went down by more than a millibar.

Whoever won the battle would cap the wormholes again, presumably.

A few seconds after the first blasts came the vibration, the waves traveling over the surface of Courtland like a storm across the water. Aristide could feel the waves striking at his insides, driving his viscera up against his heart.

Still there was no sound.

Seconds later came more shocks, the only evidence that another pair of wormholes, out of Aristide’s sight, had also been opened.

Aristide wished for sunlight, so that he could see the great ice plumes in their full glory, the rainbow playing over the crystals as it rose kilometers high over Courtland’s surface… He altered his implant display, tinkering with different wavelength bands, but failed to get the effect he was hoping for.