by David Weber
“Show me.”
A window opened on the map of Earth, and a view from orbit showed a long, pale ovoid racing through the cityscape.
“Isn’t that the same chronoport from a few days ago?” Mikael asked.
“You’re absolutely right.” Sung-Wook turned to his drone operator. “Scramble the Switchblades. Get them in the air now.”
“Unscheduled chronoport now hypersonic and still accelerating. Still heading directly for us.”
“Incoming alert from DTI headquarters. Unscheduled chronoport is confirmed hostile.”
“Then get those Switchblades up!” Sung-Wook shouted.
“Target decelerating rapidly. Sir, it’s almost here!”
“Give me an external view!”
Another window opened over the map to show the craft flying straight at them. Its hull formed a full moon of gunmetal gray, and shallow blisters on either side split open. Sung-Wook sucked in a quick breath a moment before the map of Earth exploded inward.
The deafening roar of incoming fire masked secondary explosions as the 12mm rounds burst into cones of antipersonnel fléchettes. Twin streams of fire raked across the operations room, and fléchettes shredded equipment and pulped the first row of agents. Blood splattered Sung-Wook’s uniform, and a hot shard of malmetal cut across his cheek.
His mouth barely formed the first syllable of a command when the fire swung back, this time bursting into red powdery clouds that immolated everything they touched. Mikael’s face and shoulders burst into flames, and he fell from his seat screaming.
Sung-Wook backed away, but the red powder spread everywhere and a wisp caught his arm. His sleeve and flesh ignited, and he cried out. The gunfire traversed the room once more, and agents blew apart into clouds of fiery entrails. Fléchettes deployed a meter in front of Sung-Wook, and his chest exploded into crimson mist.
*
Philo kept firing until everyone in the operations room was dead. It wasn’t the first time he’d used a TTV’s weapons in self-defense, and he supposed this was no different. None of these people would exist after they fixed the Knot, so he couldn’t kill people that would soon be erased from reality.
At least, that’s what he told himself as the last pieces of the last Peacekeeper dropped to the ground in a wet, flaming heap.
“The tower’s drones do not appear to be active,” Kleio reported.
“That won’t last for long, but it’ll help,” Philo replied.
He adjusted the Kleio’s target, and the guns’ line-of-sight slewed up to the tower’s suppression antenna. Their dynamic loaders switched to high-explosive armor-piercing rounds, and a cascade of tiny explosions shredded the antenna’s exotic matter. Flickers of phasing debris rained down the tower’s sides, and the suppression field over the Yanluo Blight died.
“Debris from the tower is phasing erratically into the past,” Kleio reported. “I can no longer single out the chronoports in Blockade Squadron.”
“Good. Then they might not be able to see us when we run for it.”
“Admin attack drones approaching from both the south and northeast.”
“They’ll have to try harder than that to catch us,” Philo said. “Now get us moving, Kleio!”
*
Raibert did his best to adjust to prison life. Or at least to look like he was adjusting to prison life. He had pants now, which was a big plus. And shoes, and a shirt, and food in his stomach. With those basic needs out of the way, he found Cynthia behind the temple with two pickaxes slung over her shoulder.
“What’re those for?”
“Looks like you’re on mining detail.” She handed one to him. “We’re stockpiling materials for the second temple.”
“A second temple? Isn’t one enough?”
“Maybe. But some people really want to fight another dragon. Come on. I’ll show you the way.”
Raibert shrugged and followed her down the back of the hill and away from town.
“Don’t you have anything you need to get back to?” he asked.
“Yeah, but you seem a decent sort, so I thought I’d help you get settled in. You kill any Peacekeepers?”
“No.”
“Blow up any of their buildings?”
“No,” he answered more forcefully.
“That’s a shame. Oh, well. I’ll guess it eventually.”
“Would it help if I made one up? I already told you what I did to get thrown in here.”
“Sure you did, Raibert. Whatever you say.”
She led him toward a clearing between the foot of the hill and the woodland beyond. He spotted a narrow path that led into the woods.
“You do realize a pickaxe isn’t ideal for a marble quarry, right?”
“Not a problem. The next temple’s going to be out of solid gold.”
“Seriously? There’s that amount of gold nearby?”
“There is after we asked for it nicely.”
“Doesn’t that amount of gold upset the town’s economy or something?”
“What would we spend it on that she won’t just give us?”
“Good point. Never mind.” Raibert’s vision blurred and he hefted the pickaxe. “Hey, Cynthia?”
“Yeah?” She turned around just as the edge of the pickaxe split her head open. The blow killed her instantly, and she flopped onto the grass, pulling Raibert forward with the tool embedded in her skull. Her legs twitched, and blood drained from the wound. He placed a shoe against the side of her head and pulled the pickaxe free.
He stopped and froze, his vision clearing.
“What?” Raibert stared at the body, then at the bloody weapon in his hands, then at the body again. “What just happened?”
The sound of stone grinding against stone echoed from the temple, and six huge statues stomped out and then descended the hill in great, powerful strides that shook the earth. Raibert dropped the pickaxe and backed away, but they quickly surrounded him.
“Explain yourself, prisoner!” one of them thundered down at him.
“I-I-I-I-I,” he stuttered.
“You have been given a command, prisoner! Explain yourself!”
“But I don’t know! I have no idea what just happened! It must have been a glitch in the simulation!”
“A likely story. Sweep the area!”
One of the statues bent over and lifted the pickaxe between two fingers. Pink, spongy fragments still clung to the blade.
“Find anything?” a second statue asked.
“Negative. No sign of aberrant code. What about on the prisoner?”
The second statue ran a hand over him. He tried to back away, but a third statue shoved him forward.
“Nothing. Diagnostics on the connectome interface are clean.”
“Then it looks like we’ve got a troublemaker. The warden will hear of this.”
“I think she already has.”
Booming footfalls echoed from the temple, and Raibert spied the marble statue of Ixchel stepping into the open. She fixed him with a cold glare and descended the hill with earthshaking strides.
“Wow. That was fast,” a statue said. “She must have had her eye on this one.”
“Oh, you’re in for it now.”
“But I swear I have no idea what just happened!”
“The code doesn’t lie, scum. Unlike your mouth.”
The guard statues formed a semicircle behind Raibert as the statue of Warden Ixchel lumbered to a halt.
“Report,” she said.
“Ma’am! This man was implicated in the temporary death of a fellow prisoner. We are in the process of checking the area for domain aberrations, but so far have found nothing.”
“You did this?” Ixchel demanded of him.
“I honestly have no idea what happened, I swear! It was like I wasn’t in control of my own body.”
A textbox opened next to Ixchel and her statue skimmed its contents.
“You’ve been here less than a day, and you’re already killing people in my
prison? This is totally unacceptable.”
“But I—”
“Guards!” Ixchel commanded. “Sweep the area again. Leave nothing to chance. I want a full report within the hour.”
“Yes, Warden!”
“And as for you.” Ixchel gazed down at him with brimstone in her marble eye-pits. “Prisoner Raibert Kaminski, you are hereby confined to the isolation subdomain, pending a review of this incident. If you are found guilty of willfully killing another prisoner, you will be punished accordingly, and in my prison that means one-way abstraction.”
“But I didn’t do anything!”
“Guards! Take this trash away!”
One of the statues grabbed him by the shoulder and was about to haul him off when the ground reverberated. Not from heavy footsteps, but with the oscillations of a distant and alien sound.
“What was that?” a statue asked.
The reverberation grew, tickling up through Raibert’s shoes, and so did the sound. It was a low musical cacophony not unlike an orchestra testing out their instruments and warming up before a performance. The ground trembled, almost as if it had become a single, giant speaker.
“What’s going on?” Ixchel demanded. “Is something wrong with the domain?”
“Running diagnostics now, Warden.”
The cacophony died away, and all seemed calm again until the ground shook with an escalation of trilling musical notes.
“Is that…Wagner?” Ixchel asked.
“There, Warden!” One of the guards pointed toward the edge of the woods. “Look!”
A solitary warrior charged out of the tree line, horned helmet upon his head and battle axe in hand. His red bushy beard flapped with each mighty stride, and spittle ran from the side of his open mouth.
A second Viking bounded into the open, identical to the first.
Then ten more joined in.
Then a hundred.
Then a thousand armored, crazed, saliva-drooling, axe-wielding Vikings all thundered across the field.
“FOR SYSGOV!” the horde of Philos cried, and the ground shuddered to the rousing music of Walkürenritt—Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Department of Incarceration prison domain
2979 CE
“Multi-instance weaponry detected, Warden! Domain code is being rewritten!”
“Neutralize the anomaly at once!” Ixchel commanded.
“Yes, ma’am!”
The sky darkened instantly and a cold wind blew across the field. Lightning crackled from cloud to cloud, then forked to the ground. A few Philos dropped in smoking ruin, but the rest charged on, unfazed by the attack.
“Try harder!” Ixchel urged.
“Working on it, ma’am!”
More lightning stabbed at the charging horde, and the clouds lit up with inner flame. Fiery boulders fell from the sky and pummeled the Viking ranks, and each mighty impact shook the earth and blasted dozens into the air. The Philos howled with frothing, berserker rage and raced on as the “Ride of the Valkyries” escalated with bombastic brass.
“Increase countermeasure magnitude!”
The boulders ballooned out to ten times their previous size, and the first one crashed to earth and rolled through the horde, crushing over a hundred Philos. More fell from the sky, but then suddenly froze in midair.
“What are you doing?” Ixchel demanded. “Continue the attack!”
“I’m trying, but my commands are being interrupted!”
“What’s going on here? How is this possible?”
“I don’t…oh, no. Yanluo Violation detected! We’ve got an AI in here!”
“Freeze the domain state! Freeze it now!”
“I…I can’t! It’s actively rerouting my interface!”
Ixchel swung to face Raibert. “That thing is here for you, isn’t it?”
“Ma’am, you already know the answer.” Raibert sneered at her and backed away.
“In that case…” The giant statue clenched a fist and pulled it back for a bone-crushing strike.
A lone Philo ran ahead of the pack, raised his battle axe so far over his head that the blade almost touched the small of his back, then hurled it forward. The axe spun through the air, twirled over Raibert’s head, and sank into Ixchel’s face. Her statue disintegrated into a pile of white and gray cubes, and the axe fell to the ground blade first. It stuck in place with the handle facing Raibert, and the grass around the blade sank into soil that then changed to a flat brown grid.
The weapon’s edge gleamed with lethal sharpness, and a label had been placed upon the axe head in bold letters against a yellow and black checkered background.
It read FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY.
“Codeburner weapons!” a guard shouted. “We’ve got codeburners in here!”
Raibert grabbed the axe handle, lifted the remarkably light weapon, and swung it through the knee of a guard statue. The construct fell to the ground and shattered into hundreds of dark cubes.
“All guards, interface with domain one two seven! Backup required! Backup—”
Philos swarmed over the remaining guards like ants defending their mound. They toppled them over with weight of numbers, and hacked their prone bodies to pieces. The horde formed a protective circle around Raibert, and one of the Philos, the one that had thrown the codeburner axe, stepped forward.
“Miss me?” he asked.
“You have no idea how glad I am to see you!” Raibert ran up and embraced his companion. “These animals violated my connectome!”
“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry, but there was nothing I could do to stop them.”
“Can you get me out of here?”
“We’re about to find out. Come on! This way!”
“THIS WAY!” the horde echoed as they charged up the hill to the temple.
Raibert ran with them alongside the lead Philo.
“The guards have the ability to spawn dragons and other fantasy creatures!” he shouted over the clamor.
“Probably nonsentient combat auxiliaries!” Philo replied. “Thanks for the warning! We’ll be ready for them!”
“WE’LL BE READY!”
Dozens of guard statues filed out of the temple, more than could have possibly fitted inside at once, and the front ranks of the Philos crashed into them. Some guards trampled through the horde, crushing Philos underfoot, while others sent Philos flying through the air with great punches and kicks. The Vikings chopped the statues off at the knees and swarmed over them when they fell, but more statues kept pouring out of the temple.
“It doesn’t matter how many we destabilize!” Philo shouted. “They’ll just keep coming, but that works to our advantage!”
“How exactly is this helping us?”
“You’ll see!”
Several Philos picked up severed heads and limbs from the statues, carried them back to the horde’s rear, and set them on the ground.
“We’re taking trophies?” Raibert asked.
“In a manner of speaking!” the lead Philo said as his copies arranged the dismembered pieces into a wide arc. “The guard avatars have interface code stored in each instance! I’m using the fragments in a way they didn’t intend!”
More statues slammed into the horde’s front ranks, and several Philos flew over Raibert’s head.
“You’re running out of copies!”
“I know, but we’re almost finished here!”
The clouds stirred, and a massive silhouette slid by just above them.
“Philo, I think they just spawned the dragon!”
“Good!” Philo proclaimed. “About time they tried that!”
“Good? How is this a good thing?”
“You’ll see!”
A great golden beast swooped out of the clouds, flapped its broad, leathery wings once, twice, then landed atop the temple and sank its talons into the marble. It reared back with a many-horned head, breathed in deeply— “Philo…”
—and spewed
a continuous plume of blue flame that reduced statues to molten sludge.
“What?” Raibert asked.
The dragon swiped its barbed tail through the guards, catapulting them through the air to land in the village with heavy thuds. It pounced on three more, crushing them under its bulk, and snatched a fourth into its powerful jaws before biting it in half.
“What’s theirs is mine!” Philo laughed. “All right, Raibert! Let’s wrap this up!”
The statue fragments on the ground formed a complete circle now, and arcane energy crackled out of the hollowed eye sockets of the severed heads. Philo took the codeburner axe out of Raibert’s hands and brought it down on one of the heads. Energy flashed around the circumference and a pool of blue light swirled into existence within.
“Where’s it lead?” Raibert asked.
“No time! I’ll explain on the other side! Now get in!”
“Now Philo, I’d really like to know what I’m—”
The Viking kicked Raibert in the butt, and he fell into the glowing portal. The outer layers of his body dissolved, and an impenetrable darkness fell upon his mind.
*
Raibert blinked his eyes open against the glare of overhead lights and found himself seated within a sterile white room. He heard the hum of ventilation and felt air flow across his skin.
“Great. I’m naked again, aren’t I?” he said in a voice deeper than his own. “Wait, what?”
He looked down at heavy hands that were not his own, then down further at a well-defined abdomen and other parts that definitely didn’t belong to him. The cool air against his skin also didn’t feel the same. Not wrong but different. It was as if his skin simply informed him the ambient temperature was low without relaying the unpleasantness of actually feeling cold.
“Umm…”
“You make it?” Philo asked over his virtual hearing.
“Yeah,” Raibert replied. “Is this real or an abstraction?”
“Real. I pulled your connectome out of the domain and found a way to load it into an empty case. Then I loaded the case into a STAND general purpose synthoid.”
“Case? STAND?”
“Admin synthoids work a bit differently than ours, but all that can wait. Kleio’s getting shot at outside, so you need to move.”
