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  A goose getting cooked, Aubry thought. But the virtual tongues of flames licked the sides of his buttocks and thighs, and did him no harm.

  Again, the gathered Friends sighed, “Old bone dancer.”

  Tod gazed around at them all. Because of the crook in his neck, he was able to make a 360-degree sweep without moving the rest of his body. His gaze finally settled on Game and Otis, who were sitting near one another, and he spoke.

  “The arthritic doorjamb of forever can’t stop the creaking swing on yesterday’s stoop, but tomorrow’s sand palace will ruin the wash early.”

  Otis and Game nodded sagely, as if they understood exactly what Tod was talking about.

  “Furthermore,” said Tod, “five hundred crows don’t a bacon sandwich make. Flight is not greasy, so if you’re going to leave without your luggage, you might as well not leave at all.”

  Tod now craned his elastic neck around at the rest of the gathered Friends.

  “And furthermore furthermore,” he said. His eyes lit on Aubry. His irises were a pale gray that might have been invisible, had not the remainder of the orbs had a sallow cast, like aged ivory. His gaze held hers. As always, his expression was a combination of the slightly bemused and the slightly put-upon. “Furthermore,” he continued, raising a long, bony finger in the air, “there is no furthermore.” Tod then promptly vanished.

  The gathered Friends sat silent for a long while. Finally, Game spoke.

  “Old bone dancer has spoken truly.”

  The Friends nodded. One of them said “amen” and another intoned “Allah be praised.”

  “This is a sad day,” said Otis. “But a wise day, too.”

  Aubry waited for an explanation. It wasn’t long in coming. The plan as communicated by Tod, according to Otis and Game, was for the Friends to split into two groups: those who would evacuate and those who would stay and be destroyed with Nirvana. Tod clearly intended to remain. His cloaking presence would provide cover for those who wished to escape. As with most religions, there were factions among the Friends, and those who favored a more “active” pacifism—the didacts, they called themselves—would stay. Running away from force was, in their view, as aggressive and confused a response as fighting back. As Aubry heard one of the didacts say, “You have to teach your enemies not just with words, but with your life.”

  The others, more than two-thirds of the remaining Friends, would attempt to escape using the transmission pods much like the one that had brought Aubry to Nirvana in the first place.

  Jill’s partisan force—her transfigured rats, ferrets, and other nasty code-creatures—would be the last to leave and serve as the rear guard. If it seemed as if the Met forces were going to try to capture the remaining Friends instead of killing them, it would also be their task to execute the didacts so that no information could be obtained as to the others’ whereabouts. The didacts agreed to this readily, which didn’t surprise Aubry. She’d lived among the Friends of Tod long enough to begin to understand their queer ways. They were a bunch of analytic mystics, Leo Sherman had once said.

  The Met attack played right into the Friends’ hands. A Dirac-class warship and its retinue of smaller ships used the mycelium for target practice. The only resistance was Tod, whose presence continued to block the merci in the vicinity. Some of the DIED Sciatica fighter pilots still didn’t realize what this meant to them. Most had never been in a state of total disconnection from flight control before. Two were destroyed in a collision. Most of the pilots were able to compensate, however, and the destruction was thorough.

  As more than one merci news feed noted at the time, this was the first time in history that a Met structure had ever been militarily attacked.

  The Friends escaped in gas exchange pods—structures that the Met engineers, and the Met biosystem itself, had created to regulate the ecology of Met structures. The exodus was staggered—it was timed to appear as if the devastating blasts from the destroyer’s antimatter cannon was causing the spontaneous release of the pods. As a diversion, the Friends sent out their small transfer ship registering false life signs. It was immediately destroyed. The DIED forces evidently had instructions to kill everything in sight.

  The didacts who remained were killed when a torpedo breached the Oregon Bolsa and the atmosphere was spun out into space. Aubry, Jill, and their remaining partisan fighters were either outfitted with pressure suits or previously space-adapted. All of them were anchored against being sucked out into space when the bolsa’s integrity gave way. One of the Friends had run a simulation of how a textbook attack would likely progress. It was as if the DIED commanders were following the same script.

  With little to do except get their asses out of there, Aubry and Jill prepared to board one of the final transmission pods. A high wind roared as the atmosphere of Oregon Bolsa departed through the hole in the ground no more than a half mile from where Aubry was stationed. She couldn’t actually see the hole, but she could feel the suck of all things toward it. She was about to clamber into the pod access cloaca when Jill tapped her on the shoulder and motioned for her to turn around.

  There, walking toward them against the heavy wind, was Tod.

  The old time tower had taken off his shoes, and Aubry saw that his feet were as elongated as the rest of his body parts, and his toes were sharpened on the end. He was using his feet as spades—one in, the other out, and so on—to advance rapidly. When he reached Aubry, he spaded both feet into the ground and reached out a bony hand. Aubry hesitated for a moment, then touched it. Instantly, she heard the time tower’s creaky voice inside her.

  “I remembered the ‘furthermore,’ girl,” he told her. Why don’t you come with us? She hadn’t said it, but thought it.

  “Because I’m too busy thinking,” Tod replied with a trace of annoyance in his voice. “Now, where was I? The furthermore of it all is you.”

  What do you mean?

  “You’ll be like me someday. You’ll be a manifold. I can see it in your genes, so don’t argue. So I have to tell you: Eat a peach and swim in the river.”

  I don’t understand.

  “No time for understanding. That’ll be the least of your problems. Take my hand.”

  But I’m holding your hand.

  “No,” he said. “Take it. Hold it tight. And don’t lose it.”

  As Aubry watched, the time tower turned his wrist. And turned it again. And again. And his hand, still in her grasp, broke away. Tod withdrew his arm, now ending in a stump. He smiled broadly. His mouth was full of squat, densely packed teeth—the self-sculpted mouth of a vegetarian.

  Please come with us , Aubry thought.

  Still smiling, the time tower shook his head. Without another word, he turned and stalked away on his stavelegs. There was an explosion nearby, and Jill pulled Aubry into the transmission pod. The slitlike entrance closed behind them, and they were in regular atmosphere once again here inside the access cloaca.

  “You should stow that for takeoff,” Jill said.

  Aubry realized she was still holding Tod’s severed hand. There was no blood to it. The wrist that had broken from Tod’s body ended in a neat, pointed twist. Aubry shoved it into the copious pocket of her trousers. She’d taken to wearing the wide-legged, dresslike pants that many of the Friends women preferred. The hand sat inert against her thigh. Kind of creepy. There wasn’t much time to think about that, though.

  They pulled themselves through the access cloaca. In addition to Aubry, there were fifteen other partisans—several rats and a ferret. Two ferrets, thought Aubry, even though Jill looks like a regular woman. The cloaca was just wide enough for the largest of them. It seemed to be headed almost straight downward, and if the sides of the passageway weren’t sticky, they might have all slid down on top of one another. They did jostle and inadvertently kick one another quite a few times.

  When they got to the entrance to the pod proper, Jill cautioned them all to use the ropes, already in place, to lower themselves. “If you just d
rop through the pod to the other side,” she said. “Then there won’t be enough goo when we go.”

  The “ropes” turned out to be pod fiber that a Friends crew had previously worked into something like a vine. The partisans descended into the pod, working their way through the moist streamers that stretched in all directions throughout the pod. Growing within some of the streamers were clumps of slime-coated sacs that resembled seeds. Several of the sacs were filled with a photoreactive chemical, and they suffused the pod with a warm glow. In every way, the interior of a transmission pod was very much like the inside of a gigantic pumpkin.

  Aubry’s feet had barely touched the ground at the bottom of the rope when Jill called out, “Get ready for transmission.”

  Jill fingered blue-black bulbs of enzymes dangling from the pod walls. These, Aubry knew, contained the activator enzymes. The final partisan made it down the rope and dropped to the soft, sticky pod floor.

  “Here we go,” called out Jill. Jill squeezed the bulbs until they burst. There was a flash of light, then a sparkling glow as the bulbs’ contents spilled out and signaled to the pod that the time had come for it to be off. There was no time to admire the light. The pod blasted away from Nirvana.

  Aubry had done this before, but she was never quite prepared for the shock. Gravity—or in actuality acceleration—reversed itself. What once had been up became down, and they all fell back the way they had, moments before, climbed down. But the gooey streamers that they’d worked their way through now acted as nets and cushions. Aubry fell into one, and it stretched, stretched, then broke, leaving her to tumble into another. In that manner she and the other partisans survived the huge initial acceleration of the pod—shot out like a seed from dying Nirvana. Knowing what to expect, she made a gentle touchdown, feetfirst, on the other side.

  “You’re getting good at this,” said Jill, who had also nimbly touched down beside her.

  Somewhere behind them, Aubry knew that Tod was dead, and Nirvana was no more. She felt tears come to her eyes. She thought of her father and brother. Had they made it to the outer system? She thought of her mother. The tears welled, but instead of crying, she suddenly felt a huge sense of relief.

  I’ve got time to cry, Aubry thought. That means we escaped. They didn’t catch us and kill us.

  Instead of crying, she found herself laughing out loud.

  Jill looked at Aubry, smiled her evil, ferrety smile. “We’re alive,” Jill said. “I like it every time that happens.”

  Nine

  From

  Grist-based Weapons

  Federal Army Field Manual

  Compiled by Forward Development Lab, Triton

  Gerardo Funk, Commandant

  Section IV: Delivery Systems

  Grist-mil delivers itself. The methods used are a sub-microscopic version of transportation systems in the visible world.

  1. Mechanical transport

  Grist-mil travels on wheels, legs, pseudopods. It slinks, crawls, travels by grist-made railway and highway systems that destroy themselves behind the main grist.

  2. Subversion of existing transportation

  Conventional transports can deliver grist-mil. In addition, grist can take control of other transportation systems—an enemy streamer bead or even an enemy’s nervous system, for instance—and use that means to transport itself.

  3. Physical viral transport

  Grist-mil can infect like a virus. It often infiltrates enemy positions through random or partially random physical transmission.

  4. Superluminal viral transport

  This is perhaps the most insidious and powerful means to use grist as a weapon. An algorithm traveling instantaneously through the virtuality can overcome and subvert controlling programs at a given destination, then manufacture its own grist substrate. If security measures can be overcome, grist weapons can be delivered anywhere within the solar system instantly. This is often easier said than done, however, as security countermeasures are usually in place.

  Ten

  As the Federal Army commander—the supreme leader of the outer-system military forces—General Roger Sherman saw it, the fight was, from the beginning, a matter of material versus energy. The inner system had the sun’s energy; the outer system had most of the solar system’s matter. The inner system had the advantage of complexity, population, and infrastructure. The outer system had the advantage of gravity—if and when it could get its vast material into weapons form. This, Sherman believed, would ultimately tip the balance in the outer system’s favor. Gravity was on his side, and the kinetic energy of a million falling rocks. The problem was rolling the rocks to the brink of the cliff.

  Sherman’s strategy from the start was threefold.

  First, he had to fight a holding action to keep what was left of the outer system under his control. Second, he must regain the conquered territories of the Saturn, Pluto, and Uranus systems. And, finally, he had to take the fight to the inner system.

  In the end, he had the most rocks to throw.

  In that light, then, the main thing for the army to do was to provide a screen so that the outer system could ramp up its war industry. The main concern of that industry, so far as Sherman was concerned, was to gather material. Then the material had to be maneuvered into place so that it could be sent hurtling against the occupying forces, and, ultimately, into the inner system.

  After the bombing, invasion.

  New cloudships—thousands—would have to be accreted. The final assault, as Sherman saw it, was an enormous rain of boulders upon the Met, followed by a concerted assault by cloudship-supported infantry. A borasca—a storm of enormous proportions—one of the old cloudships had called it.

  The victory of the Federal Army should be, as the expression went, as sure and certain as a handclap and a smile. But smiling wasn’t coming easy to Sherman these days (if it ever did), and he hadn’t felt like applauding anything for several e-years.

  As a matter of fact, things were going worse than normal—and normal was pretty bad in itself. Early in the war, Amés had taken Ganymede, and with it half the Federal Army. In some ways, this had been fortunate for Sherman, since the half of the army taken prisoner included central command. Those generals—none of them friends to Sherman in the past—were now out of the war, at least until Ganymede could be liberated. But Sherman had also been deprived of nearly one million fighting soldiers, and this was a heavy blow indeed. The remaining Army in the Jupiter system was over a million strong, but, so far, under the command of General Meridian Redux, they were barely able to keep control of Callisto and had lost two of the remaining Jovian moons.

  Redux’s appointment had been a compromise with the Jovian powers that be in the newly formed Solarian Republic (the government Sherman now worked for), and Sherman had never been comfortable with it. But instead of her defeats weakening her, Redux was successfully blaming it all on Sherman during her press conferences on the merci. As a result, he was losing what control he once had over her actions.

  He wished he could tell Jupiter to go to hell—he contemplated it for a moment with grim satisfaction—but, of course, he could never let that happen.

  It was the damned merci, with its incessant war coverage. He’d never been good at public relations, and that lack was beginning to tell. It didn’t help that he felt a vitriolic contempt for most of these so-called war correspondents. Not a one of them had ever served in the Army. And several of them had been part of the hue and cry that had gotten him shuffled away to the Army weather command on Triton, the Third Sky and Light Brigade, over a decade ago.

  He was going to have to do something about the press problem, nonetheless.

  But first, we have to keep Zebra 333 from taking Io, Sherman thought. Then I can worry about my image.

  Zebra 333, who reportedly did not go by his rank of general, was General Redux’s opposite; he was the commander of the DIED forces seeking control of Jupiter—Amés’s top man in the planetary system. He was also a LAP
who existed entirely in the virtuality. There were reports he had bodies in storage somewhere, but he never used them. Not doing so was normally harmful to a LAP’s mental stability, but Zebra 333 seemed to be a man exceptional in many ways. One thing Sherman knew, Zebra was a hell of a tactician—much better, unfortunately, than General Redux.

  Oh, Redux was fine so far as she went. She was capable, intelligent. But not adaptable. Not in the way you needed to be when fighting against an opponent who could think a few thousand moves ahead of you, at least on an analytic level.

  Redux had recommended abandoning Io and falling back to Callisto to concentrate. Her forces were too spread out. She was leaving her flank open, and she risked losing everything that way.

  Concentrate, concentrate, concentrate. That was the perpetual drone from Redux. He read it in her communiqués to him, and, hell, he heard it every night on the merci. Did Redux not realize that the enemy had access to the outer-system merci channels? Of course she did. She simply didn’t care.

  Concentrate.

  General Redux, if you concentrate any further, thought Sherman, you’ll soon put yourself in a concentration camp.

  Meanwhile, Zebra 333 was preparing for a major assault as the Met sped matériel and soldiers to him. Every goddamn Jovian moon still in Republic hands was at risk. And the more territory Zebra captured—three of the lesser moons, so far: Elara, Himalia, and Sinope—the less energy he must devote to the greater effort and expense of maintaining his forces in space.

  Eleven

  From

  Grist-based Weapons

  Federal Army Field Manual

  Compiled by Forward Development Lab, Triton

  Gerardo Funk, Commandant

  Section V: Types of Weapons and Devices