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household robots, they ll be here in twenty minutes. Perhaps less.
To Sidney and Brian and Nick he says, Refresh yourselves quickly, in there.
Hello, sir, they say to Radmer in passing.
Hi, he says back. You shouldn t have come here.
Then, looking out unhappily at the approaching glints, Radmer asks Bruno,
What of Highrock? Is Tillspar in enemy hands already?
I haven t heard. But this army apparently followed the southern route,
bypassing the Divide. So there may yet be reason to hope.
For now. How many are coming? Are we enough to hold this site against them?
Perhaps, Bruno says, though even with Queendom equipment he doubts it very
much. The odds are just tilted too steeply in the enemy s favor. But we may
find greater advantage in moving onward.
A fighting retreat? I ll begin the weapons training immediately.
Do that, yes, Bruno says, But first there s something you should know.
This machine here he waves a hand at the bronze tower-top sticking out of the
sand is in contact with at least three collapsiters, somewhere in the lower
Kuiper Belt, just above Neptune s orbit. A bit of Nescog survives!
How is that possible? asks an incredulous Radmer. We would have known,
long ago.
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Before the Shattering, yes. Even before the Murdered Earth cracked and fell
in itself and breathed a last puff of air from the lungs of its dying
billions. Curses, mostly, with Bruno s name figuring prominently among them.
Indeed we would, Bruno agrees. And something as complex and fragile as a
collapsiter doesn t simply reconstitute itself. Perhaps the hand of God has
intervened on our behalf, or perhaps the hand of Man, if Lune is not the last
bastion of us after all. It hardly matters at this late hour, General. My
point is simply that I can take us out of here. Swiftly and without a trace.
To where? asks Radmer.
And here Bruno cannot help grinning, for there s nothing more just in this
world than turning a villain s own dirty tricks against him. The survival of
a fax machine for this long without maintenance is surprising, but hardly
incredible. It suse that wears them down. And the gates are just as durable,
so it s reasonable to suppose they re intact. I d be more surprised if they
weren t.
So, what? We fax out and back? Use the speed-of-light delays as a kind of
time bomb, and step out of the plate ten or twelve hours after we left?
Impatiently, Bruno tries to run a hand through his hair, but bangs up against
the dome of his helmet instead. Listen, all right?Ours is not the only fax
machine. We ve assumed another all along. In Astaroth, yes? In the Glimmer
King s own presumed fortress, somewhere in the vicinity of the south pole. It
will take hours, yes, for our signal to travel to the outer system and back.
But when it does, we can step right to the heart of this world s problems. And
solve them.
Oh, says Radmer. He seems stunned to blankness by that remark, but slowly
he recovers himself, and finally matches Bruno s grin. That sounds a bit
dangerous, old man. Are you sure you re up to the task?
As sure as the sun shines, my boy. I ve penetrated a fearsome lair or two in
my day. And I hadn t the Dolceti with me then, nor you, nor the element of
surprise. Now if you ll excuse me, I have a three-thousand-year-old telecom
network to fix.
Alas, this proves more difficult than he d assumedat first. The collapsiters
are clearly pinging and responding to pings, but sorting through the fax
machine s comm logs, he s baffled at first by the nonsense he finds there.
Hebuilt the Nescog, and while the passage of time has bleached out the
specific details of its comm protocol, he does at least recognize his own work
when he sees it. And this is something . . . else.
This isn t Nescog at all, but some derivative coding system built upon it.
When? By whom? Could it be the fabled Shadow Network of the Fatalist ghouls? A
hundred gigatons of collapsium could not be hidden in the Old Solar
System every collapsiter was known and tracked but a parasitic protocol
running secretly in the margins . . . Well, it isn t impossible, but it still
doesn t explain how dead collapsiters have turned back into live ones. And
anyway something in him doubts that explanation. It fails Occam s Razor; it s
too complex. Something else is going on.
Alas, the mystery will have to wait for another time; with a few minutes of
study he s able to decipher the important features of the log file, and
construct an access request that will race out ahead of their own corporeal
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images, logging them on to the mystery network just in time to be routed
through it, and also scanning for additional gates and logging them on,
involuntarily. A hostile takeover of the Glimmer King s fax. Or so he hopes;
if the process fails, they ll bounce right back here again, to face the robot
army.
They re coming! someone shouts down to him from outside.
Well, yes. That goes without saying. Of the fax he asks, Does this
transaction look valid to you?
I have never seen one like it, Sire, the fax replies, from a speaker grown
adjacent to its print plate. But it appears to be a valid construction.
Then implement it, under full Royal Override.
Doing so.
Architect! he shouts then through the open doorway. We re ready! Start
sending people through!
But something s wrong; there s a rising din and clatter out there. The battle
has begun, or rather resumed. Blast. He races outside, prepared for the worst,
and sees pretty much what he expects: the site is overrun. Already there are
dozens of robots down and dozens more swarming among the Dolceti, and there
arehundreds pouring over the nearby dunes. Presumably thousands racing upward
through the dune field, out of sight for the moment but not planning on
staying that way for long.
Radmer! he shouts, blasting his voice over the loudspeakers. Bordi! Get
the Dolceti through the fax!
I m not going in there, someone protests, over the grunt and clatter of
combat and the death screams of household robots.
You re not staying here, someone else remarks. And a third
voice Mathy s adds, I m not going first, I ll tell you that much.
Bruno pauses to smash down a pair of attackers, and then says, General
Radmer will go first. Then Sidney Lyman and his men, for they ll know better
what to expect on the other side. He pauses again to rescue a fallen comrade,
then continues, Next will go Natan and Zuq and Mathy, and all the rest of
you, and he fires an energy blast at a nearby hilltop, scattering the robots
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