ALL CITIES’ PRAYERS WITH LORD OF LAGASH
POLICE SEEK NOMAD AGENTS IN BABYLON
LORD SHAMASH ASKS LORD ANSHAR TO RESTORE ORDER
AN EYE FOR AN EYE
NATIVIST WITCH-HUNT
ASHUR TO INVADE SIPPAR
V. MACHINES
At Lagash they had drilled a double dozen scenarios: city-sized habitats, ramship fleets, dwarf planets threaded with ice tunnels like termite tracks in old wood. When the cities fought among themselves the territory was known and the weapons were familiar. The vacuum armor Ish had worn as a Surface Tactical was not very different from what a soldier of Lagash or Ashur or Akkad would wear, although the gear of those warlike cities was usually newer and there was more of it. The weapons the Surface Tacticals carried were deadly enough to ships or to other vacuum troops, and the soldiers of the interior had aircraft and artillery and even fusion bombs although no one had used fusion bombs within a city in millennia. But there had been nothing like the nomads’ weapon, nothing that could threaten the fabric of a city. No one could say with certainty what they might meet when they found the nomad encampment.
Ish had seen nomad ships in dock at Isin. There were ramships no larger than canal barges that could out- accelerate a troopship and push the speed of light, and ion-drive ships so dwarfed by their fuel supplies that they were like inhabited comets, and fragile light-sailers whose mirrors were next to useless at Babylon, and every one was unique. Ish supposed you had to be crazy to take it into your head to spend a lifetime in a pressurized can ten trillion leagues from whatever you called home. There wouldn’t be many people as crazy as that and also able enough to keep a ship in working order for all that time, even taking into account that you had to be crazy in the first place to live in the rubble around a star when you could be living in a city.
But that wasn’t right either. Because most of the people that in Babylon they called nomads had been born out there on their planets or wherever, where there were no cities and no gods, with as much choice about where they lived as a limpet on a rock. It was only the crazy ones that had a choice and only the crazy ones that made it all the way to Babylon.
The nomads Ish was hunting now, the assassins somewhere out there in the dark, he thought were almost simple by comparison. They had no gods and could build no cities and they knew it and it made them angry and so whatever they couldn’t have, they smashed. That was a feeling Ish could understand.
Gods and cities fought for primacy, they fought for influence or the settlement of debts. They didn’t fight wars of extermination. But extermination was what the nomads had raised the stakes to when they attacked the Corn Parade and extermination was what Ish was armed for now.
—There, said
In the X-ray spectrum Sinkalamaidi-541 was one of the brightest objects in the sky, but to human eyes, even augmented as Ish’s had been at Lagash, even here, less than half a million leagues from the target, what visible light it gave off as it cooled made it only an unusually bright star, flickering as it spun. Even under the magnification of
A display square opened, the dead star’s light masked by the black disc of a coronagraph, reflected light— from the dead star itself, from the living stars of the surrounding cluster, from the Old Galaxy—amplified and enhanced. Girdling Sinkalamaidi-541 was a narrow, spinning band of dull carbon, no more than a thousand leagues across, oriented to draw energy from the dead star’s magnetic field, like a mockery of Ninagal’s ring.
—A loop accelerator, the ship said.—Crude but effective.
—They must be very sophisticated to aspire to such crudeness, said Ninurta.—We have found the sling, but where is the slinger?
When straight out of the temple orphanage he’d first enlisted they’d trained Ish as a rifleman, and when he’d qualified for Surface Tactical School they’d trained him as a vacuum armor operator. What he was doing now, controlling this platform that had been shot down an electromagnetic rail like a corn can, was not very much like either of those jobs, although the platform’s calculus of fuel and velocity and power and heat was much the same as for the vacuum armor. But he was not a Surface Tactical any more and there was no surface here, no city with its weak gravity and strong spin to complicate the equations, only speed and darkness and somewhere in the darkness the target.
There was no knowing what instruments the nomads had but Ish hoped to evade all of them. The platform’s outer shell was black in short wavelengths and would scatter or let pass long ones; the cold face it turned toward the nomad weapon was chilled to within a degree of the cosmic microwave background, and its drives were photonic, the exhaust a laser-tight collimated beam. Eventually some platform would occlude a star or its drive beam would touch some bit of ice or cross some nomad sensor’s mirror and they would be discovered, but not quickly and not all at once.
They would be on the nomads long before that.
—Third company, Ninurta said.—Fire on the ring. Flush them out.
The platforms had been fired from
Below Ish—subjectively—and to his left, a series of blinking icons indicated that the platforms of the third company were separating themselves still further, placing themselves more squarely in the track of the dead star’s orbit. When they were another thousand leagues distant from
Time passed. The flares marking the weapons of the third company went out one by one as their fuel was exhausted. When they were three hundred thousand leagues from the ring, the longest-ranged of the weapons— antiproton beams, muon accelerators, fission-pumped gamma-ray lasers—began to fire.
Before the bombardment could possibly have reached the ring—long before there had passed the thirty or forty grains required for the bombardment to reach the ring and the light of the bombardment’s success or failure to return to
—Machines, machines! he heard Ninurta say.—Cowards! Where are the
