one. Yet... yet I think I can win. Fifty seconds out of every minute, I have tight beam comm with my fleet.' She patted the meter-long pole that lay on the ground between them. One end consisted of a ten-centimeter sphere. She had laid the pole so that the ball was at the cave's entrance. Wil looked at it more closely, saw iridescence glow and waver. It was some kind of coherent transmitter. Her own forces knew where they were hidden, and needed to keep only one unit in line of sight for Lu to run the battle.
Della's voice was distant, almost indifferent. 'Whoever they are, they know how to pervert systems, but not so much about combat I've fought through centuries of realtime, with bobblers and suppressors, nukes and lasers. I have programs you just couldn't buy in civilization. Even without me, my system fights smarter than the other side's....' A chuckle. 'The high-orbit stuff is dead just now. We're playing 'peek and shoot': 'peek' around the shoulder of the Earth, 'shoot' at anything with its head stuck up. Boys and girls running round and round their home, killing each other.... I'm winning, Wil, I really am. But we're burning it all. Poor Yelen. So worried that our systems might not last long enough to reestablish civilization. One afternoon we're destroying all we've accumulated.'
'What about the low-techs?'
'Their little play-war?' She was silent for fifteen seconds, and when she spoke again seemed even further away. 'That ended as soon as it had served the enemy's purpose.' Perhaps only Town Korolev had been wiped. Della sat against the rear wall of the cave. Now she leaned her head back and closed her eyes.
Wil studied her face. How different she looked from the creature he had seen on the beach. And when she wasn't talking, there were no weird perspectives, no shifting of personalities. Her face was young and innocent, straight black hair still fallen across her cheek. She might have been asleep, occasional dreams twitching her lips and eyelids. Wil reached to brush the hair back from her face-and stopped. The mind in this body was looking far across space, looking down on Earth from all directions, was commanding one side in the largest battle Wil had ever known. Best to let sleeping generals lie.
He crawled along the side of the cave to the entrance. From here he could see the plains and part of the sky, yet was better hidden than Della.
He looked across the land. If there was any way he could help, it was by protecting Della from local varmints. A few of the birds had returned to the rock. They were the only animal life visible; maybe these bone-littered condos were abandoned property. Surely Della had brought handguns and first-aid gear.
He eyed the smooth shells of the acceleration chairs and wondered if he should ask her about them. But Della was in deep connect; even during the first attack she had not been concentrating like this.... Better to wait till he had a certifiable emergency. For now he would watch and listen.
Twilight slowly faded; a quarter moon slid down the western sky. From the track of the sun's setting, he guessed they were in the Northern Hemisphere, away from the tropics. This must be Calafia or the savanna that faced that island on the west coast of North America. Somehow, being oriented made Wil t eel better.
The birds had quieted. There was a buzzing he hoped was insects. It was getting hard to keep his eyes on the ground With the coming of night, the sky show was impossible to ignore. Aurora stretched from north horizon to south. The pal,. curtains were as bright as any he had seen, even from Alaska The battle itself danced slowly beyond those curtains. Some of the lights were close-set sparkles, like a gem visible only where its facets caught some magic light. The lights brightened an( dimmed, but the cluster as a whole didn't move: that must b: a high-orbit fight, perhaps at a Lagrange zone. For half an hour at a time, that was the only action visible. Then a fragment of the near-Earth battle would come above the horizon-the 'peek and shoot' crowd. Those lights cast vivid shadows, each one starting brilliant white, fading to red over five or ten seconds.
Though he had no idea who was winning, Will thought h;. could follow some of the action. A near-Earth firefight would start with ten or twenty detonations across a large part of the sky. These were followed by more nukes in a smaller and smaller space, presumably fighting past robots towards a central auton. Even the laser blasts were visible now, threads of light coruscating bright or faint depending on how much junk was in the way. Their paths pointed into the contracting net a detonations. Sometimes the net shrank to nothing, the enemy destroyed or in long-term stasis. Other times, there was a bright flash from the center, or a string of flashes heading outward Escape attempts? In any case, the battle would then cease, or shift many degrees across the sky. Aurora flared in moon-bright knots on the deserted battlefield.
Even moving hundreds of kilometers per second, it took time for the fighters to cross the sky, time for the nuke blasts to fade through red to auroral memories. It was like fireworks photographed in slow motion.
The land around them was empty but for moving shadows, silent but for the insect buzz and occasional uneasy squawking. Only once did he hear anything caused by the battle. Three threads of directed energy laced across the sky from some fight over the horizon. The shots were very low, actually in the atmosphere. Even as they faded, contrails grew around them. After a minute, Wil heard faint thunder.
An hour passed, then two. Della had not said a word. To him, anyway. Light chased back and forth within the ball of her communications scepter, interference fringes shifting as she resighted the link.
Something started yowling. Wil's eyes swept the plain. Just now his only light was from the aurora: there was no near-Earth firefight going, and the high-orbit action was a dim flickering at the western horizon.... Ah, there they were! Gray shapes, a couple of hundred meters out. They were loud for their size — or hunkered close to the ground. The yowling spread, was traded back and forth. Were they fighting? Admiring the light show?
... They were getting closer, easier to see. The creatures were almost man-sized but stayed close to the ground. They advanced in stages-trotting forward a few meters, then dropping to the ground, resuming the serenade. The pack stayed spread out, though there were pairs and trios that ran together. It all rang a very unpleasant chord in Wil's memory. He came to his knees and crawled back to Della.
