dozen-then a dozen more. Maybe fifty in total before the guns could no longer acquire targets. It was nowhere near enough. Clavain’s memory of the simulations told him that at least four hundred units of the attack wave would survive both re-entry and the Conjoiner’s heavy defenses.
Nothing that Galiana could do would make any difference.
And that had always been the paradox. Galiana was capable of running the same simulations. She must always have known that her provocations would bring down something she could never hope to defeat.
Something that was always going to destroy her.
The surviving members of the wave were levelling out now, commencing long, ground-hugging runs from all directions. Cocooned in their dropships, the soldiers would be suffering punishing gee-loads…but it was nothing they were not engineered to withstand; half their cardiovascular systems were augmented by the only kinds of implant the Coalition tolerated.
The first of the wave came arcing in at supersonic speeds. All around, worms struggled to snatch them out of the sky, but mostly they were too slow to catch the dropships. Galiana’s people manned their cannon positions and did their best to fend off what they could. Clavain clutched his gun, not firing yet.
Best to save his ammo-cell power for a target he stood a chance of injuring.
Above, the first dropships made hairpin turns, nosing suicidally down toward the nest. Then they fractured cleanly apart, revealing falling pilots clad in bulbous armor. Just before the moment of impact each pilot exploded into a mass of black shock-absorbing balloons, looking something like a blackberry, bouncing across the nest before the balloons deflated just as swiftly and the pilot was left standing on the ground. By then the pilot-now properly a soldier-would have a comprehensive computer-generated map of the nest’s nooks and crannies; enemy positions graphed in real time from the down-looking spysats.
Clavain fell behind the curve of a dome before the nearest soldier got a lock onto him. The firefight was beginning now. He had to hand it to Galiana’s people-they were fighting like devils. And they were at least as well coordinated as the attackers. But their weapons and armor were simply inadequate.
Chameleoflage was only truly effective against a solitary enemy, or a massed enemy moving in from a common direction. With Coalition forces surrounding him, Clavain’s suit was going crazy to trying to match itself against every background, like a chameleon in a house of mirrors.
The sky overhead looked strange now-darkening purple. And the purple was spreading in a mist across the nest. Galiana had deployed some kind of chemical smoke screen: infrared and optically opaque, he guessed. It would occlude the spysats and might be primed to adhere only to enemy chameleoflage. That had never been in Warren’s simulations. Galiana had just given herself the slightest of edges.
A soldier stepped out of the mist, the obscene darkness of a gun muzzle trained on Clavain. His chameleoflage armor was dappled with vivid purple patches, ruining its stealthiness. The man fired, but his discharge wasted itself against Clavain’s armor. Clavain returned the compliment, dropping his compatriot. What he had done, he thought, was not technically treason. Not yet. All he had done was act in self-preservation.
The man was wounded, but not yet dead. Clavain stepped through the purple haze and knelt down beside the soldier. He tried not to look at the man’s wound.
“Can you hear me?” he said. There was no answer from the man, but beneath his visor, Clavain thought he saw the man’s lips shape a sound. The man was just a kid-hardly old enough to remember much of the last war. “There’s something you have to know,” Clavain continued. “Do you realize who I am?” He wondered how recognizable he was, under the breather mask. Then something made him relent. He could tell the man he was Nevil Clavain-but what would that achieve? The soldier would be dead in minutes; maybe sooner than that. Nothing would be served by the soldier knowing that the basis for his attack was a lie; that he would not in fact be laying down his life for a just cause. The universe could be spared a single callous act.
“It’s all right,” Clavain said, turning away from his victim.
And then moved deeper into the nest, to see who else he could kill before the odds took him.
But the odds never did.
“You always were lucky,” Galiana said, leaning over him. They were somewhere underground again-deep in the nest. A medical area, by the look of things. He was on a bed, fully clothed apart from the outer layer of chameleoflage armor. The room was gray and kettle-shaped, ringed by a circular balcony.
“What happened?”
“You took a head wound, but you’ll survive.”
He groped for the right question. “What about Warren’s attack?”
“We endured three waves. We took casualties, of course.”
Around the circumference of the balcony were thirty or so gray couches, slightly recessed into archways studded with gray medical equipment. They were all occupied. There were more Conjoiners in this room than he had seen so far in one place. Some of them looked very close to death.
Clavain reached up and examined his head, gingerly. There was some dried blood on the scalp, matted with his hair; some numbness, but it could have been a lot worse. He felt normal-no memory drop-outs or aphasia. When he made to stand from the bed, his body obeyed his will with only a tinge of dizziness.
“Warren won’t stop at just three waves, Galiana.”
“I know.” She paused. “We know there’ll be more.”
He walked to the railing on the inner side of the balcony and looked over the edge. He had expected to see something-some chunk of incomprehensible surgical equipment, perhaps-but the middle of the room was only an empty, smooth-walled, gray pit. He shivered. The air was colder than any part of the nest he had visited so far, with a medicinal tang which reminded him of the convalescence ward on Deimos. What made him shiver even more was the realization that some of the injured-some of the dead-were barely older than the children he had visited only hours ago. Perhaps some of them were those children, conscripted from the nursery since his visit, uploaded with fighting reflexes through their new implants.
“What are you going to do? You know you can’t win. Warren lost only a tiny fraction of his available force in those waves. You look like you’ve lost half your nest.”
“It’s much worse than that,” Galiana said.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re not quite ready yet. But I can show you in a moment.”
He felt colder than ever now. “What do you mean, not quite ready?”
Galiana looked deep into his eyes now. “You took a serious head wound, Cla-vain. The entry wound was small, but the internal bleeding…it would have killed you, had we not intervened.” Before he could ask the inevitable question she answered it for him. “We injected a small cluster of medichines into your head. They undid the damage very easily. But it seemed provident to allow them to grow.”
“You’ve put replicators in my head?”
“You needn’t sound so horrified. They’re already growing-spreading out and interfacing with your existing neural circuitry-but the total volume of glial mass that they will consume is tiny: only a few cubic millimeters in total, across your entire brain.”
He wondered if she was calling his bluff. “I don’t feel anything.”
“You won’t-not for a minute or so.” Now she pointed into the empty pit in the middle of the room.
“Stand here and look into the air.”
“There’s nothing there.”
But as soon as he had spoken, he knew he was wrong. There was something in the pit. He blinked and directed his attention somewhere else, but when he returned his gaze to the pit, the thing he imagined he had seen-milky, spectral-was still there, and becoming sharper and brighter by the second. It was a three-dimensional structure, as complex as an exercise in protein-folding. A tangle of loops and connecting branches and nodes and tunnels, embedded in a ghostly red matrix.
Suddenly he saw it for what it was: a map of the nest, dug into Mars. Just as the Coalition had suspected, the base was deeper than the original structure; far more extensive, reaching deeper down but much further out than anyone had imagined. Clavain made a mental effort to retain some of what he was seeing in his mind, the intelligence-gathering reflex stronger than the conscious knowledge that he would never see Deimos again.
“The medichines in your brain have interfaced with your visual cortex,” Galiana said. “That’s the first step on the road to Transenlightenment. Now you’re privy to the machine-generated imagery encoded by the fields through which we move-most of it, anyway.”
