Borders of Infinity

'Copy,' he gasped, as Suegar pressed his fist into the boy's solar plexus for emphasis.

'Tell him Brother Miles sent you,' Miles called as the boy staggered off, glancing nervously over his shoulder. 'You can't hide in here. If you don't show, I'll send the Cosmic Commandos to find you.'

Suegar shook out his cramped limbs, his new used clothes. 'Think he'll come?'

Miles grinned. 'Fight or flight. That one'll be all right.' He stretched himself, recaptured his original orientation. 'Oliver.'

In the end they had not twenty, but 200. Oliver had picked up forty-six. The running boy brought in eighteen. The signs of order and activity in the area brought in the curious—a drifter at the edge of the group had only to ask, 'What's going on?' to be inducted and promoted to corporal on the spot. Interest among the spectators was aroused to a fever when Oliver's troops marched up to the women's border—and were admitted within. They picked up another seventy-five volunteers instantly.

'Do you know what's going on?' Miles asked one such, as he fed them through a short gauntlet of inspection and sent them off to one of the fourteen command groups he had devised.

'No,' the man admitted. He waved an arm eagerly toward the center of the women's group. 'But I wanta go where they're go-ing . . .'

Miles cut the admissions off at 200 total in deference to Tris's growing nervousness at this infiltration of her borders, and promptly turned the courtesy into a card in his own hand in their still-continuing strategy debate. Tris wanted to divide her group in the usual way, half for the attack, half to maintain home base and keep the borders from collapsing. Miles was insisting on an all-out effort.

'If we win, you won't need guards anymore.'

'What if we lose?'

Miles lowered his voice. 'We don't dare lose. This is the only time we'll have surprise on our side. Yes, we can fall back—re-group—try again—I for one am prepared—no, compelled—to keep trying till it kills me. But after this, what we're trying to do will be fully apparent to any counter-group, and they'll have time to plan counter- strategies of their own. I have a particular aversion to stalemates. I prefer winning wars to prolonging them.'

She sighed, momentarily drained, tired, old. 'I've been at war a long time, y'know? After a while even losing a war can start to look preferable to prolonging it.'

He could feel his own resolve slip, sucked into the vortex of that same black doubt. He pointed upwards, dropping his voice to a rasping whisper. 'But not, surely, to those bastards.'

She glanced upwards. Her shoulders straightened. 'No. Not to those . . .' She took a deep breath. 'All right, chaplain. You'll get your all-out effort. Just once . . .'

Oliver returned from a circuit of the command groups and squatted beside them. 'They've got their orders. How many's Tris contributing to each group?'

'Commandant Tris,' Miles quickly corrected for her as her brows beetled. 'It's gonna be an all-out shot. You'll get every walking body in here.'

Oliver made a quick calculation in the dirt with his finger for a stylus. 'That'll put about fifty in each group —ought to be enough . . . matter of fact, what say we set up twenty groups? It'll speed distribution when we get the lines set up. Could make the difference between bringing this off, and not.'

'No,' Miles cut in quickly as Tris began to nod agreement. 'It has to be fourteen. Fourteen battle groups make fourteen lines for fourteen piles. Fourteen is—is a theologically significant number,' he added as they stared doubtfully at him.

'Why?' asked Tris.

'For the fourteen apostles,' Miles intoned, tenting his hands piously.

Tris shrugged. Suegar scratched his head, started to speak—Miles speared him with a baleful glance, and he stilled.

Oliver eyed him narrowly. 'Huh.' But he did not argue further.

Then came the waiting. Miles stopped worrying about his uppermost fear—that their captors would introduce the next food pile early, before his plans were in place—and started worrying about his second greatest fear, that the food pile would come so late he'd lose control of his troops and they would start to wander off, bored and discouraged. Getting them all assembled had made Miles feel like a man pulling on a goat with a rope made of water. Never had the insubstantial nature of the Idea seemed more self-apparent.

Oliver tapped him on the shoulder and pointed. 'Here we go . . .'

A side of the dome about a third of the way around the edge from them began to bulge inward.

The timing was perfect. His troops were at the peak of readiness. Too perfect . . . the Centagandans had been watching all this, surely they wouldn't miss an opportunity to make life more difficult for their prisoners. If the food pile wasn't early, it had to be late. Or …

Miles bounded to his feet, screaming. 'Wait! Wait! Wait for my order!'

His sprint groups wavered, drawn toward the anticipated goal. But Oliver had chosen his group commanders well—they held, and held their groups, and looked to Oliver. They had been soldiers once. Oliver looked to Tris, flanked by her lieutenant Beatrice, and Tris looked to Miles, angrily.

'What is it now? We're gonna lose our advantage . , .' she began, as the general stampede throughout the camp started toward the bulge.

'If I'm wrong,' Miles moaned, 'I'm going to kill myself—wait, dammit! On my order. I can't see—Suegar, give me a boost—' He clambered up on the thin man's shoulders and stared toward the bulge. The force wall had only half twinkled out when the first distant cries of disappointment met his straining ears. Miles's head swivelled frantically. How many wheels within wheels—if the Ceta-gandans knew, and he knew they knew, and they knew he knew they knew, and … He cut off his internal gibber as a second bulge began, on the opposite side of the camp from the first.

Miles's arm flung out, pointing toward it like a man rolling dice. 'There! There! Go, go go!'

Tris caught on then, whistling and shooting him a look of startled respect, before whirling and dashing off to double-time the main body of their troops after the sprint groups. Miles slithered off Suegar and started limping after.

He glanced back over his shoulder, as the rolling grey mass of humanity crashed up against the opposite side of the dome and reversed itself. He felt suddenly like a man trying to outrun a tidal wave. He indulged himself with one brief anticipatory whimper, and limped faster.

One more chance to be mortally wrong—no. His sprint groups had reached the pile, and the pile was really there. Already they were starting to break it down. The support troops surrounded them with a wall of bodies as they began to spread out along the perimeter of the dome. The Cetagandans had outfoxed themselves. This time.

Miles was reduced from the commander's eagle overview to the grunt's worm's-eye as the tidal wave overtook him. Someone shoved him from behind, and his face hit the dirt. He thought he recognized the back of the surly Pitt, vaulting over him, but he wasn't certain– surly Pitt would have stepped on, not over him. Suegar yanked him up by the left arm, and Miles bit back a scream of pain. There was enough howling already.

Miles recognized the running boy, squaring off with another tough. Miles shoved past him with a shouted reminder—'You're supposed to be yelling Get in line', NOT Get fucked! . . . The signal always gets degraded in combat,' he muttered to himself. 'Always . . .'

Beatrice materialized beside him. Miles clung to her instantly. Beatrice had personal space, her own private perimeter, maintained even as Miles watched, by a casual elbow to somebody's jaw with a quite sickening crack. If he tried that, Miles reflected enviously, not only would he smash his own elbow, but his opponent's nipple would probably be quite undamaged. Speaking of nipples, he found himself face to—well, not face—confronting the redhead. He resisted the urge to cuddle into the soft grey fabric covering home base with a contented sigh on the grounds that it would certainly get both his arms broken. He uncrossed his eyes and looked up into her face.

'C'mon,' she said, and dragged him off through the mob. Was the noise level dropping? The human wall of his own troops parted just enough to let them squeeze through.

They were near the exit point of the chow line. It was working, by God it was working. The fourteen command groups, still bunched rather too closely along the dome wall—but that could be improved next run—were admitting the hungry supplicants one at a time. The expediters kept the lines moving at top speed, and channeled the already-supplied along the perimeter behind the human shield wall in a steady stream, to flow back out into the larger camp at the edge of the mob. Oliver had put his toughest-looking bravos to work in pairs, patrolling the