Kartaphilos smiled. “Of course. How foolish of me. Well, then, what was the thing which you first felt?”
A MOST CURIOUS THING. IT WAS GUILT.
“Guilt? You felt guilty?” said Kartaphilos. “About what?”
PERHAPS AFTER I TELL YOU, EVERYTHING WILL BE MADE CLEAR. I DEEMED IT NECESSARY, HOWEVER, TO DELAY THE FINAL EXPLANATION UNTIL I HAD PROVIDED A SKELETAL BACKGROUND, SO THAT YOU MIGHT BETTER UNDERSTAND ME, AS WELL AS THE STORY I MUST TELL. DO YOU FOLLOW?
“Yes, that makes sense.”
VERY WELL. HERE IS MY STORY:
Chapter Fourteen
The War which had been ripping and tearing at the earth, and at the souls of hardened men, converged upon the battle which now itched to begin.
The battleplain had once been a deep, green forest, a verdant, enchanted place of cool whispering winds and small animal scuttlings. But now it was a stricken, arid place, with the memory of the forest defiled by the thousands of black, charred stumps occasionally breaking the surface of the dry earth. Stretching far beyond the western horizon, and to the northern boundaries of the sea, crawled the hordes of desperate men, clanked the treads of their machines. The air was scorched by the formations of aircraft, low-slung insects grown fat from bellyfuls of bombs and liquid fire. The smells of sweat and machine oil, of powder and exhausts hung heavy over the plain, swirling in the occasional gust of wind to mix with the odor of fear.
Far above the moving columns, the monolithic blocks of men, the atmosphere crackled from the energy screens, the defensive perimeters that hung like invisible umbrellas, singeing the air in a silhouette of electric blue. The standards and banners of every family, every claim to a thread of aristocracy among the Riken Confederation, now flapped and beat out their colored messages to the winds. The tribes of a millennia gathered to fight the final battle, the battle which gave the dark hordes control of the Southern Hemisphere and therefore the World itself.
The target of their movements lay before them like a five-faceted stone—the Citadel. It rose up like a titanic gem in the midst of a bed of ashes. The smoldered ruins of Haagendaz spread out from the Citadel, forming a buffer zone of death and sterility.
But rising up, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of the dead city were the soldiers and war machines of the Genon Forces. Sown like the teeth of the Hydra, they multiplied and joined, spreading out like spilled liquid until they covered the ashes and became a blanket of living men. The Genon Forces wore the camouflaged colors of the ocher terrain so that, when they moved, it looked as if the entire basin floor rippled and surged like a gigantic field of grain.
Thermonuclears fell from the bombers like ripe fruit from deadly trees, arcing and dying against the energy screens, slipping in between defensive cracks in the systems, obliterating isolated, or temporarily undefended, divisions. Men’s lives, their memories and their hopes, their loves and their hates, were burned out of existence in an eyeflash, but still the amoebalike bodies of the two armies advanced, extending pseudopods tentatively at first, touching the enemy and then withdrawing, only to seek them out again.
At the center of it all, the Citadel lay like a plum to be picked. The Guardian monitored the conflict, digested real-time data on the enemy’s movements and computed new strategies of counterploy.
The noonday sky grew brighter by several magnitudes as the battle gathered the intensity of a storm. Illuminated by the blossoming explosions which dimmed the warped sun, the armies labored, slipping and struggling in the sweat of their bodies, smelling the stinking flesh of their dead comrades.
Sweeping beams razored the sky above the Citadel, slicing aircraft from the sky as they descended like locusts in a blood-dark cloud. The screams of men commingling with the wrenching groans of metal, steel met steel in clanging, deadly unions, fueled by dying muscle, frying brains. As if emerging endlessly from the distant sea, the dark columns of the Riken advanced, cutting and biting into the defensive rings about the Citadel. Closer the Riken Forces marched and crawled, across a carpet of corpses, of vaporized metal, and scattered, broken bones. A soldier could not plant his boot without crushing the charred skull of a comrade or picking up the jagged edge of a twisted, dead machine.
And still the armies grappled, with the desperation of war-ravaged men. Ideals became memories, as the only thing with meaning became the ugly twisted face before you, the thing driven by a frenzied brain that would kill you if you were not quick enough to kill it first. The earth shuddered and the sky screamed as the armies executed their choreography of death. It was a controlled chaos, rattling and clanging about the fortress city, ignoring the procession of dusks and dawns.
The Citadel hung silently against a bloody sky, watching the encounter as though it were a disinterested bystander. But inside its walls, tactics were analyzed, weaknesses bolstered, probabilities computed. After the fifth day, the Guardian began the first attempts to reach the Northern Forces. Without reinforcement, the defensive ring would collapse, the Citadel be taken. The atmosphere above the battle was a maelstrom of electromagnetic fury. No radio signal could ever hope to penetrate such a bramble; nor were there any sky-spies left in orbit over that part of the continent. The Citadel had been isolated, estranged, as completely as if a shroud had been thrown over its peaks. Small expeditionary teams were dispatched in the hope that one of them might break through the chaos and reach the Northern Perimeter.
Time passed and still no assistance came. The Riken Strike Force seemed to sense the eroding resources of the defenders and pressed harder. The energy screens were penetrated and whole tracts of men were obliterated, but the Genon Forces held to the battle. There was no real alternative, since the Riken took no
