And back at home, I snapped my android body upright, hands clapping my face as I realized that I might just have figured out how to buy that time I so desperately needed...

  TWENTY-ONE

  “This is going to be a setback,” Argus griped, as I crafted my fifth recon drone. Fifth and final, as I’d had to shut down just about everything else to avoid overloading my bandwidth. Five nanoswarms, four recon drones, myself, and Argus. That’s all I would have to work with until I either lost a few, or the scheme was done.

  “A necessary one,” I replied as I directed my consciousness to the workshop, where the Arcadians were assembling packages full of supplies under my observation. They were small and light, fine electronics and batteries mostly. About the heaviest things in them were the containment spheres.

  They shone there, on the workbench. Four little silvery little spheres full of pinholes, the very air rippling around them as the nanoswarms filtered into them and settled into their new homes. Easily the most crucial component of this plan, and a thing that wouldn’t have been possible before I’d managed to survive my severance from my main core.

  “I’m still not a hundred percent on this,” Argus confessed as he bopped around the room, focusing on everything at once. “You realize that there have been no real studies on this; with the fatality rate, there’s not much information available in my usual update and helper files. If you’d told Juno what had happened, she could have loaded me up with the databases I need, but without gridnet capability I just don’t have the answers for you.”

  “We’ll figure it out on our own.” I didn’t tell him that it’d be a cold day in hell before I trusted Juno with one of my weaknesses. Willingly.

  Soon enough it was done, and my people loaded the spheres into the packages, which got loaded in turn into the recon drones.

  After that, it was off into the less-than-friendly skies. I jumped into the lead drone, and the others fell into formation behind me as we hummed out of the corridors and into the sun-drenched sky.

  Below, I caught a glimpse of Hiram and his helpers doing one last sweep through of the farms. The weather had been warmer than expected of late, and the crops were ripening well. But regardless of how our current crisis went, the harvest would be reaped well after my fate had been decided.

  “No,” I whispered to myself. “I will decide my fate. It won’t be decided for me.”

  A small mantra but one that suited me better. This whole chain of events, all of this had happened because I refused to lay down and die with dignity. No, I’d claw and scratch and gouge every inch of the way. No trick was too dirty, no blow was too low. I would survive and to hell with my foes.

  Of course, there was a difference between surviving and thriving. The Arcadians had taught me that.

  My little string of drones made decent headway, flying just above the treetops and dodging the worst of the winds. After six hours we dipped down, and I used the manipulator arms I’d installed on their undersides to change out batteries.

  That took a few minutes, and I checked in on my eyes in the field. I’d pulled Marb and Derigo back to a safe distance before dawn broke but left Ven in place.

  I opened my eyes to a firefight.

  The mercs were picking their way down the ridge, taking it slow and moving in squads. The Jaspa were sending sheets of arrows up from long range, arcing them over cover and hoping to get lucky. But the supporting merc squads were returning fire, keeping their heads down.

  It was textbook military, and I knew how it would go. The purpose of an offensive like this wasn’t to kill the enemy. It was to grab control of territory and force the enemy into a bad spot, and close off their options so that they would be killed if they persisted.

  The Jaspa were good at persisting, but the mercs had a lot of bullets. If the mercs seized the right territory without suffering too many casualties, then they could pick off the Jaspa without much risk until the bastards could fight no longer.

  The Jaspa knew this. They were doing their damnedest to hold. But they just didn’t have the guns. They had some; I could see them behind the lines with the warriors who surrounded the robed figures who were the Speakers and their families.

  They were in the back.

  Not out there with the warriors on the frontline but guarding the sons of bitches who called the shots around Jaspa town. Literally.

  I thought back to the warlord who had come after me when I was new and just into my Core. Then I looked at the Jaspa deployments and tactics, took a good hard look at their defense, and found it lacking.

  I found Ven, where she was crouched in the rubble. She was at the outskirts of it, staying out of the line of fire as much as possible. Just as I’d instructed her to.

  “I need an angle towards the town,” I told her. “Make an excuse and get around the perimeter, find me something in the east that would be visible to both the Speakers and the merc camp.”

  It took some finagling. And she almost caught a bullet from a twitchy merc sniper. But eventually I had an angle on an old comms tower, overgrown by vines and crumbling to rust.

  “Perfect,” I told her. “Now get the hell out of here and head back home. You’re done.”

  “They’ll shoot me as a deserter if I try,” she reminded me, nodding her head toward the wooden hall the speakers were holed up in.

  “Nightfall, then?” I gauged the sun, the distance, and the mercs’ advance. They were closing the square pretty quickly.

  She shook her head. “They are watching for that now. Many have fled already. I can try...”

  I would have chewed my lip, had I either teeth or lip. “All right. Keep yourself out of danger. We’ll try again tomorrow.”

  With that, I hopped back into the lead recon drone and hit the skies again.

  We headed northwest, angling to catch the sun as it rode down. Timing would be everything.

  Though I would have been happier if she was out of it, I was grateful for Ven’s eyes. I focused, waiting, and when the mercs won a fairly sizable victory and advanced a few hundred feet, I sent the drones in while the Jaspa were shifting their pickets. With the sun at their backs, I felt pretty good about getting through unspotted. Well, unspotted by anyone who could connect the dots.

  The comms tower was a good starting point, and I landed there, surveying the undergrowth and rubble.

  What I wanted was down. And after a few minutes of quiet hovering with my drone, I found what I was looking for: a crack in the ground that showed corridor beneath.

  It wasn’t much, as starting points went. But I’d done plenty with less, and time was of the essence. I slipped the drone in and surveyed the passage. Solid heavy door on one end, with a dead access panel. Rubble choking the other end of the corridor, and the floor was bowed where water had worked its erosive ways over time. Earth and rocks carpeted beneath, with a healthy coating of moss growing merrily in the crevice.

  It was the moss that decided me. This was a dead core. Even the most damaged core had subroutines that cleared out moss and other plants that relied on spores.

  Perfect for my needs.

  I had the drone take the nanoswarm containment chambers down into the corridor and got to work.

  To my endless relief, they functioned. Normally you couldn’t take nanoswarms out of their designated bunker. But thanks to Argus doing some arcane things he referred to as reassigning IP and spoofing domains, they were reading the containment chambers as part of their bunker. Everything else was semantics and trial and error. Within half an hour I had chewed through the door and started exploring beyond.

  In short order, I found myself impressed. This defunct core had been both industrious and devious. The mechanisms of half-destroyed traps protruded from burst walls, obvious pressure plates in the ground both open and closed, showed lethal spikes beneath, and half-active photocells in the walls flickered with malice now and again as my drones made their way down two, three, four levels. I lost a drone to an unexpectedly placed door trap as I used a nanoswarm to chew through it, and at another point I found a chamber full of poisonous gas that made me whistle as my swarm consumed it. Clearly, he’d taken the upgrade that allowed lethal airborne counter measures.

  And then there were the bones.

  The Jaspa had paid for their freedom, paid for their people’s survival with blood. And after tallying the dead, I could understand just how warped they’d grown after this. I could understand a bit why they’d gone mad and bad and predatory to all of their neighbors.

  It didn’t change my plans one bit, but I could understand it.

  With one recon drone down, I activated a nanoswarm back at home and got to work on the backup servers again. Argus floated up while I was directing matters. “How’s it going?”

  “Workable,” I said. “I’ve got the swarms setting up the basic machinery while I map out what’s left of the complex.”

  “Sorry I can’t help with it. Y’know. Kinda stuck here.”

  “I’m guessing the trick you used with the containment chambers wouldn’t fly.”

  “Yeah... best case I’d be running about two frames a second. Nobody wants that.”

  I nodded as I pretended to know what he was talking about and headed back to my remote drone. It was a stretch... If I hadn’t upped my broadcast power subroutines to two before everything went to crap, I wouldn’t have been able to pull it off. Foresight was getting me the shot I needed. I had to make the most of it.

  With the battle raging above ground, I waged my own war against the falling sun, building the small portable generators I’d designed first, and doing a rough conversion of nearby molecules into ethanol to power the thing. Noisy, yes, but nobody was near enough to hear and they had other concerns on their minds.

  I directed the remaining nanoswarms like a conductor, using them to chew through barriers and the lighter falls of rubble until I found a reasonably intact door to the outside. I repaired it, then started working backward along the best possible route for my purposes. It would take quite some time to finish what I had in mind, but I didn’t need to finish it tonight. I just needed to make sure that my foe’s first steps didn’t end the game before it started.

  And once the door was fixed, and I’d put a few small lights on the outside of it, I took one of the signal lamp attachments I’d made back at base out of its bundle and slapped it onto one of the remaining recon drones. Under cover of darkness I ran it up to the top of the comms tower.

  Then I had Marb move in as close to the merc camp as I dared and waited.

  I didn’t have long to wait. An hour after sunset, Yulian came back in from the front lines, moving fast and low.

  I approved. He was well out of range from the Jaspa, but still within sight. For all he knew, they could have some sniping capability that they hadn’t revealed yet. It didn’t do to relax your guard on the way back to a secured zone.

  Once he was back and settled and sitting on his camp chair talking with his officers, and the pickets were looking my direction I started flashing the recon drone’s lantern. Flashing it in patterns that said quite a lot to anyone who knew the code.

  Morse code.

  Old code.

  Juscade knew of it, didn’t know how to use it. Had never seen anyone use it.

  Which told me that if he had no clue beyond what it was, that nobody in the Jaspa would either. He had been their slave, more or less, for years. If they hadn’t used it or spoken of it, then they were oblivious to it.

  Yulian, though? The highly trained agent of a sinister rogue AI? Some sort of supersoldier wearing computerized armor that probably had databases full of things far more obscure?

  I rather thought he was ahead of the curve, there.

  The light stood out against the torchlight around it, the only thing that high off the ground in the middle of the dark patch that was the old city.

  Through Ven’s eyes and ears I heard the confusion of the Jaspa around her, the fear as they saw ghosts of the past stir, some strange witchcraft around the long-shattered core’s domain.

  Through Marb’s eyes and ears I heard the mercenary pickets call out, and saw them point. And I saw Yulian rise, moving forward to get the best view as I flickered out a simple message.

  “Speaker Darrul. Initiate the fourth measure. Deny all if captured.”

  He missed some of it, I was sure. But I watched him study the comms tower, rapt, long after the message was done. One of his officers tried to ask a question, and the power-armored soldier whipped up a hand, shushed him.

  Then he went back to the camp and called his lieutenants into his tent. Marb couldn’t see them there, and I wasn’t about to risk getting him close enough to hear. The seed was planted.

  I used the opportunity to snake the recon drone back into the hole and triggered the fast-crete dispenser I’d built half an hour ago to seal it behind me.

  That done, I metaphorically rolled up my sleeves and got to work, occasionally peeking in through Ven’s tac-rig. I had her take a walk by Speaker Darrul’s quarters, make sure he was in. He was nobody in particular, just a name I’d picked up from her yesterday.

  The Jaspa were talking about the lights but didn’t know what they signified. They assumed it meant nothing good. Nobody seemed in a hurry to examine them, which suited me fine.

  And when the recon drone I’d parked on a crumbling roof caught motion three hours later, I knew that the bait had been taken.

  It wasn’t Yulian, I was sure. But they moved slowly and quietly, and when they found the door with the active lights on it, they studied it for a solid seven minutes, then withdrew the way they’d come. I couldn’t get a visual on them without exposing the drone, but I didn’t need to.

  Two hours before dawn, there came a ruckus from the Jaspa left flank. A group of mercs had snuck up under the wire, more or less, and fought with the Jaspa sentries. Ven was asleep at that point, so I didn’t get details.

  But Marb wasn’t, and I watched the survivors of the early-morning raid come back into camp with a very shaky-looking Jaspa civilian at gunpoint.

  They shoved the poor bastard into a tent, and even from Marb’s distance I was able to hear Speaker Darrul’s name come up a few times. They were shouting it, while the poor bastard was screaming back. I had no doubt that some bare-knuckled interrogation was going down.

  “Sorry Charlie,” I said, after I directed Marb back. But hey, maybe they’d let the poor sap go after they got the information they wanted.

  “You’re done,” I told Marb and Derigo. “Get to the southeast and wait for Ven.”

  They withdrew with obvious relief. Their rations were running out, and they hadn’t had time to hunt with two twitchy armies so close.

  The mercs pushed hard that day, and the next. They took casualties. The Jaspa became emboldened, but I could see it wasn’t enough. The outcome was certain at this point, it was just a question of how bad of a mauling they were going to dish out on the way down.

  The time came when the Jaspa were gearing up for a major push, and I knew it was time.

  “Ven?” I said into her ear, and she jerked upright at the end of the line. “Don’t respond. It’s time. I’ll get you a distraction, get ready to book it.”

  She’d done her job well. Well enough that I didn’t feel a minute of loss when I crashed one of my remaining recon drones into the face of the Jaspa next to her.

  The bald bastard screamed and broke cover, got himself lit up by mercenary fire, and Ven fled in the chaos.

  After that, I resumed work on my new vacation home. And two days later when the guns were finally silent outside, and the sensors I’d put outside registered a lot of feet heading straight toward the doorway I’d prepared, I knew that the hook I’d put in the water had been swallowed.

  “Step into my parlor,” I whispered as I prepared for their breach.

  INTERLUDE: MERCENARY 3

  Things weren’t simple anymore.

  Things weren’t simple at all.

  And Bastard Brock liked it not one bit.

  Ever since the peace talks had literally blown up, it had been a desperate fight against people who thought they would lose everything.

  Once the first skirmish at Homesford was done, it had almost cost Yulian a third of his troops. The ones who cared about stuff like rules of parley and their reputations had wanted to walk. Bastard hadn’t been close to the tent this time, but it had been a heated discussion, and afterwards no one had been happy. But they’d stayed.

  Bastard hadn’t been one of those guys. War was war and shit happened. But there were still lines, and soldiers who did too much bad shit didn’t get hired for good jobs, and sometimes ended up catching bullets from their buddies. So, he didn’t feel exactly right about it either.

  Word came whispered down in the days that followed, when the black-clads sprung ambush after ambush, and came in the night over and over again like untrained hookers, word found its way down that Yulian hadn’t been the one responsible for the bomb. Someone was playing them and the Jaspa both.

  Fuck, maybe it was even true. Either way it didn’t matter. Yulian’s army gave better than they took, but they still took casualties.

  That was then.

  This was now. Now, where he was hugging the ground behind the Jaspa’s own barricades and trying to keep from catching lead.

  Bullets whined and cracked off the concrete near him, and he laughed, laughed because he wasn’t dead. Jory couldn’t say the same. Jory was dead next to him, face half gone, and hair matted with gore. And Gillis? Why, Gillis was leaned back against the wall, blood puddled under her. She hadn’t spoken up in a while. So, Bastard laughed because they couldn’t, and somebody ought to have some fun around here.

  A line of pain traced itself on his hand, and he jerked it back and laughed harder at the blood. Oh, the bastards couldn’t shoot through the old road barrier he was behind, but the problem was it was tight quarters back here. A corner of an old stone building, with a few empty windows. And while the Jaspa couldn’t shoot worth a damn, they had evidently figured if they sprayed enough bullets into the stone, eventually a ricochet would catch him.