Sharp breath hisses between the pellegrini’s teeth. ‘Mieli! Stop! It’s not a civil war! It’s theatre! They are faking! Don’t—’
The thoughtwisp explodes.
The light rips the spimescape apart. The wisp’s ghost warhead burns itself out in a white-hot jolt of bandwidth, aimed straight at Mieli. Attack software comes with it like hard burning rain.
Mieli’s suit screams. Her tactical gogols flounder and panic. The suit’s outer armour bubbles and fluctuates. It forms a spike that stabs inwards, through her subdermal q-dot armour. Pain lances in her side before the combat autism dulls it into a damage report.
Abort, Mieli qupts at the Zweihänder, urgency mingled with pain. Repeat, abort! It’s a fake battle, the hsien-kus, the pellegrinis and vasilevs are cooperating! And I did not follow the script.
She is losing control of the q-armour. Its lasers send out flickering comms bursts at the two raion fleets. Mieli focuses on her Liquorice-jewel, pushes through one more volition command at the suit. With a sickening, tearing feeling, the suit ejects her, spits her out to the Dark Man’s embrace, into the hard vacuum of Hektor’s surface. She rolls in gravity that is too sluggish for quicktime, digs her fingers into the rocky surface, pulls herself down like a rock climber for balance. Her zoku jewels follow under their own power in a faithful, scattered halo.
Dark blood bubbles out from her pierced side, boiling in the vacuum. She regards it dispassionately: another parameter in the problem she has to solve, in the ten minutes she can survive in hard vacuum without external life support. In the thirty seconds it will take Zweihänder to reach her. In the seconds it will take for raions’ first kinetic missile volley to fall on Hektor.
She stands up, in full combat mode. Time slows down. Dust particles swirling in the air become static brushstrokes. Her wings bloom from her back, radiating waste heat. The fusion reactor in her right thigh pumps energy into coherent payloads of the q-gun in her right hand. She is already firing the ghostgun in her left: war gogols in nanomissiles, hurling themselves at what used to be a Great Game warsuit.
Even in quicktime, the suit moves like a raindrop in a powerful wind, shivering into a new shape on the moon’s surface. It rises up on thin silver limbs. It extrudes a face that is not a face, a hollow oval atop a sketched neck. Lasers fan out from its shoulders. Mieli’s ghostgun bullets and their gogol pilots evaporate in tiny, brief flashes.
She follows with a pattern of a dozen charged q-dots that become extensions of herself as soon as they are launched, plunges them at the suit’s weapon systems like gouging fingers into eyes. They detonate in blasts of coherent light. The suit-thing’s skin becomes a dazzling mirror.
Then the raion kinetic needles hit, soundless and invisible in the vacuum. They shake the ground beneath Mieli’s feet. New craters appear around them like the holes of a god’s shotgun blast, and slow pillars of dust rise from them. Without flinching, Mieli keeps firing. A high-explosive dot gets through, splattering the suit’s material into the vacuum in tiny droplets – until the suit catches them in a q-dot web and absorbs them back into itself.
Mieli risks a glance at the tattered spimescape. Both raion fleets are converging towards their position. The space around Hektor is full of roaring electromagnetic noise across the spectrum. They are trying to make sure no information leaves this moon. She detonates her passive sensor network with a thought. Not much a distraction, but she is going to take everything she can get.
Mieli, we are coming, Zinda qupts. Hold on. Ten seconds.
The suit-thing is whole again, in a more humanoid shape this time. Mieli reviews its specs. New weapons are forming beneath its skin. It contains nuggets of zoku picotech, able to translate quantum information into matter, and an antimatter power source. And without a fragile human inside, even controlled by a warmind with no experience of flesh-combat, it is orders of magnitude faster than her.
Jumalauta, Mieli swears. My only hope is to pierce the antimatter containment. She extrudes a q-blade from her hand. She is almost disappointed that in the combat autism, a moon-shattering explosive death feels just like another tactical option. At least that would take my zoku jewels as well.
But the suit’s electronic warfare barrage has died down, and the thing stands still, as if its empty face had eyes, looking at something standing next to Mieli.
The pellegrini.
The Sobornost goddess is still there, pale, staring at the faceless silver thing.
‘Do something!’ Mieli shouts at her.
But the pellegrini only shakes her head.
‘Mieli, she says, fear in her voice. ‘Meet the All-Defector.’
The suit-thing tilts its head to one side, as if listening. Then the void in its un-face seals itself into a perfect mirror oval. The pellegrini’s features appear on its surface, sculpted from silver by invisible fingers.
‘It is an unexpected pleasure to meet you here,’ it says, in an EM whisper that sounds like the pellegrini’s echo, targeted at Mieli’s communication systems using a Sobornost military protocol. ‘I have to thank you for offering me the chens. They are now me, as you can see. So are younger generations of you. And your Prime has chosen to serve. Perhaps you will, also.’
‘No,’ the pellegrini whispers. ‘Never. You are our creature. We released you. What are you doing, playing games with the hsien-kus and vasilevs? You are supposed to eat them!”
The All-Defector smiles the pellegrini’s own serpent smile.
‘My appetite is greater than that,’ it says. ‘But, as your other self thought, I have given them a common enemy.’ It takes a step forward. It even moves like the pellegrini now, swaying lightly.
‘But what’s this? Your pet project. The Oortian. Interesting. Now that she is here, I think I will take her, too.’
Mieli is frozen. The thief did not like to talk about the All-Defector – All-D – but from what she knows, the thing somehow models its opponents and finds an optimal strategy against them, without ever cooperating. Her game theory gogols compute payoff matrices, and they all look bleak. The Zweihänder won’t make it here in time.
That’s why All-D is not attacking. It has already won.
To hell with it.
Another volley of raion needles falls. This time, they divert their course away from direct impact, and blast up a curtain of rock shards and dust in a circle around them. Of course. Can’t break the new toy it wants.
‘You want me?’ she whispers through gritted teeth. ‘Come and get me!’ She raises her q-dot blade. It is still moving like the pellegrini. Need to use that.
She lunges forward. Her toes dig into the rock, propelling her forward like a väki spear. She aims a lightning blow at the dense hot spot of the antimatter container in the suit.
Silver hands seize her right arm and twist. Her dermal armour bursts. The thing swings her around and slams her down against the moon’s surface so hard that the quickstone-enforced bones in her arm and ribcage snap. The back of her skull digs deep into the crushed rock. Her wings tear and fray beneath her. The control system of the fusion reactor in her thighbone goes mad.
All-D looms above her. She drops out of combat autism to stop from blacking out and screams a silent scream. Her right arm is on fire, but she forces it to obey, stabs upwards with the q-dot blade, but the thing is not there. It stretches a willowy arm towards her. The fingers become spikes that impale her forehead.