He stopped at the door. "Oh yeah. From now on, if you’ve got anything to say to me, you come see me."
"Goddamn motherfucker sonofabitch!" Craig screamed at the door. That arrogant bag of shit! Just tossing it off like all the work he’d done was nothing. Just didn’t count next to his high and mighty projects.
He grabbed the iron arrow off the table and threw it against the wall. It clanged off and the wastebasket scuttled under it to catch it as it fell.
Goddamn that sonofabitch! Why, he could take on NATO and the Warsaw Pact and stomp them both with what he had here. There wasn’t an army on earth that could stand against what was here in the castle and out in the wargame area.
With an angry gesture he turned on the scanner. The central display showed the arrays of forces in neat green and gold symbols. Around the edges were six smaller screens, each showing a view of part of the battlefield in full color. The units were poised and ready. Except for scouts nothing had moved since he found the destroyed patrol.
Looking at the main map he saw that a platoon of green tanks was just over a small rise from a battalion of yellow armor. Perfect situation for the kind of fast-moving ambush he loved. With the mouse he turned both units on and took control of the green force. Quickly he moved them into position hull down behind the ridge and opened fire on the advancing battalion at barely 200 yards.
Six yellow tanks died in the first salvo and four more before the yellows could return fire. Their first shots were ineffective but they were maneuvering for cover and the next green shots only destroyed two more tanks.
Twelve to nothing. It was the time to scoot, but Craig held his ground, firing salvo after salvo into the deploying yellow forces.
Now it wasn’t all one-sided. The yellow battalion had taken cover and was returning accurate fire. The battalion’s SP battery opened up, walking volleys of tank-killing shells toward his platoon’s position. First one and then another of his green tanks blew up and turned dark.
"Goddamn you!" Craig yelled and ordered his remaining tanks to charge directly into the lead elements of the battalion, all guns firing. He lost two more tanks in the wild charge and then he ran the survivors head-on into the remains of the battalion’s transport section. Tanks ground over jeeps, butted trucks off the road and smashed scout cars. Then the battalion artillery began firing into its own supply train and in seconds it was all over.
Craig screamed in frustration and scanned the board. There was a section of warbots in the next hex over, 130-ton monsters with limited flight capability. They were also on the gold side, but that didn’t matter. Taking direct command of the unit, Craig sent them hurtling toward the armored battalion even as it reorganized for the march.
The battalion was massacred before it could even deploy again. Salvo after salvo of missiles tore through the armored column. Multi-gigawatt battle lasers raked it from end to end, blowing up tanks and simply melting smaller vehicles. Finally the warbots themselves closed, smashing tanks beneath their enormous feet and picking up vehicles and flinging them for hundreds of yards.
"Yes!" Craig yelled and hunched over the screen. As fast as he could move the mouse he ordered a general engagement. Everything was to attack everything else.
What had been a relatively well-planned large-scale exercise turned into a mechanical armageddon. From one end to the other the central plain of the exercise area blazed with explosions, laser blasts and burning vehicles and robots. Artillery batteries fired on the units they were supposed to be supporting or turned their guns on each other. Recklessly tanks crashed together. Warbots tore other warbots limb from mechanical limb.
Where the battle wasn’t fierce enough or the destruction great enough, Craig took direct command of his units, overriding their carefully programmed tactics in an urge to slaughter. Blind and unheeding, robots charged forward in obedience to their master’s command. They didn’t even break stride when they reached laser range. Instead they slammed into each other, flailing with their arms and butting their heads against each others’ armored carapaces.
Finally it was over. On all the plain there were no more units capable of movement. Every damaged unit had fired off every available round, even if it meant beating the bare earth senselessly with machine guns. The few units that had ammunition they could not fire set it off in the magazines in an orgy of self-destruction.
Looking down on the destruction he had caused, Craig felt more relaxed. His fury at Mikey had died to a dull resentment. The guy was an asshole, but hey, it didn’t matter much. They’d go into battle soon enough and when they did, Craig would show him what this stuff was worth.
As he rose from his command chair Craig remembered about the scouts. He still needed to scout the rest of the island. Well, he’d start making more tomorrow.
Thirty-five: COSMIC SQUARE DANCE
The blue thing on the screen wove and interwove. It divided, branched and rejoined in a complex, twisting pattern that hinted at an order beyond human imagining.
"How goes the work, Sparrow?"
Wiz jerked his attention away from the screen and saw Duke Aelric standing behind him.
"About like you see. We’re making progress, but it’s slow going." He reached for the keyboard and called up a second program with a couple of quick commands. Now a yellow thing joined the blue one on the screen. It wove in a complex and elaborate pattern that almost matched the blue one. Wiz moved the mouse and the two shapes melded together into a single form that was mostly green. Here and there, however, patches of yellow and blue still stood out vividly.
"The blue is what we’re producing. The yellow is the pattern you gave us," Wiz explained.
The elf duke nodded. "Very good, Sparrow. You make excellent progress."
They watched the shapes for a while without comment.
"Lord, you said there was something stronger behind Craig and Mikey," Wiz said. "What?"
Aelric took his eyes from the screen. "Does it matter, Sparrow? More to the point, do you think you would understand the explanation?"
"Yes," Wiz said levelly. "I think it does matter. As for the explanation, try me."
"Very well." Duke Aelric stared into the screen and stroked the line of his jaw with a long pale forefinger.
"Perhaps it would be easiest to say that the World as it is today exists because of choices, a multitude of choices made since the first instant of primal chaos. But each of those choices meant that other things were not chosen. In that dance of choose and choose again, some became strong and flourishing while others were made weak or even nonexistent. The patterns of the dance are not to the liking of all and there are those who would alter them."
"So they’ve set themselves up against the caller in this cosmic square dance?"
"Cosmic… ? Ah, I see. No Sparrow, there is no caller to this dance. It is blind chance working itself out through the interaction of chaos and such forces as came out of chaos. But yes, there are-those-that would have things work another way and they seek to alter the pattern, given a lever to work through."