The Wiz Biz II: Cursed & Consulted (30 page)

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.

"God
damn 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.

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."

"And Mikey and Craig are the lever?"

"So it would seem."

"And we don't know what it is these others want?"

"I would not wager that they could be said to 'want' anything at all, any more than a river 'wants' to run downhill. However I doubt very much that the World could survive in a pattern that would be more to their liking."

They were both silent for a minute.

"Aelric," Wiz said at last. "My Lord?"

"Hmm?"

"If Jerry and Danny and I can match their programmers are you strong enough to fight the ones who are behind them?"

The elf duke looked down at him with eyes gray and cold as a winter's sea. "No Sparrow, I am not. Not I and all my kind could stand unaided against them."

"Oh," said Wiz in a very small voice.

"Nor is it needful that we do so," Aelric continued. "The World as it is exists because it is stronger and more stable this way than in any other form it could easily reach. To say that a thing came about by chance is not to say that it can be altered effortlessly once it has happened."

"You can't unscramble an egg," Wiz agreed and then frowned. "Only here you
can
unscramble an egg."

"That does not mean it is equally easy."

"So there's something like an energy gradient these others will have to cross before they can settle the universe into another stable state."

The elf duke paused as if tasting Wiz's words. "That would not be an incorrect way to put it. Perhaps it would be more nearly right to say they seek to create the conditions necessary to tunnel through the gradient to another state."

"Where did you learn about solid-state physics?"

Duke Aelric smiled. "Where did you learn about magic, Sparrow? We teach each other, I think."

Wiz thought that Aelric knew a lot more about physics than he had ever taught Wiz about magic, but he didn't pursue the point.

"You know this sounds an awful lot like cosmology."

"What is cosmology?"

"One of our sciences. The branch of physics that deals with things like the beginning and end of the universe."

The elf duke smiled. "Then this is cosmology."

Wiz turned that over in his mind and then returned to the main point.

"What you're saying then is that we can take them."

"What I am saying, Sparrow, is that there is a chance that we can take them. But first and above all else, you must wrest this new lever from their hands."

"That doesn't sound very hopeful."

"It is not hopeless, Sparrow. Leave it at that."

He nodded with mock gravity. "Now, are there any other matters on which I may set your mind at rest?"

Wiz took a deep breath. "Yes. What does Lisella want?"

Again that marrow-freezing stare. "What the Demoselle Lisella wants is none of your concern, Sparrow. She has not bothered you again, has she? No? Then dismiss her from your mind."

"But you've met her here."

"How do you know?"

"Someone saw you."

"Sparrow, you would do well to concentrate on matters of import, not my intrigues by moonlight. What is between the Demoselle and myself is none of yours. Now, is there aught else?"

"Just one other thing. Are those dwarves who are trying to kill me part of the Others' plan?"

Aelric's laugh was like the peal of a silver bell. "Believe me, Sparrow, they are not." He sobered. "No, that is a matter between you and others of this world, mortal or non-mortal, I think. But be wary of them, Sparrow. They can be dangerous."

Craig couldn't really name the impulse that drove him to visit Mikey. He hadn't seen him since Mikey had called his weapons "toys." He didn't really have anything he needed to talk to him about. But he still decided to go. Maybe he could explain to Mikey about his new robots. Maybe Mikey would apologize for the things he'd said. Maybe whatever, he hadn't talked to anyone but robots for weeks.

Craig hadn't been in Mikey's part of the castle for a while and Mikey had made some changes since then. Where Craig's work area was modelled on a laboratory, airy and brightly lighted, Mikey's wing was gloomy as a smoggy twilight. The further he penetrated the dimmer and redder the light became until he felt he was pushing his way through blood-soaked gloom.

He turned the corner and started climbing stairs. The walls fell away as he climbed until the staircase seemed to stretch up into a bleak, blood-lit, starless sky.
Come on,
he told himself,
this is just an illusion. You know you're still inside the castle.
But somehow that only made the illusion stronger. The wind whistled around him, tugging at his jacket and whipping his jeans against his legs. There were hints of shapes in the sky above him, huge dark-on-dark things that shifted and twisted in ways his eye couldn't quite follow.

Craig shivered and stayed close to the center of the railless staircase. He thrust his hands deeper into the pockets of his windbreaker and kept his eyes on the stairs under his feet.

Suddenly he was there. There was no door, no anteroom. Just a pool of light at the top of the stairs and Mikey hunched over a desk in the middle of it.

As he reached the top Mikey regarded him in a not-quite-hostile manner.

"What brings you here?"

Craig shifted uncomfortably. "Well, I hadn't seen you in a while and I just felt like coming to see you, you know?"

Mikey grunted and turned back to his work. Craig stood uneasily as the silence stretched out and the wind whipped and whistled around them.

"This is kinda spooky," he said at last.

"I like it," Mikey said without looking up.

The silence dragged out as Craig stared at Mikey's back.

"You look like you've been learning a lot." Craig tried to flog his enthusiasm. "It must have taken some real magic to put this place together."

"Yeah," Mikey said. "I've been learning. That and a whole lot more."

"Oh?" Craig asked brightly. "Like what?"

"Like philosophy, man. I've really clarified my thinking." He smiled and for an instant the old, charming Mikey flashed through. "You know who really owns something? The person who can trash it. Just fucking ruin it completely. That's how you know the real owner."

"But what about the guy who can use it? You know, build something with it?"

"So what? If he can't protect it, he doesn't really own it. It's like a computer. The name on the paper may say it belongs to IBM or Pac Bell, but that doesn't mean shit. The people who really owned those computers were people like me who could get at them any time we wanted to."

Craig laughed nervously. "Man, you're getting heavy."

Mikey smiled. "Heavy times. Our friends now, they understand that. You know what those guys are really? They're the greatest goddamn hackers of all!" The smile grew wider, dreamier. "Man, this is gonna be great."

"Yeah, but there are people out there, you know?"

"So? If they can't protect it, they don't own it. Simple as that."

"Yeah," said Craig desperately, "but you don't have to destroy something to prove you own it, right? I mean it's enough to know that you can do it, isn't
it?"

"Yeah," Mikey said with the same dreamy smile. "Sometimes that's enough."

"So all this is really theoretical, isn't it?" Craig pressed. "I mean it's not like you're actually gonna destroy anything, are you?"