Zai stared at her blank-faced.
Ensign Tyre was speaking again. She related more information 185 about the Legis feeds and the object. She had matched the common patterns to Marx's brain waves, now.
Damn, Zai thought. Had he lost his master pilot to the abomination?
"Sir!" cried Hobbes. Then she fell silent.
"Report, Hobbes."
"It seems the compound mind is gone, sir."
"From the palace?" he asked.
Hobbes shook her head. "From everywhere. The Legis nets are recovering, but the mind is gone, sir. Imperial shunts are taking over to prevent it from propagating again."
A com officer added her voice. "I'm getting local militia transmissions on the emergency band. They're saying the same thing. Legis is free."
Zai sat back, shaking his head.
"It's gone, sir," Hobbes said. "Somehow, we won. The compound mind is gone!" "No," he said. It couldn't be this easy. A Rix mind couldn't be ousted by an infostructure failure, no matter how drastic. There were no such miracles. No simple victories. No rest for Laurent Zai.
Then he saw it, realized what had happened.
Zai's hands flicked in the air, bringing up the object's shape in the airscreen.
"It isn't gone."
He pointed at the twisting shape.
"It's in there."
The staff stared into the airscreen silently, as if hypnotized again by the undulations of the object.
Tyre came out her fugue, nodding her head.
"Yes, sir. It's in the object. I can see it there."
"Engineer Frick," Zai said.
"Yes, sir?"
"Get me acceleration," he ordered. "In forty minutes."
"But, sir--"
"Do it."
Laurent Zai strode to the command bridge door. He needed to clear his head for a few moments, to escape this surge of revelations.
"How much acceleration, sir?" Frick called after him. "How many gees?"
Wasn't it obvious? Zai thought.
"Enough to ram that thing," the captain said, and left.
Marine Private First Class
On Legis, Marine Private First Class Sid Akman despaired. Weary of trying to make himself understood, he made the signal for a global fall-prone order. As one, the militia soldiers dotting the icy hills around the target dropped to the ground.
A perfectly executed maneuver, Akman thought sourly. He had finally found something the Legis militia was good at: cowering.
When he'd first been assigned to planetside, Private Akman had been glad to escape the Lynx. The frigate had just received her orders to go after the Rix battlecruiser, and figured to be a doomed ship. For a marine, dirt was never a plum assignment, but it beat a cold death in space.
But now the word was that the Lynx was doing fine, having bested the superior Rix craft on the first pass.
And Private Sid Akman found himself in perilous circumstances.
As the Imperial marine on the planet with the most actual combat experience--i.e., three drops--he was in command of this assault, which involved a hapless platoon of Legis militia closing in on an incomparably deadly Rix commando. The commando was cornered in her own lair, which she'd had weeks to prep defensively. In addition, her ice cave lay within one kilometer of the planet's magnetic north pole, and Legis's wild EM field was playing hell with the militia's gear. The thermal imagers were screwy, remote drones were use-less, and the platoon's minesweeping robot would only walk in a 187 giant lazy circle, a figure which the machine's internal nav insisted was a straight line.
To make matters worse, PFC Akman's heavy artillery support was nonfunctional. Something about the freezing cold. Therefore Akman's preferred strategy in this situation--quietly paint the target with x-ray lasers and have a flight of guided missiles launched from over the hill--was not going to happen. Air support was also out of the question. Some ghostly force had been attacking civilian aircraft around the pole for the last few weeks, and it was widely held in the militia command structure that the Rix compound mind could take control of anything in the air.
The militia bigs were very scared of the compound mind, even though it seem to have disappeared during the big crash of a few hours ago. So they had electronically isolated this mission, even from the secure military infostructure. Akman had no headsup display, no pov feedback from his so-called soldiers, not even radio, for heaven's sake.
He was reduced to hand signals, a hastily constructed gestural code that had thus far failed to get his troops into position. Akman wished he had brought trumpets and drums.
The whole attack was unnecessarily dangerous in any case. The Rix commando was trapped here in the arctic. The recon flyer that she'd stolen was damaged beyond repair. A military satellite had spotted the grounded flyer easily, its black armor glaring against the white background. Oddly, the Rixwoman hadn't bothered to cover it with camo, or even a few handfuls of snow. He could see the flyer now through his field amplifiers (which were, thank heaven, working). It bore the marks of grievous damage sustained while penetrating the entanglement facility's perimeter defenses. It might fly again, but not for more than a few klicks.
So why not just keep the commando surrounded? At least until they could hit her with artillery. Remote drones. Air power. Anything but a ground assault.
The militia bigs were giving Akman the runaround, making excuses for this risky assault. They wanted to debrief the hostage (or traitor) who was with the Rixwoman, so taking down the entire mountain wasn't their preferred strategy. Akman hadn't bothered to remind them how the last hostage rescue against the Rix had gone.
The marine private sighed and raised his right fist, three fingers up. After a moment, Squad Three rose slowly to their feet, glancing at each other for confirmation. Akman extended his arm forward, palm flat and parallel with the tundra. Squad Three moved forward.
He smiled thinly in the bitter and wind-blown cold. For the first time, this signal thing was working.
The marine private brought Squad Three to a halt and dropped them again. Then he moved Squad Two back a bit, just to see if they understood the pullback signal as well. For a few more minutes, Akman shuffled the elements of his command around the target area aimlessly, like a chess player wasting moves against an immobilized opponent. The militia soldiers were getting slightly better. And as far as Akman could tell, the Rix commando wasn't even aware of the surrounding force yet. The incessant howl of the wind covered the sound of their footsteps, and the attackers were hardly lighting up the EM spectrum. Perhaps Akman's stone-age communications had actually given the assault group a momentary advantage.