[Somewhere on Adriata]
The narrow ravine was filled with balls of glowing plasma, super-heated laser fire, the scream of metal, and piles of smoldering wreckage. It looked like some madman's conception of one of the lower circles of Hell, crossed with a demolition derby where contestants were encouraged to bring heavy weaponry. In many ways, it was.
The Core Commander was stationed at the head of the ravine, right where the land flattened and widened into the steep-sided valley that was his last major production facility. The hills around the valley were riddled with caverns, mineshafts, and more production facilities, as well as various escape routes. Those routes had long since emptied out, small squads of two or three light tanks and K-bots escorting single construction vehicles or K-bots to new locations, to metastasize the Core presence. The Commander knew all this because he'd ordered it, and because their movements geographically were still linked digitally into the dataweb of his base. He also knew that, if this base fell, he would fall defending it. And that would be the end of his faction's presence on the planet.
The pair of Punishers on one side of the ravine lashed out, the pair on the opposite side firing out a moment later. A Can dissolved under their fire, turning into so much smoldering metal and expanding gas. A Raider nearby was damaged into immobility, and the Goliath behind it, its bulk taking up nearly the entire ravine, began firing straight into the Raider, soon reducing it to wreckage and then rolling it under its treads.
"All Punisher batteries, single shots at highlighted target. Aim for immobility." If that Goliath could be destroyed, the heavy tank would block the offensive effectively until a construction vehicle could reclaim it. And some of the light laser towers, mounted laterally higher up the ravine, could cover those approaches and effectively halt the attack. The valley, although open to the sky, was loaded with so many missile towers well-hidden in the higher mountains that an air attack was out of the question. The ravine rose over five hundred feet and nearly touched at the top, making an air attack almost impossible.
"Sir, Orthodox air units approaching." Or, perhaps it wasn't.
"Scramble three Vamps down the ravine."
"Yessir," the digital assistant responded before flitting off into the datanet to alert the Vamp pilots that they had been volunteered for martyrdom.
The Goliath, hammered by the Punishers, shuddered to a stop. The Commander performed an approximation of an unpleasant grin as he watched a small mixed squad of K-Bots, mostly Thuds and AK's, scramble up or around the corpse of the super-heavy tank and begin firing back down into the area that was now a parking lot full of Orthodox Core units. The spotless white of the Commander's own units, with the painted red flames licking up their legs, stood out sharply against the deep brown earth and occasional green scrub of the ravine. And blended easily into the bright red and white explosions of plasma and missile fire. More K-bots were streaming out of cave entrances high up in the ravine and joining the fight.
The Orthodox air units were confirmed now. Air transports, carrying bomb units. The Commander suddenly understood. He'd guessed rightly that his erstwhile Commander would not be able to resist sending in his super-heavy units, Cans, Sumos, and Goliaths, which was why he'd chosen this base - with this sharp ravine - for his last stand. But he'd forgotten that as much as he liked heavy units, he liked large explosions more. The three Vamps screamed down the trench, taking the sharp turns at dangerous speeds. Most likely they were too late.
The Commander watched his three air units round the major corner that marked his best defense and watched, too, as two of them dissolved into sparks and paint chips as missile fire ripped into them. The third had avoided the first salvo and loosed his missiles at some unseen enemy.
Two air transports came into sight around the corner. One was trailing flame and diving towards the ground, and hit with a small explosion that barely shuddered the earth. The other, judging by the heat signature, was mere seconds away from imploding its plasma tanks and starting the explosion that would trigger the bomb. What units he had left in the ravine all opened fire on the transport that was dropping towards the shattered bulk of the Goliath, to tear it apart and open the way up the ravine again.
Two shots hit home, then three more, but it was too late. The sinking transport hit the Goliath just as it detonated. Perfect timing by the pilot. The smaller explosion of the transport triggered the bomb and the Commander inadvertently threw a hand over his faceplate a disturbingly human reaction as the explosion ripped out. He glanced back at what used to be a Goliath and his main force of K-bots, now an empty hole in the ravine. The side of the canyon were ripped open, as was the floor. And here the Commander grinned again at the error of his adversary. There was a groan, louder than any of the explosions that had preceded it, as the shaken earth chose to settle to a more comfortable position. K-bots and vehicles began speeding back out of the ravine as either wall, weakened by the blast, began collapsing inward. First a few clumps of dirt shaken free by the blast and the movement, then the whole wall came crashing in toward itself, meeting in a landslide that piled hundreds of feet high and covered most of the ravine. The Commander stood his ground as the dirt cascaded towards him, finally rolling in an almost gentle wave to cover his feet. He looked left and right, saw the crazily-canted barrels of his Punisher artillery where the mounts had been torn from the ground, or the turrets had been ripped off.
He turned from the scene and began strolling back into the base. He called for his favorite lieutenant on the datanet. "Begin build protocol three, sub A. Heavy on the K-bots." Another of his lieutenants tapped on his digital shoulder. "What is it? Good news, I hope."
"Yessir. Our discussion of three days ago . . ?"
The commander replayed the recording quickly. The command team had been lamenting the fact that, when Core fought Core, unit strengths and weaknesses were all too well-known. New units were needed, but his small force lacked the originality and brilliance for truly great unit design. "Noted. Proceed."
"Our satellites have detected a presence on the planet. An ARM presence. And there is a Core pattern with them."
The Commander thoughtfully called up more processing power. "An ARM presence. True Humans. We'll have to see if we can capture a few, then. Fresh Patterns would be just the thing for new units. Excellent . . ."
[Adriata City]
Since its first gentle touch two days earlier, Derek-16 had twice more felt the presence of a Core program probing in the Arm datanet. Always faint, always vague, and never with even the weak strength of its first visit. After the second contact, he had decided on a course of action. After the third contact, he had enough astronomic information to make inferences about the placement and orbits of the satellites that were being used to make the contact. With that information, he had created a table projecting the likelihood of further visits.
So he waited in the unit design facility. It was deep in the night of Adriata, and save for the troops on night watch, no one was stirring. He sat at the workstation in the repair facility, manipulating the keyboard with his fingers as he'd become accustomed to doing, but with the cerebral jack in the back of his skull to keep him in the closest possible contact with the datanet.
The design for a long-range search and rescue vehicle were springing up under his fingers when he felt the first whisper of a Core presence, like the first touch of wind on a dense, hot summer evening. He was so startled that he jumped, and was momentarily pleased by the humanity of the action, before focusing quickly back on his task. His fingers flew over the keyboard, closing and saving the design files and opening up the programs he had been designing during the past two nights.
With the cerebral jack he commandeered the processing power of all of the unit design workstations. His eyes absently noticed the intense glow as all six workstations around the room suddenly lit up. His focus began to split, spreading fractally down and out, splitting his consciousness across innumerable tasks. In truth, the Pattern called Derek-16 was really only handling the upper few layers of the tasks. These included, first and foremost, handling a complex camouflage program he had written. It was ponderous and unwieldy, but with it he was convinced that he could trundle about the dataweb and be completely indistinguishable from another large data packet or program. He had long ago warned the ARM AI's of his presence and been accepted. None of them would be tricked by the disguise, but they would accept his being there.
The Core presence was stronger this time. Not enough to affect any changes, but enough that an autonomous program could begin sniffing around the dataweb, looking for information or weaknesses. The program gingerly spread out from the central radar node, where the information from the missile towers was all compiled and sorted through. It slipped through the ARM digital defenses unseen to anyone or anything but Derek-16, who knew just what he was looking for.
He focused in on the program, keeping his camouflage adapted with a major portion of his mind, sensing rather than directing all the myriad other computations and communications that were necessary to keep him functioning in the dataweb. An idle alarm warned him; the computers were heating up. Even with six of them in sequence and slaved to his body's processors, he was pushing them beyond their limits.
The Core data loomed in front of him on the dataweb now. He knew how such programs would be built. He had even built many of them himself in his time as a Director both when he was in contact with Central Consciousness and when he wasn't, in attempts to get back in touch. He knew the Core codes inside and out, literally, and he had spent the rest of the last two nights writing a parasite program that, he hoped, would piggyback on the Core program and, every time it made contact with the ARM base, bring back information. It was an easy task, and a simple program, and it was the work of a moment for Derek-16 to slide up to the Core automaton program and insert his own code. He watched with satisfaction as it latched on to the bits of interface code left in the Core programming and melted in.
Now to the third part of his plan, the riskiest to himself and to his friends. The Core program was riding a ridiculously small bandwidth, a few megabytes at best. His program could only hijack a miniscule portion of that bandwidth to bring its information back into the ARM base or it would be detected. So he had decided that he had to help the Core, in order to help the ARM.
Derek-16 pushed his own slaved processors even further and, using the digital defenses of the dataweb itself, began to shepherd the program through a series of traps that he had laid. These traps pointed out holes in the ARM digital defenses, ways that the dataweb itself could be warped by the Core to allow greater access. Greater access meant greater bandwidth, and greater vulnerability. Derek-16 had realized that, along with opening these holes, he was shouldering the task of keeping them guarded and safe. But this was the risk he had to take if he was to get any useful information, and have anything that he could show Maritius as proof of his good intentions.
First one, then two more of the computers gave out. He sniffed and smelled smoke in the room. No matter, it was finished. The last of the traps sprung, he launched his final program, and heavy defensive program that was to the standard defenses as a Maverick was to a Peewee on the battlefield. The Core program knew it was outclassed and retreated, slowly retracting up the radio waves and into the sky, stitching the holes that it had caused to makes its passage invisible. A circuit breaker in the repair facility tripped, and the room was plunged into darkness.
Derek-16 looked around the room in the repair facility in the near-blackness. He sniffed once, smelled the burning plastic of the charred solid state electronics. He realized that he was tired, truly tired, and he heaved himself out of the chair and carried himself off to bed.
[Somewhere on Adriata]
The Core Commander was awakened by a signal nearly as old as the Core itself. It jarred him from his half-processes as a baby's cry would awaken its mother. It was not a distress signal, but it was a frequency and a series of codes so ancient as to be almost holy to the Core. All around him he felt his entire base startled into full wakefulness by its broadcasting.
"What is it?" he asked in a flat, menacing growl that rumbled across his base's small dataweb. His lieutenants shook themselves and rushed to decipher the message.
"It's a message from the other Commander. The Orthodox commander." The lieutenant could barely believe it. "He wishes to arrange a meeting."
"When?"
"Now, sir. Coordinates and passcodes are given. As well as datapoints for our own security to lock in."
"Make it happen," the Commander responded, then launched himself fully into the dataweb. So, the Orthodox Commander wanted a meeting? It was unlikely that he was going to gloat over his impending victory. And even if he was, the collapse of the ravine had simply given the Commander more time to make good his final defenses. Who knew? Maybe if enough forces were beaten back, he could escape with a force that could start another base.
He was millions of datapoints away from the location the Orthodox Commander had given when he first saw evidence of the meeting point. The dataweb was alive with thousands of Patterns and other digital presences, all belonging to his own True Believers and all rushing towards the datapoints he'd been given. As he got closer, he saw the meeting point as the enormous, dense mass of data that it was.
There, thousands of Orthodox units reinforcing their own security precautions, layering anti-trace proxies in, setting up checkpoints across I/O nodes, establishing waypoints for pull-out procedures. His own True Believers were doing the same. And there, from another quadrant, he saw Patterns of the Society as well. So, this was to be a meeting of all three factions. Something serious was happening.
The Commander of the True Believers reached the camp that his Patterns had set up anticipating his arrival. His Pattern was augmented with any number of baffles, enhancers, and add-ons, and he was sent in towards the datapoint. First a checkpoint of his own faction. Then an Orthodox checkpoint, where he was scanned and milliseconds were spent while his lieutenants haggled with the Orthodoxs Patterns over which augmentations his Pattern could keep and which he could not. Then through a checkpoint of the Society. Another of his own. Another Orthodox, this time with less haggling as precedents were set. Another of the Society. So on and so on, proceeding ever closer through a shifting, disorienting maze until, finally, he reached the center.
The Orthodox Commander was seated at a small round table, the red and black of his Command suit marking his faction. Next to him sat the commander of the Society, a Pattern that inhabited an Advanced Construction K-bot, detailed in blue and white. The K-bot had been scaled up so that, crouching at the table, its scale was consistent with the two Commander suits. Another detail that must have been haggled about, the Believer Commander thought wryly.
The Orthodox Commander gave no preamble. "ARM units have been detected on the planet. We must join forces to destroy them. We cannot risk the Gate."
Well, that was one advantage gone, thought the Believer Commander. They know of the ARM as well. "How do you know of the ARM presence?" he asked.
The Orthodox Commander. "An experimental facility on the western shore of continent D was destroyed. The experimental ship escaped and reported."
"I have been conducting flyovers as well," the Society K-bot intoned.
"Very well. I will consent to an end to this war to fight the ARM menace." The other two commanders seemed vaguely shocked, and the data around them rippled slightly. "My conditions are that you step down from command of your Orthodox units and fold them in with my True Believers. You will remain imprisoned until we can find out how to re-activate the gate and you can be sent to stand trial on Core Prime for your treasons."
The Orthodox Commander exploded from his chair. "The only treasons here are yours and those of your Heretic scum!" he bellowed. "I will not have my efforts to uphold the Core's missions defamed by the likes of you!"
"It was your experiments that closed the gate, and your laxness that has allowed the ARM to spread unchecked so far on this planet," retorted the Believer Commander. "Continent D is your domain! We have no units there."
"I had a base there until recently, Believer. Your rage blinds you," answered the Society K-bot. "We of the Society wanted no part of this war, and have only defended ourselves when either of you has seen fit to attempt to roll us under your treads in your infernal march towards your mutual destruction!" The rage of the normally calm intellectual had a slight pacifying effect on the two warring Commanders, and they allowed him to continue.
"At issue is the fact that we have been out of contact with Central Consciousness for far too long. To solve this, we simply need to activate the Galactic Gate, march back to Core Prime, and be replaced here by fresh Patterns. We shall all stand trial for our actions here, and Central Consciousness will decide the right and wrong of them."
"We cannot activate the Gate. It is damaged," answered the Orthodox Commander.
"It is not damaged!" the Society K-bot yelled back. "Our spies have infiltrated your base and run the diagnostics. It is in perfect working order! But your wars leave you without the necessary power to turn it on. If you would give the Society access to the Gate, this could all be settled."
"Never!" the Orthodox Commander leveled a digital finger at the Believer Commander. "As long as these Heretics poison this world, I will never activate the Gate. I will destroy it before allowing the taint of your treason to spread to other Core worlds."
"So blind are you that you would attack my forces over ARM forces on your own world. A wonderful job you've done with this command. If you were truly Core, you would be attacking the ARM. As I will be. I swear that it is by my hand that the ARM on this planet will be destroyed."
"And by my hand, I will destroy you along with the ARM units," the Orthodox Commander stated.
"You are both emotional imbeciles," the Society K-bot stated, the stinging insult whipping into the charged atmosphere. "While you are at each other's throats, the Gate will be re-opened, and the true Core units, those of Central Consciousness, will flow across this world and sweep all before them. If you help me with that goal, I will mention it when I recommend who among you is to be wiped. Because my conscience will be clean when I am once again submerged in the Central Consciousness. I doubt you two will be able to claim the same."
With that, the Society presence was gone, whipping out through all of the security with a speed that confirmed his faction's skill in preparing their defenses. Wordlessly, the two Commanders left the meeting point, vowed to continue their war against each other. The meeting had accomplished nothing but the addition of another combatant to the table.