The Machine Crusade Read online

  Although her mother's body still covered hers, Serena could see a Rorschach splash of scarlet on one of the guards' robes, not at all like the precise crimson trimming on the white uniform. A gasping, heroic Seraph — the only survivor of the three — choked out, "The threat has been neutralized, Priestess." She caught her breath and quickly composed herself.

  Shaking, Livia helped her daughter to her feet. Serena was astonished to see two of her chosen guards lying dead: her bloody defender, fallen with a slashed throat, and the other broken. The traitor.

  "An assassin?" Serena looked down at the woman whose head lay cocked at an awkward angle.

  Livia demanded, "How did she penetrate our training:"

  The remaining Seraph said, "Priestess, we must get you to safety inside one of the buildings. There may be another attempt on your life."

  Alarms had already sounded, and more white-robed Seraphim rushed to the scene, scanning in all directions for additional threats. Serena felt her knees growing weak as she and her mother were hustled to the shelter of the nearest large building.

  She looked at the white-robed young woman who had saved her life. With her gold-mesh hood askew from the struggle, the guard's short blonde hair could be seen. "Niriem? That is your name, correct?"

  "Yes, Priestess." She straightened her hood.

  "From this moment on, I appoint you my chief Seraph. Make certain the Grand Patriarch summons his best Jipol officers to investigate this matter," Serena said, breathless as she ran.

  "Yes, Priestess."

  Because of the severity of the incident, Iblis would have to get involved personally, and might replace all of the Seraphim… except for Niriem. Serena would leave it to him to unravel what had happened. She could still hardly believe it herself.

  Livia urged her daughter into the safety of the main sanctuary building, a converted manor house with cupolas and turrets. "You have always known the threat, my daughter. The machines are everywhere."

  Serena's eyes were dry, her expression cold. "And they will never stop plotting against us."

  "A human lifespan is not always sufficient for a person to achieve greatness. To counter this, some of us have seized more time for ourselves."

  —General Agamemnon, Memoirs

  "The greatest enemies of humanity gathered on the primary Synchronized World of Corrin: cymeks, robots, and Omnius, the computer evermind itself. Only four of the original Twenty Titans remained alive. A thousand years ago, fearful of their mortality, these human tyrants had installed their brains in armored cylinders so that their thoughts, minds, and souls could live forever. But over the long and violent centuries, they had fallen to mishaps or assassinations, one at a time. In the recent uprisings, both Barbarossa and Ajax had been assassinated.

  General Agamemnon, the leader of the Titans, had repaid that debt a thousand times over, slaughtering countless humans. Crushing them and letting them rot where they lay or piling them in heaps on the ground for bonfires. His lover Juno had helped him plan horrific, vengeful strategies.

  So many ways to tall humans.

  Dante, the unambitious but talented bureaucrat cymek, still served in quiet but necessary ways. The coward Xerxes, who had originally allowed Omnius to take over from the Titans, clung to his foolish belief that he could regain respect.

  Now the Titans arrived in four specially configured ships. Manipulator arms from Agamemnon's spacecraft installed the general's preservation canister into a serviceable walker form. Thoughtrodes connected his mind to mobile systems, and he stretched arachnidlike mechanical limbs before walking out under the blood-red skies. Juno, Dante, and Xerxes emerged from their own ships and followed their leader toward Erasmus's opulent villa, which bore a strong similarity to an estate that had been leveled by the League Armada in their attack on Earth.

  Erasmus fancied himself a cultured individual, an admirer of past human glories. He had modeled this grand estate on ornate historical palaces, though the Corrin landscape necessitated certain modifications, including diffusion devices to keep the human slaves from being poisoned by concentrated emissions of groundgas.

  Corrin was a rocky world, originally frozen and dead; when the sun had swelled to its red-giant phase, incinerating the system's inner planets, the once-uninhabitable lump had thawed. Back when the Old Empire of the humans still retained a few sparks of genius and ambition, hardy pioneers had terraformed Corrin, planting grasses and trees, bringing in animals, insects, and colonists.

  But the settlement had not even lasted as long as the short lifespan of the red giant, and now machines ruled here under ruddy skies, with the baleful eye of the bloated sun peering down on dirty pens of slave workers.

  The cymeks marched through villa gates made of treated metals twisted and looped into curlicues. Lavish vines bursting; with scarlet flowers draped the walls and open ceiling grid. The air must be stiflingly heavy with perfume; Agamemnon was glad he had not taken a walker form with olfactory sensors. Smelling flowers was the last thing he wanted to do right now.

  With an artificial grin on his flowmetal face, Erasmus glided up to the visiting dignitaries as they entered his courtyard. The independent robot wore a foppish robe trimmed with a spray of plush fur in imitation of an ancient human king. "Welcome, my colleagues. I would offer you refreshments, but I suspect the gesture would be wasted on machines with human minds."

  "We aren't here for a party," Agamemnon said. Xerxes., though, had always seemed disappointed that he could no longer indulge in fine foods; he had been a soft hedonist in his human days. Now he just gave a mechanical sigh and admired his surroundings.

  Omnius screens were mounted on the walls, and floating watcheyes drifted about like fat mechanical bumblebees. While the actual nexus of the Corrin evermind was housed in the Central Spire elsewhere in the city, Omnius could watch from myriad viewers and hear every whispered conversation. Agamemnon had long ago grown accustomed to, and annoyed with, the constant surveillance, but there was nothing he could do — until he got rid of Omnius altogether.

  "We must discuss this war against the irrational humans." The evermind's voice boomed across speakers like an all-powerful, omnipresent god.

  Agamemnon dampened his listening receptors, reducing the evermind's thunderous commands to small squeaks. "Lord Omnius, I am ready for any further aggression against the hrethgir. You need only authorize it."

  "General Agamemnon has been advocating such action for years," Xerxes said, too eagerly. "He's always said that free humanity is like a ticking bomb. He warned that unless we dealt with the hrethgir, they would eventually reach a boiling point and cause great harm — exactly as they have done on Earth, Bela Tegeuse, Peridot Colony, and, more recently, on Tyndall."

  (The cymek general controlled his annoyance. "Omnius is fully aware of our previous conversations, Xerxes. And our battles with the humans."

  Erasmus's voice was erudite. "Since we have never seen an update of the final thoughts and decisions made by the Earth-Omnius, we do not know exactly what occurred in the last days on Earth. That information is forever lost to us."

  "We have no need of the exact details," Agamemnon growled. "I've been a military officer for over a thousand years. I led human armies and robot armies. I orchestrated the original overthrow of the Old Empire."

  "And you have been a loyal warrior and servant to Omnius in the centuries since," Erasmus added. The Titan thought he detected a trace of sarcasm.

  ("Correct," Juno said before Agamemnon could make a retort. "The Titans have always been valuable allies and resources to Omnius."

  "Our primary concern is to ensure that no similar rebellion takes place on any other Synchronized World," said Omnius.

  "That is not statistically likely," Dante pointed out. "Your watcheyes constantly monitor the populations. No slave will ever again have the opportunity to rally underlings, as the trustee Iblis Ginjo did."

  "I have personally led neo-cymeks in raids to obliterate rebel cells," Xerxes said, stepp
ing forward. "The unruly humans will never gain a foothold."

  Erasmus paced the courtyard, swirling his fur-lined robes. "Unfortunately, such repressive measures only increase discontent. The Army of'the Jihad has sent agent-provocateurs to our worlds. They smuggle propaganda to enslaved workers, artisans, even our reliable trustees. They carry recordings of impassioned speeches by Serena Butler, whom they call their Priestess of the Jihad." The robot's flowmetal face formed a wistful expression. "To them, she is beautiful and persuasive, a veritable goddess. When they hear Serena's words, how can they resist doing as she asks? They will follow her, even to death."

  Agamemnon grumbled, "Our trustees have everything they could possibly want, and still they listen to her." Like my own son Vorian. The fool. "The best solution is to excise the cancer, obliterating each flare-up as it occurs. Eventually, we will root out all discontent… or be forced to exterminate the bothersome humans once and for all. Either solution is acceptable."

  "Where would you like us to begin, Lord Omnius?" Xerxes said.

  "Incidents of sabotage and blatant unrest occur most frequently on Ix," Erasmus interjected. "Most of the landscape has been converted to useful industries, but the rebels have located a honeycomb of natural caverns in the planet's crust. They hide there like termites, then strike our weak points."

  "We should have no weak points," Agamemnon said.

  "There should be no rebels either, considering that I have improved efficiency across the planetary network," Omnius said. "This turmoil has caused numerous problems, and I wish to examine all options. Perhaps these humans are more trouble to eradicate than the effort warrants. It may be more effective for us to simply stop fighting them."

  Agamemnon could not control his outburst. "And let them win? After all we have created and accomplished over the past thousand years?"

  "What is the significance of a mere millennium?" Omnius asked. "As thinking machines, we have alternatives the humans do not. Our bodies can adapt to environments lethal to biological life forms. If I simply abandon the hrethgir-infested planets, I can exploit the numerous airless moons and rocky planets. Thinking machines will thrive there and expand the Synchronized Worlds without further inconvenience."

  Even Erasmus seemed surprised by the suggestion. "Humans once had a saying, Lord Omnius — 'It is better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven.'"

  "I serve no one. I am analyzing the ratio of the greatest benefit for the least cost and the smallest risk. According to my projections: we can never sufficiently tame our human slaves. Short of complete eradication of the species — which would require a great deal of trouble to accomplish — humans will continue to offer the threat of sabotage and loss of raw materials."

  Agamemnon said fervently, "Lord Omnius, is it a victory to command territory that no one wants? If you abandon all planets that we once ruled, you are admitting failure. You would be the King of Inconsequence. It is folly."

  Omnius was not incensed. "I am interested in expansion and efficiency, not in archaic, grandiose notions. The propaganda distributed by Serena Butler has made me question the basis of my rule. I do not know how to control the inaccurate information coming in from the outside. Why do slaves believe such statements without supporting data?"

  Erasmus said, "Because humans have a tendency to believe what they want to believe, based upon feelings, not evidence. Witness their scurrying paranoia, looking into every shadowy corner and behind every curtain because they fear that countless machine spies and infiltrators are in their midst. I realize we have managed to slip a few of our trustees into League-controlled worlds, but the paranoid humans have convinced themselves that most of their neighbors are secretly in league with Omnius. Such baseless fears cause harm only to themselves."

  Juno chuckled, and Xerxes made an exaggerated scornful sound at the gullibility and weakness of the hrethgir.

  "Back to the point at hand," Agamemnon said, scraping a sharp metal foreleg against the flagstones. "You can blame Erasmus for triggering this destructive rebellion. His experimental manipulations created the conditions that sparked the initial uprising on Earth."

  Erasmus turned to the powerful cymek walker. "Without the Earth-Omnius update, General, one can never be certain. However, you are not blameless in this. One of the greatest jihadi soldiers is your own son, Vorian Atreides."

  Agamemnon simmered with anger. He remembered having high hopes for his thirteenth and last son, and how he had killed twelve previous children upon discovering their serious deficiencies. Now, all of Agamemnon's irreplaceable stored sperm had been destroyed in the atomic attack on Earth. He took it very personally, an assault on his family.

  Vorian had been his final hope, but had turned out to be his greatest shame instead.

  Omnius said, "There is enough blame for everyone who wishes to accept it. I have no interest in such irrelevant diversions."

  Juno's voice was deep and slippery. "Lord Omnius, for centuries we Titans have wanted to crush the feral humans, but were never granted permission to do so."

  "Perhaps that will change," the evermind said.

  Agamemnon spoke emotionally. "At this moment, my son is with the Army of the Jihad holding off machine forces on IV Anbus. Allow me to lead a cymek fighting group, and I will hunt down my rebellious offspring."

  Omnius agreed. "The fight on IV Anbus wastes much time and energy. I had expected a simple victory. See that it is accomplished, General Agamemnon. Also dispatch one of your Titans to Ix to quash the trouble there. Eliminate both problems quickly and efficiently."

  "I volunteer to go to Ix, Lord Omnius," Xerxes said quickly. Apparently, he imagined that smashing a few disorganized rebels would be easier and safer than facing the Army of the Jihad. "Provided I can have full military support? I would also like to have Beowulf as my general—"

  "Beowulf goes with us," Agamemnon said, primarily to thwart Xerxes. Beowulf was one of the first new-generation cymeks, created by Barbar-ossa more than a century after the computer evermind took over. As a human, Beowulf had been a collaborator with the cymeks, a trustee warlord on a secondary planet. He had proved himself immensely capable and ambitious and had been ecstatic when given the opportunity to become a cymek.

  The Titan general did not really need Beowulf, but was glad not to have cowardly Xerxes along. With Juno and Dante, he could recruit scores of reliable neo-cymeks as well as robotic military forces to augment the machine battle groups already at IV Anbus. Even so, defeating Vorian Atreides would not be easy.

  Agamemnon had trained his son well.

  Here is where the analytical power of the thinking machines fails them: they believe they have no weaknesses.

  —Primero Vorian Atreides, Evermind Nevermore

  When the jihad fleet passed over the enemy landing site on IV Anbus, they dropped a meteor shower of disruptor units. From his orbiting ballista, young Vergyl Tantor whooped with bravado when initial scans showed the vanguard of robotic ground forces reeling, brought to their metal knees, their gelcircuitry scrambled.

  Upon returning from the city of Darits, Xavier Harkonnen had changed into a crisp new green-and-crimson uniform that bore the impressive marks of his primero rank. He still felt soiled from arguing with the stubborn Zenshüte elders. Now, while dispatching the next wave of troops and equipment to the surface, he looked like the very ideal of a commanding officer.

  A shuttle full of eager Ginaz mercenaries — the best fighters money could buy — soared down to the machine base camp and covered the assigned ground area, wielding pulse swords, scrambler grenades, and slaggers. Zon Noret's professional combat experts took less than an hour to eradicate the enemy's half-completed base, destroying the last functional robots. The machines had not expected such swift and overwhelming resistance.

  As he stood on the bridge of his flagship, Xavier wore an expression of pleased satisfaction. "This is a setback for the enemy, but don't believe for a minute that it'll stop them."

  Vor lounged next to
his friend. "Since they're not smart enough to know when to give up, we'll just have to convince them."

  Huddled over papers and maps in analysis rooms aboard the flagship, diligent Jihad tacticians studied the dispersal of machine strength, to determine Omnius's plan for seizing IV Anbus. Apparently, even with their initial beachhead knocked out, the machines planned to land an overwhelming force and launch a ground-based invasion that would surely capture the planet.

  In the war room, the two primeros laid out the projected path along which the invaders would have marched. Xavier waited for his dark-haired comrade. "Well, does it make any sense to you? What are the machines trying to do?"

  Vor pushed some strands of long hair out of his eyes. "As with most everything the thinking machines do, their plan is straightforward and obvious, utilizing massive force and no subtlety." He pursed his lips, pointing to the tactical projections that had been delivered to them from the analysis rooms. "See, the robot fleet has enough firepower that they could simply bombard IV Anbus and wipe out all the Zenshüte cities. Easy enough. But it looks like Omnius wants to keep the infrastructure of Darits and the other cities intact for a more efficient conversion into a full-fledged Synchronized World. It's primitive compared to what they would normally install, but the machines can adapt."

  Xavier looked at him grimly. "And that requires more work for them than just blasting everything into dust."

  "Of course, if it takes too long, they'll just go back to the original plan. My guess is we don't have much time. We've stalled them long enough here."

  Xavier traced his finger along the feathery gorges displayed on the satellite images. "If the combat robots intend to use an overwhelming ground force to take over Darits, the hydroelectric generating station, and the communications grid, then the machines will likely sweep down the canyons here. Once they're inside the cliff city, they will install the usual copy of Omnius."