The world of Enigma. Out near the edge of explored space, alone in the void. It is near no stellar cluster or star grouping. The nearest inhabited world is over one hundred light-years away. Enigma itself is nearly the distance between Sol and Pluto from its sun. But due to its high-speed orbit and rotation, its timescale is about equal to that of Terra.

  Enigma is an ice world. Its atmosphere is barely breathable by humans, with high concentrations of nitrogen and helium. Not that an unprotected human could survive on Enigma's surface. Its temperature during the day can be as low as 100 degrees Kelvin. And during the night, the temperature dips to a mere 50 degrees Kelvin. The entire world is covered by ice, and not all of it is water ice.

  But there are many worlds like this throughout the human-explored worlds. There is Hoth, named after a world in an ancient Earth legend; or New Norway; or Frost; or IceBall. But Enigma is different in other ways.

  The first Core exploratory teams passed it over. It was a barren ice world, and there were more fertile worlds closer to colonized space. It was too cold and its atmosphere was wrong for the races that preferred ice worlds. So it was forgotten. Until a research vessel charting a nearby nebula took a closer scan of one of its moons as a possible base of operations.

  They found some very odd power signatures. As the world was examined closer, more power signatures were found. Eventually, the Core government dispatched an expedition to investigate the anomalies. What the expedition found was quite startling. On Enigma, in its orbit, and buried on two of its three moons were the remains of an extremely advanced alien civilization.

  This was completely new. Most races the Core had found were about its level of power, with some slightly higher or lower, and some at much lower levels. None were anything close to this advanced.

  The artifacts on Enigma were identified and catalogued. A degraded defence network was found in orbit, and the remains were studied. Some technological breakthroughs were achieved, but nothing notable. Most were far too advanced for the scientists studying it to understand, and the rest had already been developed by humans independantly.

  Then the Great War broke out. Worlds were plunged into war, forced to ally with the Core or Arm, depending on beliefs. The War even spilled onto Enigma. But there it ran into a major impediment. Newer forms of heavy amour simply did not work on Enigma. The cold caused the generators to slowly fail, eventually reducing the armour to almost nothing. The first models of heavy armour still worked, but they offered less than half the protection of the later models.

  Both sides kept small research bases on Enigma, in hopes of gaining some kind of breakthrough from the incredibly advanced technology found there. But little progress was made, even though more and more artifacts were discovered on the surface. And Enigma passed from the attention of both sides, until near the end of the war.

  Sci-591-Phys-Chem-Enig was, as his name suggested, a scientist stationed on Enigma. He specialized in the fields of physics and chemistry, and was fascinated by the artifacts that littered Enigma. He had personally published almost twenty papers on various artifacts, all of which had been well-received. He was one of the few patterns who had actually requested a transfer to Enigma. For military patterns it was pure torture, as they could only use ancient, light units. But for a scientist, it was pure heaven.

  Of course, there was the small problem of the Arm base on the planet. But Sci-591 payed it only a marginal amount of attention. After all, why worry about a minor thing like galactic war when there were so many fascinating artifacts to study?

  Even now, he was looking for more. He was hooked into one of the few orbital satellites they'd managed to mask from the orbiting defences (something Sci-591 was quite proud of), a combination power scanner and camera, and was sweeping over the surface. They'd catalogued almost all the artifacts on the northern continents, and he was now sweeping one of the southern ones.

  Both bases were in the north. The south had far to many severe ice storms for even modern heavy armour to stand up to for long, never mind the obsolete versions they had to use. And the cursory scans of the southern continent had never turned up any power signatures worth mentioning. Only a few faint signatures had been spotted.

  Sci-591 had taken it upon himself to examine each more closely. The first was what they'd always assumed was a weather station, and there were several of those in the north already. The second was the reactor of a dropship that had crashed down there a long time ago. It flickered out even as he watched, erased by an ice storm. Amazing that it had survived that long.

  The next one was quite interesting. It was a faint source, but surprisingly constant. And when he zoomed in with the camera to examine it more closely, he could see nothing but ice. He made a note to examine it more closely when the geologic survey satellite passed over, and perhaps determine its depth so the actual strength of the reading could be determined.

  He then forgot about it for several days. The satellite he wanted made several passes over the area while he flew a retrieval ship down to the south to pick up the crashed remains of one of the orbiting gauss rifles.

  850213 was Sci-591's counterpart at the Arm research station. While Sci-591 was flying the retrieval ship, he was jacked into the Arm power scan satellite, making a very similar sweep to the one that Sci-591 had made. And he too spotted the large, buried power source.

  The satellite 850213 was jacked into was a combination geologic survey satellite and power scanner. Since the Arm didn't have as large an orbiting nanofactory as the Core, they had to make their satellites do more. And by some freak chance, this one had those two functions combined.

  850213 activated the geologic survey routines and attempted to get a reading on the power source. After several minutes of processing his request, the computer returned the data. Whatever that thing was, it was buried quite far down. The next thing he did was measure the density of the material above the power source, so he could calculate the exact strength of the source.

  He ran the results through a simple program. The result was surprising, more so than anything that had been discovered on this world so far. Whatever that power source was, it was stronger than a Commander's. Not only was it producing more power than anything he'd ever seen before, it was producing it more steadily. There were no fluctuations at all for the entire time he'd been watching it.

  He forwarded the data to the base commander, so a course of action could be decided on. The commander, realizing that Arm Command would be interested in this, forwarded it to them. Within hours, a reply returned. The base was to do nothing. A team was going to be dispatched from the closest Arm world, including a Commander and two intelligence officers, and would arrive in just over a month.

  By pure coincidence, a routine scan of all files at the Core research base discovered the same data just as a geologic survey satellite was passing over. They scanned the source out of curiosity. Since a power source of such a magnitude would interest the military, the data was forwarded to Central Consciousness with all available speed. The return message was just as fast. The Core, too, was dispatching a team that was almost identical in make-up to the Arm's. Whatever that power source was, both governments were committing a lot of resources to be the first to get to it. Enigma may have been ignored before, but the prescense of two Commanders ment that it could be ignored no longer.

  Commander Hrine-02 slowly awoke, shaking his head. His commconsole was beeping, informing him that a message was waiting. Careful not to disturb his wife, he climbed out of bed and tiptoed over to the communications console. The message was on the display as he sat down, a priority-01 dispatch from Arm Command.

  "Commander Hrine-02. You are once again on active duty, and have been assigned a Model 10 Commander suit, modified for extreme cold conditions. Strange energy readings have been noted buried somewhere on the southern continent of Enigma. You and any two units of your choice will be dispatched there immediatly, to supervise excavation of whatever the Artifact is. Be forwarned that there is a Core base on-planet, and they may know of these readings too. Dispatched along with you will be two outstanding Arm Intelligence operatives, to assist you in your task. Good luck Commander."

  He nodded and sent an acknowledgement message. This assignment was good. He'd been away from the front too long, stuck on this backwater world building a military base to defend against an invasion that would probably never come. He needed to be on the front lines again.

  Hrine-02 was something of an enigma himself. He'd been cloned in the early days of the war and given the serial number 187295. The wonders of nanotechnology had kept him from succumbing to disease or age before now and his skill had let him survive through every battle he'd been in. He was one of the first clones to be promoted to Commander after the supply of qualifed natural borns began to run out.

  Ria-175896, his wife streched and yawned. He grinned. The two of them had been together since she was first cloned, and upon promotion to Commander, he'd selected her as his bodygaurd unit. She piloted a model 8b Fido now, quite a lot more powerful than the Jeffy she'd started the war in. It wasn't standard policy for Arm Commanders to be allowed to serve with their wives, but an exception had been made here, since they worked so well together as a team.

  Some would think it odd that a light vehicle pilot was driving a heavy Kbot. But Hrine-02 knew the reasons for it. Most Kbot pilots couldn't get used to the free-ranging turret on the Fido chassis, and most tank drivers couldn't get used to the speed. Jeffy pilots proved to be the ideal compromise, at least until some Fido operators could be engineered and cloned. And many of the Jeffy pilots were still in their Fidos.

  Ria looked over at him sitting infront of the console thinking and knew almost instantly that they'd been assigned somewhere. They'd been together for longer than most people had lived before the war, and been reassigned once every few years. She'd easily learned to recognize his behavior when a new assignment came through.

  Hrine-02 loved the raw power of his Commander Kbot. He sat in the neural interface cocoon as the huge Kbot, three times the size of a human, lumbered through the spaceport towards the transport shuttle that would lift it into space. Loud clangs rang as his feet struck the ground, and Hrine-02 could have sworn the ground shook as the Kbot moved across it.

  His D-Gun and laser were powered down now, but Hrine-02 could feel them at the edge of his consciousness, ready to power up and destroy things. He hated using the D-Gun, but realised that sometimes he had no other choice. Like when that wave of Sumos had been crawling towards the defensive perimiter on Mare Infinitus...

  He cut off that line of thought and concentrated on moving the Kbot. The fusion reactor thurummed within his torso as fed power to his Kbot's limbs. The designers of the Kbot could have included an antimatter reactor instead, but had judged that it was too great a risk with so much antimatter already in the Kbot's backpack.

  The backpack. Another thing Hrine-02 hated. He could always feel its weight and the raw power contained within. But it was another necessity, since without it, the Commander would be just another Kbot with a nanolathe and guns. The backpack contained huge amounts of energy stored as antimatter and metal in the form of nanobots. It was what allowed his nanolathe to work at such a high power, but was also very dangerous. Its explosion was about as powerful as a nuclear weapon.

  Beside him walked Ria-175896's Fido. It was the 8b model, equipped with a pair of light lasers in addition to the Gauss Rifle. On his other side crawled a Bulldog, its plasma cannon powered down but still looking deadly atop its hull. All three vehicles and all of Hrine-02's blueprints had been modified for the cold surface of Enigma. They incorporated a basic nanorepair system that offset the effects of Enigma's cold weather.

  Then he was striding up the ramp of the shuttle, and metal claws were reaching down to grab his suit and hoist it into a secure position. Similar claws were grabbing the Bulldog and Fido. He winced as his suit banged into a support before being magnetically locked into place.

  He popped his cockpit hatch and clambered out. A small hovering platform of some kind had already picked up Ria-175896 and the Bulldog's pilot, and was coming up to meet him. He stepped onto it and it moved away, headed for the transport's crew section.

  Hrine-02 looked over at the Bulldog pilot. He'd chosen the Bulldog with the most kills from the tank squadron stationed here. He almost did a double-take when he saw who it was. At first he thought it was 165937, a friend of his who'd been killed during a Core invasion of their training camp. Then he looked closer and saw the age lines. Whoever this was, he was older than anyone Hrine-02 had seen before.

  The man grinned, "I never expected to see my best student stepping out of a Commander suit. Good to see you again, kid. Or should I say, sir."

  Hrine-02 did a double-take at that, and barely kept from falling of the platform. It was Sergeant Denson, his old training instructor. How the man had survived this long was beyond him. Denson had already been fairly old while he was in training, so to see him now was a real shock.

  Denson laughed, "This isn't my original body. Thanks to my kill score, I was one of the first ones transferred to an old clone body when Arm Command started "reincarnating" its veterans." Hrine-02 nodded. It was logical. He and Ria-175896 were the only people on the base's roster with more kills than Denson.

  The shuttle lifted off without much fanfare. Magnetic acceleration fields lifted it up to an altitude where it could safely use its ion drives, which it then used to boost into space. It had only a short flight to an orbiting jumpship.

  Space travel had changed a lot since the early days of the War. Most ships now didn't bother to mount interstellar drives. Interstellar drives were big and bulky, and took up room that could be better used for weapons. And the Arm ships needed all the weapons they could get. But they also needed a way to move between systems.

  Deeper in inhabited space, a network of galactic gates were used for instant system-to-system transit. Charged by solar power, which was much more effecient in space, and huge antimatter reactors, the gates could open once every fifteen minutes instead of once every couple of weeks. Out here, near the rim of inhabited space, they didn't have the luxury of galactic gates.

  Instead they used jumpships. The jumpships had no weapons and little armour. Most of their mass was engine equipment or their huge interstellar drives. The rest of their mass was either sophisticated AI databanks that controlled the ship or docking arrangements.

  Jumpships were essentially huge transport starships that could move between distant stars. They used a grapple system very similar to a water-based Hulk's to attach ships to themselves. Then they jumped between stars using a system very similar to a galactic gate, towing the attached ships with them. The jumpship carrying Hrine-02's transport vanished from its holding point in a flash of strange light as soon as the transport had docked.

  Commander-103 slowly booted up his Commander frame. It had been on idle for a long time, not needed on the now highly-developed world of Derris. Commander-103 had continued to direct the operations on-planet, but most of what he did was filling construction orders for Commanders on other worlds.

  Now, new orders had come through from Central Consciousness. He was being provided with a set of modified blueprints and being sent off to a world he had never heard of, Enigma. He hated the idea, but he didn't want to disobey Central Consciousness. They'd made it clear to him several times in the past that he could be replaced, by another incarnation of himself if necessary. And he did not want to be demoted to driving an A-K or Freaker.

  The frame's reactors came to life quickly, and the antimatter backpack filled with charge from Derris' resource teleporters. The frame's weapons were slower to activate, but still came online for a few seconds before he shut them off. No need for them here.

  The nanolathe was a lot slower to come online. Its systems had to be modified for the new blueprints flooding his circuits. Finally, they too came online. Last were the pattern storage circuits, the most delicate components of the entire frame. If they were damaged, a priceless Commander frame would be turned into several tons of junk. The systems came online and his view changed.

  Instead of the virtual reality of Regional Central Consciousness, mutable to whatever the control patterns deemed needed or was requested by a lesser pattern, there was the stark sensor impression of the "real" world. Instead of the comforting flows of data of a Core mainframe, there were the sensor inputs from his "body." And instead of the comforting flow of other minds all around him, there was nothing. Except for the command circuit, of course.

  He hanging from a Valkyrie air transport, flying quickly over the metal surface of Manufacturing Complex 27. Below him, construction plants churned out units to fill demands arriving daily from off-world. No matter what Central Consciousness said, he still suspected the war was not going well. Unit orders had increased a hundredfold over the past decade, indicating either a renewed Arm push or the loss of many unit factories along the front lines.

  The air traffic gradually began to lessen and the Valkyrie's thrusters flared, boosting it up towards orbit. The Core had no need of the Arm's spaceports, which they considered a foolish drain on resources. Instead, all their aircraft had the capability for surface-to-orbit flight. Since frames didn't need oxygen (neither did patterns, for that matter), they had no ill effects from exposure to hard vacuum.

  Hanging in space was the huge bulk of a Core starship. Solar panels glittered as they caught the light and the drive glowed with a strange light as it powered up. Weapon barrels glowing with priming charge momentarily tracked the Valkyrie, before confirming that it was friendly. A squadron of AH-7029 and RP-568 class fighters flew by, wiggling their wings in salute to welcome him to the starship.

  The Valkyrie manouvered into a docking bay and nanolathes began to play over it. No matter what Central Consciousness said, surface to orbit flight was hard on aircraft. As per standard protocol, Commander-103 extended his data interface probe to the recepticle on the wall of the docking port. A brief flash of "pleasure" ran through his circuits as the connection initiated, then he was inside the starship's Regional Central Consciosness Core.

  Datastreams all around him relayed data showing the status of every aspect of the ship. Child processes directed various preperations for the jump between star systems, making sure energy levels were right and that the drives were free of damage. More complex patterns directed the child processes, and 103 could easily pick out the various stations.

  A feminine laugh from behind him made him spin around. With a swirl of data, a very attractive female form appeared. Of course, a pattern could look like whatever it wanted in the dataspace of a Core mainframe, but he'd seen nothing this detailed in a long time. He activated a cursory scan and was surprised at the result. Whatever this pattern was, it was doing more with fewer resources than he'd thought possible.

  "Greetings Commander-103 and welcome to CSS-32. We are ready and awaiting your command. I am Diana-3, command pattern of this CSS. I will also be serving as your RCC Control Patern once we reach Enigma."

  103 bowed to her, a traditional gesture of respect and she laughed again, "Come now, Commander! We know that you've no respect for me as a pattern. After all, I did choose this form for a reason. But we now have a mission to perform. If you would do the honours?"

  103 had no idea what most of that sentance ment. He'd had few contact with patterns this female for almost five hundred years. And none of the ones he had contact with had acted like this. He activated his command interface protocols, and felt his awareness of the starship expand as his circuits interfaced with its systems. He was also more aware of the patterns in the starship, and something troubled him about Diana-3. But he wasn't worried about that now. He sent the codes to initiate a jump.

  At first nothing seemed to happen. Then space shimmered and twisted. A strange light lept out from the starship and it was gone. Time inside the Core Mainframe seems to freeze...

  Near the rim of Enigma's star system, space shimmered. Then, with a strange light that didn't belong in this universe, space twisted...

  The form of the AJS Ajax appeared in realspace, its surface glowing and shimmering as the energies that had propelled it here dissipated. It had jumped to here, the edge of the system, because it carried the least risk. Jumping further in-system resulted in increased calcuations from gravity wells, and therefor increased danger. The planet based galactic gates were the only way to make a completely safe in-system transit because of their redundant systems and gravity stabilizers.

  The ship's ion drives flared to life with a blue flame, accelerating it to the speed where the ramscoops could be deployed. The ramscoops, in turn, would provide hydrogen fuel for the antimatter engines. Antihydrogen could be generated almost at will by the onboard fusion reactor, but hydrogen itself wasn't nearly as easy to come by.

  On the bridge of the AST Logan, the transport that was carrying the Arm forces towards their destination on Enigma, Commander Hrine-02 sat in an observer's chair and gazed out at the starfield.

  At the relatively low speed the AJS Ajax was accelerating at, almost no movement could be seen in the star field. When the antimatter drives kicked in and propelled them up to .4 lightspeed, a definate movement in the starfield would be visible. But now, using just his eyes, Hrine could barely see any indication that they were accelerating.

  He wasn't in command of the Logan, of course. He wasn't nearly qualified to be a starship captain. He hadn't even bothered to check over the captain's course plan. What did he know about starships, other than what he needed to? His best field was planet-based warfare. He'd leave the spacy to the starsailors.

  The ship's captain was at the center of the bridge, wired into a modified neural interface cocoon. It wasn't really a cocoon, more of a reclining chair with a direct neural interface jack and multiple control panels. The entire ship could be run from that interface, if needed. The rest of the bridge was just a backup, in case the captain was disabled. The clones to man it were in cold storage in a room just off the bridge and a backup crew was stored elsewhere in the ship.

  The captain's hand tapped some keys and his voice spoke over the bridge speakers. Even after all his trips on starships or in other vehicles, Hrine still didn't like the feeling of someone talking to him through speakers even though they were sitting right infront of him.

  "I think we've got problems, sir. The Ajax's sensors have picked up the signature of another ship emerging from transit. Signature looks quite Core, sir. Should we launch interceptors?"

  Hrine shrugged, "Don't consult me. Its your ship, captain."

  The starfield shifted as the Ajax altered course, changing its heading so that it would diverge from the Core ship's path. A jumpship wasn't equipped for combat, and they only had a wing of interceptors aboard. The AST Logan was combat-capable, but the captain had been ordered to keep her out of combat if at all possible. The Commander battlesuit his ship was carrying was too valuable to risk.

  Timeflow resumed in the Core Mainframe as the systems recovered from the jump shock. That was one advantage Commander-103 gave freely to the squishies. Their biological bodies recovered from jump shock /much/ faster than Core mainframes. The flow of activity in the dataspace around him resumed.

  The reality of the dataspace shimmered and warped. Diana-3 stood there, hands outstreched and hair floating. She looked for all the world like a medieval sorceress casting a spell. Then the dataspace returned to normal, and 103 was looking out at a field of stars. Diana-3 smiled.

  "Beautiful, isn't it? I never tire of looking at the endless star field. Millions of worlds, just waiting for the Core to come and transform them into metal paradises."

  103 nodded, still amazed by the feeling of hovering in the middle of a field of stars. Diana-3 laughed and a red dot appeared. It seemed to be moving quite fast. Even as 103 watched, smaller red blips seperated themselves from it and angled themselves towards him.

  "The Arm?" he asked. She nodded.

  "Are we going to launch fightercraft?"

  She nodded again. 103 jumped as the sleek shape of a spacefighter appeared almost right infront of him. Its drives flared to life, glowing orange against the black of its hull, and it sped away from its mothership. More joined it, speeding away and towards the Arm dots. He stood there watching them, not moving until Diana-3 touched his arm. He didn't even notice as the ship's ion drives flared to life, starting them moving towards Enigma itself.

  "Shall we move to one of them and watch the fun up close?" she asked, smiling a smile that would have made a lion think she was going to eat it. He nodded and his view changed again. Now he could see the Core ship receeding behind him, feel his hull cutting through the void of space. The tingle of the ready plasma cannon and the priming charge of the lasers replaced the feel of millions of datastreams. And he could feel the warmth and thrust of the engines, pushing them onwards.

  There was another pattern with them now, the pilot of the fighter. He wasn't paying them any attention, concentrating instead on flying the craft. 103 settled back, enjoying the sensation of being in a combat frame again. There was nothing quite like the feel of your weapons ready for a fight.

  Skywalker-723 floated in the neural interface cocoon of his StarHawk fighter as it accelerated towards the enemy at just over 10 gravities. Thanks to the extensive intertial compensators, he felt only a small fraction of a G. Barely noticeable. Not even enough to pull him towards one side of the cocoon.

  He loved flying the Arm starfighters. He'd started as a pilot in the Core Space Defense force in the days before patterning. He'd gone over to the Arm when patterning was introduced. He was glad he had. He liked the fast, sleek, manouverable chassis of the Arm fighters. The Core fighters were too big and sluggish for his taste.

  Sure, the Core did mount more powerful weapons and heavier armour on their ships. But those weapons also had a hard time locking onto and hitting the faster Arm ships. And dispite their extensive armour, the rapid-fire Arm weapons could eat through it quickly enough. He was confident that he could fly rings around any Core pilot you could name. The Core's heavier units could give it more advantage on the ground, but the Arm ruled in space.

  A plasma lock jolted him out of his thoughts. That showed what happened to starfighter pilots who thought too much. They got killed. Thinking got in the way out here. You had to loose yourself in the fighter...

  A quick blast of thrust from a set of his manouvering jets shot him out of the way of the plasma shell. It only missed him by five kilometers, and he momentarily berated himself for being so careless. At this range, he should have dodged it by at least twice that.

  He felt his AI get a lock on the fighter that had fired at him and launched a volley of twelve missiles. He felt the missiles slip out of their storage, accelerated away from his ship by magnetic launching rails. As soon as they were clear, the missiles' antimatter drives fired up, bright pinpricks of light against the blackness of space. The drives accelerated them to .7 lightspeed in under a second, and they were away towards the enemy.

  103 almost panicked and grabbed control of the fighter from the pilot. But Diana somehow caught onto his fright and calmed it before he could do anything rash. He sat back, trying to ignore the feeling of impending doom that came from the missile locks and wondered how she'd done that. Not even Commander patterns could do that. Not even Central Consciousness could do that without using an entire planetary mainframe.

  His view of the starfield whirrled as the pilot twisted the craft through evasive manouvers. One missile lock, then another fell away as they lost their target or were fooled by countermeasures. More fell away as the missiles closed the distance, but four still managed to keep their lock dispite anything the pilot could do. Their antimatter payloads swept away the basic particle shielding as if it wasn't there and began to eat away at the Heavy Armour.

  103 almost screamed at the pain of it, but Diana gave no visible reaction. The pain slowly faded as the generators compensated for the damage, but the craft's heavy armour was still hovering around 60% effeciency.

  Then, with a suddeness that shocked 103, they were back in the Core starship and Diana was reaching out and taking control again.

  "We're nearing the outer envelope of the planetary defense system. In a couple of seconds, we're going to be under a much more intense attack than the Arm could ever hope to mount," she explained in a brief data transfer.

  "So why haven't we just destroyed all the orbiting defenses far before now?" he asked, genuinely puzzled.

  "We have tried. Several times. And several times we removed every contact from all points around the planet. But every time, the defences somehow managed to regenerate. New killer satellites were launched from somewhere faster than we could kill them off. Finally, it was decided to be too much trouble."

  He tensed temporarily as a lock played over the ship. But Diana somehow managed to avoid the gauss shell that the unseen attacker launched at them. Explosions blossomed as the ship's point-defense cannon started picking off inbound missiles. Lasers shot by, barely missing the craft. And Diana didn't seem to even be working up a sweat. She wasn't even using any more processor power than normal, which indicated that she wasn't concentrating very hard at all. Yet she was dodging everything that came their way.

  The blue particle beam of an energy weapon sped by, inches from the ship's hull. The explosions of missiles began to get more intense, and 103 could have sworn that he spotted at least two nuclear detonations. Then they were clear, Enigma's frosty blue and white surface looming ahead of them.

  Hrine-02 watched carefully as the captain piloted the AJS Ajax toward Enigma's second moon. All the fighters had been recovered as soon as possible, with surprisingly few losses for a space battle. Usually space dogfights were quick and deadly, with casualties that Hrine would consider disasterous in any planet-based conflict.

  The Arm had one advantage in dealing with the defensive net that the Core didn't. Instead of trying to destroy the network, the Arm had mapped it. They knew the strong points and the weak points, where the particle cannon were concentrated and where the nuclear warhead launchers were.

  And the network was weakest near Enigma's second moon. For some reason, there was only a scattering of gauss and plasma batteries there, and some lasers on the surface of the moon itself.

  Locks began to chime, but the captain easily defeated them. That was another advantage of this route. The weapons here had very basic target aquisition gear. They couldn't even maintain a lock on a jumpship, dispite its huge signature and minimal ECM gear.

  Some of the enemy weapons still kept their lock. The ship shook as gauss javelins slammed into its armour. None penetrated, but they still did damage. The moon loomed ahead of them, and laser fire began to rise up from its surface. At this range, even lasers took several seconds to close, and the captain managed to dodge the worst of the fire.

  The captain changed course at the last second, cutting the antimatter drive and using ion thrusters to twist the ship around. Instead of slamming into the moon's surface, they were flying above it. Hrine settled back in his chair, enjoying the tour of the lunar landscape.

  With a jolt that startled him, they pulled away from the surface, using their antimatter engines to quickly break out of the gravity well. Ahead of them, the frosty surface of Enigma loomed. It made him feel cold just looking at it. Hrine couldn't even imagine what it would be like on the surface.

  Commander-103 had always hated being dropped to a planet's surface. In theory, the Valkyrie's jets could make almost any manouver. But 103 didn't trust the Valkyrie any further than he had to. There was always a chance that the jets would give out, or that they wouldn't be able to exert enough force. Then he'd be transformed briefly into an antimatter cloud, then into gamma rays, then into a crater on the planet's surface.

  His view faded back into the lonliness of his Commander frame from the bustle of the ship's Mainframe. In some ways, he liked the solitude better. He was alone, and could think his own thoughts in the frame. Commander frames were one of the few frames without a permanent link of some kind to Central Consciousness.

  He remembered another thing he hated about being dropped. The powerlessness of being clutched in the Valkyrie's claws.

  The transport's engines fired up and it slowly moved out of the hangar bay. The pilot obviously knew how important his cargo was, and was handling it carefully. There was hardy a jolt as they cleared the edge of the docking bay.

  Then the planet was spreading out infront of him again. The Valkyrie's engines blazed as it reoriented. Before, it had been heading straight for the surface of Enigma. Now it was plummeting towards it in a barely controlled drop. Clouds snapped by so fast that 103 could barely track them. Then they were through the could layer and he could see the icy surface of Enigma below him.

  The Valkyrie's jets sputtered, then activated. Brilliant lances of orange flame blasted down all around him and he felt their velocity drop considerably. In about three seconds of deceleration, they'd gone from a barely controlled plunge to a steady drop. And the ground was coming up fast. 103 braced his legs for the shock of impact, but it still surprised him when it came. The Valkyrie's jets absorbed most of it, but his legs bent at the knees under the force of impact.

  After confirming that his suit was undamaged, the Valkyrie pilot disengaged the clamps and flew off somewhere to refuel. 103 twisted his torso back and forth a couple of times, getting used to the Commander frame again. He hadn't used it in months, but he'd spent a lot of those months in accelerated time, so it was more like a couple of years.

  His nanolathe activated, drawing matter from his antimatter backpack to for its initial load of nanobots. His D-Gun and laser activated too, coming on-line with a suddeness that surprised him. The cloaking device buried deep within his torso toggled on and off quickly and a shimmering feeling slid over his skin as he decloaked and cloaked.

  Knowledge flooded into his mind as deeply-buried programming reactivated. The first thing he had to do was construct a RCC control center, a place for his patterns to be stored. His body could handle enough patterns by itself for a combat situation, but this would need more. And the science patterns would need a lot of processor space, which his body couldn't always provide.

  He raised his nanolathe and a green frame shimmered into existence infront of him. Nanobots began to pour from the lathe coating the wireframe. This was what a Commander frame should be used for. Not mindless destruction but logical construction. Transforming worlds into metal paradises.

  Hrine-02 settled himself into the interface cocoon of his Commander suit. The cocoon had come a long way from the primitive cockpits he'd used in Jeffies as a cadet. Instead of being built into a biosuit or in a jack at the base of his neck, the direct neural interface (DNI) hardware was a thin, light, web of sensors. It could even read through a full head of hair, unlike the earlier meshes that required the skull to be shaved bald.

  The DNI mesh settled onto his head, feather-light. A panel of switches presented themselves to his hand. They were the powerup controls for the suit of armour. As a precation against theft, flipping the switches in the wrong order five times would not only not activate the suit, but would cause the suit to self-destruct. Most Arm units had a deadly self-destruct, but a Commander self-destructing was absolutely devastating.

  He flipped the switches. Arm protocol called for all units aboard a dropship to be powered up and ready for combat upon landing. Hrine saw the sense in that for a landing on world where there were Core units, but for a descent to a fully Arm-occupied world it was foolish. There were Core units here, though, so he followed protocol.

  He felt his senses expand in a rush of data. He could still feel his body, sitting inside of the cocoon, but he wasn't paying much attention to it. He could if he wanted or needed, but he chose not to. Instead, he payed attention to the sensor feed coming from the Commander suit. In effect, he was the Commander suit.

  He could feel the magnetic claws gripping his shoudler. He could feel his antimatter backpack as it processed resources into a useable form. He could feel the raw, destructive energy of his D-Gun. A feeling he had never liked, but had grown used to. And he could feel the D-Gun's total opposite, his nanolathe, slowly coming to life. His light laser powered up, but he could barely feel that, since it took up so little power.

  He initiated a sensor feed from the dropship. All units being carried by a transport could do that, to relieve the monotony of transport. Most chose not to. Almost all units that required a transport were ground-based, and flying or sailing usually made them sick in some way or another. Hrine had never been sick from flyng or sailing. To the contrary, he loved both almost as much as he used to love driving high-speed vehicles.

  The blue-white surface of Enigma was growing larger infront of them. The captain had chosen a minimal-risk entry angle, taking them in over the ocean at a steady rate of descent. Hrine approved. There was no telling what anti-air weapons the Core had on land, and the ocean here was far too cold for any ships. Most Arm or Core ships couldn't even float in it.

  The fog of the upper atmosphere began to stream by as they descended. Hrine's view shimmered slightly as the captain activated the heat sheilding. More clouds and fog were streaming by, getting thicker as they dived further into the atmosphere. The clouds weren't the familiar water vapour found on many worlds, but were some strange mixture of other gasses. All the water on Enigma was frozen solid.

  With a suddenness that would have shocked Hrine-02 had he not been watching for it, they were clear of the cloud layer and the ocean was speeding by below. Hrine wasn't sure what liquid the oceans were made of, but whatever it was was cold. And to be liquid at this temperature ment it was probably nitrogen or some similar gas.

  The waves sped by below, getting closer and closer slowly. They were still far above the waves as they passed over the shoreline. It was like few other shores that Hrine-02 had ever seen. There was no beach, no gradual slope. Just a sudden cliff. Ice raced by below now, much less interesting than the ocean. Hrine set a process in motion recording the terrain for possible future use and returned his senses to his suit.

  He could see easily in the darkness of the bay, thanks to the suit's light-enhancement features. Ria-175896's Fido was hanging on one side, powered up but inert. Ria had always been a good waiter. She was likely enjoying the view as they came in for landing. Denson-896952's Bulldog was hanging on his other side, its treads spinning every so often as Denson vented his impatience. Denson didn't seem to be a good waiter at all.

  Looking further around the bay, Hrine spotted a couple of Arm Intelligence Kbots. Smaller and faster even than Zippers or PeeWees and with a better cloak than Shooters, Arm Intelligence Kbots were built to be sneaky. They were unarmed, but equipped with remote interfaces and viruses that could do incredible amounts of damage when released into a Core mainframe.

  These two had very specialized remote interfaces. They looked like systems infiltration Kbots, their operators specializing in breaking into Core systems and stripping out any data they could find. Or breaking in and generally wrecking havoc. Most of them, when interfacing through a DNI, could outmanouver most patterns in almost any dataspace.

  He switched back to external sensors just as they came over the last of the mountain ranges. The Arm base had been built in a metal-rich and easily defensible section of mountains in case the Core ever got interested in wiping them out. Right now, the base looked very small. A landing pad for spacecraft, an interstellar communicator, an aging Kbot lab, and several large buildings that were combination residences and science centers. One of them looked like it incorportated a simple orbital launch faculty too, but he couldn't be sure. Several metal extractors and solar panels were scattered around, and a single radar twisted slowly at the center of the base.

  The Logan extended landing "legs" and touched down gently on the pad. Hrine barely noticed the bump and clang of contact. He silently applauded the pilot, and noted to put in a promotion request. The man was obviously very good at his job, and deserved a chance to prove himself on the front lines.

  The bay doors opened and the magnetic grapples swung around to lower Hrine-02's suit to the floor. The pilot was very good. He hardly even noticed the bump as his feet hit the floor and the claws released. Most pilots would have lowered him too hard or released the claw too soon. The man definatly deserved a promotion.

  Hrine-02 walked down the exit ramp, Ria and Denson flanking him. Their turrets traversed, looking for any trouble. There was none. The Intel Kbots followed them. The two were communicating with each other, although about what Hrine couldn't even speculate. He knew who they were, from their Kbots' ID signatures. Nck-0245962 and Bth-0245961. Two of the best-known system infiltrators in Arm Military Intel and Data Collection.

  His radar came online and his command interface activated, linking him to the systems of all Arm units on the planet. He could watch from the sensors of any of them, transmit orders, or do whatever. And with the multi-tasking abilities the DNI link gave him, he could do several of those things at once.

  He carefully walked off the landing pad and began planning what expansions he would make to the base. Not only did he have to prepare for a possible Core offensive, he had to find out what in the name of Empyrrean that artifact was. And the cold weather wasn't going to make things easy.

  Hrine-02 played the green beam from his nanolathe over the huge structure rising infront of him. Larger than almost all Arm combat structures, it was a combination drilling station, repair bay, barracks, and scientific research station. It could take a direct hit from an Intimidator shell and survive.

  It also cost a lot to build. His metal and energy reserves were already seriously depleted from the construction of the base to the north. That had been completed hours ago, and he had proceeded onto the next phase of his mission: construct this drilling station and a garrison to protect it.

  His energy reserves began to refil as another fusion reactor came online. He already had three running, so this made four. And he was still only barely gaining power. Most of it was being sucked up by the metal makers he had running to provide him with the metal for constructing this thing.

  Another wave of nanobots washed over it, and the outer layer formed, overlaying the initial green surface created by the nanolathe. More nanobots swept over the structure, adding systems and completeing internal elements. Finally, the structure was finished and Hrine's nanolathe clicked off. Atlases would soon be launched from the north to ferry down equipment and personel.

  He turned away from the drilling station and began work on the garrison forces needed to protect the drilling station. A Kbot lab was first, since C-Kbots were more mobile than Construction Vehicles. He assisted the plant in producing the first few Kbots, and assigned them to begin constructing perimeter defenses.

  Commander-103 was, like Hrine-02, hard at work on the southern continent. The Core had use a much different method from the Arm for digging down towards the energy signature. Instead of a large drilling complex and research faculty, he'd chosen to create several smaller drilling units. These units used powerful but limited nanolathes to continually reclaim the ground, slowly digging their way down. And RCC relay was built near them, so they could be controled from the base to the north. A combination between a repair bay and production faculty for light science frames was near that, so that the scientists could easly be transferred here to study once the tunneling was completed.

  Commander-103 survayed the site one last time. Everything seemed to be going well. Then entire area was lit by the green glow of the digging nanolathes at work. A storm was developing to the south, but 103 was not worried about that. He was confident his construction could survive whatever the storm threw against it.

  On the other hand, it was still vulnerable to an Arm attack. 103 considered this with all his computing resources. If the Arm did locate this base, it would be in serious trouble. The enemy would likely use Level 1 units to attack, and they would cut apart most types of Level 1 defenders he could build. The only thing that might provide protection would be a Leveller, and that probably wouldn't survive the coming storm.

  Finally he reached a decision and activated his command relay. Connecting to the base's RCC through the newly-constructed relay, he began transmitting orders. A squadron of Goliaths and suitable escorts were to be build with all possible speed and ferried down south by as many Valkyries as were available. That should provide protection against most level 1 raiders.

  He turned towards the one C-Kbot that he'd brought down here with him and began giving it orders. Using satellite data and recon reports, he began to plan what defensive structures he'd need. Missile towers all around, heavy lasers at chokepoints, and a battery of Punisher MRPCs in the center of the base, surrounded by Dragon's Teeth. He'd add stronger defenses if necessary.

  Commander-103 hated having to build these weapons of war, but it had to be done. The squishies were relentless in their campaign to wipe out the "abomination" of patterning. Why couldn't they see that this was the greatist gift ever given to sentient life? He shook his head in confusion and resignation. The Core would fight to keep this gift, fight for the right to give it to all sentient life.

  Hrine survayed the garrison he'd built to protect his drilling base and saw that it was good. The Level 1 Kbots and vehicles stood straight and tall, seemingly ready for anything. Sunlight glinted off the reflectors of newly-created solar power generators and the green light of operating nanolathes lit parts of the perimeter as C-Kbots worked hard on defenses.

  Sunlight slid down the twin barrels of a Guardian as it swept back and forth, ready to lob balls of super-heated plasma towards hostile contacts. In the south, a storm was building. Weather systems predicted it would be here by nightfall. Hrine-02 was well prepared.

  Not wanting to risk storm damage that they might not have time to repair before a Core attack, he'd modified all the blueprints of defensive structures so they were able to retreat underground. They couldn't automatically duck down or pop up like an Ambusher. Instead, they had to be ordered to retract or extend, but it still provided protection. Only the drilling base would remain above ground, and it had its own nanorepair systems. Even the Kbots would move inside the drilling base's repair bays.

  Hrine saw that all was as it should be, and called for his Atlas. He wouldn't wait around down here for a storm to arrive. His Commander suit was too bulky for the repair bays, and he didnt't want to risk more storm exposure than he had to. His nanorepair systems were already strained just compensating for the cold. Besides, he had things to do up north.

  [Planets to invade, patterns to destroy,] he thought, recalling a joke that had been popular among the members of his first combat unit... how many years ago? He didn't like destroying patterns, but the Core had made a mistake by forcing patterning on its citizens. Allowing those who wished to to be patterned was fine and good. But forcing all to have their minds reduced to bits and bytes? He shuddered at the thought.

  For what seemed like the thousandth time that day, he felt the magnetic grip of an Atlas on his shoulders. His suit's servos deactivated, and the ground fell away below him. He could feel the steam from the Atlas thrusters heating the air. Then the ground was speeding along below him, and he was on his way back to the main base in the north.

  Commander-103 felt the storm sweep in around him, but didn't really care. These frames had been built to survive the rigors of battle. A little blowing snow and ice wasn't going to do a lot of damage. A quick scan of the structures in his base confirmed this. The heavy and resilient Core construction was weathering the storm well.

  103 strolled through the base. He knew he should return to the north, to help with the construction of the garrison and continue expanding the base there. But he didn't particularly feel like it right now. 103 had always been a bit of a solitary type. This was his first time in almost five of his years (really about six months of real-time) that he'd been free to just walk in his Commander frame, without worrying about fulfilling production orders for whatever Core planet found itself short of units and under Arm attack.

  As he walked, he felt the storm around him. The whirling winds, the blowing snow, the flying crystals of ice. The wind and snow swirled around him, its natural pattern disturbed by the presence of his frame. For some reason, he'd always liked things like this. Walking through ocean currents or standing in the middle of a storm. It reminded him that he was alive, not just a machine mindlessly fightning. It reminded him of what it was to be human.

  Nck's world flickered out as he activated the neural jack. Arm Intel agents couldn't use the new-model neural mesh. There was something about the data transmitted from it that Core mainframes didn't like. The first few Arm Intel agents that tried it were fried by security programs within microseconds of accessing.

  So they were forced to use the archiac neural jacks. That ment they had limited data transfer speeds, and they therefor couldn't react nearly as fast as patterns. Nck couldn't imagine what it had been like in the beginning of the war, when the neural jacks were still primitive. He'd heard that losses among Intel operatives were nearly 99 out of every hundred.

  He broke through the Core access security almost automatically. A Flea had planted a comm relay near an enemy radar. That provided the two Intel operatives with a link into Core dataspace through the radar tower's transmitter. For some reason, the Core had never learned to place security on their radar towers. The Arm didn't either, for that matter, but it made the Core especially vulnerable since their radar towers uploaded directly to their dataspace.

  The Core interface programs scanned his "pattern," trying to determine how the dataspace should be presented to him and what he should look like. Since he wasn't a pattern, he was running a complex program that made him look like one to the RCC systems. The program tagged him as a Construction Kbot pattern. Just what he wanted. Something with a high level of access that most combat patterns would ignore.

  Bth was there waiting. She wasn't as good at breaking security as he was, but she was a lot more experienced at other things. She'd chosen to appear as a Construction Ship pattern. Like a C-Kbot, that would automatically clear her through most security protocols. Nck grinned as he imagined the confusion the presence of a C-Ship in the access logs would cause.

  They set off through dataspace. They had two objectives while they were here. Find out exactly what the Core knew about the energy signature on the southern continent and plant listening programs on the command relays.

  They walked through the dataspace side by side. Somehow, this RCC node was especially realistic. Nck could practically smell the vegitation that was "growing" all around them. Everything looked lush and green, and Nck was momentarily reminded of Empyrrean.

  He shook off that memory. No point in thinking of that garden paradise until he could retrun there. Patterns were all around them, and Nck tried to act natural. Most of the patterns were in small groups, talking or just exploring their reality. Some were actually engaged in work, but most were combat patterns waiting for an active deployment. Nck saw several subsystems that looked like bars or other recreation establishments, but ignored them. He and Bth had a job to do.

  Bth grabbed his arm and pointed.

  [There!] she sent, using an internal relay in the Arm network instead of the Core system. All transmissions in a Core dataspace were monitored and recorded, so communication between agents in one could be dangerous.

  He looked where she pointed, trying to ignore her touch. There it was, just as she said. A glittering tower, looking almost like a mage's tower straight out of the legends. Tendrils of energy, encased in something that looked like glass, spread out from the glowing ball at the top. As he watched, one of the tendrils disappeared and two others reached out. He reached into his "bag of tricks" and produced a custom-built analysis program. A flight of Finks lifted off from his hand and began circling the tower.

  He'd chosen Finks because most combat patterns didn't look twice at them. Finks usually ran on AI, so they looked like Finks in a dataspace as well as in real life. So far, they'd only been spotted for what they were once, and that was a long time ago.

  The analysis program finished and the Finks darted off in every direction, then vanished, one by one. He looked over the data they'd returned. The tower was definatly the command relay. The hardware of the relay was actually located in the enemy Commander's body. Which ment they'd have to bypass the Commander's security to get to it. Nck didn't particularly like the idea. Commander frames had some of the toughest security he'd ever run into.

  A sentry held out his hand as they approached. No patterns other than the Commander and the RCC control pattern normally had access to the command circuit. Even Construction units couldn't access it. That didn't present a problem to a couple of Arm Intel experts.

  Almost faster than he could track, Bth reached out. Her hand made a complex motion, and he could have sword her fingers moved through each other at least once. Then the security program caught on fire. She twisted her hands again, and the security program was encased in crystal.

  What she'd really done was dump a load of garbage into the program core, to crash it, then frozen it so that it couldn't "scream," or tell the system it was going down. Bth had always preferred to make her programs look like magic or psionics of some kind. Nck liked big, modern guns and high-tech devices. Either way, the security program was out of the way.

  A palm-print scanner stood beside the door. It was actually a authentication program of some sort, but Nck didn't care. His hand transformed into some kind of shimmering, metallic substance, and he layed it on the scanner. After a couple of seconds (microseconds in real time), the door sprang open, and the two Intel operatives strode into the Command Node.

  An almost bewildering array of energy patterns danced over the walls, but neither cared about those. Instead, their attention was drawn to the pulsing globe floating in the absolute center of the tower. That was the link between the Commander's pattern and the command interface.

  They floated up towards it, slipping through the layers of security that surrounded it. The security programs were so advanced that they didn't even appear in the computer-generated reality. Somehow, they managed to slip through without triggering any defensive measures.

  Bth reached out for the pulsing sphere. A little shape slipped from her sleave and flew towards the sphere. It hit the surface, stayed there for a moment, then sank in. They turned away and dropped towards the ground again. Their first objective was complete, now it was time to move onto the second.

  Quinn-34 watched the two Arm Intel operatives leave. He shook his head. In most Core dataspaces, they would have been practically undetectable. Even he probably couldn't have caught them. But here, things were different. Two organic minds stood out like a tree on Core Prime.

  He cautiously moved closer to the command sphere. They might have modified its security protocols too. Even though those were hard-coded into the Commander's hardware, you never knew. They might have had some program to use a nanolathe to cause magnetic fluxes, and the effect of those on hardware was unpredictable.

  The security programs were unchanged. He breathed a sigh of releif. They needed this Commander frame intact. He reached out a hand and touched the command interface sphere. Now this they had changed.

  He felt it, trying to figure out what changes they'd made to it. For the most part, the flow of data was unchanged. He could still feel the commands coming out of the control circuit and being routed off to where they needed to go. But there was some strange about the way they were being routed...

  He peered closer at that datastream and grinned. Those two were good. They'd managed to implant a listening program on a sealed command circuit. In any normal dataspace, he wouldn't have had a chance of spotting it. But here, it was like a Sumo in the middle of some A-Ks.

  With a wince, he realized that wasn't such a good comparison. Ever since the "Fred" incident, where a... computationally disadvantaged pattern had been given the task of escorting a group of A-Ks and promptly flattened all of them, Sumos had been banned from moving around too close to A-Ks.

  He shook his head and reached out for the program. He'd have to remove it. The Arm couldn't be allowed to get data about every move the Core made. It would be disasterous. As he touched the program, a shock ran up his arm.

  With a jump, he drew back. A quick analysis determined that if he'd not jumped back, the shock would have killed him. A pair of complex goggles formed over his eyes, and he peered at the program, trying to figure out what he could do to it. He couldn't remove it, that was for sure. Any attempt to do so would simply destroy whatever made the attempt. He peered closer. Could he perhaps modify it?

  A tendril of light reached out from his finger. He couldn't modify it directly without being fried, so perhaps he could use another program to modify it. The tendril passed through the edge of the command interface sphere and touched the Arm program. Light pulsed, and his modifications were completed. The program wouldn't stop transmitting, but would transmit false data.

  A form appeared in a shadow behind him. With all the energy dancing along the walls of this place, a shadow shouldn't have been possible. Yet there was one there. The energy danced all around it, but never passed through the shadow. A shiver ran through Quinn-34. He'd sensed what had just happened, and it shouldn't have been possible. Even an RCC control pattern couldn't do that!

  A female hand emerged from the shadow, perfect in all respects. No pattern Quinn-34 knew of could create a hand that detailed, that perfect. Almost everyone created a body that looked like their own in Core dataspace, but they usually didn't have the resources to get every detail in. Nor did they usually want to.

  He took the hand and bowed over it. He'd been expressly instructed to show respect to this individual. Central Consciousness had only recently become aware of the power of beings like this, and wished to cultivate them as allies. Quinn-34 couldn't imagine the disaster that would result if they were enemies.

  "They were Arm Infiltrators?" she asked.

  Quinn-34 nodded, "They planted a listening program in the command interface sphere. I have managed to disable it."

  She nodded, "And where did they go from here?"

  Quinn-34 shrugged, "I do not know. I barely noticed them here, and that was only because of your modifications of this dataspace."

  Her reaction surprised Quinn. With an almost casual flick of her hand, she sent him flying backwards and held him immobile against a wall. She stepped forwards out of the shadow, and almost moving faster than Quinn could see, grabbed the Arm program. He cringed as he felt the shock it delivered to her, the stared in amazement as she almost effortlessly pulled it out of the interface sphere. Holding it with both hands, she smiled.

  "So this is the best the Arm can do? You should easily have been able to destroy this with the power I have granted you. Yet you did not. Like the rest of the patterns I have encountered, you are foolish. This shows that you are not willing to accept the wonderful gift that I have given to you."

  She laughed, and to Quinn it sounded inhuman. More like a lion or tiger, a predator. She gripped the Arm program tighter, tighter.... Then it vanished in a flash. Quinn looked on in shock. She'd simply wiped the program from memory, bypassing layers of interface protocols, memory protection programs, and the program's own security routines. Not even a Commander pattern had the authority to do that. Not even the control patterns of Central Consciousness could do that!

  She grinned at him, and Quinn suddenly felt very nervous. Her teeth looked sharper and sharper and more and more like a predator's the longer he looked at them. The neverousness vanished as soon as it appeared. She wasn't going to hurt him. She was just trying to protect her own dataspace, and was annoyed that Quinn hadn't use the gift she had given him. He felt the bonds that were holding him in place vanish.

  "Continue your duties, Quinn-34. I shall take care of these intruders. And spend your idle cycles trying to find it in yourself to accept my gift, instead of visiting the simulational recreation faculties." Then she was gone, and Quinn felt quite relieved. He was always never quite at ease in the presence of Diana-3.

  Nck sighed. They couldn't use the higher-level Core search programs, since those had multiple layers of heavy security. He could break through it, but doing so would cause more problems that it solved. So he and Bth were restricted to using the lower-level search routines. Which made looking for data on the energy signature extremely tedious.

  Nck felt a sudden spike of alarm and pain. He turned around to see Bth clutching her head.

  "What?" he asked, suddenly very concerned. There was nothing hostile nearby, so that ment...

  "They got to the listening program," she moaned in pain. "They know we're here. Finish the search fast! Use the high-level search routine, if you have to, but get that data!"

  He nodded and turned back towards the search routines. The higher-level routine looked like a huge computer, with many monitors and keyboards. A long snake with sharp fangs and giant eyes was streched across the keyboards. It was the security program.

  Nck reached out and a massive gauss rifle appeared out of nowhere. Gripping it with both hands, he blasted the snake. The thing writhed and shimmered as the blast of garbage data and random instructions tore into its core routines. Another blast, and it vanished. He raced forwards and began tapping keys.

  Within seconds, he had the data he needed. He turned away from the search routine just as shadows began gathering. A prickling sensation ran up and down his back, and he pointed the gauss rifle at the point where the shadows seemed to be focusing. Bth shook her head and began to straighten.

  "Get out of here!" he shouted at her. "You're in no condition to fight."

  The shadows combined, and a woman was hovering there, about half a meter above the ground. Her hair was floating, and her eyes seemed to be like pits of darkness, waiting to suck him in. Whatever this thing was, it was amazingly powerful. Nck didn't want to stay around and fight it for any longer than he had to.

  Bth began the process of unloading herself from the Core dataspace. It would take a while, had to take a while. Suddenly being dumped back into an organic body was almost too much of a shock for anyone to take. So leaving the dataspace was a gradual process, to avoid damage to the organic body and the mind contained in it. Nck had been fast-dumped before, and he hated the process.

  The woman began to float though the air towards him. He aimed his gauss rifle at her, but his targeting programs were unable to find her core routines. With a shrug, he let loose a blast of garbage data at her head. That should at least slow her down.

  It didn't even faze her. She just laughed and kept coming. The laugh sent more needles racing down Nck's spine. Whatever this was, it wasn't human. To him, most patterns had a slightly inhuman feel to them. Either this thing was the Core's next experiment at a super-pattern, or it was something he'd never seen before.

  He fired again, and the attack had just as little effect. Darkness gathered around the woman's hands and lept towards him. The last thing he noticed was Bth safely unloading from the dataspace. His last thought was that at least she was safe, then his world fragmented and pain blasted through his mind.

  A general alert rang through the Arm base on all communications frequencies. Advance radar posts had detected a hostile Core advance. Recon elements, consisting mainly of Zippers, had managed to confirm this. The Core were advancing with almost three full regiments of units. Everything from A-Ks to Sumos to Goliaths.

  Hrine-02 had been prepared for this eventuallity, but hadn't really expected the Core to attack. At least, not this soon. He'd expected them to try and secure the artifact with all available resources, then crush his forces with overwhelming firepower. Within minutes, he'd powered up his Commander suit and strode out of the hangar bay where it had been stored. Ria-175896's Fido kept pace beside him.

  Denson's tank threw ice into the air as it drove out from the hangar. Being a veteran many times over, Denson's tank had been modified. It was almost equal to a Goliath in armour. It retained the twin plasma cannon, characteristic of the Bulldog and Reaper designs. But a railgun had been added on top of the turret, giving the Bulldog far more direct firepower than almost anything else on the battlefield. Of course, there were downsides. The modified version required a full 120 power units to run, twice as much as a Metal Maker.

  Denson's tank rumbled away, headed towards the front. Since Denson was an excellent small-unit tactician, he'd be commanding a platoon of Bulldog tanks on the front lines. Hrine would be, as was a Commander's usual role, directing the battle from the safety of his base. He couldn't say that he liked staying here, behind the lines, while others went out and fought. But his Commander suit was far too valuable to risk.

  Making sure that his D-Gun was fully charged and his armour was at full effeciency, Hrine concentrated on his command link. His view from the Commander suit faded, until he was only peripherally aware of it. It was replaced with the standard Arm Command Interface, and the battle was on.

  Commander-103 manouvered his forces carefully. He had much more firepower than anything the arm could amass, but he still liked to minimize losses. Especially when the battle would be this easy. Columns of faster Reaper tanks were moving around to flank the Arm forces, and Pyros and Cans were taking up entrenched positions. A platoon of Dominators and Diplomats had taken up positions on the hills above and Morties were scattered throughout his forces, to provide fire-support when needed.

  To the south, he'd delegated control of the forces to Diana-3. She was laughing, seemingly unused to the Command Interface programs. All patterns were like that during their first use of the CI. He'd thought she surely would have used it before, especially for a pattern with as low an ID tag as 3.

  Her columns of Goliaths were charging across the ice plains, their weapons glowing with priming charge. She didn't seemed too concerned about tactics. Then again, why should she? All the recon data they'd managed to amass said that the Arm base was only lightly defended by Kbots. The Goliaths should be able to handle them no problem.

  He felt a momentary spike of pain as the first exchanges of plasma were fired, and tore his attention away from Diana. As fascinating as she was, he had duties to attend to. Several of his units had strayed from their posistions, chasing after fast Arm assault squads. He recalled them, repairing those that needed it.

  Denson was jarred around a bit as the Bulldog hit a spot of rough terrain. He was moving at full speed, trying to avoid fire from the Core artillary units. Hrine-02 had dispatched a squadron of Brawlers to take care of them, but their ETA was still over two minutes. So he had to keep moving.

  He twisted his turret around. Brilliantly glowing balls of plasma blasted from the barrels, tumbling slowly as they flew towards the enemy. Trailing steam, they hit the turret of a Reaper that was attempting to flank his squadron. It had just poked around a mountain, and Denson had nailled it.

  His railgun was slower to fire. The magnetic coils were kept at half charge when idle, to avoid overloading the systems. In half a second the coils took to come up to full power, the Reaper levelled its barrels, its targeting systems aquiring Denson's tank. He could almost feel the patterned Core scum working out a firing solution.

  Then his railgun fired. He'd set it to single-shot mode for now. Railguns could fire at an extremely high rate for short periods of time, before they needed to cool and nanolathe more ammunition. On single-fire mode it took longer to shoot again, but he could keep up a steady rate of fire.

  The nickle-iron shell tore through the air, a sonic boom sending snow flying as it passed. The Reaper's armour didn't stand a chance against such a high-velocity projectile. Power crackled along its hull as the heavy armour fields strained to hold, then an orange bloom of energy lept from the tank as they failed. The backsurge of power tore through the other systems, and the tank literally disintigrated.

  More Reapers swung around the edge of the mountain. In there center, Denson could see the squat form of a Deleter. So that was how these things had managed to flank them without being detected. The other members of his squadron were taking up firing positions and volleys of plasma began to fly back and forth as they opened fire.

  Hrine was definatly on top of things today. A platoon of Panther Lightning tanks detached themselves from the main forces and sped off towards the other flank, guns glowing with power. They'd take care of the Reapers on that flank easily enough.

  On the southern continent, the Core Goliaths sped across the ice plains. They were coming up fast on the Arm base, and already they were starting to compute firing solutions for the groups of Kbots that were pouring out of the drilling base's hangars. The swarms of light Kbots would be little threat to this many Goliaths.

  What they weren't prepared for was the snow erupting into the air on all sides of them. Trap doors flung open, catapulting the snow that had lain ontop of them into the air. Towers telescoped upwards, and turrets expanded and assembled ontop of those. Barrels twisted around to point at the Goliaths, gleaming in the sunlight.

  The Goliaths barely had time to react before the weapons opened fire. The weapons' controllers had waited until the last possible minute to reveal their defenses. It proved to be a very effective tactic. When the weapons activated, the Goliaths were right in the middle of their kill zone. A couple of tanks were even thrown into the air by extending weapons, destroyed instantly when they hit the ground.

  The rest didn't even have time to react before the weapons opened fire. Explosions bloomed as missiles struck and steam poured from the cold air as lasers cut through it. Plasma shells whined through the air, impacting in great flashes of light. The Core tanks didn't have a chance. Over a third of their number were lost in the first half-second of fire. Those who had gotten past the defenses before they activated were surrounded by Arm Kbots and given a choice of surrender or death. All chose surrender.

  By the time the tanks managed an organized withdraw, they'd suffered just under two-thirds of their number in losses. The Arm defenses had taken very little damage. The Goliaths didn't even bother to fire parting shots as they retreated.

  Gol-729 had been in service of the Core for what seemed like forever. He'd been replicated several times, his pattern used in heavy tanks all across Core space. He was a good driver and an excellent gunner. He'd claimed to be able to hit a speeding Zipper at maximum range, and had actually pulled it off a couple of times. Right now, his frame was rumbling across the ice plains, towards the Arm forces. He always loved the feel of a heavy tank frame. The rumbling sound of the engines and the treads working to drag the hull along and the sheer power of the weapons systems.

  His AI combat aid highlighted a squadron of Zippers making an attack pass. Gol-729 could hit Zippers, but that didn't mean he liked them. Nothing, nothing at all should be able to move that fast. Especially not in a combat situation. But they were coming straight for him, so he had to do something about them.

  He felt his frame rocks as a plasma shell burst from his turret. It flew towards the charging Kbots, exploding among them. Zippers went flying in every direction. Most of them survived the impact, but they were scattered and their charge broken. They would be easy pickings for his Freaker escorts. he Arm main battle tanks would provide a larger problem. Especially the Panther lightning tanks. If they got inside his minimum range...

  He cut off the thought. If they got that close, his escorts would cut them up. His concern should be the Bulldogs. They were the ones who could shoot at him from outside of the range of his escorts. His AI painted one for him, and he quickly reviewed the sensor data on it. Yes, this one would be a good start.

  He swivelled his turret around and fired off a shell at the Bulldog. Light flared briefly as the shell impacted on his target's hull. One of the Bulldog's return shells missed him, but the other hit his side. He gritted his teeth (although he couldn't really, since he was missing the necessary equipment) as he felt the plasma burn into his hull. That was one thing he really hated about combat.

  Another plasma shell blew the turret off his target. The tank's electrical systems breifly strained to compensate, then the heavy armour generators imploded. With a flash of orange light, the Bulldog was reduced to a heap of scrap metal. Gol-729 was satisfied. Another dissenter dead by his hand.

  Denson was firing his railgun on full-auto now, mowing down more and more of the seemingly endless tide of soulless Core. Like the undead of ancient legends, they were hard to kill, relentless, came in legions, and were immortal. Or already dead, depending on how you looked at it.

  Another Can rocked backwards, then fell over and exploded as his railgun struck it. Soon his railgun would be out of ammunition and inactive while his internal nanolathes replenished its ammunition. He tracked the fire across the Sumo, almost laughing as the Core's "ultimate weapon" was blown to bits by his fire.

  He felt power bleed away from the railgun's firing coils as his ammo ran out, and his internal nanolathes activated, replenishing his depleted ammunition. It would only take thirty seconds to refill his ammo bins, but thirty seconds was a long time in combat. Battles could be won or lost in thirty seconds.

  He turned his turret, searching for targets. Targeting data from command flowed through his awareness, telling him who was shooting at what. The Kbots were mostly occupied with the escorts, which was good. They needed as many of those cut apart as fast as possible, so the Panthers could get in and tear apart the heavy artillery.

  Well, since the escorts needed to be destroyed, destroyed they would be. He ordered his platoon to cut loose, firing at the closest targets first and working their way out. Plasma flew from his turret guns, and explosions blossomed among the Core units. Denson kept up a steady rhythm of fire, tracking his fire towards something else as his current target was destroyed.

  Commander-103 began issuing withdraw orders as Denson's Bulldogs cut into the escort forces. Without those, his heavy units would be far to vulnerable. He'd accomplished his objective anyways. For every Core unit that had been lost, the Arm had lost at least two. Whoever the Arm Commander was, it would take him a long time to recover from this battle. It would at least take some resources away from their drilling operation. He hadn't completely eliminated the Arm, but not everything was perfect.

  The appearance of a tank-mounted railgun was puzzling. To 103's knowledge, the Arm had never managed to engineer a railgun that small. Up until know, railguns had only been mounted on capital ships, which could sustain their demands for power and their awsome recoil. If the Arm had managed to find a way to mount one on a tank, it could be a serious threat.

  He disengaged from the Command Interface. His forces had their withdraw orders. If they ran into something they couldn't handle, he could re-activate the Command Interface in moments. It was integrated into his pattern software as tightly as the dataspace interface routines.

  Diana-3 was sitting in her command interface module, smiling. Her eyes were bright as she looked over at him and stood up. All patterns experienced something like this when they first used a Command Interface, but usually nothing this strong. He was surprised that she hadn't used one before. After all, she had been a starship captain. She walked over to him, still smiling.

  "Its not my first time using that thing," she whispered. "It affects me like this every time."

  He nodded, mute, completely shocked that any pattern would approach a Commander like this. Perhaps some things were perfect after all. Then his thoughts were swept away by a tide of emotion....