Brian turned back toward the ridge to see two soldiers snake their way through the grass toward the last of the soldiers. One lay down a suppressing fire as the second tried to lift the wounded soldier into a firecarry. As he did so he popped up out of the grass. From the copse came a hail of fire; one struck the soldier just below the jaw, tearing open his neck. The soldier instinctively grabbed at his neck, causing the soldier he was carrying to drop heavily to the ground, head first. A second bullet from the copse struck the still-standing soldier, punching him back down to the ground. The soldier who had been laying down fire crawled to the second soldier and pressed his hand against his friend's neck.

"That won't help," Hayter-Ross said. "Look at the spurting. It hit the carotid artery."

"Stop this," Brian said, turning away. "Stop this now."

"Very well," Hayter-Ross said, and everything froze. Brian stared at the stopped time.

"Do you know why I'm showing you this?" Hayter-Ross said.

"No," Brian said.

"I'm showing you this because you have a distressing tendency not to think before you act," Hayter-Ross said. "You attacked the Church's network because you stupidly thought there would be nothing to stop you from burrowing through its defenses. And of course we see how that ended." Hayter-Ross nodded toward the frozen battlefield. "Here, you ran into the open, chasing the enemy you thought you had on the run, and because of it, you died—but not before condemning three of your fellow soldiers to the same fate. You were the last to die, you know. Your friend Harry Creek managed to get to you and stop your bleeding and then protect you and the other fallen members of your squad for two Chagfun days before you could be pulled out. You died just before they got you out. Peritonitis complicated by an infection of Chagfun microbes. The microbes killed a lot of soldiers. Something about the human chemistry superheated their metabolisms and made them reproduce like mad. Your hip had almost entirely rotted away before you died."

"Shut up," Brian said. "I get your point, okay. Please, just shut up, now."

"Don't get angry at me for your own shortcomings," Hayter-Ross said. "I'm doing this for your own good."

"I don't see what good this does me," Brian said. "I have a problem thinking before I act. Fine. Now let me go help my friends."

"Not yet," Hayter-Ross said. "You recognize you have a problem. That's the first step. Now you're ready to learn what you have to tell your friends. It's not going to be easy, and your first impulse will be to ignore the advice—or would have been, before I showed you this. Now you may be willing to listen to reason."

"And what is that?" Brian said.

"I'm not going to tell you," Hayter-Ross said.

"Jesus fucking Christ, woman," Brian said. "You are the single most irritating person I've ever come across in either of my lifetimes."

"Thank you, Brian," Hayter-Ross said. "Coming from an eighteen-year-old, that means a lot."

"Why did you show me this if you're not going to tell me how to help my friends?" Brian asked.

"I'm not going to tell you, because I'm going to show you," Hayter-Ross said. "Or rather, I'm going to show you, and It'll be up to you to see if you can understand it."

"I mentioned you were irritating, right?" Brian said.

"You did," Hayter-Ross said. "Let's just take it as a given from here. And let me direct your attention back to this battle. As I'm sure you know by now, the Battle of Pajmhi was an unmitigated disaster for the UNE: Half of the human forces were either killed or wounded over two Chagfun days, including you. That"'s an awful waste of humans, wouldn't you say?"

"Yes," Brian said.

"Excellent," Hayter-Ross said. "Then here's what we're going to do. You and I are going to recreate the Battle of Pajmhi—the whole thing, down to the very last soldier. You'll be the UNE, and I'll be the Chagfun rebels. You need to find a way to get through the battle without losing so damn many lives. The answer to how you'll help your friends is inside these simulations."

"If I promise to believe you, can we skip all this?" Brian asked.

"This is exactly your problem, Brian," Hayter-Ross said. "Always trying get around the hard work. This isn't a Gordian knot you can slice through. You're going to have to unravel this a thread at a time. Also, you're going to have to find processing power for your side of the simulation."

"Excuse me?" Brian said.

"Having both of us control roughly 100,000 combatants is different from splicing together all those recorded video feeds," Hayter-Ross said. "And it's different from creating a garden. We're going to need a little more room for this one."

"Fine," Brian said. "I know just the place."

Bill Davison was simulating Hurricane Britt smashing into the Outer Banks (and not without some small satisfaction, as his former in-laws had beachfront property in Okracoke), when he noticed the simulation throttling back processing to non-useful levels. Bill grabbed his desk comm and punched through to Sid Gravis, who he knew was modeling a line of storms erupting in the Ohio valley.

"Goddamn it, Sid," Bill said. "You know that hurricanes trump inland storms in the processing hierarchy. It's like the first law of NOAA computer time apportionment."

"It's not me," Sid said. "I'm taking cycle hits myself. I thought it was you." Bill opened his mouth to respond but shut it as his boss popped his head through his office door and told him that the entire system had suddenly ground to a halt.

Three minutes later, Chaz McKean, the department's tech geek, figured it out. "Someone's running a huge fucking simulation out of the IBM," he said. "And whoever's doing it slaved up most of the other processors."

"I thought we took the IBM out of circulation," said Jay Tang, Bill's boss.

"We did," McKean said. "But we didn't take it off the network. So whoever's using it could still hijack the other processors on the network."

"Well, who's the asshole?" Sid said.

"That's just it," McKean said. "No one's the asshole. No one here's been logged into the IBM since we took it out of service. It's like it developed a brain of its own."

"Right now I draft care who the asshole is," Tang said. "We need our computers back. Get into the IBM and shut down the simulation."

"I already tried," McKean said. "But it's locked me out. I can't send any commands."

"Then unplug the goddamned thing," Tang said.

"If we do that, we could tube the entire network," McKean said. "Whoever's set up this simulation has got it locked up good and tight. Realistically, the only thing we can do with it is ride it out."

Tang cursed and stomped away. Bill went back into his office, pulled out his secret flask of whiskey, took a slug, and hoped to Christ that whatever it was Creek was doing, if d be done before anyone could trace the disruption back to him.

Come on, Harry, he thought. Get your ass in gear.

In simulation after simulation, Brian got his ass handed to him. Certain facts became obvious after the first few dozen simulations. The first was that the rebel informational advantage was simply too great to overcome. Even though the rebels had shown they could manipulate the Nidu computer network, the Nidu arrogantly sent combat details through the network as if it were un-compromised. The rebels knew when the UNE forces were landing, which forces were landing where, and what the weaknesses of the various forces would be. UNE forces were constrained by working under Nidu military command, in which clan and chain of command loyalty were more important than military skill. The UNE forces were also misled by the Nidu both about the strength of the enemy and the amount of useful information the Nidu possessed about the rebels and their plans.