Heroic and desperate, maybe, but it all seemed an invitation for a repeat of the carnage that had happened yesterday. Cade and the others made themselves as useful as they could, all the time waiting apprehensively; but as the morning drew on, the skies remained strangely quiet. Subtly but significantly, something had changed. Everyone could sense it, but nobody was quite able to say what.
Cade watched a tank crew carrying out repairs under camouflage netting to something in the engine compartment of their machine, which they had opened up. None of them could have been more than in their early twenties, except maybe the captain, who could have been brushing twenty-five. They worked calmly and competently, despite the stress and fatigue they had to have suffered over the past few days. Cade had never had much of a head for machinery or technicalities—his talents lay more with human foibles—but he had always respected and marveled at the mentalities that could conceive and construct generating plants, jet planes, automobiles, and telephone networks, and generally bring into being the world of material productivity that enabled his world to exist comfortably and prosperously. He marveled at it now, seeing the exposed, precisely machined gears, tangles of piping, bundles of color-coded cables snaking like vines to reach mysterious cylinders and inscrutable metal boxes. What had it taken in human worth and ingenuity, education, training, dedication to make possible the display of skill that he was witnessing now? And by how much more would that need to be multiplied to take into account everything else that was going on across the continent right now? And then add the factories that had produced it all, and behind them all the mining, drilling, rolling, forging, refining, processing that sustained them. For what? The price in expended human value was incalculable.
Though awesome in its image of menace and power, the tank was ugly and utilitarian. Cade took in the squat lines of the turret carrying its long-barreled cannon; the impersonal lethality of the grenade throwers and machine guns protruding from invisible stations within; the hatch lids open, revealing the armor thickness that its crew would depend on when they became the stakes in a duel pitting the abilities of rival teams of designers. Two armorers were loading ammunition from a field tractor: different shapes and casings, some with dull black bodies, others yellow, another kind white. Gerofsky had described a standard type of armor-piercing round which punched a hole through the hull and blasted a jet of white-hot molten metal into the interior.
He looked at the crew again: each life potentially priceless by the measures of the economy of Chryse, dedicated to the sole purpose of killing and maiming indistinguishable others who had played the same games, had the same kinds of kid brothers and older sisters, parents, lovers, guys on the street in the same kinds of neighborhoods of the same kinds of homes. In Australia, Krossig had described the new insight that he and Mike Blair had found, which made all of physical reality an environment contrived—implicitly by some as-yet incomprehensible intelligence?—for the purpose of enabling consciousnesses to make choices. If so, then surely the choices being made by the consciousnesses dominating this particular part of that reality qualified it as the lunatic asylum of the cosmos. Or was it as bad everywhere? Cade wondered.
“Guys! Look!” A shout from Marie pulled his attention away. He turned to where she had been managing a stove and dispensing hot water for washing, shaving, and coffee to the troops, and found her standing, pointing toward the road. Hudro and Koyne climbed up from a slit trench that they had been digging. A dust-covered flatbed carrying two large-caliber howitzers, and with disheveled passengers taking up every spare foot of space, had stopped to let several figures dismount. Most were in regular combat dress, carrying packs and weapons, but two stood out immediately. One was of pinkish countenance beneath streaks of dirt and a field dressing on one cheek, with a wide brow, and wearing a bedraggled Air Force flying suit; the other was big and wide although youthful in looks—and blue-skinned. It was Nyarl and Davis. They both managed tired grins as they traipsed across the rocky shoulder of the road to where the regiment’s vehicles were clustered. Gerofsky appeared as the others went forward to greet them.