their fellow warriors. “Not good,” Dev heard one frustrated, gasping tiger-rider muttering as others in her skirmish group helped her down off her wounded mount. “Those countermeasures were effective only for a few hundred milliseconds. Then the damn attacks rerouted. They were pulling our own core routines out of the viruses and using them to generate antibody routines on the fly; we were just getting canceled out—”
Behind Dev, Tau was already talking to the air again. “No, it’s not working, we’ve got to shift away from that algorithm, they’re onto it already. I want everybody moved over to the M1H1 variants—yes now, we’ve got plenty more variants in the locker but that one’s the most virulent, so just do it, we’re getting ready to move here and I want our best shot!”
The last of the skirmishers were coming in now—a company of Mongol horsemen, a loping herd of tyrannosaurs, a last few zombie-crewed haunted tanks. All of them pushed their way behind the Omnitopian lines, and as the lines sealed behind them, turned once more to face the foe.
And out there in the darkness, more darkness drew near. The advancing gloom was now resolving itself into countless dark faceless humanoid shapes, hulking and silent, slowly moving toward them—the physical manifestation that Mike and his upper-level code warriors had chosen to represent the attacking programs. The golemlike shapes were armed with spears that burned with black fire, each one representative of a loaded code probe, all ready to slice or stab into Omnitopia’s data system and suck out data and money. They had been coming slowly, at first. But now they were coming faster. And faster still—
“Yeah, yeah, but has it propagated completely?” Tau was saying to somebody up in the light and relative sanity of the real world. “Are you sure it’s—oh, okay, I see it now—” He turned toward Dev, gave him a thumbs-up.
Dev swallowed, looking around him at the warriors of Omnitopia. “Okay, everybody,” Dev said. “Here they come. You ready?”
A growl of fury was what came back. Dev glanced over at Mike: and Bloomberg the Terrible gave the nod. “Okay then,” Dev shouted. “They wanna play around with us, huh? Then let’s go play!”
The answering shout was deafening. Mike held his club high and charged. The army followed, pouring past Dev—
The two fronts crashed together, and battle commenced in earnest, the opposing sides clashing in a muddle of weaponry. The dark shapes of the attacking programs presently appeared to be trying to bull their way through the defenders by sheer weight of numbers. In such places the Omnitopian fighters were using the same tactic to hold them out, the closely serried ranks expressing the pingstorm routines that the Conscientious Objector system was generating to block the logins. Elsewhere, the attackers seemed to be trying to target specific fighters, and the whole front line was an assortment of one-to-one duels, each sheaf of illicit logins being stopped by a single player guiding a massively multiple defensive routine. Many weapons now being brandished glowed with the lava-green of the Conscientious Objector defense modules, each now being guided by human minds and by hands on a keyboard somewhere—inputting new Internet addresses or host-server information ripped from the attacking programs, teaching the CO system what it needed to know about each attack as it came in, helping it cope until its own heuristic routines could absorb the data and apply it to other bridgeheads that needed defending.
Here and there the dark shapes were breaking through the Omnitopian lines in ones or twos, only to be attacked by crowds of small green-glowing creatures like gigantic and ambitious amoebas, which flung themselves onto dark bodies and smothered them by sheer weight. These were the Conscientious Objector’s more normal defense routines, tasked to stop illicit queries or multiple logins. If the darkbody creature representing a given hostile routine was simple enough or limited enough, these subroutines would gang up on it, smothering its exterior connection so as to starve it of remote processor time and finally phase-canceling it out of existence. If it was too strong or complex, the CO system’s “green blood cells” would hold it in place until a small fighting group could break away from the Omnitopian defenders’ lines to deal with it.
Dev and Tau stood a hundred yards or so back from the battlefront, peering into the turmoil. “What do you make of it?” Dev said.
Tau looked from one side to the other. ““I think we’re holding,” he said. “System