Emily was a little ashamed of her fascination with battles and warfare but there was no denying the strength of it, so when the human army and the orc army met twenty miles west of Elmton, she was watching.

     She took control of a nearby robo-pigeon, flew it to a tree on the edge of the field where the battle seemed likely to take place and waited. Both armies seemed to be heading for a large area of common grazing land, a field normally used by several towns and small communities to graze their cattle, but the farmers seeking refuge in the city had taken the cattle with them leaving nothing but hammocky grass and dried cowpats.

     The human army got their first, just as night was falling. Both armies had scouts reconnoitering the area and they knew where their adversaries were every step of the way. The human army, under the command of General Kimble, had hoped to reach the safety of Elmton's walls, but when they realised that that wouldn't be possible they began defending the common instead. Twenty thousand beefy soldiers unpacked their spades and began digging, and before the end of the night they'd created a dyke and ditch surrounding a circular area two miles across. A very primitive kind of fort. Humans always fought defensively against orcs whenever possible, since equal numbers of humans and orcs on level ground almost always resulted in an orc victory.

     The next morning, when Emily checked in on them again, the defensive fortification was finished and Kimble's army was getting what rest they could while they waited for the orcs to arrive. There were orc scouts present already. About twenty of them, circling the earthen fort from a safe distance as they examined it for weaknesses. They seemed particularly interested in the southern stretch of the ditch, where a layer of bedrock just a metre or so beneath the surface had limited the depth to which the humans could dig. The human officers, seeing this, told their subordinates to keep an eye on this area in case it needed to be reinforced.

     The main body of the orc army arrived a couple of hours after dawn. They didn't bother to make a camp of their own. Instead, they left their supply wagons a safe distance away and pushed their trebuchets to within striking distance of the human camp. Against the sturdy walls of a city they would have been loaded with a single giant boulder weighing up to twenty tons, but such an attack would have been of little use against an earthen dyke. Instead, therefore, they were loaded with hundreds of small rocks, each the size of a man's head. Thrown with force and falling from a great height, they would be devastating against closely packed ranks of infantry.

     "They don't have cavalry," mused Emily to herself as she watched through the pigeon's artificial eyes. "I would have thought that cavalry would be quite effective against orcs."

      "Horses are terrified of orcs," said the priest, making Emily jump in alarm. She looked around and saw that a priest had entered the sitting room of Baron Wright's mansion without her noticing. She began to stand but the priest waved for her to remain seated. Instead, he took a chair to sit beside her.

     "Orcs have a quite distinctive scent," the priest continued. "Horses become quite uncontrollable when they get the scent of it. We bred them that way."

     "The orcs or the horses?"

     "Both. We can't allow humans to use cavalry against orcs. Not if we want the orcs to win."

     "The orcs could just use cavalry too," replied Emily, "or you could just engineer them to run as fast as a horse."

     "There would be drawbacks," the priest replied. "Making them faster would inevitably make them weaker, with less stamina. They'd be less effective killers. And any horse would have to be bigger, to carry them, which would make them slower, less agile. No, I'm afraid that a human on a horse is an unstoppable combination. We had to forbid it so long as we wanted to use a predator species to control their population. Ah, looks like the battle's about to begin."

     With both of them watching through the pigeon's eyes, they saw the humans aiming their war machines at the orc trebuchets. The same kind of machines that Randall had seen at Duffield, designed to shoot a whole salvo of arrows at a time.

     "They're called multi-scorpios," said the priest chattily. "Very similar to a weapon used in ancient Gaul, except that they could only shoot one arrow at a time. Looks like they're trying to..."

     Before he could complete the sentence the weapons were discharged and dozens of arrows flew at the orcs manning the trebuchets. Several orcs fell as arrows found gaps in their armour but more ran in to replace them to complete the preparations. A moment later catches were released, the huge throwing arms turned and their payload of head sized rocks was launched towards the human army.

     Every human crouched down with his wooden shield held over his head, but the onslaught was still terrible. Every impact caused a man to stagger back, gasping in shock and pain, some with shields broken in pieces, some with broken arms. Those able to do so struggled back to their feet and raised their shields again ready for the next attack while the scorpio crews hurried to reload their weapons. Emily saw officers shouting orders at their men, but the whole scene took place in silence for her, as if she were watching an ancient piece of archive footage taken before the advent of sound recordings.

     While the humans were still hunkered down to shield themselves from the trebuchet bombardment, the orcs charged, all of them aiming at the same stretch of the dyke. The officers shouted more orders and men from other parts of the dyke ran across to reinforce it. Shields with notches in the top corner to hold and support the wooden shaft of a halberd were raised side by side in a continuous wall at the top of the dyke, waiting for their enemies to impale themselves on the steel bladed weapons. Emily doubted it would be that easy, though.

     When the orcs reached the ditch they leapt across, then scrambled up the dyke to reach the humans at the top. The wall of shields held them back, though, and the poleaxes, two handed weapons with the notched shield serving as the second hand, thrust and stabbed, the points and blades at the end finding gaps in the orcs' armour and piercing deep, causing howls of bestial pain and sprays of crimson blood. Emily watched in horror, too fascinated to cut off the images. "How sapient are orcs?" she asked. "Are they people, like humans?"

     "They're as intelligent as humans but they have no true sapience." the priest replied. "They lack the CRES code. They don't suffer, therefore. They can't suffer, any more than a piece of iron being hammered by a blacksmith can suffer." Emily nodded, reassured.

     "Only the chieftains are truly sapient, like you and me," continued the priest. "Ah, there's one there." He took over control of the pigeon and made it turn its head towards the rear of the attacking army where an orc larger and infinitely more dangerous looking was barking orders while holding its halberd over its head. The halberd had a pennant attached to it, Emily saw. Long, waving in the wind and bearing an emblem of a wolf's snarling jaws. Emily assumed that its only purpose was to intimidate the humans as it would have no meaning to the orcs.

     As she watched, Emily saw just how effective a poleaxe could be in the hands of a man trained to use it. Soon, the ditch was full of orc bodies while only a third as many humans had been harmed. The wall of shields kept the orcs, who had to climb uphill to meet their enemies, from being able to engage directly with the humans and the height advantage also kept the humans safe from the halberds of the orcs. The humans, who had been digging all night, were tired, though, and growing visibly more exhausted as the battle progressed, while the orcs seemed to have inexhaustible energy and in the meantime the trebuchets of the orcs continued to throw hundreds of football sized boulders, their crews seeming not to care whether they killed humans or orcs.

     "If the humans can hold the line then they'll win," said the priests conversationally. "The orcs will keep throwing themselves at it until they're all dead. If the orcs break through, though, then they'll have the advantage. Nine times out of ten, a human army that fails to maintain the line ends up being slaughtered to the last man."

     "And then they'll return to Elmton to finish what they started," said Emily, starting to feel a little sick despite herself.

     "Right. Possibly with a few reinforcements from the orc factory. There's a factory just a few dozen miles to the north with fifty thousand units in hibernation waiting for the order to march."

     "So Elmton is doomed no matter what happens," said Emily.

     "No. If the human army wins we'll grant them their victory. The city will be spared. We'll destroy another city in a few years time to keep the population down. We have to grant mankind a victory every so often or they'd lapse into despair. We don't want a hopeless, broken mankind. We want a confident, healthy mankind. Healthy in both body and spirit."

     Despite her general hatred for the human race, Emily found herself horrified by the priest's cold, clinical detachment. They're monsters, she realised. They're evil, but if they had only agreed to preserve the Earth and its biosphere she would have been willing to tolerate them as a necessary evil. They wanted to destroy the Earth, though. To dismantle it for raw materials, and for that they had to be destroyed, and as she watched the battle she found herself growing easier in her mind about the decision she'd reached.

     "Every time I see a human army in action I get a feeling of almost religious awe," said the priest in a low voice, as if he was speaking only to himself. "No wonder your species became the most dangerous apex predator the world has ever known. You can forget your T-rexes and your sabre toothed tigers, humans make them look like pussycats. Just look at how they're using those poleaxes! A spear is a good enough weapon by itself, simple and easy enough to be used by farmers and carpenters, people who are too busy with a mundane occupation for anything but the most basic military training.

     "But a career soldier does one thing and one thing only, and that's learn how to fight, to kill. In the hands of a skilled soldier, the poleaxe is a truly terrifying weapon, the ultimate weapon for an infantryman facing an armoured opponent on foot. Those flaps and spurs on the end are designed to find gaps in the armour and then, when the shaft is twisted, they prise the gap wider, allowing the tip to squeeze in to tear muscle and sever tendons. And those soldiers, by the look of them, are truly skilled. I mean, look at them! They're cutting down wave after wave of orcs and making it look like a dance! Like the army is a meat grinder and the orcs are sides of beef being turned into mince. At the moment, anyway."

     The priest took control of the pigeon again and flew it across to the other side of the battlefield. The human soldiers manning the dyke here were keeping watch on the surrounding terrain, but they were distracted by the battle going on behind them. They knew that if their comrades failed to hold the line and the orcs broke through, they would have almost no chance of survival. It was scary enough to have danger threaten when your life was in your own hands, but true terror was to have your life in someone else's hands, to know that you might be killed by someone else's carelessness. The soldiers on this side of the camp were distracted, therefore. Not as alert as they might have been.

     "They haven't seen them," said the priest thoughtfully.

     "Haven't seen what?" asked Emily.

     The priest directed the bird to look to the west and Emily gasped to see a column of orcs creeping on their bellies through the long grass. They were wearing long, woollen cloaks through which grass and greenery had been woven, making them look as if pieces of meadow had come alive and were creeping like caterpillars towards the human lines.

     Emily's thoughts reeled. If the human army was destroyed then Elmton would be destroyed. Randall would be killed, the only man who could defeat the machines and save the Earth. Was there anything she could do to save them? Even with their camouflage, the orcs would be easily visible if the humans were paying proper attention to their surroundings. Perhaps all they needed was something to attract their attention in the right direction...

     She took control of the pigeon and made it fly towards the creeping orcs. "What are you doing?" demanded the priest, but it was too late. One of the human soldiers had seen the flash of movement out of the corner of his eye and turned to see what it was. Another movement caught his eye, the nearest orc, raising his shoulders to take another shuffle forward. Emily saw the man's eyes widen in alarm, and then he was shouting at the top of his voice, alerting his fellows to the threat.

     "You warned them!" said the priest, jumping to his feet.

     Emily also jumped to her feet, her hands held out in front of her as if to ward off an attack. "I'm sorry!" she said. "I didn't mean to! I just wanted to get a better look! I forgot it was a pigeon. Cameras in my time were tiny, unobtrusive. I forgot it was a huge great pigeon!"

     "I think you knew exactly what you were doing," said the priest, though. "You couldn't bear to see people of your own kind massacred and you wanted to save them. Right?"

     Emily relaxed in relief, but she tried to give every impression of being afraid and guilt stricken. She decided that denying the priest's accusation would make him believe it more. "No! I wouldn't do that! I know that the human population has to be managed, to preserve the natural world. I would never interfere with a cull." She was glad to see disbelief in the priest's eyes. So long as he believed she'd only wanted to save the soldiers he wouldn't look for a deeper motive.

     "You will no longed be allowed to watch battles," he said. "You're supposed to be looking for Randall and the others. You will confine yourself to this endeavour from now on."

     Emily nodded contritely. "I will," she promised. "I'm sorry."

     The priest nodded and turned to go. On an impulse, Emily ran to stop him before he could reach the door. "I need a break, though," she said. "I've been doing this for weeks now, just sitting and watching people walking around in cities. I need a little time off."

     The priest studied her face, then nodded. "Perhaps you're right," he said. "Perhaps you need a holiday. Some time out in the countryside, surrounded by the natural world you love so much. A reminder of why you're doing this."

     "A holiday, yes," agreed Emily. "Just a few days, then I'll get back to work."

     "Where will you go? You'll need an escort of soldiers wherever you go, in case you come across an orc patrol."

     "You said that if the humans won that battle, you would grant them the victory," said Emily. "You'd withdraw all the orcs from that part of the country and spare the city. That means that the area around Elmton will be the safest part of the country for a few years."

     "If the human army wins the battle, yes. You want to go to the Elmton area, then?"

     "It makes sense, if that's going to be the safest place."

     "If the human army wins the battle."

     "Yes, obviously."

     The priest nodded. "I'll keep an eye on the progress of the battle," he said, "and if the humans win I'll make the arrangements."

     "Thank you."

     The priest nodded and left.