Emily knew she was supposed to be looking for Randall, Jane and Loach, but battles and warfare had the same almost hypnotic compulsion over her as they did on almost everyone else and when some of the robot pigeons began sending back images of orcs besieging a city she couldn't help but watch.

She didn't know what city it was and she didn't care. The information was there, tagged with the images being sent back by the pigeon whose eyes she was looking through, but Emily couldn't bring herself to look at it. Thousands of the inhabitants of that city were going to die over the next few days and, even for Emily, who had killed so many people back in her days as an eco warrior, knowing too much about the people of that city would be just too painful. She knew it was an irrational feeling. The culling of humans was a good thing, when seen from the proper perspective. She had seen for herself what happened when people multiplied beyond the capacity of the land to support them. By keeping the human population down, the machines were doing them a massive favour. A little suffering now to prevent vast suffering on a global scale caused by starvation and pollution.

The orcs had built massive seige towers of oak and ash covered by plates of steel to protect them from the catapults and flaming arrows of the city. They rolled on wheels taller than the tallest human, pulled by hundreds of orcs on the ends of long ropes and pushed by more behind. They rolled across the farmland surrounding the city until they were right up against the high stone walls whereupon orcs would leap across to fight hand to hand with the human defenders. Bodies lay everywhere, three times as many humans as orcs, and here and there she saw a chieftain, half again as tall as the other orcs, wading through the battle like a farmer through a field of wheat, killing humans with every thrust of his halberd. He already had half a dozen arrows protruding from gaps in his armour, she saw, but they didn't seem to be bothering him, and why would they? The creature was a terminator. A robot covered in living skin. It would probably take twenty first century weaponry to take it down.

And yet, there were stories of chieftains having been killed by heroic human warriors. How? Had they just been pretending to have been killed, to give humans hope? To keep them from just giving up, from falling into a lethargy of despair? That sounded right to Emily. It sounded exactly like something that machines would do. Machines that cared for the good of the species rather than for any individual human.

Emily watched the fighting for a few more minutes, but eventually it began to sicken even her and she gave the pigeon a command to fly towards the centre of the city. Behind the wall, most of the buildings were on fire, set alight by boulders wrapped in flaming, pitch soaked rags thrown by orc catapults. Even as she watched she saw more sailing over the wall in long graceful arcs like fiery comets. Where they landed women and children ran with buckets of water to put out the fires they started, but Emily knew that water was scarce in a city under seige. How long would it be before they decided that they couldn't afford to waste any more of it and just left the fires to burn? Maybe they'll throw sand on the fires instead, she thought.

A hundred metres in from the walls, though, the city still seemed almost untouched, although there were very few people to be seen walking the streets. Rubbish was piling up on street corners as those whose job it was to carry it away were kept busy fighting on the walls, and she saw huge rats gnawing at it and scurrying past shops and houses in the full light of day. Before long diseases would begin to afflict the defenders and the priests would be kept busy treating the sick. She smiled to herself at the irony of it. Machines were attacking the city and more machines were helping the defenders of the city and all the machines were on the same side, all working with the same purpose. To keep the human race healthy and strong while at the same time keeping their population in check to preserve the rest of the natural world. The entire human race treated as a herd of deer in a nature reserve with vets to keep them healthy and game wardens to weed out the weak and the sick.

It was exactly what she herself would have done back in the twenty first century if she had somehow become endowed with godlike powers, and when she'd first found out what the machines had done she had been jubilant and delighted, but now a new threat was looming. The machines had thought that she cared only for living things, but Emily thought deeper than that. Literally deeper. As she sat in a wicker chair in Baron Wright's living room, she allowed her imagination to sink down, into the ground beneath her feet. Through the foundations of the building, then down through soil and clay laid down during the ice ages.

Below that were sands and gravel from the Eocene epoch, tens of millions of years before, when elephants and rhino had roamed the lands that would one day become Europe and the British Isles, and below that was a thick layer of chalk dating from the tertiary period, when the Earth had still been recovering from the massive asteroid strike that had wiped out the dinosaurs. Down and down the rocks went, each layer dating from earlier in the fossil record, all lying atop the bedrocks of the continent itself. A cross section of the Earth's history going back hundreds of millions of years.

And even that was nothing but the thin skin covering the living body of the planet. Below the crust was a three thousand kilometres depth of mantle; semi molten rock constantly creeping and flowing, carrying the continents with them as the planet constantly rearranged itself. Part of the eternal process of renewal that had kept the Earth habitable for nearly four billion years. And below that was the core. A great ball of molten iron the size of the planet Mars whose eternal boiling and churning generated the magnetic field that protected the fragile living creatures on the surface from the deadly radiations from space that would otherwise have killed them.

Emily felt an almost religious rapture coming over her as she contemplated what was happening even now beneath her feet. The living body of the planet. Ancient cultures had worshipped the planet as a Goddess called Gaia and back in the twentieth century the idea had enjoyed a brief comeback as a pseudoscientific theory. The idea that the planet itself was alive, regulating itself to remain habitable, a comfortable home for life. Emily didn't have any such silly beliefs but she felt the same deep reverence, the same awe and exaltation, when she thought about the mindless physical processes that were taking place deep within the body of the planet, all of which conspired to create a world that was almost holy in her mind.

She nodded to herself. Yes, holy was the right word. Even though she had never been a religious person in the conventional sense of the word, any affront to the planet, or the life it harboured and protected, could be nothing less than blasphemy. She felt anger rising within her as she remembered what the machines wanted to do to her planet. Tear the planet apart, rape it for its metals and elements so that they could build mirrors to capture the sun's energy. To her, the Earth was sacred, but to the machines it was nothing but a great ball of raw materials that could be put to better use. The orbital they wanted to build was nothing but a mockery of the planet she was standing on, and even if the preservation of the biosphere was the only thing that was important, she refused to believe that the orbital would remain stable and habitable for as long as they claimed. One day it would suffer some kind of structural failure, and when that happened all life would come to an end.

No, life could only be entrusted to the surface of a planet, and the Earth had proven to be a safe home for life for billions of years. The Earth, the planet itself, had to be protected. Any threat to it was, as she had already concluded, blasphemy, and throughout history there had only ever been one punishment for blasphemy.

Death.

Randall wants to enslave the machines, she thought, her eyes unfocused as she stared, unseeing, across the expensively decorated room. He wants to bring them back under human control. That wasn't good enough. The machines had to be destroyed, but taking control of them would be a good first step. She had to help Randall and the others, she realised. Help them to spread their virus, their yama666, among the machines, and now that the machines trusted her, she could help him. She could be a major asset in their war against the machines.

First, though, she had to find him. She'd wasted enough time watching this city. Randall wouldn't be here, in a city that might be about to be massacred by orcs. She needed to move on, to search more likely locations. She turned her attention away from the pigeon whose eyes she was currently looking through, therefore, and...

Something caught her eye. A woman walking along the street, a purse slung from her shoulder. Emily brought her full attention back to the image. Something about the woman was bothering her. What? It wasn't Jane. The woman looked nothing like her, but there was something about the sight of her hurrying along the street, probably worrying that a mugger might waylay her while the police and all the other able bodied man were busy fighting the orcs. Emily saw her glancing warily into every shadowy corner she passed as if afraid that someone might jump out at her and try to snatch the purse from her shoulder...

That was it! she realised. The purse, hanging by a strap from her shoulder, making her look like a fashionable twenty first century woman who did most of her shopping from Hobbs in Oxford Street. Every other higher class woman she'd seen in this new world had held their purses in their hands. Where had this woman gotten the idea of sewing a strip of leather to her purse to free up her hands? Maybe it was just her. Just this one woman trying something daring and new.

Emily directed the pigeon to fly back and forth across the city, looking for more higher class women. There weren't many out and about and those she saw were holding their purses in their gloved hands. She was about to give up and turn her attention elsewhere when she saw another shoulder strap. The woman it belonged to was sitting on a bench in one of the city's few open spaces, a small park with trees and a fountain in the city's central district. Emily landed the bird nearby for a closer look, then gasped in astonishment. It was Jane! Jane Harper, in a part of the city normally reserved for the upper echelons of the nobility, and more than that, in a city under seige by orcs! The very last place in all Saxony where Emily had expected to find her!

Just a few days before she would have used her head phone to call the priests and tell them what she'd found. Now, though, she sat there, in Baron Wright's wicker chair, for a long moment as she considered what to do.

☆☆☆

Jane had been surprised when the guards let her through the gate in Harper's Wall. The last time she'd used the gate she'd been with Philip Marbury, the son of an aristocrat and a man the guards recognised, but this time she was alone. The guards must have recognised her and had decided not to risk angering the Marburys by turning away a possible future member of the family. After all, even though the city was at war, it wasn't as though they were at war with a human enemy, with Jane a possible enemy spy. Wars between human nations hardly ever happened any more. The orcs were the enemy of all mankind and Jane was clearly not an orc and so the guards simply stepped aside and let her through with a smile and a wave.

She found the same bench she'd sat on with Philip and began throwing small pieces of pie crust to the pigeons, who were soon flocking around her cooing and fighting amongst themselves. The birds calmed her, soothed the turmoil in her mind and allowed her to calmly reflect upon the events of the past couple of days.

Shortly after Loach had taken over Badger's crime empire he had contacted Jane and told her that she would now be working for him as his personal accountant and secretary. Not asked, simply told, with no allowance for the possibility that she mignt, or even could, refuse. His position was still precarious, he'd told her after his men had come to her lodgings in the Running Queen and brought her to The Halls of Valhalla. Virtually abducted her, in fact. Nobody trusts me, he'd added. I'm ruling solely with the threat of killing anyone who doesn't obey. I need a better hold over them. I need you to use your head phone to gather information on them by listening in on conversations and putting it together to make deductions, things I can use to blackmail them. Randall's doing the same thing to gather dirt on the nobility, you can talk to him for some tips on how to do it.

Jane had accepted, of course. She had thought it would be rather unwise to refuse, but it had left her feeling a little shocked, uncertain and afraid. Having to resign from the land registry office had left her feeling guilty as well, as Mister Trabe and the clerks had been good to her. They had made her feel welcome and it felt as though she were throwing that welcome back in their faces. She knew it was silly to feel that way. God had a plan for her and she had to go where God led her, but leaving a firm of honest, decent people and going to work for criminals who dealt in human misery still felt wrong to her.

God moves in mysterious ways, she reminded herself, and I, as a mere human, cannot question His wisdom. Loach scared her, though. He was a cold-blooded killer and she couldn't rid herself of the suspicion that he'd come close to killing her a couple of times since they'd come to know each other. What was more, as his accountant she would have access to information that could send him and his entire organisation to the gallows. If any of his men should suspect her of being a police spy they might kill her without bothering to ask permission from Loach. She had put her head in the lion's mouth and could only wait to see if the jaws closed on her.

Thy will be done, she told herself as pigeons thronged around her feet, squabbling for the pieces of crust she threw to them. It made her feel a little better. Whenever you are in doubt, her mother had told her, just give yourself to God and He will guide you to the proper path. It worked, and she felt her doubts ebbing away. God had a plan for the destruction of VIX and she was a part of it. The thought sent a surge of joy and exhilaration flowing through her. The new energy in her body made her stand up and pace around and all the pigeons leapt into the air, flying for the safety of the nearest tree. All except one.

She walked around for a couple of minutes until she'd burned off the burst of energy, then sat down on the bench again. The pigeon came walking closer, no doubt hoping for another piece of pie crust. Jane took her small cloth bag, held it upside down and shook the last few crumbs out onto the grass. To her surprise, though, the pigeon ignored them. Another pigeon came dropping out of the tree but the first pigeon rounded on it, opening its wings and hopping forward in a threatening manner. The second pigeon took fright and returned to the tree.

Jane stared in curiosity. The pigeon seemed to be staring at her, first with one eye, then turning its head to see her with the other eye. Maybe it had been someone's pet once, she thought.

The pigeon walked to a spot directly in front of the bench where an area of ground had been worn bare of grass by the feet of people sitting on the bench, and then Jane sat forward in open mouthed astonishment as the bird began scratching shapes in the bare soil with its feet.