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jarring you with mortality like a rubber glove full of ice water slapped across your face. Living jittery high all the time, so that everything gets so real that it looks fake. You live in an anticipation that’s pain, like straddling a fence with a knifeblade for a top rung, waiting for something to come along in the dark and push you off. You get so you like it. The pain’s so consistent that you forget it’s there, you forget there ever was a time when you didn’t have it, and you live on the adrenaline.
    We liked it. We were dedicated. We hated. It gave us something to do with our hate, something tangible we could see. And nobody’d done it but us for hundreds of years; there was an exultation to that. The Scholars and Antiquarians who’d started the Quaestor movement—left fullsentient and relatively unwatched so they could better piece together the muddle of prehistory from generations of inherited archives—they’d been smart. They knew their only hope of baffling the Combine was to hit them with radical concepts and tactics, things they didn’t have instructions for handling, things out of the Combine’s experience. So they scooped concepts out of prehistory, as far back as the archives go, even finding written records somewhere and having to figure out how to use them.
    Out of one of these things, they got the idea of “guerrilla” war. No, I don’t know what that means either, but what it means is playing the game by your own rules instead of the enemy’s. Oh, you let the enemy keep playing by his rules, see, but you play by your own. Gives you a wider range of moves. You do things. I mean, ridiculous things, but so ancient they don’t have any defense against them because they never thought they’d have to defend against that. Most of the time they never even knew that existed.
    Like, we used to run around with these projectile weapons the Quaestors had copied from old plans and mass-produced in the autfacs on the sly by stealing computer time. The things worked by a chemical reaction inside the mechanism that would spit these tiny missiles out at a high velocity. The missile would hit you so hard it would actually lodge itself in your body, puncture internal organs, kill you. I know it sounds like an absurd concept, but there were advantages.
    Don’t forget how tightly controlled a society the Combine’s was; even worse than the Commonwealth in its own way. We couldn’t just steal energy weapons or biodeths and use them, because all those things operated on broadcast power from the Combine, and as soon as one was reported missing, the Combine would just cut the relay for that particular code. We couldn’t make them ourselves, because unless you used the Combine’s broadcast power you’d need a ton of generator equipment with each weapon to provide enough energy to operate it, and we didn’t have the technology to miniaturize that much machinery. (Later some genius figured out a way to make, say, a functioning biodeth with everything but the energy source and then cut into and tap Combine broadcast power without showing up on the coding board, but that was toward the end anyway, and most of them were stockpiled for the shock troops at D’kotta.) At least the “guns” worked. And there were even unexpected advantages. We found that tanglefields, scattershields, phasewalls, personal warders, all the usual defenses, were unable to stop the “bullets” (the little missiles fired by the “guns”)—they were just too sophisticated to stop anything as crude as a lump of metal moving at relatively sluggish ballistic speeds. Same with “bombs” and “grenades”—devices designed to have a chemical reaction violent enough to kill in an enclosed place. And the list went on and on. The Combine thought we couldn’t move around, because all vehicles were coded and worked on broadcast power. Did you ever hear of “bicycles”? They’re devices for translating mechanical energy into motion,