Count to a Trillion by John C. Wright

guessed Menelaus was firing on an indirect path.
    Menelaus had the swifter reflexes, and had fired an instant before his foe, sensing by the tilt of the shoulder-armor that Nails had committed himself. So he was also hidden in a cloud, but this one was a cone reaching straight overhead, like a black tornado. His own aiming beam was pointed straight up.
    It was only an instant, but that instant was long enough, because the leading edge of Nails’s chaff cloud, approaching faster than the speed of sound, sensed the aiming beam of Menelaus’s pistol, and flew upward, following it. This distorted the cloud directly between the two, thinning Nails’s defense.
    Menelaus brought his arm down like Zeus calling a lightning bolt down from heaven, like a samurai chopping with an immense but unseen blade. This was purely theatric motion, of course. His main shot, which had been loaded in his escort-bullet’s lower Six O’clock launcher, had already found and piled through the thin cloud. The bullet had been programmed to pull the tightest possible angle, so its flightpath was as near to straight as a man with his gun pointed away from his target could manage.
    Menelaus, by this stunt, of course, had almost none of his cloud around him. It was all streaming up overhead. Even so, his pistol computers with casual genius located and deflected the enemy main shot.
    Nails’s head exploded, for Menelaus’s bullet entered his helmet, but did not have enough velocity to exit, and so ricocheted like a bead in a baby’s rattle, a momentary pentagram of burning metal.
    And because Menelaus was a serious man when he fought, he had programmed his escort bullets to follow the wake, and so Nails was struck again and again and again as slug after slug hit his skull, collar, shoulder, neck.
    A serious man. When he saw his headless opponent fall, Menelaus, who was covered with sweat, his heartbeat hot in his face, not consciously believing that the corpse might get up again, nonetheless drew his Bowie knife and started forward. (The picture in his mind was of plunging the knife again and again into a metal-hard torso, into bloodless plastic limbs, to make sure they would not keep moving.)
    He did not even know he was seriously wounded until he took that step. It was not even an escort bullet that had traveled through his leg and shattered his kneecap. It had been a splinter of granite, half-buried in the dry winter grass, some stray escort bullet struck. His leggings were red, and his boot was already full of blood, for a major vein had been severed. Then the sky turned a funny metallic black, lit with flashes of colorless light, and he had the sensation of stepping into an elevator whose cable was cut.
    Hitting the ground woke him for a moment. He saw the scarf flutter to the grass and lie still.
    4. The Harvest Is Great
    He woke to the smell of mown hay, the sound of bees buzzing. Out the window, brothers in brown cassocks were bent over, a line of men with sickles, working in devout silence, piling the harvest in bundles along the parallel paths they made in the standing wheat. In the silence, one voice spoke: et dicebat illis messis quidem multa operarii autem pauci rogate ergo Dominum messis ut mittat operarios in messem . Menelaus did not understand the words, but there was a lilt of humor there.
    Leonidas was slouched, perhaps asleep, balancing on a stool near his bed, tilted back so not all the stool legs were on the floorstones, his crossed boots making the only mark on an otherwise clean and white wall. Perhaps he was awake, for a thin blue trail of smoke was spilling slowly upward from beneath his hat brim.
    “Little brother,” said Menelaus.
    A low chuckle answered him. “Not no more. I’m older than you, now.”
    “You froze me?”
    “The bone-grower messed up, started your ribs and stuff getting all crinkly. Had to bring in a Jap to redo your skeleton, and that cost. Specialist from Osaka.”
    “How long was I out?”
    “Year