They made their way together back down the hill. They saw no one, though once, for several heart-pounding minutes, they lay crouched in the shadows of a gaping, stone-walled basement after Jaime heard the distinctive clink of metal scraping stone. After wading up the sewage ditch and back within the invisible walls of the compound, they took a few moments to wash themselves off in the stream above the latrine, removing the worst of the stench clinging to their bodies. The idea was to slip back into the barracks without attracting attention to themselves. There were almost certainly informers among the slaves . . . or, at the least, minute and easily concealed listening devices.
At the entrance to the wrecked factory building, they touched hands lightly, then went their separate ways. Jaime sank onto his rag pile gratefully; the climb up and down Overlook Hill took a lot out of him, and the longer he worked in the dig, he knew, the weaker he would become. The knowledge lent a definite urgency to any timetable the tiny conspiracy decided to adopt.
He was awakened before dawn for the next work shift and spent the next twelve hours in the mud west of the crater, digging for bits of glass, plastic, and technology. Most of the time, though, his mind was back on Overlook Hill, studying the problem of what Hector had become . . . and how the small but growing band of military and civilian personnel could fix him.
The suns were still up when the shift ended, and Jaime and several thousand other men and women trudged the three kilometers back to the barracks. Chow time was not scheduled until after suns-set; the conspirators, Jaime, Alita, Dieter, and Wal, all met by the eastern wall of the old factory, and this time Shari Barstowe joined them.
When he introduced her, he didn't tell them—and she did not volunteer—that he'd met her on the bone pile at Hector's fifty-meter line.
"So you're telling us that Hector remembers some stuff, but not anything about the battle, or him getting taken over," Dieter said, thoughtful. "That's pretty weird. How could the Masters know our programming methods, how could they know Hector so well that they could reprogram him that way?"
"Bolobotomy," Wal said.
"I beg your pardon?" Dieter said.
"Sounds like Hector's received a Bolobotomy."
"Like a human lobotomy? He had part of his brain chopped out?"
"Well, not quite that," Shari said. "Remember, you can't just carve a piece of a Bolo's memory out with a filleting knife."
"That's right," Alita said. "Holographic memory."
"You just lost me," Jaime said. He made a swishing motion above his head with his hand. "Right over."
"Yes, well," Shari said. "Do you understand the concept of holographic memory?"
Jaime frowned. "I know what a holograph is."
"Yeah," Wal added. "A three-D comm transmission."
"That's not what I'm talking about."
"The language has changed with the technology," Tamas pointed out. "The word holographic is Old Anglic, no, earlier than that. Late English, maybe. Definitely pre-spaceflight."
"Right," Shari said. "The very first holographs were still photos that showed holographic properties. The subject—let's say it's your Great Aunt Matilda—would be photographed using laser light that bathed her from several directions. The laser beams, then, reflected back, would pass through a piece of film, which would record, not the light, as with a normal chemical process, but the interference patterns caused when you brought the separate laser beams together again. Today it's all done with pattern fields and force lenses, of course. Back then, the film was a square of chemically treated plastic. Later, when you shine a laser through the film with its interference patterns, pow! There you see, floating before you, the three-dimensional image of Aunt Matilda, once more in all her glory!"
"Okay . . ." Jaime said, uncertain. He couldn't see where Shari was going with this.
"The interesting thing about that process was the film. You look at it, and you see nothing like the original subject. Not like a traditional photographic negative, where you could see the subject's image in reverse."
"Right," Tamas said, nodding. "You see only smears and blurs and rings."
"Say you cut off one corner of the piece of film," Shari said. "Does the holographic image of Aunt Matilda suddenly lose a head or an arm? No! The entire image is still intact . . . maybe with a little less resolution, a little less crispness and clarity. So you cut some more off, you cut the film in half. Matilda is still there, all of her, but fuzzy, with detail lost.
"Do you see?" Shari continued. "In that one piece of film, information allowing reconstruction of the entire image exists everywhere on the film's surface. You could snip the tiniest piece from one corner of the film, shine your laser through it, and still get the complete image of Aunt Matilda, though it might be too blurry and lacking in detail for you to see her very well."
"Except for the fact that I don't have a Great Aunt Matilda," Jaime told her, "I'm following you. But what does all of this have to do with—"
"With Bolo memory." She nodded. "I was just getting to that. Now I won't go into how psychotronic memory works. In fact, humans have used various systems over the years for the storage and transmission of data, and the actual physical process isn't important. But you can picture a Bolo's memory like that square of film with the holograph of Aunt Matilda. It is a whole, with the information uniformly dispersed across the entire memory field."
"Right!" Tamas said. "Chop a piece out of it, somehow, and the Bolo doesn't suddenly forget what it had for breakfast yesterday. No, it still remembers everything, though maybe the detail, the resolution, isn't quite what it was before. You cannot selectively destroy pieces of a Bolo's memory."
Jaime mulled this over for a moment. "Then how do you explain Hector's behavior? He acts like he has some kind of selective amnesia. He doesn't remember anything important . . . like who or what he is, or what happened on Cloud. I can't be sure, but sometimes I get the impression that he is remembering, but then just as quickly he's forgotten again. Whatever it was, it's gone."
"That's quite possible, you know," Alita put in. "It sounds like a data shunt."
"What's that?"
"She's right," Shari said.
She scratched absently beneath her left breast. "I was thinking along those lines myself." She hesitated, as though trying to think how best to explain it. "Once Hector calls up a particular memory . . . let's say it's the result of one of his autodiagnostics."
"Yeah. That's a good one."
"Okay. He runs the diagnostic. He gets the result. All sorts of things are wrong."
"Yeah, starting with a big fat hole in his side."
"Right. The data is routed first to his storage memory, where its incorporated into the whole, then routed up to his working memory, what you might call his conscious mind."
"Working memory. That's different from the holographic memory you were talking about?"
"It is holographic. It's also part of the Bolo's overall memory system. But it is different, yes, a subset of the Bolo's memory, where it deals with the here and now, where it makes plans and interacts with its environment and does all the other things that an intelligent and self-aware creature does when it thinks. My guess is that the information passing from storage memory to working memory is being intercepted, somehow."
"Physically intercepted, you mean," Wal said. "You're saying there's some kind of clucker device buried inside Hector? Something that monitors the data coming through to his working memory and maybe reshuffles it?"
"Has to be," Alita said. "They wouldn't have been able to reprogram him from scratch."
"Why not?" Wal wanted to know.
"Clucker programming languages and protocols aren't the same as ours, obviously," Tamas pointed out. "Their machines can't possibly talk to our machines, unless they use some sort of a go-between, a translator."
"They must have learned something about how our computers work," Jaime said, "or they couldn't have programmed the translator."
"There was the Empyrion," Wal reminded them. "She had computers, including psychotronic stuff. And she had people who knew how to program them."
Empyrion was one of the transports that had brought the original colonists to Cloud, two hundred T-years before. Refitted as an exploration vessel, the ship had been engaged in a long-range survey of local space, an outlying region of the galaxy's Western Arm . . . what Terran astronomers once had called the Sagittarian Arm from its location in the night skies of old Earth. Almost fifty T-standard years before, Empyrion's captain had reported picking up some odd E-M transmissions emanating from the direction of the Galactic Core and announced his intention of finding the source. Those transmissions were indecipherable but almost certainly a product of intelligence; contact with a hitherto unknown species was anticipated with some excitement.
But Empyrion had vanished, never to be heard from again. And the Masters, when they appeared, had entered Cloudan space from the direction of the Galactic Core.
"I think we can make a good guess about how this, this clucker device was placed inside Hector," Jaime said.
"The hole in his side," Alita said. "We still don't know how the enemy burned that into him, do we?"
"Their meteor strike took out the whole damned city," Wal pointed out. "Melting through a meter or so of duralloy wouldn't be a problem for them. Hector's battle screens would have been tougher to crack."
"They had Empyrion's battle screens as a model," Tamas pointed out. "They probably used a phase-shift cycler to get through the screens, then something like a fusion torch to melt through the armor. The question is what they put inside Hector, to scramble his circuits."
"We could go inside and find out," Jaime said.
"Eh?" Wal looked puzzled. "What's that?"
"I said we could go inside. Through the crater. It's big enough for someone my size to pass easily."
"Interesting thought. Then what?"
"We find out what they did to him, and fix it."
"It won't be that easy," Alita told him. "It's possible that there could still be spare parts on board. Ever since the Mark XXIX, Bolos have included an internal logistics/maintenance capability. But the cluckers might've stripped him of his spares. And even if they didn't, we don't have contra-gravity cranes or fusion forges, no duralloy slab rollers, no casting molds." She held up her hands, turning them palm-up, then palm-down. "We have nothing at all but these."
"And this," Jaime said, pointing to his head. "Hands and brains. That's all humans have ever had, really, all the way back to the Ice Age that spawned us. All the rest are incidentals."
"If we can find the mechanism that's affected Hector's operation," Shari said, "we should be able to initiate a reboot. Bring him back on line . . . all the way."
"Also, there's one tool we do have access to," Wal pointed out. "It. If ever there was a time . . ."
"Yeah," Jaime said, nodding slowly. It was never named aloud, just in case.
"Won't help with reprogramming Bolos," Alita added, "but it'll sure take care of any surprises the cluckers have planted inside him."
"I think," Jaime continued, thoughtful, "that it's time I went and talked with the general."
The ship was happy.
Well, to be precise—and all cognizant !°!°! were always precise—it wasn't the entire ship that was "happy," an emotional state possible only for fifth-level cognitives and above. The unit designated DAV728-24389, however, which was currently serving as primary activator of fortress/ship/factory MON924 Series 76, would have been ecstatic had its response parameter controls not been restricted, and even with the restrictions in place it couldn't help feeling an almost organic tickle of excitement, satisfaction, and pride.
According to the foldspace message just received, the Ninth Awareness Itself was arriving within 1.85 x 1014 nanoseconds to acknowledge DAV728's victory over the organics, at which time DAV would receive his fifth brain.
The !°!°! did not think in abstract terms such as "great honor" or "accomplishment," and in fact the addition of a fifth brain to DAV's current processor array was only logical and expected, given his success in this campaign. Nor was the abstract term "worthiness" a factor. All !°!°! were "worthy," at least insofar as all machines approved by inspectors for release from the natal assemblers performed to design specifications. Success, after all, was expected.
But on purely statistical grounds, it was definitely the case that stochastic chance had favored DAV by a significant margin, even allowing for the usual plus-or-minus due to the effects of chaos. If all !°!°! were worthy, a remarkably tiny percentage of the whole followed that slender and convoluted five-dimensional pathway of placement and action in space and time that could result in such distinguished success as his.
The ship's broad-spectrum sensors fed their input directly to DAV's first brain, allowing, when he willed it, an all-round panorama of space, including the local planet and its two satellites and, beyond, the encircling, frosty banks of stars, thick and turbulent this close in to the Galactic Core. Vast clouds of dark matter, gas and dust, obscured the center of the galaxy in the optical bands, but the simmering glow of radio emissions and the sparkling, sharper urgency of X-ray and gamma sources let DAV pick out the landmarks of home. From fifteen thousand light years away, it sensed the gush of antimatter, the annihilation of matter equivalent to tens of suns every few million nanoseconds.
It sensed the tragedy there, the tragedy of the !°!°!, without feeling anything like emotion. The !°!°! did not feel, not in the organic sense of the word.
DAV728—the list of alphanumerics were only an approximate translation of the string of modulated whistles, pops and !s comprising the unit's designator—acquired the data feed beacons of the !°!°! fleet and logged onto the primary command web. Approach clearance requested and granted, the fortress/ship/ factory hurtled past outlying pickets and scouts, dropping deeper into the planet's gravity well, angling toward the innermost and larger of the two attendant natural satellites.
DAV decelerated as it guided the ship in for a landing on the moon, called "Delamar" by the organics. All human centers on the body had been occupied and long since converted to !°!°! purposes. On Delamar's primary, a world the locals inexplicably called "Cloud," the surviving population had been allowed to live, though some tens of thousands had been sequestered in special compounds as useful labor, spare parts, and of course, for research into their place within the Prime Code. Here on the inner satellite, however, there'd been no point in maintaining the oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere and temperatures that humans required for continued metabolism. The atmosphere had been released to the vacuum of space and the surviving life forms on Delamar had simply ceased functioning . . . the term, it had learned recently, was "died."
As the immense fortress/ship/factory gentled in on humming contra-gravs at the largest of the Delamar habitats, DAV could sense the surrounding Community of machines, a gentle pulse and flickering of information exchanged on numerous tight-beamed E-M frequencies, from long, cool radio waves to the actinic stab of high-frequency gamma rays. Though only a small fraction of the transmitted information was directed at it, DAV could extend electronic senses and sample the ocean of data engulfing it, a comfortable and familiar environment that demonstrated a rightness to the universe.
As organics moved and lived within a sea of atmosphere, the !°!°! had their being in a sea of constantly shifting information. Coded challenges, download requests, and replies, the electronic equivalents of friendly greetings and hi-how-are-yous, chattered between ship and base. A small army of floaters appeared, rising from hatchways in the habitat and drifting silently toward the docking facility. DAV gave a series of whistling, chirping orders to its system support complex, then began disconnecting itself from the ship. Seconds later, its broad-spectrum, wide-angle view of the universe clicked off, replaced an instant later by the narrower, more claustrophobic confines of a Series 52.
Snug in its new body, DAV swung down from the recess in the ship's internal structure where the elongated, smoothly sculpted form had rested for the duration of the mission, slid into an exit well, and emerged above the surface of Delamar. Other machines similar to DAV passed on their way to service the MON fortress-ship, Series 50s and 47s and one other 52. DAV sensed the throbbing electronic web that connected them all. The !°!°! were not a totally communal intelligence or hive mind, like several that had been annihilated within the past few millennia; individual units retained individuality of thought, purpose, and action. Still, the awareness of information flow and data exchange was an important sense for the !°!°!, a sense as important as taste or magnetics were for the extinct Ka'Juur, or hearing seemed to be for these humans.
DAV entered the complex, passing through a low corridor littered with lifeless human bodies. The corpses had been allowed to lie where they'd fallen. Small-unit harvesters had already picked over the remains for useful spares, but most organic parts didn't hold up well to hard vacuum, and there'd been little recovered deemed useful.
Unfortunate, DAV thought with a flicker of passing interest and something that might almost have been regret, that the organics' brains had not been harvested before the complex of buildings had been opened to vacuum. The only living organics captured here were those who had been able to scramble into protective suits, a scant eighty-three out of the hundreds of organics inhabiting this population center alone. Inefficient. The Prime Code demanded that use be found for all recovered raw materials, and organic brains showed great promise as series add-ons and upgrades. It was distinctly possible that that was what the human organics were good for within the Prime Code's schema . . . but so much more research was necessary to learn how the organic brains functioned, and why they functioned as they did.
Perhaps, DAV thought, with its new elevation to five-brain status, it would be able to hasten the Prime Code's assimilation and learning process. The !°!°! would need every advantage in the coming struggle with the Grakaan of Dargurauth.
Yes, DAV728 decided, the thought racing back and forth between all four of its brains, there were going to be a number of necessary changes once it received its promotion . . . .
Jaime hesitated outside the shack, then rapped sharply on the sheet tin beside the doorless frame. "Enter," a heavy voice said from within, and Jaime ducked to go in. Dieter, who'd accompanied Jaime on this visit, took up a nonchalant pose nearby where he could watch the comings and goings of floater eyes and possible snitches among the camp's inmates.
The senior-ranking military officer in the Camp was sprawled on a pile of rags, his back against a support post. Once, an eternity before, before The Killing, General Edgar Spratly had been lean and trim and hard, a recruiting poster of a man with eyes like chips of anthracite set deep beneath bushy brows. After almost a standard year at the Celeste Camp, however, it was as though he'd shrunken inside, and his skin sagged and hung on his heavy frame like a suit too big for its owner, and his one remaining eye had been dulled and softened by the endless horrors he'd seen.
A half dozen other men watched from the darkness encircling the room . . . young survivor officers whom Spratly had assigned as his personal staff. As far as Jaime could tell, though, his staff did little but serve as Spratly's personal retinue of yes-men and ego-boosters.
"General? It's good of you to see me."
Spratly grunted. "Pull up some floor."
Jaime sank gratefully to a bare patch of ground. He was tired from the day's labors and still feeling the effects of the long night preceding them.
"We may have a chance at Valhalla," Jaime said without preamble.
Spratly's eyes widened slightly, but he didn't answer immediately. Instead, he glanced at the walls of his dark shed in silent warning. Careful what you say.
Jaime glanced around the inside of the shanty. The general claimed to prefer this tiny, outlying building, which he called "HQ," to the communal claustrophobia of the ex-factory, which he shared with the members of his staff. There was less chance of being overheard, he said, though Jaime wondered how secure the clapboard-and-sheet-tin building really was. Still, it was possible to assign miraculous powers to the alien machines . . . and in so doing paralyze yourself with fears of what they might know or do.
Dieter was convinced that the cluckers didn't really care what their human slaves did, so long as they followed orders. It was as though they were convinced that they had nothing to fear from creatures so obviously as helpless and as insignificant as humans.
Well, Jaime thought, that could be an advantage for the humans as well. Overconfidence on the part of the enemy could be as great an ally as an operational Bolo.
"Would you rather talk outside?" Jaime asked.
Spratly glanced at his chief of staff, a wiry former captain, named Pogue. The man shrugged slightly.
"S'probably all right," Spratly said. "There haven't been any machines sniffing around HQ for a long time. But . . . keep your voice down."
"Of course . . . sir." The honorific came with difficulty to Jaime's lips. It was hard to see the general today, as he was now, and feel the same whipsnap of command he'd possessed as Jaime's commanding officer, back when the CDF had been in existence and military protocol still meant something. For a time, shortly after the lost Battle of Chryse, Spratly had maintained his rigid, military bearing, holding roll calls for military personnel, continuing to wear his uniform, even going so far as to organize an escape committee.
None of that had lasted beyond the first month or so. The roll calls had been pointless, especially since the staggered labor schedules meant some of the ex-military slaves were gone no matter when a meeting was held, and eventually they were abandoned. Depilatories had given out, and every man in the camp now sported the same shaggy growth of beard. Spratly's uniform, like most everyone else's, had eventually succumbed to the constant wet and heat, and he made do now with cut-off shorts or a breechcloth or sometimes nothing at all.
Worse, the escape committee had fallen apart when one of the members, Dewar Sykes, had turned, becoming a camp trusty, a turner. Spratly had been lucky. All he'd lost had been an eye, and Wal Prescott, his second-in-command, had lost an eye and a hand. Half of the other members had been harvested completely, not just trimmed, and in the long months of dying since that time, few had dared raise the subject of escape again.
"So you think you have a handle on that damned traitor machine?" Spratly asked.
Traitor. Jaime knew that General Spratly had never fully trusted the colony's Bolo, and he viewed the terrible ease with which it had ceased operations at Chryse to be proof that it had sided with the machine invaders, an act of deliberate and calculated treachery.
"Our . . . friend is pretty sick," Jaime said. "But I've found someone in the camp who might be able to help."
"That monster is no friend . . . !"
"Valhalla will have no hope of success without him, General. If we can . . . make him feel better, we have a chance."
Operation Valhalla was the plan the freshly captured troops of the First Armored had cobbled together during their very first week in the camp, a few days after Chryse. They'd still been thinking of the invaders as organic creatures, beings who used machines to wage their wars. The startling reality, that the Invaders were machines pursuing some kind of twisted parody of Darwinian evolution, had not yet sunk in. The plan had called for slipping a technical team out of the camp, trekking overland north to the Chryse battlefield where Hector lay disabled, reactivating him, and using his considerable firepower, the firepower of a planetary siege unit, to . . . what?
Escape from the camp, certainly, but then? Some of the conspirators had claimed that a reactivated Hector could kick the invaders clean off the planet. General Spratly, and others, had pointed out that if the invaders had been able to take down a Mark XXXIII Bolo with such remarkable ease once, they would be able to do it again a second time.
A few days later, Hector had rumbled ponderously out of the north and taken his position atop Overlook Hill, a position he had not abandoned in nearly a year. Humans who tried to approach him or move past the hill were killed. Somehow, the invaders had suborned him. And Operation Valhalla, named for the place where fallen warriors feasted in the Norse afterlife, had been dropped.
"I can't say that I'm pleased at the prospect," Spratly said after a long silence. He scratched at his belly thoughtfully, where an angry red rash was spreading across his hairy skin. "He is a machine, after all. Like them."
"Exactly. He is a machine, which makes him more trustworthy—if we can find out what they did to him and correct it—than any human." Pointedly, Jaime stared at Captain Pogue, then at the other staff officers. There was no reason to suspect that any of the men were camp informers. Jaime was simply reminding the general that men placed in such stressful conditions were capable of anything. Extreme situations did extreme things to people, and to their minds. "I'm going to need it, though, to carry this thing off."
Spratly's face worked unpleasantly. "For what?"
Jaime didn't answer right away, considering his response carefully. If there were listening devices planted in the hut . . . or hovering just outside with sensitive electronic ears, the !°!°! might learn enough about what the two human slaves were talking about to intervene. They couldn't risk losing it.
A sharp whistle sounded from outside, Dieter's warning. The whistle meant a floater was moving into the area. It was time to end the interview, at least for now.
"I don't really know, General," he said, answering Spratly's last question as honestly as he could. "We need more information. Some of us will try to get that, tonight. To learn how to apply . . . it to best advantage."
"You'll have to convince me that resurrecting that damned, traitorous collection of spare parts is going to get us somewhere," Spratly said. "I don't trust that machine. I don't trust any of 'em."
Jaime hesitated at the door. "I understand, sir. Still, we're going to have to trust sometime, or we might as well plan on spending the rest of our lives, what's left of 'em, right here in the mud."
He stepped outside, then, into the dazzling sunshine of the late afternoon.