Shari Barstowe remained a few paces behind Jaime as they approached the looming Bolo. They'd left the Camp shortly after the evening meal, sneaking out through the sewage ditch and making their laborious way up the eastern slope of Overlook Hill, moving slowly, always on the alert for !°!°! machines or sensors.
Now, at last, nearly an hour later, they stood once more on the small, sharp-edged ridge of bones, fifty meters from the huge, metallic beast. She shuddered. She still hadn't adjusted, quite, to the unexpected reprieve. For a moment, she considered shoving past Jaime and into the Bolo's killing ground, deliberately challenging the monster and calling down a swift and painless death.
But . . . no. Quite apart from the fact that she didn't want to risk killing Jaime as well, she found, almost to her surprise, that she wanted to live again.
"Halt," the Bolo said in human, yet disturbingly uninflected, tones. AP weapons ports snickered open, the muzzles tracking them in the darkness. "Identify yourself."
"Major Jaime Graham and Technician Barstowe, First Armored Assault Brigade, Cloud Defense Force," Graham said.
"Present code authorization."
"Authorization Code Tango three-three-seven Victor Delta niner. Maintenance."
"This unit is not scheduled for standard maintenance."
"Override Security Alpha, Code Delta Echo One-one."
"Advance, Major Graham and Technician Barstowe."
"Is its challenge speech always the same?" she asked Jaime as they stepped off the bones and began walking across the blasted, open hilltop toward the machine.
"Always." Gravel crunched beneath their sore, bare feet. "You know, before the invasion, talking to Hector was like talking to another person. Now, hell, my calculator had more personality, back when I had a calculator."
"It sounds as though its working memory has been constricted, somehow," she said. "The base holomem settings may need to be reentered."
"Where would you do that?"
"From the main computer access terminal. That's inside Hector's control room."
"Huh. Old Hector isn't about to let us go in there. Not like this, anyway."
They stood directly in front of the Bolo now, looking up at the smooth, back-slanting slope of its front armor, what Jaime called its "glacis." The rounded forward turret with its stubby, ominous-looking Hellbore mount was just visible protruding above the top of the cliff, some eighty feet above the ground.
"Hello, Hector," Jaime called. There was no reply, nothing to hear at all save the whistling of the night wind across cold metal.
"Let me try," she said.
"Be my guest."
"Hector," Shari called. "Your unit has won some prestigious battle honors over the years. I wonder if you can recite them for me?"
There was a sound . . . not words, but a kind of far-off creak, like the moving of a rusty door, and then a rapid series of clicks. This was followed by a tiny, high-pitched electronic squeal, rapidly cut off. She wondered if the great, metal beast was in pain.
"You are a Mark XXXIII Bolo," she said, pressing ahead, "last and greatest of the Dinochrome Brigade. Your name is Hector. Do you remember your unit? Do you remember your adopted unit?"
Again, a series of clicks echoed from the interior of the dark machine, clicks that increased in frequency and pitch until they whined like a rusty hinge. They ended with a single, loud pop, echoing hollowly.
"What the hell is that?" Jaime wanted to know. He sounded worried.
"Relays closing," Shari replied. "He's trying to answer, but it's not getting through."
"It sounds like something's broken in there."
"Damn, a monitor and a data feed jack would be real useful right now," Shari said. She felt frustrated, and helpless. "I'd give just about anything to know what Hector was thinking right now."
I stop, clearing my circuits, resetting all switches to zero, and try again. Each time I reach for the required information within my main storage banks and begin to assemble a reply, there is a brief span, several milliseconds of lucidity, and then the information fades once more beneath the shifting, blurring surface of my memory.
Two organics stand 5.3 meters in front of the leading edge of my glacis. I have to struggle to retain even the word they use to describe themselves: humans. They are . . . alien, somehow, organic life forms utterly unlike myself, and yet I can't help but feel an odd, inexplicable pull, something akin to camaraderie, as one of the beings, the one identifying itself as Technician Barstowe, calls out to me.
"Bolo! What is your unit?"
My . . . unit?
The information is there, in my main storage, it is there. Bolo HCT of the Line, Mark XXXIII, 6th Mobile Starstrike Regiment, the Indomitables, on special deployment with the Third Terran Colonizing Fleet and the 1st Armored Assault Brigade at Cloud, Western Arm, 212th Sagittarian Sector . . .
And with that information comes a flood of other data, memories long hidden, or deliberately suppressed by . . . by . . .
I can feel the Interloper moving to cut me off from the inflow of data, can feel it deleting material from my working memory. I attempt to create and store a backup, but the Intruder is already there, a virus reading each character string and changing it almost as soon as I pass it on to the storage subdirectory.
I can feel my memories being rewritten, edited as I view them.
But, however briefly, I can live those memories again, and I feel a surge of emotion. I first achieved full consciousness at the Durandel Bolo Assembly Plant, on Luna, Lot 5, Series A Number 28373. The 6th Mobile Starstrike was commissioned as a regiment of twenty-four Mark XXXIII Bolos on Earth, on 26 June, A.E. 1477. We served together in the campaigns on Marxis, Carragula, and Jorgenson's Worlds, and helped lift the Siege of Proxima. I was deployed independently to Aldo Cerise, and when the Melconians' Khalesh allies assaulted nearby Grauve, I took part in the stand that broke the Khal Dependency. At the Third Battle of Sardunar, I held off superior Melconian forces, including a triplet of heavy battlers then entering orbit, allowing elements of the 5th Terran Marines and the 12th Proximan Infantry to complete their evacuation of the planet. For that action, during which I was damaged seriously enough to necessitate my salvage and rotation back to Earth, I was awarded the Triple Star of Valor.
Though I was fully repaired, by that time it was determined that Melconian advances in military technology had rendered me obsolete, and I was relegated to reserve status on Mars. There, I was assigned to the Third Terran Colonizing Fleet as the heavy mechanized element of the 1st Armored Assault Brigade, a key component of the highly classified Operation Diaspora. On Cloud, I participated in the fighting with both the Vovoin and the Kajuur, as well as the fratricidal engagement known now as the Outreach War.
In all, I served with the 1st Armored for 204 T-standard years, before the arrival of the !°!°!. I was at Chryse when the Enemy attacked and was engaged against numerous units inbound from orbit when . . . when . . .
I feel the icy hand of the Intruder closing on my memories, on my very thoughts. It has been 1.382 second since Technician Barstowe asked me what my unit was, eliciting this flood of information. I speculate that the Intruder, whatever it is, requires approximately .9 second to detect cyberneural traces that it has been programmed to watch for and subvert or delete them.
Even as I lose the fleeting, ragged substance of those memories, I can hear myself—a different part of my self centered with my voice control network—replying to the question. "I remember no unit."
"Yes you do, Hector!" the other human, Major Graham, calls out. I detect strong levels of stress in his voice and deduce with 76% certainty that he is frustrated about some matter that is currently beyond his control. "You won the Triple Star for Valor at Sardunar! It's welded right there to your glacis! You must have done something to deserve that award! What was it? The information is in your primary banks!"
"Negative," I hear the detached portion of my awareness reply. "I have no record of a battle at . . . of a battle at . . ."
Strange. Major Graham named the battle only an instant ago, but the memory of that name, the very shape of it, has been snatched from me. Obviously, something is very seriously wrong with my psychotronic systems, and this is cause for considerable alarm. I am aware, of course, of the concern many humans have that psychotronic systems such as Bolos might suffer malfunction and enter a state similar to human insanity. I have discounted such possibilities until now, but the bizarre workings of my mind at the moment are enough to give me pause.
Have I, as humans would say, gone crazy?
"Okay," Jaime said. He rubbed his beard. "What've we got? About a one-second delay?"
"I can't tell without a computer link," Shari replied, "but that's a pretty close guess."
"But I thought psychotronic AIs were designed with built-in delays. To make them more human."
"Well, yeah. That's true. Humans find it unnerving when a machine answers a question immediately, without even seeming to think about it. What they forget, of course, is that an electronic intelligence is a lot faster than an electrochemical one like ours. A second, a tenth of a second, is a long, long time to a Bolo."
"So how can you tell there's a delay?"
"Call it intuition. That's a hell of a note, isn't it? Psychotronics depends on precision and measurement, like all science. And all I can do is rely on female intuition."
"Male intuition too," Jaime admitted. "Each time I've been up here, it seems to me like Hector takes his time answering my questions. There's none of that usual snap, that 'Affirmative, my commander' stuff you usually hear from these things."
"So something is intercepting the primary data flow, and either blocking it or altering it on the way to working memory. The only thing that could slow down a Bolo's processing cycle at all would be something, another computer, physically astride the primary data bus. My bet is that Hector is remembering when we ask him things, but forgetting them again within a second or so."
"Can we get around that with software? Or are we going to have to rewire him?"
She looked at him in the half darkness, one eyebrow perfectly arched. "My, you are ambitious, aren't you?"
"If you have any alternatives, I'd be glad to hear them. You're the expert on Bolo AIs, remember. I'm just a mud-footed grunt."
"Hardly that." She thought for a moment. The Bolo, a duralloy cliff looming above them, seemed to consider them in glacial silence. "Well, the only way to restore full operation would be to actually go in, find the primary data bus, and physically remove whatever is affecting him. That won't be easy."
"But not impossible. If the intruder got in, I'm betting it was through that hole melted in Hector's side. If the intruder got in, so can we."
"I doubt we could rip it off with our bare hands."
"There are . . . other possibilities."
"Well, there is a software fix we can try in the meantime. It won't solve Hector's problem, but it'll make sure he knows what we're doing when the time comes."
"Good." Jaime grinned. "Frankly, I'm not sure what those codes Alita gave me cover. I don't know how intimate we can get with Hector without calling down an AP shot. I do know that Hector's not going to take kindly to us stumbling around inside him."
"Well, at the very least maybe we'll be able to talk to him about it when the time comes." Turning away from Jaime, she looked up at the black cliff. "Bolo!" she called out. "Code sequence Alpha three-one! Initiate ongoing primary data copy to new file. Source, workmem, filename 'Rising,' access code . . . 'Graham Barstowe.' Execute!"
Somewhere in the depths of the steel mountain, relays began to close . . . .
Code sequence Alpha 3-1 is an instruction reserved for software engineers and AI technicians testing Bolo psychotronic relays and main memory, a routine procedure during maintenance checks and precombat service checks to confirm proper memory management and basic psychotronic integrity. Though it is unusual to be initiating this procedure outside of a Bolo maintenance depot, and even more unusual to be working by voice rather than via direct data link, the request must be accepted.
Accordingly, I open a new file inside my working memory and name it "Rising." As data comes into working memory from main storage, I automatically copy each packet and store it in Rising. Information begins to accumulate within the file almost immediately, I am a Bolo, Mark XXXIII Mod HCT of the Dinochrome Brigade, and my human companions call me Hector. I entered service on 26 June, A.E. 1477 with the 6th Mobile Starstrike Regiment, the Indomitables, on special deployment with the 1st Armored Assault Brigade at Cloud, Eastern Arm, 212th Sagittarian Sector . . .
I recognize that File Rising will swiftly grow to unmanageable proportions unless provisions are made to recopy the data to main memory. Working memory, after all, represents only .0001 percent of my total available storage capacity, and copying all incoming data to those stacks will soon render working memory useless.
The tactic, however, is successful, as the "I" residing within working memory watches information about myself, about my identity fading away again beneath the silent touch of the Intruder, while it remains intact in File Rising.
I remember . . . and I continue to remember . . . .
Wal Prescott sat with his back against the wall of the scrap-wood and pressboard hut and scratched with one-handed viciousness at the rash spreading across the inside of his thighs. He missed civilization. More than decent food, more than clothing, more than almost anything else except freedom itself, he missed civilization, a human condition that he was having more and more trouble recapturing in his memories . . . but one which above all else he associated with being clean.
The worst health problems in the camp, so far, were pneumonia, malnutrition, and simple overwork; routine prophylactic conditioning—antibodies administered to the population of Cloud in their drinking water back in preinvasion days—had so far kept such ancient scourges as typhoid and dysentery at bay. Other health problems, though, long forgotten by civilized cultures, were making a comeback in the camp with its warm, wet, filthy conditions, including lice, fleas, and half a hundred different fungal conditions all lumped together under the common heading of "the creeping crud." Somehow, like cockroaches, rats, and the other vermin that had followed mankind to the stars, those ancient parasitic afflictions had survived being transplanted from Terra and the ancient colony worlds, continuing to exist in numbers too small to be noticed, kept in check by the sanitation and medical prophylaxis taken for granted by civilized beings.
But civilization on Cloud had been destroyed, reduced to a scrabbling hand-to-mouth existence without the sanitary luxuries long taken for granted, and the afflictions were returning now, like the plagues of Egypt, each contributing in its own small way to the misery of existence in the Camp.
Can we possibly hope to win? he wondered. With that goddamned big Bolo on our side again, we could probably break out of here, but then what? How long could we remain free?
He looked at the others gathered in the half-darkness of the hut. The small building, located in a clutter of similar makeshift structures west of the factory, was one of several used occasionally by former members of the CDF for their meetings. Of the six men living here, four were now at the dig, while two more, Sergeant Jack Haley and Corporal Peter Zhou, had been admitted to the growing conspiracy. At the moment, Jack was on guard outside, while Peter lay on his rag pile next to Wal. Alita sat on the other side of the single, dirt-floored room, fiddling with the torn-off hem of the ragged T-shirt she was wearing. The psychotronics expert, Shari, sat next to her, head back, eyes closed; she might have been asleep. Well, no wonder, after being up on the hill with Jaime and the Bolo most of the night. Her next work shift was going to be hell, though. The Masters took a dim view of slaves who fell asleep on their hands and knees in the pits. It was an invitation to the harvesters.
The other members of the budding conspiracy present so far included Dieter Hollinsworth, Tamas Reuter, and Lieutenant Lewis Moxley, formerly of the Chryse communications division. The meeting had been called by Jaime, who wanted to discuss Valhalla with all of them before their next work shift.
There was a knock, bare knuckles on rotting wood, and Jack's voice sounded from outside. "Go on in, Major. They're waiting."
The rags serving as a door were pushed aside, and Jaime Graham ducked into the room. "Any luck?" Wal asked him.
Jaime found a bare spot on the floor next to Shari and sank onto it. "No. Pogue wouldn't even let me in to see him. I don't think Spratly's going to budge on this, Wal."
"Told ya."
"We might have to . . . do it ourselves." Wal considered a moment before he replied. "Jaime, I understand what you're saying. But think about it. First, what you're suggesting could be construed as mutiny. Second, have you given any thought to the possibility that the man could be right?"
Jaime looked at Wal through half-closed eyes for a long moment. "As I see it, Colonel," he said, finally, "we go for this, and go for it now, while we have a clear shot. Or we decide that this is how we want to live out the rest of our lives." He looked around the tiny, scrap-wood room. "And how long do you think that's going to be, anyway?"
"What," Alita said quietly, "is the absolute worst that could happen? We try to reprogram Hector, we fail, and he cuts us all down with AP flechettes. Don't know about the rest of you guys, but that option's looking better and better, lately."
"No," Dieter said. "The worst is that they round us up and take us away for vivisection. Some of us have been trying to avoid that particular career path, you know."
"Then we'll just have to make sure that we die fighting," Jaime said. "I don't care what happens to me after I'm dead. I'll be damned if I'm going to let them take me alive."
"Brave words, Major," Corporal Zhou said. "The people they take don't seem to have much choice, though."
"Well, damn it," Tamas said, "what's the difference? If they don't take us now, while we're trying to do something about it, they'll take us later. I say we take a chance, before we're too weak from malnutrition and exhaustion to do anything but scream!"
"All true," Lewis Moxley said. "But . . . but we've got to have it, don't we? We don't stand a chance without it. And if the general won't give it to us—"
"We'll have to take it, that's all," Jaime said.
Lewis looked shocked. "But the colonel's right! That would be mutiny!"
"That," Shari said, her eyes still closed, "will be the least of our worries!"
"But we still have to consider it," Wal pointed out. "The order and discipline that we received through our military training has been what's kept us alive so far."
"Who do you think you're fooling, Colonel?" Alita asked. "Maybe one in ten of the people in this camp are . . . were military when the Masters came. What do we have left of military discipline today? Okay, we organized the barracks and set up latrines and an orderly procedure for chow call, granted. But the CDF ceased to exist when they whacked Chryse. If we have a chance, I say take it. And if the general doesn't want to go along, then let him stay. But I'll be damned if I let his decision not to rock the boat keep me from grabbing my chance at freedom!"
Jack Haley was leaning against the shack just outside the doorway. "I'm with the major and Alita," he said quietly through the curtain. "We fight back with every weapon we have, or we admit we're nothing but spare parts. At least this is a chance for freedom or a clean death, and that's twice as many options as we've got if we stay put!"
Wal looked at each of the military people in turn, measuring them. Moxley—he wasn't much more than a kid, really, twenty-three, maybe twenty-four T-standard years old—was afraid of turning against established authority. Zhou was more fearful of the consequences if Valhalla should fail. The rest, though, two sergeants with a hell of a lot of experience and Major Graham, all wanted to take the chance. The civilians supported them, too.
The problem was that General Spratly just flat out didn't like Bolos, hadn't liked or trusted them even before the invasion, and he sure as hell didn't trust the things now.
And Wal was caught squarely in the middle. Jaime and the others were right when they said that the surviving humans wouldn't last much longer. They couldn't, not under these conditions, even if the Masters didn't decide to harvest every last slave in the camp. But the fact remained that even with it, Valhalla stood little chance of success.
Wal was forced to admit to himself that his big fear wasn't mutiny or overturning the established authority. It was facing the Masters again. When they'd come for him before, dragging him into the convoluted bowels of the machine they called the Harvester, they hadn't used anesthetics. They'd pinned him to a table while lasers had sliced off his hand and delicately removed his eye, and Wal's shrieks had echoed from the cold, metal walls of the machine with none to hear but himself and the unfeeling mechanisms that held him down. He'd healed well enough, but he still had nightmares . . . and the very sight of a floater coming his way could reduce him to trembling, sweating, powerless terror.
No, he couldn't face that again. He couldn't. He would have to side with the general against Jaime, even if he thought that Jaime was right.
The machine with the chirp-whistle-click designator that might have translated as GED9287-8726H Series 95 possessed only three brains—one for things-as-they-are, one for memory, and a third for anticipation—and was incapable of feeling emotion. The third brain did allow for a measure of curiosity, however, and the input it was receiving now was enough to make the machine quite curious indeed.
GED9287 currently occupied a spacecraft body in low orbit over Cloud and had been tasked with a routine infrared check on several of the camps holding living organics on the planet. The surveillance was routine enough, an ongoing survey in IR wavelengths that allowed the Higher Awarenesses to track overall association and movement patterns among the captive organics.
In infrared, the assembly facility designated Camp 84 showed as a cool mosaic of greens and blues, with pale rectangles marking out the jumble of huts and shacks the organics had erected for protection from the elements. The organics themselves resolved as brighter yellow and orange shapes; from nearly two hundred kilometers up, GED's optics could just distinguish foreshortened legs and arms on the organics' bodies as they moved around the camp, worked in the nearby pits, or sprawled in their huts in their mysterious between-shifts phases of unconsciousness. Not even the pressboard slabs covering the huts, or the roof of the ruined factory itself, could block the IR emissions.
What had captured GED's curiosity was an unexpected anomaly in organic gathering patterns. At that moment, there were 3287 individual organic heat sources in the cold, water-sodden pits southeast of Camp 84 and they, as always, were huddled together in tight-knit groups. Another 2993 organics were in the Camp, most sprawled on the ground in their unconscious phase.
There was one group, however, that broke the pattern. West of the factory, nine individual heat sources were crowded together inside a single small hut. Nowhere else within the camp was there such a concentration.
While the organic species that called itself human was known to gather for many purposes, including meals, recreation, and the dissemination of news, they tended to keep to themselves when possible, erecting separate huts or dividing up the interior of the factory or the structure they used for waste elimination with wooden slabs as they sought something they referred to as "privacy." This gathering seemed atypical . . . and was, therefore, worthy of note.
GED took a half second more to scan the hill west of the camp; the huge, warm mountain of the captured human war machine remained in place, unmoving. There were no anomalous heat sources on the hill at the moment. Several other orbiting Masters had detected organics on that hillside outside the walls of the camp, and all IR scans were tasked with checking for escaped humans. The suicide of a few organics, more or less, was of no particular concern to the !°!°!, particularly when most were individuals too broken in will to be useful to the Prime Code, but the number of slaves who made that trip and killed themselves had been growing lately, and it might soon be necessary to shut off that particular means of culling the herd.
The captured machine was alone for the moment. That group of nine humans, though, would have to be investigated.
GED9287 opened the channel to the Primary Web.