Bolo Rising

Chapter One

The stars were . . . astonishing.

Crouched in the mud-floored pit occupying what had once been Celeste’s public square, Jaime Graham lifted his eyes to the eastern sky, beyond the ragged, flash-melted stubble marking the former site of Roland Towers. The dig was almost completely lost in darkness now, save for the gold-white gleams of work lights and various species of hovering clacker. Despite the glare of lights from the nearest floaters, the starclouds of Sagittarius filled the night sky with wonder and ice-glittering beauty.

Strange, he thought, that such beauty could have masked such unspeakable death and horror.

Even so, it seemed sometimes as though the sight of the stars was all that kept him sane, a way to lift him, however briefly, out of the living nightmare from which he and the other survivors could never wake.

"You’d better get back to work, Jaime," a cracked and dry-throated voice whispered at his side. "If the trusties don’t see you, the clackers for damned sure will."

"As long as I keep moving, Wal," he replied, his own voice sounding just as ragged in his own ears. He glanced at his companion. Wal—formerly Colonel Waldon Josep Prescott of the Cloud Defense Forces—knelt in the mud by Jaime’s side, a nylon bag strapped to the red-scarred stump of his left forearm, as he scratched through the muck with his right hand. His body, what could be seen of it through its glistening coat of slime and clay, was shockingly emaciated, the ribs showing like curved bars through taut, mud-encrusted skin, while both his hair and beard were matted and unkempt.

Jaime didn’t need to see his own mud-coated body to know that he didn’t look much better. Wal, though, was fifteen years older than Jaime and hadn’t been in as good physical condition a year ago when the !*!*! had appeared in Cloud’s skies. Both his left hand and his right eye had been harvested some months back, and the brutality of the past year had ground him down to a shadow of his former self. Jaime doubted that the colonel would be able to survive much longer.

As for himself, well, all of his body parts were intact so far, but there was no way of telling how long that condition would last. The worst of it for him was the debilitation brought on by constant work, unrelenting stress, and chronic malnutrition.

A faint, warbling hum warned of the approach of a floater eye, and reluctantly, he tore his eyes from the sky and made himself look busy. When he sensed the spy hovering close beside him, he looked up but kept digging.

Softball-sized and steel-gray in color, the floater hovered on internal contra-gravs that set his bare skin to prickling with the local buildup of a static charge. On the sphere’s equator, a single, disturbingly human eye stared down at him from within a precisely crafted hollow on the floater’s surface, unwinking, glistening in its trickling bath of nutrient solution, the iris a pale blue in color.

He wondered whose eye it was. Not Wal’s, certainly, whose remaining eye was brown. Besides, speculation among those slaves with medical training and knowledge held that parts harvested from humans wouldn’t survive more than a few weeks before they started to die, though there was no proof of that.

After a few tense moments, with Jaime continuing to feel through the mud, the warble increased in pitch and the floater eye drifted away. There were hundreds of the things adrift above the dig, constantly watching the slaves and presumably relaying what they saw to the Masters.

Keep working. Have to keep working. . . .

Not for the first time, he considered the Hector Option. It would be quick, almost easy . . . and without the agony of vivisection if the Masters came for him. Others had taken the Hector Option, lots of them . . . with more and more attempting it each week.

Not yet. There has to be a way. . . .

His hands slid an ooze of slick mud aside, and he reeled back on his haunches as a fetid stench broke the surface. "Uh oh," he said. "We got one here."

Wal moved closer, reaching in to help. The foul death-stink grew sharper, sweeter, and more eye-watering as they exposed the body, or what was left of it, lying in the wet muck next to a toppled, squared-off pillar from a shattered building.

After almost a T-standard year in the flooded grounds behind Celeste’s waterfront, the body had been reduced to little more than a skeleton, with wet-paper skin still molded to the face and some of the longer, flatter bones, and colorless hair still clinging to the skull. It lay on its back, skull turned to one side, the fingers of the right hand crammed between gaping jaws, as though in a deliberate and desperate attempt to stifle a dying scream. From the length of the remaining hair, and the rags of cloth still clinging to the ribcage, Jaime guessed that it had been a woman. Only the top half of her body was accessible; the spool-train of her lower vertebrae vanished beneath the fallen pillar, and her pelvis and legs were hidden somewhere beneath the multiton block of stone.

No matter. Her organic parts could no longer be harvested in any case, and there was plenty of pure metal here, within easy reach. A gold ring encrusted with tiny gems still encircled the fourth finger of her left hand, a fingerwatch the fifth. A black-stained necklace of flattened chain links that might be gold but were probably gold-plate circled her neck. A pin of some kind, an ornament of some heavy, silvery metal worked into a lozenge shape centered by an exquisite, emerald-cut heliodore, lay on her ribs above what had been her left breast. Stardrop pendants next to the skull had probably been earrings.

Working swiftly, he plucked each article of jewelry from the bones and transferred them all to Wal’s bag. The necklace clasp had corroded into an unworkable lump of oxide, so he had to work the skull free from the vertebrae to get at it. With the skull free in his hand, he checked the teeth for gold or gemstones. Gold dental fillings were a curiosity of the remote Dark Ages, of course, a medico-historical footnote, but some Cloudwellers had affected gold or silver teeth as cosmetic statements. This nameless woman, though, still had all of her original teeth, and no body prosthetics. There were some tiny catches and hooks here and there, however, that might have been part of her clothing. Each of these was carefully rescued from the muck and placed in the bag.

And through it all, Jaime carefully ignored the stink, ignored the emotions welling up in his throat as he stripped the skeleton of every scrap of metal he could find, and somehow buried the very thought of what he was doing far beneath the reach of his conscious mind. He knew from long experience that it simply didn’t pay to dwell too much on what the Masters forced him to do each day.

"That’s it," he said at last, the thing done. He wiped at his beard and mouth with the back of his arm, then pointed. "Let’s move up that way."

They continued their sweep of the plaza, moving past the toppled pillar, inching along on hands and knees, feeling through the mud for any recyclable materials—pure metals, especially, but also gemstones, plastics, and even shards of ceramic or glass. The !*!*! used it all, forcing their human slaves to salvage every scrap. Around Jaime and Wal, filling the entire, stadium-sized pit, thousands of other ragged, filthy, half-starved, half-naked humans, slowly widened the dig, exploring for the bits and scraps of their own shattered technology with bare and mud-caked hands.

Life had become a nearly unendurable nightmare, an unending torture turned monotonous by the routine of slave labor that went on for day after day, punctuated all too frequently by moments of intense terror each time the Harvesters appeared. According to the calendar they’d been scratching out on one wall of the barracks, they’d been here for just under a T-standard year.

Had it only been a year? Existence now was a damned good recreation of an eternity in Hell, lacking, perhaps, in fire and brimstone, but more than adequate in the pain.

His probing fingers found a crumpled wad of metal, the surface so corroded he couldn’t even tell what it was . . . an appliance of some sort, he thought, maybe half of a power defroster, or possibly a piece of a hand sterilizer. He worked it free and passed it to Wal; the relic filled the nylon bag, so Wal struggled to his feet and started off across the dig, to the brooding presence of the Collector squatting in the midst of the slave-filled pit.

Jaime kept working. To stop was to die, and while death was welcome, most of the slaves preferred to wait and endure, knowing that there were far better ways to end this hell than to submit to the hot blades and microlasers of the Harvesters.

Has it really been only a year?

One year ago, Celeste had been the largest, the grandest of human cities on the blue and temperate world of Cloud, a white and sweeping growth of crystal-shining arcologies and polished, needle-slim skypiercers rising along the blue curve of Celeste Harbor and the nearby coastlines of the Tamarynth Sea. The city’s population had numbered something just over one hundred thousand, and the population of the planet as a whole had been nearly ten million.

Cloud—named for the Sagittarian starclouds so prominent in the night skies of the northern hemisphere’s spring and summer—had been colonized some two centuries ago by people fleeing the horrors and uncertainties of the Melconian Wars. Those pioneers had purchased a dozen large transports and abandoned several of the war-torn worlds near fair, lost Terra, seeking a new homeworld somewhere among the teeming billions of suns swarming in and around the star-thick reaches of the Galactic Core. They’d come from a dozen different worlds, from Destry and Lockhaven and Aldo Cerise, from New Devonshire and Alphacent and from Terra herself. They’d come with a single goal uniting them, the dream of a world where they could put down roots, raise crops and families, and in general get on with life . . . in peace.

While the founders of Cloud had certainly included pacifists among their number, they’d not allowed pacifistic principles to blind them to the dangers of colonizing a world some tens of thousands of light years beyond human space; they’d brought both a military force and a Mark XXXIII Bolo along as protection against the Unknown.

Unfortunately, the Unknown had found them, and the Unknown had been so unimaginably powerful that even the latest in Bolo technology and six-megatons-per-second firepower had not stood a chance. Celeste had been flattened by a rock dropped from space, the towers toppled, the arcologies vaporized in a searing instant of ferrocrete-melting heat, the towers smashed by the crystalsteel-splintering shockwave. A crater a hundred meters across and twenty deep had been blasted into the city’s heart; the shock had been so great that the very foundations of the city had settled, which was why the crater was now a lake, and the city square, inundated by water and mud, had still not drained.

Presumably, the other cities on Cloud all had suffered the same fate, though no one now slaving in these pits knew for sure. Every person in and near Celeste had died in the attacks; the survivors were those who had been outside the city when the high-velocity chunk of nickel-iron had lanced out of a cloudless noon sky. There’d been no warning, no ultimatum, and no chance to coordinate the entire planetary population. The war, such as it was, had been over within a few days of what now was called the Great Killing.

The survivors had been offered amnesty by the Masters, the offer transmitted by Speakers, the strange species of !*!*! floater that could actually communicate in Terran Anglic. The offer had been irresistible: surrender peacefully to the Masters, and they would not incinerate the continent . . . or vivisect the millions of humans already captured. Life, after all, was better than death on a planetary scale.

The Masters’ definition of "life," however, included slave pits, slow starvation, and random harvestings. More and more of the survivors were beginning to think they’d made the wrong choice.

Wal returned, his nylon bag empty. Without a word, he dropped to hand and knees and resumed digging. Everywhere, as far as eye could see, the human slaves continued digging, as a steady stream of individuals lugged bags filled with the detritus of civilization to the Collector, emptied them into the machine’s yawning maw, then trudged back to their assigned places.

Jaime’s fingers touched something slick, and he fished it out, swishing it in the muddy water to clean it. An exquisite china carving lay in his hand . . . a ballerina, en pointe, arms raised, her figure miraculously perfect and unchipped.

Jaime stared at the figure for a long moment . . . until Wal reached across and plucked her from his fingers, dropping her into the bag. He was left wondering how the figurine had survived. The meteor strike and the shockwave that had followed had leveled the entire center of the city, and moments later the ground as far back from the bay as the city square had been inundated by an inrushing wall of water. Buildings had shattered and toppled . . . the ones that hadn’t melted outright. The ballerina must have been blasted from some apartment in one of the city’s arcologies, a knickknack swept from mantelpiece or bureau top and hurled by tornadic winds . . . here. How had it survived?

"Why," Jaime asked aloud, his voice a ragged whisper, "are the Masters so damned concerned about retrieving every scrap of junk?"

"Waste not, want not, they always say," Wal quipped. He smiled, but the expression was no more than a tired showing of dirty teeth.

"There’s more to it than that. They already had their machines pick over the entire surface. They got almost everything, except for scraps. Why do they need us for that?"

"Maybe they don’t like getting their hands dirty."

"Yeah, but, I mean, what difference does it make, one gold ring on a skeletal hand, more or less?" Or one delicate, unbroken china ballerina.

Wal didn’t reply right away, but continued feeling his way through the mud. "You know, Major," he said after a long moment, "one thing you shouldn’t forget, one thing none of us should ever forget, is that these, these machines are not human. They don’t think like us. They don’t feel like us. Hell, we don’t even know whether or not the things are self-aware."

"It’s not enough," Jaime said, "to explain strange behavior just by saying they’re alien."

"Mebee. I guess if the clackers want every last gram of refined metal and plastic and stuff like that recovered, they must have their reasons." The colonel paused, moving his hand in the mud, then plucked a goblet, a drinking glass miraculously intact save for the snapped-off stem and base, from the muck. He put the find in his bag before continuing. "Trouble is, we may never be able to understand those reasons, because they would only make sense to another clacker."

"I just wonder if it’s evidence of something we could use. I mean, if they want something that bad, it suggests weakness. . . ."

"Still thinking about some kind of grand revolution? Up with the humans? Down with machines?"

"Up with the humans!" another voice called softly from close by.

"Easy, lad," Wal said, waving his stump in a placating gesture. "I didn’t mean anything by—"

"No, you’re right!" The speaker was a young man, probably in his late twenties, though judging the age of any of the scarred, muddy, and beaten-down slaves in the Celeste pits was pure guesswork by now. His beard was as long and as ratty looking as Jaime’s own. "We have to work together!"

Jaime’s brow furrowed as he tried to remember the kid’s name. Names were important . . . the last bit of individuality the ragged-scarecrow survivors possessed. Rahni. That was it. Rahni Singh. He’d talked to him more than once in the slave barracks. He claimed to have been a reporter for Cloudnews Network before the Killing, though Jaime suspected that the kid had been padding the truth a little.

"We don’t have to take it, anymore!" Rahni said, rising, dripping, his arms outstretched. "What’s the worst they can do, kill us? No! The worst is if we keep on living like, like animals! Like things to be slaughtered, or picked apart piece by piece!"

"Get down, Rahni," Jaime said quietly. "There are easier ways to die."

Rahni’s voice rose to a quavering shriek. "What can they do to us that they haven’t done already . . . ?"

"For God’s sake!" Wal cried. "Shut up and get back down!"

But it was already too late. Jaime heard them coming, heard the scissoring swish of sliding metal parts, the hum of floaters, the clacketa-clacketa snaps and clickings of oiled and glistening machines drawn by the commotion.

Like ripples spreading from the splash of a rock chucked into a pond, the other slaves nearest Rahni began crowding back, moving away, leaving the standing man at the center of a widening empty space. Wal, too, backed away, and he reached out with his good hand, grabbed Jaime by the arm, and pulled him clear as the machines closed in.

In the lead was a heavy floater, a dark gray, metal construct of smoothly rounded, convex and teardrop-shaped surfaces set round about with the gleaming red lenses of a dozen optical sensors. It rode upright on a humming contra-gravity field, a faceless machine taller than a man and massing at least one hundred fifty kilos.

Behind came three smaller floaters and a stilter, one of the walking clackers, a tripod with blade-edged legs scissoring as they moved with oiled precision. Its lumpy body sported a nest of segmented tentacles . . . and an organic prosthesis as well, a human hand grafted to a shining, jointed arm of blue-gray steel and duralloy.

Rahni spun at the machines’ approach, but only when he saw that upraised, once-human hand did the enormity of what he’d done strike him.

"No!" he shrieked, stumbling backward, arms raised as if to ward off the attack. "No! I . . . I didn’t mean it! I’ll work! I’ll work hard . . . !"

The largest floater advanced. A tiny patch on its side seemed to soften and run like water, and a glittering snake of a tentacle, silver and segmented, whiplashed into the air with a faint snicker of sound.

"I didn’t mean anything by it . . . !"

Jaime pulled free of Wal’s trembling grip and stepped into the floater’s path. "Wait!" he said, raising his voice in challenge. "He just got a little carried away, is all. Let him go back to work!"

"MOVE—ASIDE," the big floater said, its harsh voice grating like the rasp of steel and broken glass.

A Speaker! There weren’t many of them, and it was assumed that they were fairly high up in the Masters’ caste hierarchy.

"Look, you don’t understand!" Jaime called, desperate. "Surely the great !*!*! don’t need to kill him for what he’s done!" He pronounced the alien name carefully, as he’d been taught. "!" was a clucking sound of tongue against molars, made with the lips pulled back in a grimace. "*" was the same sound, but made with the lips pursed for a whistle. The rapid alternation, "!*!*!," was the only name the aliens used for themselves. All of the others, "clackers," "cluckers," even "Masters," had been invented by their human slaves.

The Speaker hesitated, and for a moment Jaime thought it was going to answer him. The answer, when it came, was not in words, however. A lightning bolt, ragged, blue-white and searing, snapped from the tip of one tentacle and brushed along Jaime’s bare left arm. His body spasmed, twisting as crackling fire convulsed him, knocking him down. He hit the mud with a splat as the floater drifted past, its contra-grav field prickling.

Rahni turned and started to run, but his bare feet slipped and squelched in the mud as he splashed for the distant edge of the pit. The big floater accelerated, sprouting two more tentacles as it moved.

One tentacle slithered out, then snapped like a bullwhip, sparkling in the light as it wrapped around Rahni’s wrist and yanked back hard. Rahni’s feet flew out from under him, and he landed flat on his back with a loud splash.

Thrashing wildly, he tugged at the tentacle, as though trying to drag the floater out of the sky. The other floaters closed in, tentacles slithering out to embrace the frantically struggling human. His shriek echoed from the stark, blank walls of the shattered ruins.

Other clackers, including a monstrous three-meter walker on five sliding, blade-edged legs, closed in swiftly from different directions, breaking up the crowd of milling slaves, isolating and surrounding the frantically struggling human.

A trusty was there as well, a fat and oily man named Sykes who’d been, it was rumored, a lawyer before the Great Killing. If so, he’d put his powers of persuasion to good use, convincing the invaders that he was of more use as an intermediary between the slaves and their Masters than he was on his hands and knees in a pit. His appearance set him apart from the other humans—clothing more complete than rags and shreds, a clean-shaven face, a shockstick, and a band of dull silver about his head.

"The rest of you slaves, back to work!" Sykes snapped. He slapped his left palm with the heavy length of his shockstick. "Fun’s over! Get back to work!"

Rahni’s screams continued, fading gradually as the floater dragged him out of the pit, carrying him suspended by a forest of tentacles. They were floating toward the Harvester crouched on the crater rim in the distance. Its great, black maw was already slowly opening to receive this new sacrifice.

Jaime slowly sat up, blinking back hot tears. The stupidity, the sheer waste of it all was sickening. Surely an intelligence as technically advanced as the !*!*! could manufacture eyes, hands, livers, kidneys, and all of the other organs they periodically harvested from their slaves, manufacture them to order, mechanical devices better than mere organics. If machines were so superior to mere organics, what the hell did they need organic body parts for, anyway?

Sykes prodded Jaime’s burning, half-numb arm with his shockstick; mercifully, he didn’t trigger it, but the nudge sent fresh agony rippling up Jaime’s arm and across his shoulders. "Let’s go, you. Back to work, and thank whatever gods you still have left that the Speaker didn’t decide to fry you . . . or worse!"

As Jaime dropped back to hands and knees next to Wal, the colonel shook his head. "Jaime, that had to be one of the stupidest things I have ever seen in my life."

"He didn’t . . . know what . . . he was doin’," Jaime mumbled.

"Not him. You. Standing up to a Master that way! I thought you had better sense!"

"Couldn’t . . . just let them . . . take him. . . ." He was having trouble making his lips and tongue work. The pain was growing worse as the numbness wore off; there was an angry, jagged black stripe on his arm where the flesh had charred, and blisters were forming around it.

"Well, there wasn’t much you could do about it, was there?" Wal retorted. "Hell, there’s not a damned thing any of us can do. Except die, I suppose. C’mon, Major, start working, or they’ll change their minds and harvest you too."

The use of his former rank, and the whipcrack of command in Wal’s voice, dragged Jaime into compliance. The pain in his arm grew worse, but he ignored it, continuing to harvest the shards of humanity’s civilization on Cloud for Cloud’s new Masters.

Time passed, measured only by the slow crawl of the stars across the sky. Eventually, trusties and tripod clackers appeared, cutting out small groups of slaves and shepherding them back to the barracks compound, while fresh slaves were brought in to replace them. Jaime and Wal’s group were led from the pit by Sykes and a dozen other truncheon-wielding humans, who herded them north past the shattered stumps of the Celestial Towers, through the gap in the power fence, and into the hole that was home.

They called it the Barracks, but it was both more and less than that. Before the Killing, there’d been a sprawling manufactory here, a robotic assembly plant housed inside a long, low building the size of a football field. Half of that building had been swept away by the firestorm; what was left, stripped bare by the Invaders and open to the elements, still provided some shelter from weather and mud, at least for some of the survivors. The building wasn’t big enough for all, and makeshift tents and shanties made of sheet metal, canvas, and even cardboard surrounded the old manufactory complex inside the encircling, invisible walls of the power fence. Here, the several thousand slaves surviving in and near Celeste had been gathered to serve the Masters’ glory; here was where they lived when they weren’t in the city, toiling on their hands and knees.

Groaning their exhaustion, the men and women of the incoming shift staggered to their allotted places and collapsed in muddy heaps. The workday was long, eleven or twelve hours, and was followed by about eight hours of downtime before the next stint in the pits. No one was sure of the exact times, of course, since none of the slaves had been allowed to retain fingerwatches or personal comps, and the only means of telling time was by estimations drawn from the movements of suns and stars through the course of Cloud’s long, long thirty-five-hour day. Tamas Reuter, who’d been an astronomer before The Killing, had tried building a water clock for the small community once, calibrating it by the movements of the suns. The trusties had destroyed it before it had been completed, though, with dire warnings about what would happen if the Masters found out . . . as if the Masters didn’t already know everything that the trusties did. Dieter Hollinsworth, once a high-energy physicist at New Aberdeen University, had rigged a sundial on the old factory roof, disguising it as stray bits of wood and stone, but that only worked when the suns were up, when it wasn’t cloudy, and when someone could actually get up there to look at the thing.

Jaime’s assigned place was on the west side of the building, Block Seven. For a long time, he lay on his spot on the floor, trying to marshal his strength and wondering if the effort was even worthwhile. A lonely gong sounded in the darkness, and the men and women crowded into the damp shadows around him began rising to their feet and trudging toward the open end of the factory. Many were naked, save for the accumulated layers of caked-on mud and grime or perhaps a breechclout of dirty rags. Any nudity taboo had long ago vanished; they moved like silent, emaciated, muddy ghosts, each clutching his or her sole possession, a bowl or plate or other container scavenged from the surrounding ruins.

Chowtime.

"C’mon, Jaime," Wal told him, giving him a nudge in the ribs with a bare foot. "Gotta keep your strength up, right?"

Jaime considered the alternative. Lots of slaves had starved to death in the past year; malnutrition was probably the greatest killer there was in the camp, after pneumonia and random harvestings by the Masters. The trouble was, it took so damned long to die that way, and if you became so weak that you couldn’t get up and work, then you were harvested, and that was the one form of death here that no one welcomed.

"Come on, Major," another voice, a woman’s voice, told him in the darkness. "There wasn’t anything you could have done for Rahni."

Like Wal, Senior Tech Sergeant Alita Kyle had been in the CDF before The Killing, a power systems technician, and a good one. He’d known her then; she’d been a crew chief for the Bolo. Back then, of course, she’d been someone Jaime had thought of as an attractive young woman, a potential but never-realized conquest. The social gulf between officers and enlisted personnel in the CDF frowned on such liaisons.

Now, her warm but no-nonsense voice was enough to force notions of suicide-by-starvation from his fuzzy thoughts. Her lean, labor-hardened body roused thoughts not of beauty or sex, but of simple camaraderie and the service they’d once shared, a precious feeling in this place of nightmare. Fumbling in the darkness beneath the scattering of stinking rags that were his bed, he found the cracked, ceramic bowl he called his own, struggled to his feet, and made his way to the chow line.

"Hey, Jaime," another voice called to him as he stepped into the line.

"Hi, Dieter."

Hollinsworth, impossibly scrawny in his mud-plastered nakedness, took his place behind Jaime. He scratched at the unkempt tangle of his beard. "Saw what you tried t’ do out there today, Major. That was . . . brave."

"Stupid, you mean."

Dieter’s teeth showed briefly in his dirty face. "Well, that too. But it’s always nice t’ know someone cares."

Eventually, the line snaked up to one of the big, steel troughs from which the slaves’ meals were served. Each person dipped out their measure as they walked past, usually boiled rice or potato soup or a nameless, sticky gruel. Sometimes there was meat in the stuff.

Many survivors shunned those scraps of meat, for rumor said that it came from harvested humans. Jaime didn’t listen to the rumors, and he didn’t look too closely at the meat. Yeah, tonight’s rations might have a few bits of Rahni Singh mixed in, sure, but he simply closed off his thinking mind and ate it. He’d also eaten cockroaches when he could find them, and rats, and crollygogs, anything he could catch, anything to add protein to his diet, to keep body and mind intact.

He was interested in the rice, however. Rice was a labor-intensive crop both in the planting and the harvesting. Machines didn’t need food, and the rice meant that someone, somewhere on Cloud was still growing it. He found a dry spot outside, against the old factory’s eastern wall, with Dieter and Wal to his left and Alita on his right. They ate with their fingers, saying nothing for a long time. In the east, the looming bulk of Delamar, the larger, inner moon, was slowly crawling into the sky, almost half full, the lighted portion bowed away from the horizon. Delamar was big and it was close, less than fifty thousand kilometers out, and its crater-pocked horns spanned a full ten degrees of sky, the dark side blotting out the shining star-glory beyond. Here and there, diamond pinpoints of light glowed on Delamar’s night side. Once those had been human cities; now, presumably, the Masters ruled there as they ruled Cloud. One story that continued to filter through the camp held fervently that Delamar had not been taken, that those cities were still free, that the remnants of the CDF flew ships from Delamar each night to scoop up a few lucky slaves and carry them off to freedom in the sky.

Most of the former CDF personnel knew better, of course. The clackers would have been foolish to leave human garrisons so close to the newly conquered world. The stories, though, like hope itself, simply would not die.

"There’s got to be a weakness there," he said, speaking very quietly. No one yet knew just how sensitive the hearing of clacker spies was, or how thickly strewn their listening devices might be.

"What weakness?" Alita asked. "Who?"

"The clackers," Wal replied. "He’s been going on about it all day."

"The cluckers have weaknesses, I’m sure," Dieter said. "Don’t see what we can do about it, though."

"We can learn."

A solitary floater eye drifted past, paused, then turned its disturbing, solitary orb on the four of them for a moment. Then it drifted away again, randomly checking other groups of slaves, maintaining that constant, fear-stirring knowledge that the Masters’ eyes and ears and thoughts were everywhere, inescapable, unbeatable.

When her bowl was scraped clean, Alita set it carefully aside. "What weakness?" she asked again.

"Why do they have us sifting through the mud for every last scrap of refined metal? Every shard of broken glass, every piece of plastic? Jewelry stripped from skeletons. Bric-a-brac and smashed kitchen appliances and eating utensils and the plumbing pulled from the bones of burned-out buildings. They cleaned up most of the easy-to-reach stuff, all the big pieces, right after the invasion. Hell, they must have gotten ninety-five percent of everything within a few weeks after they moved in. Why so much effort for that last five percent?"

"They are machines," Dieter reminded him. "They are efficient."

"Efficient? Using half-starved slaves isn’t efficient."

"I told you," Wal reminded him. "We can’t attribute human concepts of need or efficiency to the clackers."

"But it doesn’t make sense. Look, they want every scrap of glass we can find . . . but all they need to do is scoop up sand from Cloud’s beaches, and they could make all the glass they could ever need. Aluminum? Delamar’s regolith is rich in aluminum silicates, easily extracted, easily processed with a simple solar furnace. Ceramics?" He brushed absently at the crust of dried mud on his right forearm. "All they need to do is gather clay, shape it, and bake it. I think the weirdest thing, though, is their craving for iron and steel. Any spacefaring civilization has access to all of the iron ore it could possibly use simply by collecting and processing asteroids."

"Cloud’s suns have three separate planetoid belts," Dieter said, nodding. "You’re right. The cluckers could get all the nickel-iron they wanted by mining the belts. Other stuff, too. Gold. Uranium. Platinum. Just about anything they need, and enough of it to last for centuries. Compared to what they could get cheaply and easily out there, this scavenger hunt in the ruins is nothing."

"Right," Jaime said. "So where are their orbital smelters, their asteroid mining ships, their deep space ore processors?"

"Maybe they’re there," Wal pointed out. "We’re hardly in a position to see their belt activities, are we?"

"No, wait," Alita said. "Dieter put his finger on it. If they had access to belt resources, there’d be absolutely no point to collecting broken glass or gold rings. Why bother with steel clasps from rotted clothing, when one small nickel-iron asteroid will provide you with all the steel you need for the next thousand years or so? It’s stupid."

"If we knew why they act this way," Jaime told the others, "it might give us a weapon."

"Don’t see how," Dieter said.

"Knowledge is always a weapon," Jaime told him. "You just have to learn how to apply it."

"You’re getting at something," Wal suggested.

"Maybe." He scooped up the last of the rice and chewed thoughtfully. "Maybe," he said again after a long pause. "I’m going out to see Hector tonight."

"You think that’s wise, Major?" Alita said. "With Delamar coming up—"

"The clackers can see in the dark," he reminded her. "I’ll be no safer with a moon and the starclouds up than I would be on a pitch-black cloudy night. Sometimes, I think they know . . . and don’t care."

"Enough people go up the hill to take the Hector Option," Wal said. "Yeah, you could be right."

Alita laid one slim hand on Jaime’s arm. "You . . . will come back?"

"I’ll be back," he told her. "I’m not ready to option out yet."

Inside, though, he wasn’t as confident as he sounded. One of these days, he was pretty sure he would take the Hector Option.

It was, everyone agreed, the best, the cleanest ending available in this nightmare of filth, suffering, and death.