Bolo Rising

Chapter Two

Jaime heard the slave’s shriek of rage and frustration and terror in the darkness at the top of the hill, and he heard the ringing chink as the Bolo triggered a round from one of its lateral A-P batteries, chopping off the screamed challenge as abruptly as if flicking off a switch.

He wondered who the man had been, wondered if he’d known him.

Jaime let fifteen minutes pass before he rose from his hiding place behind a tumbled-down building and started moving carefully up the hill. Generally, the Masters didn’t even investigate when Hector killed another straying slave, but sometimes they did, and he didn’t want to stumble into enemy sensor range.

Getting out of the camp was simple, an open secret long ago passed to everyone by word of mouth. The latrines that served the sanitary needs of the slave camp were crude affairs, benches with holes cut into an open platform raised above a creek that flowed along the camp’s western boundaries. At the southwest corner of the camp, the stream flowed through a ditch beneath the power fence; escape was as simple as scrambling into the ditch behind the latrine platform and wading downstream, crawling through the noisome muck to clear the powerfield, then clambering to dry land again above the point where the stream oozed into Celeste Harbor. During the past year, some hundreds of men and women had slipped out that way, some to take the Hector Option, others to attempt an escape into the wilds.

Had any of the escapees ever survived the armies of machines, the fields thickly planted with sensors and alarms, the hordes of ground-scuttling clickers and hovering floater eyes known to be patrolling the area around Celeste? There was no way of knowing, since any escapees who were captured were harvested. Sometimes, the clackers would display some of the gruesomely harvested parts the next morning. Other times, there was no word, and the slaves remaining in the barracks and the pits allowed themselves to hope that there might actually be the possibility of escape.

But the Hector Option was so much surer an escape from the unrelenting pain. Few would risk vivisection simply to taste a few hours’ freedom. And few imagined that those who escaped could remain free for long.

As near as he could tell, there’d been no response from the machines. Below him, a few slaves were moving about among the shanties and tents outside the ruined factory, and to the southeast, the dig was filled with the late-night shift of slaves, continuing to enlarge the pits. Beyond, the flooded crater shone huge and oval and silver in the moonlight. Jaime could see machines moving along the crater’s edge, tiny black specks silhouetted against the light as they went about their business. The Collector bulked huge by the crater lake, sinister and black.

Nothing was moving nearby, however. On Overlook Hill, at least, Jaime had the night to himself.

Quietly, he began climbing again. The southeastern slope of Overlook Hill had once been a residential area of neat, terraced parks and the single-home dwellings of some of Celeste’s well-to-do. Every structure had been razed by the blast, but the ground was well above the water table and out of the reach of the tidal wave that had inundated the collapsing waterfront and public square. Large blocks of ferrocrete, the crumbled remains of some of the arcology towers from the center of town, littered the hillside like a giant child’s cast-off building blocks, leaving terrain that was difficult to traverse but ideal as cover.

Toward the top of the hill, the rubble began thinning out; the crest of Overlook Hill had once been a park, but the impact blast had swept the crown bare of trees, grass, monuments, even paving stones. Shortly after the slave camp had been installed in the wreckage of the old factory, however, the Masters had brought in Hector, the huge and battlescarred Mark XXXIII Bolo captured in the fight for Celeste. The Bolo, ignominiously, was now a kind of huge and vastly overqualified prison guard, posted on the hilltop overlooking the camp and blocking the main road out. South of the slave camp was the harbor and the slave-worked ruins between the waterfront and the crater. East and north were more ruins, endless kilometers of them, occupied by uncounted thousands of scavenging alien machines and by the machines’ constructs, bizarre and inexplicable shapes and structures seemingly grown from the city rubble. There was no escape in that direction.

Overlook Hill, to the west of the camp, offered the only real hope of escape, the more so because buildings and the Coastal Highway to the northwest had been in the shadow of Overlook Hill when the meteor fell. The slaves, more than once in the past year, had discussed the best way to get clear of Celeste and the occupying army of machines; an escape overland northwest was clearly the best option.

The only thing in the way was the Bolo.

Jaime reached the edge of the larger rubble just below the crest of the hill, lying on his belly as he studied the crouching machine. By the light of Delamar in the east, he could just make out the massive, hulking sprawl of the thing, a long, flat body supported by six sets of double tracks, three to a side. Each road wheel was better than two meters tall, and the slabs of meter-thick duralloy armor sloped and angled above the monster’s skirts like the faceted cliff sides of a small mountain.

The Bolo Mark XXXIII, series HCT Hecate, was the largest and most powerful ground weapon ever constructed by humankind. It massed 32,000 tons, as much as a fair-sized star cruiser, and its primary armament was more in keeping with spaceborne naval forces than with ground armor—three squat turrets, each as big as a house, each mounting a 200cm Hellbore, a weapon better suited for battleships and combat in the wide reaches of deep space than for any planetary surface. Rows of ball turrets along both flanks, twenty in all, mounted 20cm Hellbore infinite repeaters—weapons that, back in the era of the Mark XIV Bolo, would each have been considered primary weapons in their own right. Tertiary support weapons included a VLS missile system, a battery of 240cm howitzers, and 40cm BL mortars incorporated into a true planetary siege platform. Its designers had been confident that Bolo Hecate was easily the most powerful military ground weapon in the galaxy.

They’d been wrong, of course. Hector, as the CDF had nicknamed the machine, had gone into battle against the clacker landing boats hours after the destruction of Celeste and had ceased operations only minutes later. The enemy had taken Hector out with terrifying ease. More terrifying still had been the ease with which they’d circumvented the Bolo’s programming, turning it from a human weapon into one of their mindless, mechanical creatures, an automaton hooked into the Master’s planet-girdling, cybernetic web. Hector was back in service now, but he was working for the enemy. Humans who approached too closely, or who tried to escape past the Bolo, were chopped down by hypervelocity antipersonnel flechettes.

Clearly, the clackers could have reduced Hector to scrap if they’d wanted. Was there another clue here to the enemy’s weakness? Jaime wondered. That monster on the hilltop represented 32,000 tons of duralloy, ceramplast laminates, and other high-tech materials, including refined metals ranging from steel to appreciable amounts of technetium, praseodymium, and ytterbium. Simply by junking that one Bolo, captured during the Battle of Celeste, the enemy could have won far more purified metals and other materials than they could ever hope to salvage by slave labor from the muck and rubble of the city.

Was it possible that they recognized the Bolo as kin, as a fellow AI machine? Did they have rules about killing other sentient machines? Could they be affected by sentiment, or was it something more practical than that?

That hardly seemed likely, but Jaime was determined to find out.

The Bolo was a good hundred meters from the edge of the rubble field; Jaime knew from experience that he would be challenged at fifty meters . . . or if he tried to move past the Bolo and on toward the northwest. Walking in what he hoped was a casual fashion, empty hands in clear view, he started for the monster.

With each step, the Bolo loomed larger, a smooth-surfaced, artificial mountain, all angles, curves, and duralloy teardrops. The Mark XXXIII’s stats, long ago committed to memory, simply could not do justice to the sheer monstrous bulk of the thing. One-hundred-twenty meters long, thirty-eight meters wide, with three massive main-armament turrets rising from a main deck twenty-five meters above the ground, the Bolo was more like a huge, squat, elongated building—hell, like an armed and armored town—than a fighting vehicle. Thirty-two thousand tons. It was outmassed by heavy cruisers, battleships, and naval transports, but as a mobile weapons platform, well, nothing else on land even came close.

Damn. How had the clackers taken down a Mark XXXIII so easily?

He reached the Line, a perimeter fifty meters from the Bolo’s hull made all too visible by the stains and bones of past visitors to this place. There was a small ridge here, formed from piled-up bones and decayed flesh, an artificial ridge marking the line, sharp and crisp on the side facing the Bolo and splashed out in a thinning slope downhill. What was left after someone took the Hector Option wasn’t worth salvaging by clackers, and the parts were left to rot where they fell. The stench of death was thick and throat-catching here. The hot taste of fresh, coppery blood overlaid and mingled with the sweeter musk of older decay.

The most recent addition to the hillock of bones lay a few meters to Jaime’s right. The suicide’s bare legs and hips lay steaming on the cool ground, bloody at the top but almost intact, but everything from the navel up was simply gone, smeared into a fresh, bloody spray down the eastern side of Overlook Hill. There wasn’t much that was recognizable; Jaime did see a disembodied right hand nearby, the fingers still locked clawlike around a branch from a long-dead tree.

Novel approach, he thought wryly. Attacking a Bolo with a club.

The Bolo Hecate’s primary AP weapons were lateral banks of mag-driven railguns, each firing a cluster of needle-slender, steel-jacketed slivers of depleted uranium with a muzzle velocity in excess of three kilometers per second. Five hundred needle-darts, shotgunned into a human target at that velocity left very little behind that was recognizably human.

"Halt," the Bolo said as Jaime reached the line, its voice a rich, pleasing tenor with the distinct overtones and inflections of human speech. "Identify yourself."

He heard the whir of servo motors as the snouts of a half dozen AP weapons tracked his movement, heard the rising whine of superconductor coils powering up to max. The slightest of electronic twitches from the behemoth squatting above him on the hilltop, Jaime knew, and his remains would be splashed across the slope at his back in a brutally unrecognizable smear.

"Major Jaime Graham, First Armored Assault Brigade, Cloud Defense Force," he announced in as clear a voice as he could muster.

"Present code authorization."

"Authorization Code Tango," he replied. He tried to keep the quaver out of his voice. "Three-three-seven Victor Delta niner. Maintenance."

"This unit is not scheduled for standard maintenance," the Bolo said. The words were stiff, and a bit formal. As human as the voice might sound, there was no mistaking the AI, the machine mind behind the words.

"Override Security Alpha," Jaime recited. Alita had drilled him in the protocol repeatedly ever since he’d first dared approach the beast. She’d been Hector’s crew chief, part of the team that had kept him running. "Code Delta Echo One-one."

"Advance, Major Graham."

Jaime stepped past that blood-traced perimeter, conscious that the AP railguns continued to track him as he walked. Carefully, unwilling to make any sudden or surprising moves, he made his way to the Bolo’s prow, close enough that the glacis sloped up and away from him like an eighty-foot cliff.

"I’ve come to talk," Jaime told the Bolo.

There was no reply, though he had the impression that the machine was studying him closely. That fact by itself was interesting. A Mark XXXIII possessed a fully autonomous psychotronic AI and hyper-heuristic programming; ever since the introduction of the Mark XXIV, Bolos had begun developing personalities of their own that, at times, could seem strikingly, eerily human.

This was the third time that Jaime had made this trip up the hill, and each time he’d come away with the distinct impression that Hector was shackled somehow, limited in his thoughts, hampered in the way he expressed himself. It was a little like talking to a child, and a stubborn and not-too-bright child at that. The Masters were responsible, clearly. But what had they done to the Bolo’s artificial intelligence, and how?

Maybe he should allow Alita to come up here and see what she could learn. She’d volunteered after his first visit, but he’d put her off, and eventually he’d had to order her to stay clear. If he was caught up here, he knew of a way to trigger a burst from a flechette gun, and he would be just another suicide. If Alita were caught with Hector, though, the results could be catastrophic. It was possible that the enemy knew that she had once worked with Bolos. If the machines made the logical conclusion, that a Bolo tech was trying to reprogram their pet Bolo, they might well kill every human left alive on the planet.

He was beginning to wonder, though, if getting her up here to talk to Hector wouldn’t be worth even that risk. He was getting nowhere, and he was running out of ideas.

"Do you remember me coming up here before?" he asked at last.

"Yes." Just that one word, without elaboration. Mark XXXIIIs could be downright chatty at times, and they could certainly carry their end of a conversation with animation enough that humans communicating with them by audio only might never guess they were speaking with an artificial intelligence. This one had once had the reputation of being almost philosophical at times, with a love of metaphor that could be almost poetic.

Now, though, Hector was no more communicative than a Mark XIX, the last mark before the breakthrough in psychotronics that had led to self-aware, self-volitional Bolos. Jaime had never worked directly with Bolos in his military career, but he’d learned a thing or two about them. Bolos, after all, were the last word in ground combat.

At least, they had been until humanity had encountered the !*!*!.

"Do you remember the battle with the clackers . . . with the Masters?"

There was an uncomfortable pause, and Jaime had the distinct feeling that the machine was working at something, thinking it over . . . or possibly struggling to remember. There was no outward sign of struggle, but that pause . . .

"Negative," it said at last.

"Do you remember any battles?" Hector’s battle logs were impressive. Since he’d rolled off the Bolo Plant assembly lines at Durandel almost three centuries ago, Bolo Hecate of the Line Number 28373 had participated in twenty-nine major battles and some hundreds of skirmishes, police actions, and deployments. "Do you remember the Stand at Grauve?"

"Negative."

"Third Sardunar?" Hector had won the Triple Star of Valor for that one, shortly before he’d been shipped to Cloud with the First Armored. The decoration was still there, atop many others, welded to the Honors Ring on his glacis.

"Negative. I have no record of having participated in any combat."

Helplessly, Jaime shook his head. What the machines had done to the human population of Cloud was horrific, enslaving and murdering them on a planetary scale. What they’d done to Hector was horrific on an individual level; somehow, they’d managed to steal the Bolo’s very soul, if he had one. Instead of cleanly killing him, they’d robbed him of himself, robbed him of who and what he was.

Well, in a sense, that was what they’d done to the human population as well.

"Hector, run a full diagnostic on yourself, please. Level One. Check your holographic memory and all heuristic acquisition functions, please."

Again, that long hesitation. A Level One diagnostic took something like a third of a second. Unless there was something seriously wrong, the answer should have come back in an instant.

"Diagnostic complete. All operations and systems are nominal."

"Like hell they are." Rising, he walked around to the right side of the Bolo. High overhead, perhaps eight meters off the ground, the dark gray cliff of armor was pocked by a hole, a crater over two meters across just above the right forward track assembly. Something had melted its way through a meter of solid duralloy, penetrating battle screens and armor alike with equal ease.

What had the weapon been? What had it done to him?

"Hector, there is a large hole in your armor above your Number Three road wheel. Please run a local diagnostic and describe the damage."

The pause was even longer this time, long enough for Jaime to walk back around to the other side.

"Diagnostic complete. All operations and systems are nominal."

Something, clearly, was interfering with either Hector’s autodiagnostics or his memory . . . or both. Jaime was up against a wall, as he’d been on each of his earlier visits. Talking to the Bolo was an exercise in highly circularized hypermobility, a great way to get nowhere fast.

There was a whir and a clatter of motion from the Bolo’s left-side antipersonnel batteries. The blunt, ugly railgun muzzles pivoted, seeking a target in the near-darkness.

"What is it?" Jaime asked the machine.

"Target approaching from the east," the Bolo replied. "Bearing zero-nine-eight, range one hundred twelve meters."

Jaime moved to a point where he could see back down the eastern slope of the hill. He could make out the slave camp and, further south, the dig, the crater, and the sprawl of the ruined city, but he couldn’t see anything that might have triggered the Bolo’s threat warnings.

"Are you sure? I don’t see a thing."

"Affirmative. Bearing zero-nine-seven, range one hundred eight meters, and closing."

The target must be just behind the nearest piles of rubble, down below the crest of the hill. It was dark and he could see nothing but the vague shapes of shattered houses, but the Bolo, he knew, could draw on senses extending far beyond merely human scope and reach.

"Is it a machine?" He moved closer to the Bolo, hoping that his silhouette was lost against the dark mass of the big machine. If the !*!*! found him here, he could not rely on Hector to protect him. Quite the contrary, in fact. It was distinctly possible that Hector’s new masters could order him to squash the human slave crouching in his shadow like a small and insignificant insect.

"Negative. The target is human."

Human! That might mean another suicide, someone coming up to take the Hector Option. It could also be a turner, maybe one who’d seen him slipping out of camp or scrambling out of the sewage trench and who’d decided to follow him. Turners were rewarded by their Masters for such diligence, with better food, dry clothing, and even their choice of bedmates, male or female, from among the slave population.

At least a human opponent would offer surmountable odds. Jaime had no illusions about how a wrestling match with a clacker would end, especially with him as weak as he was now.

"Range eighty-nine meters."

He saw him . . . no, her. It was a woman, tall, slender. Her face, body, and long hair were mud-smeared. She wore more than most of the slaves did nowadays, a ragged pair of cutoffs; there was no silver band on her forehead, though. She was no trusty.

A slave, then, come to find a quick and relatively painless ending to the pain. She kept coming up the slope, stumbling, weaving a little as she walked. She faltered when she reached the bloody, sharp-edged ridge delineating the fifty-meter line. Then she squared her shoulders and kept on coming.

"Halt," the Bolo said, and the word was so sudden that Jaime started at the sound. "Identify yourself."

She kept coming, one bare foot stepping across the ridge of bones and decaying flesh. Jaime heard the power-up whine of the railguns.

"No!" he shouted suddenly, stepping out of the shadows beneath the Bolo. "Weapon release countermanded!"

"What is your authorization?"

Authorization? All he had was the maintenance code Alita had given him, a code to allow humans to approach the monster and live. He prayed he could make it work. "Authorization Code Tango, three-three-seven Victor Delta niner! Maintenance!"

"This unit is not scheduled for standard maintenance," the Bolo said.

"Override Security Alpha, Code Delta Echo One-one."

"Identify yourself," the Bolo repeated.

The woman was standing just inside the fifty-meter line, her face pale as she looked from Bolo to human and back again.

"C’mon!" Jaime called to her. "Tell him your name!"

"Sh-Shari Barstowe," she said, with a voice that cracked halfway through.

"Are you with the maintenance team?" the Bolo asked.

When the woman didn’t answer, Jaime called to her again. "Tell him yes!"

"Y-yes. I am."

"Advance, Technician Barstowe."

The woman was swaying a little on her feet, too dazed to respond. With a quick glance back at Hector, and the array of flechette launchers still aimed at Shari, Jaime sprinted across the open ground, catching her just before she collapsed where she stood. Gently, he helped her cross the last fifty meters to the Bolo’s side and sat her down, her back against the hard duralloy of one of the titanic road wheels.

"I thought . . . I was dead."

"You damned near were. What the hell were you trying to do here?"

"What do you think?" she shot back. "I’ve taken all I’m going to take. Hector here was going to be my ticket out." Her eyes widened. "My God! How did we, how did you get in this—"

"Easy. Hector is a friend of mine. You just have to know how to talk to him."

"Some friend. You’ve, you’ve ruined everything."

"I thought I just saved your life."

"You don’t understand," she said, opening her eyes. "I want to die. . . ."

"I’m sorry. I know how you feel, Miss Barstowe. Believe me, I know! But I couldn’t just stand by and watch Hector blow you away."

"I just . . . I just don’t know if I can steel myself to try again. It took days to work up . . . the courage."

"Not a problem. Killing yourself doesn’t take nearly as much courage as deciding to keep on living."

"Who . . . who are you? Are you free? No, wait. I’ve seen you in the camp."

"Jaime Graham," he said. "Block Seven, Group Thirty-one."

She nodded. "I’m Block Four, Group Twenty-five."

"Over on the other side of the barracks." Jaime wasn’t sure how many slaves there were now, in all. New ones were brought in occasionally as they were rounded up outside the devastation that was Celeste, and those in the camp tended to die at an appalling rate. The best estimates, though, held that there were between five and seven thousand people crowded into the slave camp . . . far too many for any one person to have gotten to know individually, or even to have seen them all. Still, Shari’s face was familiar, and he was sure he’d crossed paths with her before, possibly at the chow line, possibly in the dig.

"So what are you doing out here?"

"Like I said, talking to my friend, here."

Her eyes widened. "You were with the Bolo Corps! Before The Killing!"

He shook his head. "No. I wish I had been. It would make understanding this big guy a lot easier."

"Oh. You didn’t know Captain Fowler, then."

"Captain Fowler?"

"Jeff Fowler? He was the Bolo’s human counterpart. The commander."

"Someone you knew?"

She shrugged, a small, lost movement of her shoulders. "Jeff and I were . . . lovers. I wasn’t military," she added quickly, answering his immediate question. "I was a civilian, a cyberneticist, working at Chryse."

"A cyberjock! On the Bolo staff?"

She nodded.

"So you know how his AI works."

"Well, after a fashion. Don’t get excited, though. I don’t know how the clackers got control of Hector, and I don’t know what they’ve done to him since." She turned slightly, looking up at the mountain of black metal above her. "I don’t even know if the clackers . . . made him one of themselves, somehow."

"They’re not listening in on us right now, if that’s what you mean," Jaime told her. "I’ve been up here several times before, and while I haven’t gotten very far with my conversations with Hector, he’s never called for the guards to come get me. I think they just set him up here, wound him up, and let him go. Maybe they get periodic updates, I don’t know. But we’re safe enough for the moment."

"Safe . . ." She shuddered.

"Alien concept. I know." He studied her narrowly. Her hair, he thought, was blond, though it was hard to tell through the dried, caked-on mud. Her eyes had a dull and listless look . . . but there was a spark of keen intelligence there, a life that existence in the slave camp had not entirely extinguished. "You don’t really want to kill yourself."

She looked at him, one eyebrow arched. "Don’t I? What gives you such dazzling insight? You don’t even know me."

"I know that if you had to work so hard to get your courage up, then you must’ve been having second thoughts, plenty of ’em. Like me."

"You?"

"First time I came up here, oh, must’ve been six weeks ago, or so, I came for the same reason you did. To take the Hector Option."

"What happened?"

He pursed his lips, then pointed. "I stood on that heap of bones, right over there, for ten, maybe fifteen minutes, trying to work up my courage to step across, and all the time wondering when some damned floater was going come up behind me, throw out a tentacle, and drag me down for a quick vivisection. I thought about all the people who’d come up here before me and left nothing behind but bones and some stains on the ground. Mostly, I guess I thought about the Bolo. His challenge was so . . . I don’t know. So flat. Lifeless. Not at all like he was before The Killing."

"You did know Hector then, before . . ."

"Oh, yes. I was CO of Second Battalion, First Armored Division. I didn’t work with the Bolo Corps directly that much, but I was based at Chryse, and I got to talk with Hector a couple of times." He smiled gently. "I probably met your Captain Fowler, though I don’t remember the name now. Good bunch of people. Anyway, I stood there on the bone hill and thought that if I could find out how the machines had changed Hector, how they’d rewired him or whatever, maybe I could figure out how to fix him."

"Yes? Then what?"

"Beats the hell out of me. I sic him on the cluckers, I guess. After that, well, maybe they send in their landers again, or they drop more rocks on us . . . but I figure that’s better than what’s happening to us now, dying by centimeters. Or maybe we kick their circuits the hell off of Cloud, and we start rebuilding. All I know is that anything that happened would be better than what we have now."

Shari was nodding slowly, thoughtfully. "I don’t know if you have a chance of fixing whatever they did to him. It has to be a hardwired job, not software."

"I was thinking the same thing. One of the people in my block, back at the camp, was Hector’s maintenance crew chief."

Shari’s eyebrows went up. "A short woman? Dark hair? Muscles like—"

"Alita Kyle."

"That’s her!"

"Sometimes I think Alita knows more about the nuts and bolts of a Mark XXXIII than the guys who designed the thing."

"She’s good. I worked with her on some upgrades to his infinite repeaters, oh, about a year before The Killing."

"You know, Miss Barstowe," he went on, "it occurs to me that we’re assembling quite a useful Bolo operations team here. A bunch of us are former military officers, and we know combat tactics and theory. Me. Colonel Prescott. And General Spratly, of course. You know him?"

"I know he’s the nominal commanding officer of the camp, whatever that means. I never met him personally when he was at Chryse, though."

"Hmm. And then there’s Dieter Hollinsworth. His specialty is high-energy physics. Tamas Reuter. He was an astronomer, but he also knows math . . . and computer theory. And now . . . you, if you’ll join us. We could sure use a cyberneticist. Otherwise, we’re shooting in the dark when it comes to figuring out what’s wrong with Hector."

"I . . . don’t know."

"Don’t know if you can? Or don’t know if you want to?"

"I don’t know . . . if I can keep going on. Things’ve been . . . bad, lately."

"Well, there’s always tomorrow."

"What do you mean?"

"Work with us, and you’ve got hope," he told her. "Something to hang on to, anyway. And if it gets to be too much, if the hope isn’t enough . . ."

"I can come back up here. Tomorrow."

"Will you join our little cabal? Help us out?"

She took a long time to answer. "I’ll . . . try," she said at last.

"Maybe we should get on back, then," he said. "I don’t think the cluckers make rounds up here. At least I’ve never seen them. But we don’t want to be caught inside Hector’s fifty-meter perimeter."

She sighed. "Another swim through the sewer."

"Believe me," he told her. "You can put up with lots worse."

"I already have."

Together, they started back down the hill.