Bolo Rising

Chapter Six

I also begin studying the Enemy, which is represented by a bewilderingly diverse array of robotic machines. I have plenty of opportunity to do so. The !*!*! have begun construction on some type of scanner-defensive array here on Overlook Hill, affording me the opportunity of observing several different designs at close range. The "other me" seems content to take their orders, and I wonder what I will do, what I will be able to do, should that other me receive orders to fire on humans.

Jaime went to meet General Spratly at midday, with the suns high overhead and the haze-blurred dome of Delamar resting low in the sky just clear of the eastern horizon. He waited at the general’s hut, leaning against the wood-and-pressboard wall next to the curtained entrance. When Spratly arrived, surrounded by his staff officers, he rose to attention. He didn’t salute, of course; CDF military protocol called for salutes to be rendered and returned only in uniform, and the rags left to the slaves at Celeste were no longer complete enough to play that role.

Spratly and the men with him wore two-toned layers of mud, dark and glistening where it was still wet, pale gray and chalky where it had dried. The general was just returning from his own shift at the dig, and he regarded Jaime, leaning against the wood and pressboard of his hut, with a narrow glance that might have been exhaustion, resignation . . . or suspicion.

"Hello, General."

"What do you want?" Spratly snapped. He looked Jaime up and down, then added, "I heard about the trouble you were in yesterday. I was hoping you’d learned your lesson."

Jaime refused the offer to become entangled in an argument. "I’ve come for it, General. And to find out if you’re with us."

Spratly looked left and right, checking for eavesdroppers. There were neither machines nor trusties in sight. "Inside," he said.

Within the cool shadows of the hut, Spratly slumped onto his sleeping area. "So," he said. "Have you learned how the machines captured the Bolo the first time?"

"No, sir. But we have taken steps to begin recovering Hector’s memory. He should be able to tell us himself soon. And we’ll be able to take appropriate precautions then."

Spratly stared at Jaime for a long moment. He looks scared, Jaime thought. Well, he knows what will happen if this fails.

"I’ve discussed this thoroughly with Colonel Prescott," Spratly said. "He told me he ordered you to forget Valhalla."

"That, sir, is a sentence of death. We must act, before we’re too weak to do so. Before they harvest every last one of us. Before they decide we’re not worth the trouble and exterminate us like insects."

"I can’t think of a more direct provocation," Spratly replied, "a provocation designed to force them to exterminate us all, than what you are proposing. I forbid you to carry this scheme of yours out."

"General, let me get this right. Are you and Colonel Prescott ordering me not to escape?"

"We’re ordering you not to attempt repairing the Bolo."

"Amounts to the same thing. We can’t escape without Hector’s help."

"You can escape. Individuals have made it out of the camp. Some of them must get beyond the machine sentry perimeter. You have those codes that let you get close to the Bolo. They should let you get past it as well."

"Certainly. But then what? I’d be living like an animal, hiding from the machines out in the wilds. And machines tracking me by my body heat. I’d be rounded up for parts in a week. Less, probably."

"And if you fix your precious Bolo, what then?" Spratly retorted. "You smash down the camp fences and we’re all free. For how long? Do you remember the clacker fleet? Their ships filling the skies? The armies of combat machines smashing over every pocket of resistance? If you genuinely want to give yourself up for harvesting, Major, I suggest you do so. But kindly have the courtesy to leave us out of your plans for suicide."

Jaime looked to Spratly’s left, studying one of the uprights that held the shack up, a ramshackle column constructed of patches and layers of scrap wood. Deciding, he brushed past Captain Pogue, grabbed one of the smaller boards, and yanked it off.

Inside was a hollow space, left as a secret cache when the hut was constructed. The space was empty.

Angrily, Jaime turned to face the general. "Where is it?"

"I thought you might try to take it on your own," Spratly said, grinning.

"Damn it, General," Jaime said, advancing on the man. "You have no right to force all of us in this camp to stay slaves!"

Spratly’s hands dropped to his bedding. He rummaged for a second, then produced a bundle of oily rags. Jaime took another step, then froze in place. Spratly opened the rags, pulling forth the sleek, deadly gleam of a military-issue Mark XIV power gun, which he aimed at Jaime’s chest.

"No closer, Major," Spratly rasped. "This thing is set to narrow beam, maximum output. Don’t make me fry you, Jaime. . . ."

It—after all this time of caution, Jaime still had trouble thinking of it as a gun—had been one of a handful of weapons smuggled in by human prisoners when the camp was first under construction. Most of the other weapons had been found and confiscated sooner or later, and their owners instantly harvested. As far as Jaime knew, it was the last power gun still in human hands inside the camp.

"Would you really burn me down, General?" Jaime asked, taking another step forward. "Do you hate the idea of freedom that much?"

"I hate the idea of the damned machines carving me up like a Founders’ Day turkey," Spratly replied. Reaching up, he touched the scarred socket of his missing left eye. "I’ve been through it before. You can’t know what it’s like."

"Others in this camp have been through worse," Jaime replied. "They want to take the chance."

"A chance to get every man and woman in this camp killed, slowly and horribly!" He glanced at his staff officers, all of whom were on their feet now, as though looking for support. "We won’t allow it!"

Jaime spread his hands. "General, we don’t need to involve you! Anyone who wants to stay can stay! But let the rest of us go!" He took another step, pulling up short when Spratly shifted aim to his head. "Who are you going to use that thing on, General? The cluckers? Or people you disagree with?"

"Shut up, Major. You are being insubordinate."

"Come on, General! If you’re not going to use it, give it to people who will! You don’t need to worry about us telling them where we got it. We intend to die clean, in battle, not inside a harvester!"

"I think, Major, that that is quite enough," Spratly huffed. "I am the senior officer in this camp, and by questioning me and my orders in this fashion you have committed a serious breach of discipline. You really leave me no alternative but to surrender you to the Masters for—"

Jaime shifted his attention suddenly from Spratly to the curtained door, his eyes widening. "They’ve heard us!" he shouted.

It was an old trick, repainted to suggest !*!*! machines were coming through the door instead of Jaime’s friends. Its success, more than anything else, depended on just how worn down Spratly was by his just-completed work shift in the pits.

The general turned his head, the power gun moving off-target just enough. "It’s a trick!" Pogue shouted, but Jaime was already lunging forward, grappling with Spratly, trying to knock the weapon from the general’s grasp. Spratly gasped as Jaime slammed him against one wall of the hut, then clamped down on the trigger; a dazzling, blue-white bolt of energy seared past Jaime’s side, and he felt the hot snap of its passing. Jaime managed to slam his fist into the man’s jaw, then wrenched the power gun from his hand.

Two of the general’s toadies hit him from behind, dragging him down. He elbowed one in the face and wriggled free of the other, waving the gun. "Back! Back, all of you!"

He felt a wave of heat upon his bare back and heard a fierce crackling. Turning, Jaime saw that the wild power gun beam had sliced diagonally across the hut’s wall, setting the rotting wood ablaze. As the fire spread, the general’s staff rushed for the door, tearing the curtain down in their haste to get outside.

Swiftly, Jaime stooped, gathering up the oily rags and carefully rewrapping the pistol. He tucked the parcel into the waistband of his shorts, then he hoisted the stunned form of the general to his shoulder. As the hut filled with thick, white smoke, he staggered through the door curtain and into the open air.

A crowd of slaves was already gathering, attacking the flames with ragged blankets and articles of clothing, beating at the fire as others ran to get buckets of water from the troughs. A second hut, its wall just a few meters from Spratly’s shack, had also caught fire when the power beam sliced through rotting wood and the inhabitants were scrambling out into the open. As the flames mounted, sparks and burning fragments swirling in the air threatened to ignite other buildings nearby.

"What the hell have you done to us!" Pogue shouted, his face a contorted mask of fear. "What have you done?"

Jaime ignored him, depositing Spratly on the ground a safe distance from the converging mob. No one was paying attention to him. Holding the wrapped bundle tightly, he shouldered past the new arrivals and jogged southwest, toward the latrines. Behind him, dirty brown smoke stained the sky as the fire spread.

Fire was always a deadly danger in makeshift settlements like the Camp, and one of the most important things the original military command council had done was to organize fire drills and firefighting procedures. Cook fires and the fires used to boil water from the contaminated bay sometimes got out of control, and the shanties surrounding the wrecked manufactory were tinder-dry, a disaster waiting to happen. It certainly had not been Jaime’s intent to start a fire as a diversion, but he was more than willing to take advantage of the confusion. There could be no going back.

"Jaime!" Shari called, waving. "Over here!" She was waiting next to a water trough with Alita, as they’d planned. The latrine and the ditch running under the fence was just a short distance farther on.

"What happened?" Alita asked as he joined them.

"The general protested a little more strongly than I expected," he told her. "Come on!"

"Did you get it?"

He patted the cloth-wrapped bundle. "Let’s get out of the camp before the machines move in." He could already see several floater eyes in the distance drifting toward the swirling, smoking center of the diversion.

Sliding down the muddy embankment into the creek, Jaime started forging ahead, making for the wash-out beneath the force fence. Shari and Alita followed. He’d hoped to wait until after sunset for this part of the plan.

Thirty minutes later, they crouched among the ruins on the west slope of Overlook Hill. Behind them, smoke continued to rise from the buildings, though Jaime could see no open flames now and thought that the fire was probably under control.

Up the hill, though, things had changed in the past few hours, and very much for the worse. There were !*!*! machines up there now, and they were erecting a number of spindly looking towers along the crest of the hill. Jaime recognized them; he’d seen similar towers a year ago, when the human survivors of the invasion were first being rounded up and marched to the site of the Celeste camp. Each was a sophisticated sound or heat sensor array, together with uplink hardware and a small but powerful laser. When that array was complete, a mouse wouldn’t be able to sneak past the !*!*! outer perimeter, much less a human.

They were replacing Hector with the same impenetrable electronic wall that they’d installed north and east of the camp.

"But what does that mean for Hector?" Alita whispered. "If they don’t need him up here anymore, blocking the highway—"

"Spare parts," Jaime said with cold certainty. "They were just using him to plug the hole until they got around to dismantling him."

"How do you take apart something like a Bolo?" Shari wanted to know.

"You ever seen one of their big dismantlers?" When she shook her head, he nodded toward the Bolo. "Imagine a kind of mobile crane on six legs, rising maybe fifty meters high . . . high enough to straddle even a Mark XXXIII. Tentacles with fusion cutting torches. Arms with grippers and plasma cutters and peelers. I saw one at Logan before they brought us down to Celeste. It was straddling a factory building as big as the Barracks, slicing it into bite-sized pieces and dropping them into a Collector. I imagine duralloy would make the going pretty slow, but they’ve got all kinds of time. I’ve been wondering all along why they didn’t take Hector apart instead of trying to use him as an overgrown trusty."

Jaime didn’t add a second, more worrisome thought. !*!*! sensor technology was good enough that they must know that humans ventured up here. Perhaps they allowed the suicides as a kind of safety relief valve for the camp; more likely, the handful of people who challenged Hector and died simply weren’t important enough to bother with.

But what if the !*!*! were aware that some humans came here to talk with their captive Bolo, that those humans were trying to break whatever hold they had on the huge combat machine?

That would goad them into action if anything would. Was this beehive of activity atop Overlook Hill coincidental, or a deliberate move to block Jaime and Operation Valhalla?

Rolling onto his back, he signaled the two women, calling them closer. "Okay," he whispered. "The situation has obviously changed. We’re not going to be able to just walk over there and climb aboard. First question. Does either of you want to back out? Now’s the time to do it."

"Hell, no," Alita said.

"We’re not giving up now," Shari added.

"Okay," Jaime said. "I thought you’d feel that way. Next question. How do we get past the bad guys?"

"How much charge in the gun?" Alita wanted to know.

Jaime looked at the power readout on the casing above the grip. "Point two-one. Twenty-one percent."

"So low?"

"It probably wasn’t at full charge when it was smuggled into the camp," Jaime said. "And just sitting in a hole for a year, we’re probably lucky we have this much left."

"It should be enough," Alita said. "We can rush ’em, shoot our way through, then climb aboard. Those floaters are too big to follow us."

Jaime shook his head. "I don’t think so, Sergeant. I don’t know how many shots are left with twenty-one percent power, but we’re going to need a fair amount of charge just to do what we have to do inside. We can’t afford to waste it shooting at floaters."

"You have a better idea?" Shari asked.

"Yeah. I give you the weapon. You two stay here while I work my way over in that direction, northeast of Hector. I’ll make a lot of noise and show myself to them. That ought to draw all of the armed clackers after me. When the way is clear, you two cross the perimeter and get on board."

"No way," Shari said.

"You wouldn’t stand a chance!" Alita added.

"Believe me, I don’t like it any more than you do," he said. He was imagining what would happen if the !*!*! managed to take him alive. Would he be able to force them to kill him cleanly? Or would they simply overpower him and drag him off to the Collector? "But we’ve got to save the power gun for the repair job. Frankly, I don’t see any other way to do it."

"The way to do it, Major," Alita said firmly, "is to stay together and watch one another’s backs. We kill as many of those damned machines as we can from right here. Make them come to us and burn them down as they advance. When we’ve cleared out the dangerous ones, we move in." She paused, staring at the distant, laboring machines. "What I’m wondering is whether we’re even going to need codes. Some of the cluckers are inside Hector’s perimeter. Maybe they switched off his defenses."

"Yeah, and maybe they have their own personal IFF," Jaime said. "We can’t take the chance."

"Right," Alita said. "So we run for the perimeter and give him the codes, just in case. We shoot our way through. If the gun’s charge runs dry, there are rechargers onboard the Bolo, and plenty of power. We’ll make do. But you’re not going to go off on some damned-fool macho-martyr stunt, you hear me?"

"Yes, sir, Sergeant, sir," Jaime said, smiling.

Alita must have realized what she’d just sounded like, telling off a superior officer. "Uh . . . sorry, sir—"

"Don’t be. You’re right." And she was. With his plan, there’d been too great a chance that the machines pursuing him would kill him before the women got past Hector’s security perimeter . . . or that the !*!*! would only send one or two of their number after the unarmed human diversion. Alita’s plan gave them the best possible chance. "We go together. Alita? How good a shot are you?"

"Seventy-eight on my last quals."

"Pretty good. Beats my seventy-three. Shari? Have you ever fired one of these things?"

She shook her head. "I never liked guns."

"So you programmed Bolos for a living. I can understand that. Okay, here’s the way we’ll play it, then. Alita, you’re the best shot, but I want to take the gun first. You know more about Bolo hardware than I do, so I’m expendable and you’re not." She started to protest, but he held up his hand, silencing her. "That is an order! I’m not being macho. I’m trying to give us our best chance to do what we have to do. The machines are going to concentrate on the guy shooting at them, which means I shoot and you move. You keep an eye on me, though, Sergeant. If I go down, you’ll have to recover the weapon and keep going. That also means, if I’m wounded, no heroics to recover me, okay? You two are the Bolo experts. You have to get inside. I’m just along to provide the muscle. Right?"

"Right," Alita said reluctantly.

"I don’t like the idea of leaving you," Shari said.

"Believe me, neither do I. But that’s the way it’s got to be. Okay, are we all set?" Both women nodded. "Good. Spread out. We can’t afford to bunch up and make an easy target. You two stay low and stay out of sight. Once they start closing on me, you two should have a clear shot at Hector. Now move!"