"A toast, my dear!"
Turning to his wife, Brigadier-General Alan Damien raised his glass, the fifty-year-old wine in it swirling with a graceful slowness in the less-than-earth gravity of Newterra-G. From many meters above his head, muffled by the bulk of the great machine in whose gimbaled and cushioned personnel compartment they rode, came the familiar roar of its Hellbore. On the viewscreen, which stretched arcing around half the room and had a video quality indistinguishable from the naked eye's, twin bolts streaked outward, their trails shrinking in the distance over the blasted grey planetscape, curved in towards the silver spot that was a Djann gun-turret, and destroyed it in a blast that covered half the screen, leaving a momentary black blot.
"To victory."
Aphra Damien raised her glass in return, the proud line of her face defying its age, her earrings twinkling momentarily in the explosion's white glare, then steadily in the warm light of the candles on the table. "To victory."
Aphra counted herself lucky. Alan's rise through the ranks of the Dinochrome Brigade's human strategic and tactical corps had been meteoric. Words were used to describe him like "brilliant," "uncanny" and "an instinctive grandmaster of Bolo strategy." But the usual whisper about men who directed Bolos was that they were too much like machines themselves, impassive, distant, icily rational. Not Alan; he had a streak of romance a mile wide.
Who else would take his wife for a candlelight and wine dinner in the midst of a planet-wide pitched battle?
"I don't want to sit in a khaki-walled room with a bunch of sweaty office-types, listening to tinny action from ten light-years away," he said. "This is the seat to have in a battle—not even ringside, but right in the middle of it."
Aphra laughed, another flash of light from the screen making her teeth gleam for an instant. Not an explosion, it seemed, but a plain white laser-beam that seemed to come from another Djann installation. The Bolo they rode—Mark XXX Unit KCC-549, the flagship machine of this regiment, the grandest of its grand, old veterans, its turret sparkling with battle-honors—was talking to himself and other Bolos as usual as he fought, only the most important highlights of their millions of bytes of rapid-fire machine-language transmissions translated into English for the benefit of listening humans. The majority of inter-Bolo transmissions were tactical skills routines they learned on the field, and automatically and instantly shared with each other.
"Laser burst at range white to the human eye," the KCC said now, "no threat."
"If this were Old Earth, you'd be the sort of commander who's at the head of every charge, sword in the air," said Aphra. "Idiot. I love you."
"Alert!" The KCC raised the volume on his speaker-voice just enough to interrupt. "Enemy octopods approaching, nine, due west. Orders, Brigadier-General Damien?"
Normally a Bolo in this situation would act on its own initiative, or request orders from a superior machine; but the General's physical presence in a situation that was more than routinely dangerous meant his orders would override all others. Though the chances were slim, nine octopods could take a Mark XXX, if they managed to surround it so that it had to evenly spread its shield defenses, and then web it in ion-bolts for long enough.
But of course Damien was not the only human present. He sent his wife a questioning glance. Her smile widening, brown eyes bright from the wine, she gave a slight nod.
"Engage 'em, Casey. What else would we do?"
"I obey, sir. I theorize the question is rhetorical."
"You know me well, old buddy." With a lurch that was only barely detectable in the plush cabin, the Bolo changed course. "I guess it's about time the old bucket of bolts gets put through his paces today; he hasn't had any real exercise." He elegantly topped up Aphra's glass, and then his own. "Here's to . . . things getting interesting."
The scrabbling octopods spread out, keeping low to the ground, scuttling behind hillocks and boulders. They were a relatively recent development; the Brigade's body of knowledge on how to neutralize them was still relatively new and rapidly growing. They looked like giant silver-gray spiders, out with antipersonnel bores instead of mandibles, and a turret atop each bullet-shaped chassis, armed with an ion gun working on the same principle but much less powerful than a Hellbore. The true engineering marvel was their legs; they could run at better than a Bolo's top speed, scamper over any terrain, leap, corner, even manipulate objects with the forward pair. Disabling one leg barely slowed them down; they were designed to function on as few as two.
"Alert status two," Casey reported, meaning he was at his second-highest level of readiness. One thing Bolos had over humans; they never got overconfident. The great gun roared again, destroying one octopod in a scattering of silver leg-sections, and drive motors whined as Casey repositioned himself, aiming for the end of the line of octopods before they could curl into a ring around him, as they were trying to do. Aphra gripped her glass against the lurch. A series of blinding bolts blanked the screen; "sensor pod destroyed," Casey calmly reported, "switching to first auxiliary." The screen cleared; not an octopod was in sight. Of course Casey knew where they were hiding, his brain and sensors having tracked their motion and extrapolated their positions; he sent three thick volleys of spent uranium shells arching upward and outward, to raid them behind their cover.
Aphra's eyes met Alan's, and to the boom and streaking flash of the Hellbore, she caressed the rim of her glass with her lip. What is it about danger? She let one strap of her dress fall off her shoulder, as if by accident.
"Enemy octopods approaching, six, due west," Casey said. Six more, he meant. "Calling backup, NTN-198 and CRT-263 responding and approaching unless countermanded."
"No countermand, old pal, we don't want things to get too interesting . . ." The jolt of a sudden change in direction spilled wine from both their glasses, and made the candle flame flicker.
The screen blanked again, and stayed blank, from a steady barrage of ion-bolts that screamed against the machine's shields like a rain of saw-blades. "Alert status one," Casey's speaker-voice reported, inappropriately calm. This meant the robotic equivalent to the surge of adrenalin a human would produce when in danger of death. Casey's Hellbore roared non-stop. Aphra clutched Alan's arm, took a deeper sip, and winked at him.
Then the Bolo stopped moving.
The silence was unearthly, surreal; both humans thought for a moment they were in a dream.
"Casey?" The General's voice was suddenly small, an insect's rattling against sounds from somewhere above: the sawing sound deepening, a metallic crackling, the boom of an explosion that rang through the machine's whole body. "Casey! Acknowledge!"
A horrid sound came from the speaker: Casey's voice, distorted to a soprano whine, then to a quavering bass. Words came out crisply, as they always did from a Bolo, but made no sense. "Report octopods alert damage Brigadier-General Damien internal. . ." Then they stopped.
"What's going on, love?" The screen blacked, leaving only the light of the candle.
"I don't know." The look on his face made Aphra feel suddenly sick. "I have no idea. Casey! Acknowledge! Acknowledge, damn it!"
Silence, but for the crackling growing louder, the sound of duralloy being eaten by heat. The air was suddenly warmer. He banged his fist against the wall of the compartment, near the speaker. "Casey! Casey! What the hell is wrong?" He banged again, three times. His flesh and bone hand was tiny against the Bolo's bulk, an amoeba against a steel mountain.
The compartment was suddenly very much hotter. The Bolo's cooling system had broken down, along, apparently, with everything else. Nothing would draw off the heat of whatever glowing ion-wounds Case's exterior now bore; his hulk would conduct that energy inwards until it was evenly spread throughout. Meaning everything metal around them would soon be red-hot or worse, and stay that way for a long time—unless the heat were enough to set the machine's fusion plant to critical state, in which case it would all be instantly vaporized.
Aphra, still clutching her glass, shrugged, making her earrings wink in the light. "Oh well, I guess we stay here, until one of the other Bolos rescues us." She has to know that can't be, Alan thought, but kept to himself. No Bolo was equipped to break into the passenger compartment of another that wasn't willingly opening the hatch; it was far too well-protected.
What had been their sentient fortress was now a mountain of dead metal around them. Their friend was their crypt.
With a synthetic stench, a patch of the ceiling vinyl blackened, then peeled away smoking; the metal under it was glowing red. Then orange, and yellow, the surface growing downwards into a bulge like a boil until it finally broke, releasing a stream of white hot liquid to stretch down towards the floor, where it lasered straight through the carpet. Enough radiation was coming from that, the general knew, to kill them several times over already. How many ways were they dead?
"There won't be time," Aphra whispered. Alan just shook his head.
"Things got too interesting," she said.
It was for words like that, he loved her.
They wouldn't need to slow-roast to death. The stream of molten white would do as well as a bullet through the head. In the meantime . . . he touched her shoulder, the one from which the strap had fallen. What better to do, in their last minutes? She smiled.
Captain Benazir Ali, Ps.D. turned up the volume on the lunch-lounge news holo machine. Some other five-star type was being interviewed, a friend of the two humans who'd died in the debacle of Newterra-G.
"There's only one way their deaths could have happened," Benzi said to her lunchmate, Captain Christine Marsh, Ps.D., aka Pristine. "This is going to be on our plate faster than you can say 'software problem.' "
"No way. You're talking C.P.U. malfunction—that's impossible."
"Got any other ideas?"
Leaning forward over the table so as not to muffin crumbs on her blouse, Pristine gave an eloquent shrug. How she could afford to dress so well on a psychotronician's pay, Benzi had never wheedled out of her; they weren't that close. Moonlighting as a corporate programmer was Benzi's guess. "Well, okay . . . no."
Ours is not to do and die, Benzi mentally recited her unit's unofficial motto, ours is but to reason why. No one else in the Psychotronics Department of Sector Bolo Maintenance Central (SBMC) had arrived at the conclusion she had, either. Even though she'd only worked here three years, and couldn't quite call herself mid-twenties yet, she'd already got a reputation for conceiving—and then proving—theories no one else did. One nice thing about Pristine; she never gave you any crap out of envy. Benzi wished that were the case with everyone here.
"Well, it's not on my plate until after lunch-hour," she said firmly, lifting her fork. The corn-speaker on the wall buzz-squawked her name, adding "Urgent!"
"Wrong again," she sighed. "Psycho Ward lounge, Captain Ali here!"
"Emmett" Her commanding officer. "Private briefing, get to my office now."
"I think I know what it's about, sir," she said, as soon as she'd heard the whisper of Lieutenant-Colonel Gene Emmett's office door sliding closed behind her. "Casey's brain fritzed."
"I know there's no way it could have, after ninety years' distinguished service," she added as she sat down. "I know there's no way the enemy could have made it fritz without blowing him completely to slag, which they didn't. But nothing else could possibly explain it. If he'd known he was in trouble, with General Damien aboard, he'd have called for more help. If he'd known he was doomed, he'd have self-blown—with the Damien's' permission, of course, and they would have given it, Knowing they were done for anyway. His programming wouldn't let him do anything else—but it didn't happen. So his brain must have fried."
Emmett folded his arms. She could see a bit of a smile pulling at the middle-aged lines beside his mouth, that should have been a full smile, except for how worried he was.
"You know, Benzi, you're a very bright girl. And you know it. And you like to show it. And you know something else? You're right. The only problem is, you're thirty-seven times as right as you think you are."
Emmett did something, then, that Benzi would never have dreamed he'd do. He pulled two little cylindrical glasses and a bottle of whiskey out of his desk, filled them and put one in front or her.
"You've heard the official story of why we got reamed on Newterra-G: the enemy unexpectedly produced massive reinforcements. Like a lot of official stories, it's a lot of crap. You don't want the folks in their living rooms worried. Thirty-seven Bolos and a general get trashed, we can just build another thirty-seven Bolos and hire another general, and if it means a tax increase, it'll give the citizens something to bitch about for a galaxy-rotation or two, no problem. Except that there wasn't one ship's worth of Djann reinforcement. They did it with what they had.
"Whatever happened to Casey happened to thirty-six other units as well. Stopped fighting in mid-fight. Started rolling in circles. Took no defensive action when they were hit. Didn't self-destruct once they were disabled, let themselves get captured. If they were people, we'd say they went crazy. It wasn't all at once; but after the first few, the numbers went up exponentially. The rest were ordered into a fighting retreat and then lifted—Sector Command had no choice, if we wanted to save any of them."
Benzi took a long swig. She'd broken into a cold sweat.
Humanity had depended on Bolos to carry its banner for a thousand years, the fate of the great machines and of their makers now inextricably linked. A thousand years, this reality had had to etch itself into the collective human unconscious, to breed dependence on the great machines into the core of the human psyche, to make the fear of their failing or going rogue humanity's ultimate, existential dread.
Given such incentive, humanity had done all it could to make the great machines failsafe, and pretty much succeeded. Aside from its fusion plant, a Bolo's brain was its most well-protected part. They could malfunction, but had so many back-up systems built in that they invariably finished the fight and came into the Psycho Ward on their own power. The psychotronicians' main job was creating improvements, adding new and deadlier features and functions, invented by themselves, or the people upstairs; once lab and field-tested, the new code was distributed to active Bolos, and back to GM to be incorporated into new models. Bolos, in fact, were more dependable than people. People went crazy; Bolos didn't.
Benzi grasped at straws. "Maybe some unknown atmospheric or geological condition on the planet, sir?"
"I wish it were. But our machines have been there anything as long as fifty years, with no trouble before. Another little problem: once a machine went into this state, the Djanni would stop attacking it, and go on to others. They knew damn well it was neutralized.
"Get my drift, bright girl? They're doing it, somehow. Since it worked so well this time, they're going to do it again, any battle, every battle. Until we figure out what they're doing and stop them, we haven't a chance in hell—anywhere. You get what I'm saying? The whole Concordat's on the line."
Benzi emptied her glass. He poured her another.
"Another little problem. Sector Command doesn't seem to realize this. They want to keep it in-sector—so they can say it's no big deal, I guess, we took care of it all by ourselves just fine. As if the goddamned Djanni are going to keep it in-sector . . . You know what that means?"
Benzi's voice came out parched and tiny. "We're it."
"Yep. This one little over-worked, underfunded, rusty-equipped little Psycho Ward. We're it."
He refilled her glass, redoubling her terror. The refill meant he had more to tell her.
"So, there it is, our assignment. Since it's impossible, I figure, it calls for the most flexible mind we've got. I'm putting you in charge, Benzi. You can have any and every resource this station has. I guess this means I'm promoting you. I don't have the stripes, I just thought of it, I'll get them to you asap. That's all, Major Benazir Ali, Doctor of Psychotronics. I'm glad you're so bright, bright girl, because we're going to need all the brights you've got."
"You won't believe this!" The pear-shaped, lank-haired figure of Captain Bert Mulroney, Ps.D., staggered towards a clutch of other male psychotronicians gathered around the water-cooler. They stepped back a little at his approach, as usual; it was never wise to expose yourself to a full frontal blast of Mulroney's breath. "Hot Cheeks Ali was just going down the hall, and just on a whim, I asked her to go out with me. She said yes!"
Eyes bugged all around. Vocal expressions of disbelief rapidly followed.
"No, really!" Mulroney squealed. "After two years, she finally said yes! Say, could one of you guys lend me a good shirt?" Silence fell; the idea of his skin in contact with any article of their clothing instantly produced a collective case of itching.
"Gods and little matrices," one of the others finally said. "Something must be really, really wrong."
Benzi sat down at her desk, and let it all sink in. "Dear Mom," she imagined herself writing. "The good news is, I've been promoted. The bad news . . ."
Her console beeped. Words appeared on the screen.
Benzi, I've never seen you so upset . . . what's the matter???
"Max." She let a long sigh out towards the computer's voice sensor. "Hi, pal."
What is it? What's the matter? There's got to be something I can do to help!
"Sure. Maybe. I don't know. You don't want to know."
If it concerns the Dinochrome Brigade, I'm duty bound to know.
Once a Bolo, always a Bolo, Benzi thought. Even if he's stripped down, without even a speaker-voice, the equivalent of a brain in a jar . . .
Mark XXX Unit MXM-823 had come off the assembly line doomed never to see a battlefield. He'd failed the battery of the preliminary simulations that all new Bolos were put through. The verdict on his report: "Behavior erratic, inexplicable—replace psychotronic unit." Having his brain tossed into a fusion pot should have been the end of his story. But Benzi had noticed what no one else had: there was only one possible explanation for the pattern of his actions and reports during the tests. It helped that she'd recently read a short story, written in the days before intelligent machines, by the first great master to speculate on them . . . MXM-823 was empathic. Somehow his psychotronic entrails were sensitive to human emotion. It was the distraction caused by this which had kept him from responding appropriately to the test scenarios.
Through a combination of logical argument, wheedling, and piquing Lt.-Col. Emmett's own curiosity, Benzi had talked him into letting her take custody of the defective unit for study. Now Max sat under her desk, a big silver box wired into her personal computer (a mere fringe benefit, of course, the quadrupling of the private computing power at her fingertips). Her low-priority project, more a hobby than anything else, was to figure out how in heck he did it. And perhaps even come up with an application in which he might actually be useful.
Congratulations on the promotion, he said, when she'd explained.
"Thanks a bunch."
What did I say to cause you that irritation? An electronic fluke had enabled Max to sense human emotions; it hadn't enabled him to understand them.
"So there's the problem," Benzi said. The full staff of the Psycho Ward was assembled in its one briefing room; seventy-eight pairs of eyes stared up at her in horror. "Now all we have to do is find the solution."
Silence held for a long, painful moment; then came a clamor of voices. "How the hell are we supposed to do that? They couldn't bring back one of the ones that died, we can't even look at what's left!" Even Pristine, who had a name for unflappable cool (accurate, according to Max, who'd never sensed anyone less nervous), blurted out, "It's a needle in a haystack the size of the galaxy!"
"Tell it to the Brigade chaplain." Benzi was amazed at how crisp she was managing to be. She couldn't claim any great distinction in the cool department, and she'd never stood up in front of this many people in her life. Comes from having bigger things on my mind, I guess.
"We have the recorded transmission from that day; we'll do a full analysis of them, looking for any common event that happened before the Failures. Assad, you're in charge of that. At the same time we'll analyze what transmissions came afterwards from the machines that failed, to see if we can identify the type or method of damage. Hayes, you do that. I figure with every chip in this place working on this, we can complete it in two days. And in the meantime, if any clue starts to emerge earlier, we human brains can start trying to figure out why. Of course other suggestions for action will be welcomed. Unless there are any questions, let's get to it."
"Report, Benzi—sir."
She hadn't demanded formality; it was Luce Hayes's way of showing that he, like everyone else in the unit, was scared shirtless. The search was four hours old. "On transmissions from the, uh, affected Bolos.
"They're mostly gibberish, of course. But the first thing I noticed is that they make less and less sense as time goes on. Meaning the damage doesn't happen in one stroke, the first stroke isn't even necessarily fatal. But it keeps going on until the brain shuts down completely."
"As if they were under some continuous invisible bombardment," Benzi said.
"Yeah, maybe. Aside from that, there's really no pattern. You can't tell what part of the decision-making unit is getting hit, not from recorded transmissions . . . we need some remains."
"Luce, pal, we aren't going to get remains."
"Well . . . that's all I've got,"
Benzi tried to keep frustration out of her tone; it wasn't his fault. "Thanks."
Some kind of bombardment or object a Bolo can't sense? Their receptors could measure all frequencies of waves, travelling through any medium. The mechanical nerves embedded in their duralloy hulls could sense the impact of any form of material, almost any form of particle. If a quark dropped on one of its treads, the lore was, a Bolo would know.
She was sitting in her office when Assad buzzed. "We've found something." She took the corridors at a dead run.
"This is from KCC-549," he said, playing back a transmission recording, as Benzi stood beside the console, catching her breath. "Nine and a half minutes before it happened."
The familiar confidence-inspiring tone of Casey boomed from the speaker. Grandbolo Casey: his voice, humanized as were all the great machines', a sound associated with safety and security for most of the people now listening, from as far back as they could remember.
"Laser burst at range white to the human eye, no threat."
"He may have thought no threat," said Assad, "but the same thing happened to every Bolo that froze, anywhere from fifteen minutes to ten seconds beforehand. The machine code attached to the English message gives the light's frequency and intensity range, too—and it's exactly the same, every time."
"But that's a diffuse beam," Benzi spat, "not even steel-cutting—hell, it's the sort of beam you do laser shows with! How in tarnation is it supposed to stop a Mark XXX?"
"Allah's treads, I don't know! You got us to look for patterns; it's a pattern."
"And this didn't happen to any Bolos that weren't affected?"
"Nope—not one." Assad held up the list his printer had generated. He'd done the search much as she had expected: scanned the records of ten machines, five affected and five unaffected, then taken the list of common events and searched through the rest to see which patterns continued. It had been Pristine, actually, who had spotted the white light after a pass of only three comparisons, and got Assad to authorize her to start searching through the remainder right then, thus saving valuable time. If medal time comes, Benzi thought, men corrected herself: WHEN medal time comes, I'll have to remember that.
But what in hell did the light do? It didn't even fit in with what Hayes had found—evidence of some kind of continuous strike.
She did what she had to. She called in the entire Psycho Ward, and set everything, every human brain cell and every silicon chip, to trying to figure out an answer to that question.
Balzera Base wide-perimeter patrol I stop and transmit my current coordinates to my comrades.
RGG-134's sensors scanned across an idyllic suburban landscape. Balzera had been a one-in-a-million find for early explorers: a Terra-normal planet, or close enough, that didn't have any unhealthy surprises like seasonal typhoons or chronic planet-quakes, and needed no expensive terraforming. The thriving star-port metropolis that grew up, Balzera City, was a jewel in the Sector's crown, one of its commercial hubs and a center for government administration. Young professionals prayed for the opportunity to raise their families here rather than in the domes or lung-clenching air of nearby Phexin or Kohr.
It was a military nerve center, too, located strategically as the main gate-point at the outer end of the Sector's richest string of systems. Not the place where the Concordiat wanted an actual fight; but the loss on Newterra-G left no choice. Now Balzera's forces were swollen with survivors of that, as well as reinforcements from other bases.
Units TMM-144 and YND-788 acknowledge my send. We expect contact with the Enemy within the hour. The projection was that the Djanni would attempt to create one or more bridgeheads within the city or port/base complex: so 119 machines had been evenly distributed throughout, with orders to surround the landing forces, then attack and destroy them. While its human residents huddled in hidden, hastily-erected tent-cities in the woods outside of town, Balzera City was crawling with Bolos.
The ionosphere crackled as the first Concordiat ships engaged the attackers. Through a blue sky, lightning flared They would take out all they could but they couldn't stop the Djann drops of octopods; as usual, humanity's main defense would be its Bolos.
First octopods drop. They appear as sheets of silver on the radar horizon. They are landing 4.56 km away, in the middle of the University buildings; given that distance my duty is to maintain my position, with slight adjustment Explosions flash and voom, activating first my photon-sensors, then those of my tread sensors which touch the ground, then my atmosphere-wave sensors.
The Dinochrome Brigade is strong. Our Makers depend on us.
The Enemy is being destroyed. Radiation cascades in the atmosphere, smooth spheres of stone clatter on my hull from molten rock gouting into the air and cooling. Most of the towers of the University complex are gone from sight, knocked down by groundbursts. Black billows of smoke underveined with flame rise over the skyline.
A beam of laser light flashes. White range to human sight, a non-threat to us. The Djann drop spot became a blue-white glowing shell as the Bolos' Hellbores burned the air. A wind rose, howling in as if to a forest fire, as if hundreds of acres of burning were packed into one. Rain was falling, far above, vaporizing in the heat before it could reach the ground, adding to the storm clouds being dragged in on that wind.
Two more Djann drops, 2.76 km to the north and 2.2 km to the north-east. I calculate that is where the forest encampments of humans lie. The enemy is attacking human civilians. It is our duty to protect them. Alert status two. Thirty-two of my comrades from Units Zitadelle and Guderian immediately upshift to Alert Status One and close in at maximum velocity, with TMY-919 coordinating I follow in support. I don't understand why the Enemy does this; they must know we are programmed to protect humans and that therefore they will sustain massive losses. I theorize it is a diversion. I radio my theory, scramble code VII.
The forests were burning now, neo-pines exploding in tiny chemical explosions and crowns of flames forty feet nigh. In my atmosphere-wave sensors I can hear the screams of the people. We must not fail them.
A stumble in the communication of my comrades in the fight. Transmissions from four, correction six, correction nine of them, are growing less and less computable. They are performing actions contrary to orders and tactically neutral or negatively effectual. But none are majorly damaged. I cannot generate a theory. Twenty-one of my comrades are ineffective, including TMY-929, command reverting to RWQ-347. This aberration is following a pattern of spreading outwards from the central battle. I obey RWQ-347's command to move into position there and engage.
I apply more power to my left tread to avoid the wandering of AML-945, arching shells over his hull to destroy the Enemy Zero-zero Mark 2. Octopods burst before my shells. Eight octopods engage me, curling around my position. Alert Status One. I fire my Hellbore as I advance. White laser light flares for a moment in my sensors. A human-shaped flame runs from the burning woods, crying out with blazing lungs, and falls in front of me. I apply more power to my right tread to avoid crushing him.
I fight. Hellbore: aim -24.98843 x-degrees 13.6223 y-degrees, fire. Anomaly at CPU address 5720A9EE-B86829EC cause unknown anomaly at CPU address 68A88DE32FF04110 switching to first auxiliary. I can generate no theory for why anomalies anomaly at CPU address F00794329659669E effecting first aux, switching to second aux. Hellbore aim 57.9112 x-degrees 12.386 y-degrees, fire anomaly at CPU address AD987390099683DC switching to third aux. RGG-134 reporting affected by aberration estimated time before total inejfe\@#$^ctualness based on observation of affected comrades 12.5 seconds anomaly at CPU address E679\@#$\tfF28D9547922 switching to fourth pain sensors indicate major damage huttplate 12A-F anomaly \@#$\W CPU address 98EA29B904 C2090F switching to fifth screams from humans anomaly switching to sixth anomaly seventh anomaly eighth anomaly at CPU address 348EF—anomaly at CPU add anomaly anomaly anomaly \@#$\\ ano ano ano \@#$\\ nnnnnn a * n * \@#$\\ o * m * a. . . . . .
*****\\\\. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. \@#$\\. . . . . . .. \@##\\ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ..
"How's the search going, bright girl?"
"Rotten, sir; why?"
"Are you still sleeping?"
Emmett's face hadn't cracked a smile, so Benzi gave a straight and honest answer. 'Yes; shouldn't I?"
"No." His face still didn't crack a smile. In fact he looked as if he'd aged ten years since the disaster on Newterra-G.
Oh God, she thought.
"They got Balzera."
"Balzera . . . God help us."
"All 119 machines there . . . went the same way, exactly. Every single one of them. Of course Djanni don't take prisoners; I don't think they have the concept. . . . I said it, didn't I, that they'd see they have a good thing going, and try it somewhere else soon . . ."
Benzi sat stunned, trying to imagine, trying not to imagine, events in Balzera City, and what they must have looked like. Horror crept down through her body like the edge of a pool of blood.
"With Balzera Base gone, there isn't much to stop them from spearheading into the inner systems.
Dammit, with what's happening to the Bolo's, there's nothing to stop them . . . just between you and me, Benzi, so we don't screw up everyone else's morale—"
"Just our own."
"Yes, right, just our own. If the Djanni demanded our complete surrender now, High Concordiat Central would have to do some really serious thinking."
She took a deep breath and swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. "Let me ask one thing . . ." she said, feeling her voice sink to a whisper. "Elora?"
He shook his head. "No, sweetheart, your home planet's not in their line of fire. I wish I could say he same to everyone else here . . . The Djanni aren't headed that way. Nahhh . . . the speartip of their invasion is pointed somewhere else."
"Where?"
"If you were them, where would you send your worst? At the source of a possible threat to your effectiveness, right? Before the threat becomes reality?"
Benzi took another deep breath, fighting off sudden dizziness. "They're heading here," she whispered.
"They're heading here."
"How much time do we have?"
"Their last landing point was Gaolo Six, where they expected to find Bolos; Sector Command had the machines lifted first, and dropped here. Call it the scorched moon policy . . . and the last stand. Anyway, FTL from there to here is—"
"Thirty hours."
"So: hurry it up."
"Yes, sir. I won't sleep tonight, sir. Even if I tried."
It can't be the white light, Max said, on her screen. Probability is zero.
Thirty hours was now fifteen. Benzi paced her office next to her bed. She hadn't slept for thirty-six; subcutaneous shots of benzedrine had kept her, kept everyone, going.
I can't blow up at him, she thought, biting back a string of obscenities. It hits him as hard as it hits another human.
Of course her trying to conceal it didn't matter, with Max. The screen flashed in urgency. What in my words caused you such anger?
"It's nothing, pal, just colloid irrationality. It's looking more and more as if you're right, that's all, and no one can find anything else . . ."
So you're getting more and more afraid, he kindly filled in. One thing about having Max around; you couldn't maintain any emotional pretenses. Sort of desktop therapy. She had learned things about herself since he'd been there, one of the reasons she'd been able to resist—so far—the urge to tear his cables out. But it wasn't what she needed right now.
MainBrain, SBMC's central sentient mainframe, had just come to the same conclusion as Max, that the white light was not the cause. If there was any conceivable way it was possible, MainBrain's internal simulators, which could recreate any model of Bolo down to the atom, and throw any defined event at it, would have reenacted it. That gift of humans—inspiration—hadn't helped; the simulations the psychotronicians had conceived and asked MainBrain to execute had all turned up nothing too.
Benzi had this sudden strange thought—the kind, perhaps, that she could only get on benzedrine—that MainBrain was corrupt, had been somehow sabotaged by the Djanni. Paranoia. The huge 'frame was protected by more layers and networks and redundant systems of internal security than any human even knew. Besides they'd run simpler simulations on other machines in the place, and got the same results.
No back door through the sensors; that kind of light hit them all the time. No digital information attached to the beam; on the first coherent letter or number, a Bolo would have reported it as an incoming message, not just a beam of light. And there simply was no other pattern; the comprehensive search was complete.
An impossible situation.
Got any other ideas, Max?, she wanted to snap. But he was a machine. Ideas weren't his department. It was she who was failing.
The feeling in the entire unit was the same, though no one was saying it. No one wanted to be the first to say it. But it was in everyone's exhaustion-reddened eyes. There's no hope. We're defeated. We can't do it. Emmett had set every non-Psycho Ward staffer on SMBC Moon to enacting his Plan B, fifteen hours ago: hastily installing manual overrides in all Bolos present, so that in the fight a human driver could take over if it, as everyone had begun to call it, happened. Even with everyone down to the janitors working around the clock, there wouldn't be time to modify all the machines, but maybe, just maybe, it would be enough . . .
Maybe, Benzi realized soberly, but most likely not. No one using instrumentation and manual controls could hope to replicate a Bolo's tactical ability, except perhaps after years of training. She tried to imagine doing it herself—a possibility which was not entirely out of the question, she realized—and shuddered.
No human had done any training in driving a tank at all, for centuries.
The psychotronic solution, Plan A, would have to come from an inspiration, she knew: a brilliant flash of lateral thinking from someone, anyone, here. There was an answer—something was destroying the brains of Bolos—so there must be some way of finding it; it simply was an answer so unexpected that no one had thought of it.
I just wish the inspiration had come sooner, she thought, thinking of the bleary faces, ashen-masked in the flat grey-white light of the Psycho Ward. The more tired all our brains get, the less likely it is to come at all.
"T-minus 35 minutes to Enemy contact. Clear the area for de-pressurization. All units report once main doors open. Repeat: T-minus 35 minutes to Enemy contact. All un-suited human personnel clear the area. This bay will be depressurized in 5 minutes. Mark."
As the alert blared through SMBC's maintenance bay it froze the hive of motion for a fraction of a second, then whipped it faster.
The immense floor was overcrowded with Bolos, most lifted from Gaolo Six, in various states of manual override addition. The techs and their helpers—everyone on SMBC Moon capable of holding a flashlight, rewiring a connection or bread-boarding a new circuit—struggled to finish what they could.
Total, out of the 64 machines on hand: 27.
In SMBC Command Central, General Chuan Immen's piercing eyes scanned the main holo-image of the vast underground complex that SMBC was, and the surrounding terrain. Supported by the base's artillery and infantry, sixty-four reliable Mark XXX's against an estimated 700 octopods should be no trouble. Twenty-seven manually-operated—meaning clumsy, slow and stupid—ones would be a great deal of trouble indeed. Even if none of the manual overrides, put in hastily by unqualified and increasingly exhausted people, tailed . . . Curse those spaceheads in the Psycho Ward, she thought, for not doing a damn thing; think they're goddamned geniuses and they can't even find their way around their own mandate with both hands and a map . . . Well, no use carping. She had to do with what she had.
The Bolo tech snapped off the torch and patted LIS-668's hull with one gloved hand. "There you go, Luis. One hunk-a-junk jury-rigged manual override, as close to done as it's going to get. Grab your partner and go blow some octopods into leg-segments!''
"I already have orders, Bolotech."
"Yeah, yeah." The man's casual tone trembled at the edges with fatigue as he clambered down, dropping the flashlight and heading for the air-lock. The P.A. blared again. "Depressurization in one minute."
Like white ants on horseshoe crabs, the soldiers who would be the millennium's first human tank drivers crawled up the sides of the machines. Hatches boomed shut. The Bobs powered up, their thunderous growl fading as the air cycled out, fading to a vibration that still thundered in one's bones. Their usually shiny, well-polished hulls were patchy with trailing dribbles of welding duralloy, a feint sign of the wiring nightmares their passenger cabins had become. The huge doors of the Dag glided open, silent in the vacuum. Silent but for the rock-shaking vibrations they sent through the moon's mantle, the great machines wheeled smoothly through SMBC's miles of massive corridors, and out onto the surface to take their positions.
Ground troops were dug in already with their Gus's, the smaller, non-sentient version of the Hellbore. As the Bolos deployed, infantry fell in with them.
"LIS-668 reporting with backup system, Private Felding," the Bolo sounded off.
"Backup system Private Felding reporting. I guess that's b.s. for short, ha ha . . ."
"Standby," their commander crisply ordered.
"Order Standby acknowledged"
"Sir! Yes! Sir!"
This time there were no flares in an atmosphere from the air battle: only velvet black sky torn apart by searing light that darkened filters on helmets and screens.
Then the deadly silver seeds of octopods were dropping, sprouting clusters of legs like dandelion fluff, tumbling toward the ground.
"Tabernoche," Felding whispered when he saw their number. "Luis, have you ever felt like the place you're defending is called Alamo and you're not Mexican?"
"Private, that sentiment is defeatist. I suggest you see a company psychologist as soon as possible."
Felding shook his head inside his helmet. "Yeah, sure. You Bolos should talk." The screen flickered as filters cut in, and the order came through the com. "Engage!"
It was a half-silent battle, the only sounds conducted through ground and metal and bone, moon-quakes that lasted only a moment or two. Felding just hung on, as Luis did his thing, and reviewed his eleventh-hour crash-course in Bolo operation; there was nothing else for him to do. Yet.
A web of white beams flashed from some of the octopods, one catching every Bolo. "Shit on a pungee stick, there it is. Luis, status?"
"Advancing. Firing. Alert status two. To remind backup system, SMBC Psychotronics Department has determined that white laser light cannot cause Bolo malfunction." Luis's Hellbore and three shells took out five octopods, destroying two completely. Felding grabbed the newly installed control-wheel with one hand.
"Great. Wonderful. Maybe I won't need this. Maybe we're all right this—"
"Alert status one." A swarm of octopods had gathered out of nowhere, were trying to surround them through a hail of infantry bolts. "TRN-776, DNA-864 respond, approaching to aid aid id id id id id malfunction backup sys malfunction sys sys sys F$dt78A*6—" The Bolo's voice degenerated into static as the screen went blank.
"Hoté!" Felding grabbed the wheel, hitting the keypads wired into Luis not an hour ago. LEDs winked alive as the manual circuits came online. "LIS-668 now on backup! Here goes!"
The screen, snowy white with static, showed the field. Some Bolos continued in their formation, firing, firing, destroying the octopods in their tens. But they were coming in hundreds.
LIS-668 was circling to port at maximum speed, Hellbore tracking slowly clockwise. Octopods were all around them, ignoring the disabled Bolo, blasting the men on the ground.
Felding muscled his control wheel over hard, felt the slow response of the Bolo. Slow—but a response. He was suddenly reminded of his first driving lesson.
"Sacré, we'll get 'em, Luisi Well get 'em!" He hit the Fire key on the Hellbore joystick, heard the familiar all but subsonic roar. Octopods curled on the field like fire-washed spiders. "Ho, ho, you may be down for the count, pal, but you aren't deadl" He aimed the Hellbore, fired again, whooped. He was starting to get the hang of it. Octopods danced in patterns before him, in a hundred directions simultaneously. Complicated: but he'd faced opposition that complicated before. "And Mama and Papa thought I was wasting my time and rotting my brain, playing all those video games!" His roar joined the Hellbore's. "YaaaaHOOOOOOOo—oh, oh."
Something in the column of the control wheel grated and broke. It rasped through a complete circle without effecting the Bolo's motion. "Oh, merde alors."
The comm channel crackled. "LIS-668. You are approaching infantry position without orders."
"Merde—that's the Ninth!" Felding struggled with the wheel then reached down the shaft, trying to turn it between his palms, calling as if the Bolo could hear him. "Oh, merde, Luis, stop!" Perhaps it could hear him, and do nothing. He slammed the drive motor switch to Reverse. Nothing happened. "Merde! I can't!"
"LIS-668, stop! This is a direct order. Stop now. Stop now."
"Sarge, I'm trying! Something's gone wrong with the wheel and switches, I'm doing everything I can, merde, merde, Luis! Luis, stop! Luis!" Felding pried at the steering shaft, banged at the switches, trying to make mere human muscle re-direct a hundred tons of machinery, before God knew how many men were crushed under giant treads. "Oh mon dieu."
He looked up at the screen, saw ghostly images of the soldiers, his buddies, in the Bolo's mountainous shadow, bouncing away from their cover and into the open to get out of its way, scattering to be picked off by the second wave of octopods. He heard the screams through the comm as he and Luis plowed through the Ninth Infantry's position. "Dear God."
The octopods flocked past them.
Benzi lay awake.
She'd been sleeping on a cot in her office. What shreds of sleep she'd got. Everyone was doing the same. In case something came in, in case she had a thought, in case . . . in case of what? What was she going to do, point her monitor at the octopods and type real hard?
She hated herself for lying here, doing nothing, while everything she had ever worked or lived for stood in the path of destruction. But anything that anyone could possibly do was being done by someone else. There wasn't much more that anyone could do. She kept thinking she heard faint explosions. She kept telling herself to stop imagining them. But it was just a matter of time before the octopods laser-cut their way through SBMCs gates.
She thought of Belmuth, her home village on Elora, full of Amish horse-buggies; her mother's face, her father's, her baby brother Jahangir, they all suddenly paraded through her mind, too vivid. She tried not to cry. Majors in the Dinochrome Brigade didn't do that. She cried anyway. She was thankful for the darkness.
She tried to tell herself she wasn't personally responsible for the fate of the Concordiat. Surely that was too much responsibility for any one human being. It's not my fault the Djanni have whatever they've got . . . Perhaps it was the fate of the entire human race at stake. That was perfectly possible. Some renegade tribes on some backwater planets, too small and primitive for the Djanni to notice, might survive, she thought. Or will they hunt every single one of us down?
She wanted to hide under the covers, as she had when she'd been a child, afraid of monsters. Giant spiders. Eight-legged evils. If I can't see them, they can't see me. If I can't hurt them, they can't hurt me . . . Perhaps she'd still be huddled there, when the station walls turned to yellow-glowing slag around her . . .
She sat bolt upright, suddenly angry. Like hell I will What am I thinking? It's not over—it may be ninety-nine per cent over, but that isn't over!
She jumped out of the cot naked, feeling the sweat on the back of her neck and between her shoulderblades go cold, and hit the switch of her computer. To do what, she didn't know. Talk to Max, she guessed.
There must be something I can do to help!
There must be something I can do to help!
There must be something I can do to help!
The message scrolled all the way up her screen and beyond, to form a regularly-jerking column of desperate offering.
"Just talk to me, Max. Don't ask how that will help, don't tell me you don't understand, just talk to me."
The screen went blank, and stayed that way. She'd eliminated all his possible options, it seemed.
As General Chuan watched the holo simulation of the battle, green and red lights indicating the positions of friendly and Enemy forces, her face transformed into a white mask of rage, like a cornered animal's. Her forces were being destroyed. More slowly than she'd dared to hope for, yes, but still, destroyed.
Eyes blazing, she hit her comm to open the channel for a general order.
"All Bolos fall back. Open entrance doors West A through J, occupy corridors two deep, draw the Enemy in and hold them."
There was a stunned silence on the channel, except for the functioning machines, all of which duly acknowledged. You never had to tell a Bolo now, or do it fast; they'd assume now, and as fast as possible, unless you said otherwise. "Now!" she snapped to the humans. "Move!" Their acknowledgements came slowly.
They know I'm throwing away what's left of the infantry, she thought. But since the corridors were built just big enough for Mark XXX's, they'll be able to hold the octopods to a standstill better, without worry of being surrounded.
They know the energy-discharges of a battle will quite possibly bring a million tons of rock down on their heads, too. But it'll land on the Enemy as well, block and trap them. "If we're going down, curse it," she snarled to whoever was listening, mostly her aides, "let's do it in a sea of slag, not in a pile of loot!"
"You know what this has been reminding me of, in the back of my head, this whole time?" Benzi said to Max absently. "The Murphosensor Bomb." Blather; but it was better than lying in the dark waiting for explosions.
Clarify? the defective unit asked lamely.
"Something my boss said to me once, when I was a teenager, working in a publishing shop. Every machine has one."
Clarify further?
"You Know Murphy's Law? 'Anything bad that can happen will, and at the worst possible moment.' Well my boss used to say there was only one explanation for why machines would blow just before deadline, or when the big prospective client presentation was needed for tomorrow. All machines have a device in them which can sense the worst possible moment, and make them blow up then. That's the Murphosensor Bomb. Sure seems like our Bolos are equipped with them, doesn't it?"
It must be that, said Max. Since it can't be the white light.
"Frigging literal-minded should-be-blob of slag, you have to take me . . . seriously . . ." Benzi trailed off, stunned by a flash in her mind like a head-blow.
"They were all in alert status one." She wasn't truly conscious of whispering the words.
Another common event. One they hadn't thought of, because it had been too obvious. A chain of conclusions went off like cluster-charges in her head.
"MAX! No wait . . . MainBrain! MainBrain!" She disconnected Max from her terminal—that was regulations.
The 'frame came onto her screen in its characteristic red. Insert dogtag. She leaned forward to jam her tag into the slot, struggling to keep her hands from shaking.
She heard an explosion, muffled with distance. That wasn't in my head. They're getting in.
MainBrain: Voice/tap match correct, access permitted.
"MainBrain, check the 'execute alert status one' code of . . . JNC-147." Janice had just happened to be in Maintenance for a sensor-pod fix, the first New-terra-G survivor there whose call-letters Benzi could remember. "Look for any . . . anomalies."
Retrieving. Note: compares between all Newterra-G survivors' full psychotronic code and that of virgin GM version already executed, completed 19:56:07 yesterday, by order of Major Benazir All The virgin GM version was always kept on file, for occasions like these. No anomalies found.
She sat down hard, banging her desk on each side of her keyboard with her fists. That's right, she had ordered that, it had been one of the first things, since it would take such a long time . . .
But if it's what I think it might be, that compare wouldn't show it anyway!
The only way was by hand . . . go down through the code screen by screen looking for something amiss. Even with all seventy-eight people who had the expertise to do it, working twenty-four hours a day without keeling over, which was impossible, it would take days. They had hours if they were lucky. Maybe minutes.
Benzi's fingers clawed at her hair. No! There had to be some way, some other way—there was, dammit, she knew it, what the hell was it?
It came in another flash. "MainBrain! Run a compare between same code, JNC-147 and MXM-823."
MXM-823 is assigned to Gea Beta system, Galaxy Arm B, transmission time approx 12 million years. FTL message mission expense must be authorized by Maintenance Commander.
"No, no, the MXM-823 that's sitting under my desk!" Of course she should have remembered that the designation MXM-823 officially belonged to the Bolo now wearing Max's original hull, on which it was engraved. "You know—Max!"
Acknowledge: Defective psychotronic unit in custody of Major Benazir All Regulations forbid accessing of unit's code as unit is defective.
More obscenities burst from Benzi's lips. "Right, never mind. Transfer said code from JNC-147 to this terminal."
Sending. Regulations forbid the return of code to system in any form: must be wiped. MainBrain wasn't stupid; it knew exactly what she was going to do. "I know that, you dickhead machine!"
File send complete. SBMC policy suggests characterization "dickhead machine" inappropriately disrespectful to system.
"LIKE ANYBODY CARES RIGHT NOW!" She heard—felt in her guts—the thump through the moon's mantle of another explosion. "Plugging in Max!" MainBrain: disconnect. That was one sure way to get rid of the 'frame.
"Now there is something you can do to help, old pal: you're going to run a compare." Of course it would take Max ten minutes, instead of MainBrain's several seconds. She hoped the Djanni would be considerate enough to allow for this.
In three minutes and twenty-seven seconds, the screen flashed, Mismatch found. "Put it up on screen!"
An amazingly short routine, barely twelve lines of code, neat and precise and brilliant as a knife in the back—to commandeer a Bolo's highest-ranked processor, and set it to randomly destroying its own decision-making net, including all auxiliary systems.
Benzi's fist banged down on her intercom. "Lieutenant-Colonel! I've found it! I've found it!"
In the time that passed as he ran to her office, and she made a hard copy, Benzi realized one thing from looking at the bit of code that made her want to throw up. There's only one way this could have got in . . .
It doesn't matter, she told herself firmly. It's an easy fix—that's all that counts, right now.
"This is just lines of Betelgeusian on paper to me, bright girl," Emmett said, bleary-eyed and panting from the run.
"It's a program to destroy a Bolo's brain in just the way it's been happening," she told him. "Janice has it, no big surprise, since she was on Newterra-G. But so does the virgin GM version. Probably every active Bolo in the sector, if not the galaxy, has it. Are you familiar with the concept of computer viruses?"
"In a Bolo!?
"In all of them. Getting spread through Bolo-to-Bolo transmissions. Viruses have to be attached to executable files, so that they can be made to activate; but Bolos swap executable tiles all the time—the tactical skill programs they learn on the field and then share with each other. Those go back to GM as well to be incorporated in the latest virgin code. Max isn't infected because he's been cut out of the net for a while; it showed up since. That damned white light was a red herring, and I had every colloid and silicone synapse in the pace burning out—"
"Tell me how we get rid of it."
"That's dead easy, sir, all we have to do is send a general order out to . . ."
Emmett was already inserting his dog-tag into the slot. "MainBrain, open the channel. To all active Bolos from SBMC Psychotronics Department, Emmett authorizing, order of first priority is as follows . . ." He pulled away from the voice-sensor. "Take it away, bright girl."
She glanced at the printout. She couldn't make any mistakes. "Run search in 'execute alert status one' code for . . ." She read off the first line of characters. "If found, delete that line through . . ."—she read off the last time—"inclusive. Repeat this action after each incidence of receiving or executing . . ." After executing what? She'd had maybe a minute to think about it.
An explosion. She definitely wasn't imagining it; Emmett had flinched too.
Her mouth was suddenly dry. "After receiving or executing . . ." They were fighting octopods every time. ". . . any transmission-acquired tactical skill routine against Djann octopods. Also repeat before any incident of going on alert status one." Dear God, let that be enough . . . If it wasn't, they'd all reinfect themselves and each other in microseconds.
A chorus of Bolo voices crowded out of the speaker. "Found . . . deleted . . . found . . . deleted . . ."
She fell back in her chair. She suddenly realized, distantly, as one realizes trivial things; she was stark naked, in front of her commanding officer.
Not that he'd noticed. "While I've got you all listening," he was saying; into the com, "a tactical suggestion. We humans call it playing possum . . ."
In one of SMBC's main-trunk corridors, JNC-147 sat immobile, glowing in several places from Djann ion-bolts, as the octopods swarmed over her bulk in their graceful dancing gait, towards the next portal.
She already had her Hellbore muzzle turned to aim behind her: a senseless move in the fight. Now with almost imperceptible slowness she raised it into position. The octopod drivers, believing nothing operative with the power of a Hellbore could possibly be aimed at them, had massed into a phalanx, to concentrate their presence in the corridor.
Janice aimed dead center.
Emmett kept the channel open. In ten minutes it was apparent that no more of Maintenance's defending machines would fail. One fully-functioning Bolo could hold any corridor indefinitely, and in fact advance, and twenty-eight remained. It was enough. Most, however, opted to give the Djanni a surprise, allowing them past, and then trapping them against unbreached portals.
Within half an hour, it was just a matter of mopping up.
"Lieutenant-Colonel Emmett suggestion 'playing possum' extremely effective," one machine reported.
"That was for Alan and Aphra," Emmett whispered under his breath.
Benzi found herself laughing and crying and slipping into a bathrobe all at once. Outside, noise erupted in the corridor; the Psycho Ward broke into an instant party, as whoever had been following the fight spread the news. We did it, she thought. It was all she could think, and it turned into a delirious mantra: we did it we're saved we did it we're saved we did it we did it. . .
Emmett's voice cut through. "Bright girl," he said. "Sweetheart. It isn't over. It isn't over yet, Benzi, wake up. It isn't over until we figure out how in God's sparkly starfields that bug got in there in the first place. Or else they might be able to do this again tomorrow."
Benzi felt her own smile fall off her face, and an instant wave of exhaustion washed over her. She sat down heavily on the bed, letting her eyes close for a moment, then opening them forcibly, afraid she'd lose the ability to.
"We don't quite want to let out to everyone what exactly happened, yet," he said, more gently, "do we?"
He knew, it seemed. An absurd relief filled her: she didn't have to tell him. That the Djanni had no such knowledge of Concordiat systems, or access to them. That it had to have been an inside job. That it had to have been someone in the Psycho Ward of SMBC. She suddenly wanted to cry again. What the hell; she let the tears fall.
Lieutenant-Colonel Gene Emmett sat silent for a while, one hand curling around his sharp chin, in thought. Benzi sat listening to the party noise outside fade in and out, as she waged a battle with her eyelids to keep them open, wetness cooling on her cheeks.
"Well," he said finally, "I realize there's only one person here I can be absolutely certain is trustworthy. You—if you were the saboteur, you wouldn't have fixed the damage.
"Otherwise," he spat, "I have seventy-eight suspects. If I don't have it narrowed down to one in a day or two, which I don't have a snowball's chance in hell of doing, it'll be the Concordiat Military Police knocking on our door. Busting SBMC as a hotbed of traitors; with the flaky rep we have already, we'll all be counting our blessings just to have gotten demoted to garage-sweeper, and not dishonorably canned, even after they do figure out who it is, and even if said person doesn't do anything else in the meantime."
"We had a snowball's chance in hell of finding out what was frying the Bolos," Benzi said in a semi-conscious murmur, "and we did it."
Regret for these words came so fast it startled her awake. God. Why does my subconscious have to be cocky, too?
"No," he corrected, a slow smile creeping across his face. "You did it. Ready for your next assignment, bright girl?" Benzi pulled her hands up over her face and moaned. "Obviously you are, and raring to go," he chirped. "Good luck!"
There must be something I can do to help. There must be something I can do to help. There must—
"Oh Max, pal," she groaned. "You can do everything but the one thing machines can't do, the one thing only we humans supposedly can, the one thing we need. Have a flash of inspiration. Hell, you can even sense people's hot damn J.C. on a joystick duralloy dung-muffins ARRRRGHGHGHGH! AAAI-IGHGHGH! WHY DIDN'T I THINK OF IT BEFORE!?"
"Attention, everyone." It was nearly noon the next day. The entire staff of the Psycho Ward sat assembled in its one briefing room. The feeling in the air was a strange mix of utter relief, joyful expectancy of seeing awards handed out, and hangover.
Behind the podium Emmett stood, his face more grim under its impassiveness than Benzi had ever seen it.
Inside the hollow back of the podium, hidden from view, with a small monitor hooked up and sitting on top of him, sat Max. From her position beside Emmett, Benzi could see the monitor clearly.
Awaiting verbal cue to execute orders, it read steadily.
Emmett cleared his throat. "Now we're all finished celebrating," he said, "you must all be wondering how precisely our cause for celebration came about. That's what I've gathered you all here to tell you.
"The credit belongs entirely and utterly to Major Benazir Ali." As the applause and cheering crescendoed, Benzi's eyes found the one unmoving line of text on the screen incredibly fascinating; she could tell she was blushing by the burning of her cheeks. They even chanted her name for a while, as if she weren't embarrassed enough.
But as it faded, the pounding of her heart didn't; she couldn't imagine how it could go unheard. She took a deep breath.
"The blame," Emmett went on, his voice turning deadly, "unfortunately also belongs with one person, who was working for the Enemy." The room went so quiet that ventilator fans suddenly seemed deafening. "One person who happens to be in this room." There was a collective gasp. "We have ascertained who that person is."
Benzi looked at the monitor. She almost didn't want to; she almost didn't want to know who she'd worked side-by-side with, hung around the water-cooler joking with, shared career dreams with, who turned out to be this. Intending this for how long? Fifteen years? Twenty? A whole career? A smart enemy would make it worth that, and the Djanni are anything but stupid.
On it in blinking capitals Max had, as ordered, produced the name of the person present who'd had the most extreme reaction of fear for their own fate, as opposed to suspense or horror or puzzlement, at the moment Emmett had spoken the last sentence.
Her jaw dropped as she read the name.
Emmett looked up from the monitor. "On alert status one, are we, hmm, Pristine?"
Benzi's head was still spinning when the holo-razzi surrounded her in her office with a bristly ring of video and audio recorders, and a no-less intimidating ring of admiring, awestruck, almost dog-like expressions. I guess I'm going to be in the history books, she thought vaguely. Speaking engagements, multimillion contracts for her memoirs, honorary degrees and memberships and fellowships, keys to planets, a personal thank you from the Concordiat President . . . such realities-to-be hadn't yet impinged on her awareness.
It was Christine Marsh's echoing words that filled her brain. She'd started yelling as soon as they'd grabbed her. "They blackmailed me! They blackmailed me! When I was just twenty-one some human flunky of theirs found me and said they'd kill my parents and the husband and kids I wanted to have and everything I held in this emotion your humans call 'love,' they said! My oldest is thirteen, now, a good kid, a genius, going to a good school—"
"What the hell did you think was going to happen to that good school, when they used what you gave them?" Benzi had wanted to yell. "Not to mention you—did you notice the Djanni checking to see who they were shooting when they came here? They'd gotten what they needed from you . . ." But there was no point. She'd been allowed to sit in on the drug-assisted interrogation, when the truth came out about the fifteen-room mansion Pristine and her husband secretly owned on Macer's 'Roid, the hyper-yacht she used to get there, the many wardrobes of designer fashions, and all the other nice things she'd bought on the play-now pay-later plan with the blood of her own species . . . She remembered wondering how Pristine could afford her clothes. And it was her who oh-so-cleverly saved time by spotting that damn white light. God's heavenbores!
She didn't envy Pristine's fate now. But she didn't feel terribly sorry for her either.
"One at a time!" the reporters yelled at each other, all at once, snapping her mind back into the present.
"What lesson," one asked over the rest, "may humanity draw from this?"
Never trust anyone whose desk is spotless, she wanted to say, waving an arm towards her own clutter. Instead she uttered the usual bromide, about our mechanical creations only being as good, ultimately, as we were. "Usually, anyway," she heard herself add. "It was all Max's doing."
"Max?" they asked.
Now I've done it, she thought. I'll have to tell them about Max, and I'll let something slip that Central wants to keep quiet and they'll be on my case for revealing a weakness in the Bolo Program . . . after this . . . great. . .
"Max . . ." she winged, "is a special model. How, I can't tell you—it's classified—except that he was developed for a super-specialized security application." There, that should make Central feel better. He had been developed for a super-specialized security application, as it turned out, even though no one had known or planned it. From now on he would be in charge of the security testing of all new SMBC personnel. Let a traitor try to get through that. . . "More to the point," she added, "because he's not hooked into the regular Bolo net, he wasn't infected with the virus, which let me run the compare."
Fifteen more minutes of "No comment," and "I said security, do you really think I'm going to tell you more?" convinced them all to give up on badgering more of an answer about Max out other. Of course they tried Max himself. I've been ordered not to tell you either, he said through her screen. You're all so curious it almost hurts my pain receptors, but I just can't tell you what's special about me.
It was about then that Emmett hustled them out.