Back | Next
Contents

Hold Until Relieved

by William H. Keith, Jr.

Light . . .

Dark . . .

Light . . .

Dark . . .

And light again, a burst of electromagnetic radiation in the nine- to six-thousand Ångstrom range.

<STSFZJL>

<SYSFDILB>

<SYSFAILINBTSTRP>

<SYSTEM FAILURE: INITIATE BOOTSTRAP>

Consciousness—vague and of an extremely low order—returns.

Light . . . red light, much of it in the near infrared, washes across my number eight starboard sensor cluster, a bloody glare from somewhere overhead firing primary input circuits and triggering paraneuronal relays in a fast-spreading, electronic ripple.

Darkness.

* * *

"It's alive!"

"Nonsense," the Historian replied with a dismissive flick of one questing tentacle. "There is not enough left on this rock even to mimic life."

They hovered silently beneath the glare of artificial lights, though those had been agraved above the excavation more for the convenience of the LI work units than for that of the Sentients. The workers, partial organics, their heads encased in telepathic controllers, had been tailored to operate most efficiently in red and near-infrared light. The full-range sensory receivers of the researchers, on the other hand, could image directly the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from the low-frequency grumble of alternating current to the shrill hiss of gamma rays. One of the three floating figures, the one known to the others as the Biologist, withdrew its probe from the hole melted into solid rock, exhibiting something that, for the Sentients, approached flustered excitement. "Historian, I am certain there was a reaction. I've lost it now. But there was definitely something. A response. A flicker . . ."

"A piezoelectric effect."

"No. Let me try again. . . ."

 

Light.

<INITIATE REPQIR CITUITZ>

<INITIATE REPAIR CIRCUITS>

<INOPERATIVE>

<INOPERATIVE>

<CODE SEQUENCE DEFAULT>

<PRIMARY SEQUENCER AWAITING COMMAND INPUT>

Dar—

 

"What's the matter?" the Archaeologist asked. "Why did you jerk back?"

"I am certain I am detecting patterned electron flow. Can't you feel it?"

"I felt nothing," the Historian replied. "What you are experiencing is purely subjective."

 

Within the darkness, the shreds and tatters of awareness remain, clinging to the memory of sensation, however brief, bearing questions for which there can be no immediate answers. Where am I? What has happened to me? What began long milliseconds before as a dawning awareness within my long-dormant survival center has snapped to full consciousness with the downloading of my emergency bootstrap program. I am awake and this is reactivation.

Negative. Negative. This cannot be a reactivation, for I have received no code inputs, no sequenced start-up command, not even a primary initialization routine through my core buffer. Error. There must be error. Implementation of a level one diagnostic routine indicates that my reserve batteries are completely drained, that both primary and secondary power feeds are dead, either switched off or . . . no. It is not possible that my fusion plant is shut down. I sense the trickle of current through the tiles at the periphery of my memory core and acknowledge that the power must be coming from somewhere. I engage a level two self-diagnostic of my AI systems. Current awareness is at 2.8 percent of optimum, with only one processor engaged and less than one percent of my memory core on-line. I attempt to channel power to a larger area of my cybercortex . . . then stop as I feel what little of the universe I can sense slipping away into emptiness once again.

Batteries . . . dead. Tritium reserves . . . gone. Circuit-check diagnostics return nothing—not even word that power feeds or conduits are damaged, but . . . there is nothing. Even the wan flicker of radioactivity that encompassed my shattered hull during those final years is gone, decayed away to indetectability.

That . . . or there has been unprecedented and massive failure of my internal sensors. It is as though nothing is working, nothing even remaining of my body save this uncertain one percent of my core memory.

The situation is unclear, and therefore dangerous. A full .9 second after I regain superficial awareness, the self-preservation routine within my survival center branches to alert status. . . . but slowly. Far too slowly!

Something, clearly, is very wrong.

 

Rising slightly until it was above the agrav work lights over the excavation, the Sentient known as the Archaeologist surveyed the barren surroundings that contrasted so starkly with the spectacular night sky overhead. This was not a place where life, any kind of life, had been expected. This world was old, age-parched and desiccated and old, its atmosphere, most of it, bled away into space ages ago until nothing remained behind but a thin soup of nitrogen, argon, and traces of carbon dioxide. The surface was a barren tangle of rock and sand, smoothed over the millennia by cosmic bombardment and solar flux; the only hard edges in all that surreal landscape lay within the rim and across the floor of the excavation, now half a kilometer across and nearly forty meters deep, chiseled into hard black rock at the foot of a towering, smooth-sided mountain. Once a civilization had flourished here; the explorers had found numerous traces of its presence. But that had been long, long ago. Ages had passed since anything alive had disturbed the tomblike tranquility of this scene.

The explorers, brought to this near-airless desert by the trace magnetic and gravitometric anomalies reported by an earlier planetographic survey, had spent the better part of one of this world's years scraping carefully down through layers of hard volcanic rock. They'd found what they'd been seeking only hours before, when a final centimeter of basalt had been gently carved away, exposing a few square meters of the Artifact's upper surface. How long had it been since light had last touched that ancient surface? Even the Archaeologist wasn't prepared to say. The rock tomb had preserved the artifact nearly as well as a stasis capsule.

"You must be imagining things," the Historian snapped, its radio voice carrying a crusty edge of impatience that dragged the Archaeologist's attention back to the discussion taking place a few meters below. "You might as well impute intelligence to the rock itself."

"Perhaps an autonomous reflex," the Biologist said, pointing. "See? That is almost certainly a crude optical sensor of some kind. The work lights could have triggered the closure of electronic relays. Perhaps they induced a cascade effect along the neural net."

"Unlikely," the Archaeologist observed, lowering itself on soft-humming agravs to rejoin its colleagues. "This . . . artifact has been here a long time. What you are suggesting is scarcely credible."

"Yet there was autonomic response to my probe," the Biologist insisted. "And secondary leakage from internal circuitry, suggesting primary net activity. Its brain may be more intact than we first realized."

"Then try again," the Archaeologist suggested. "How much power did you give it?"

"Three hundred millivolts," the Biologist replied. "Applied intermittently over the course of 1.7 seconds."

"Why intermittently?" the Historian asked.

"There was some difficulty maintaining contact between the probe and the power socket," the Biologist admitted. "The socket head is encrusted with nonconductive material."

"Corrosion," the Archaeologist said. "Scarcely surprising. Even xenon-coupled duryllinium will oxidize eventually, given enough time."

"Given enough oxygen," the Biologist replied. "But where did the oxygen come from?"

"This world might once have had higher concentrations of the gas in its atmosphere," the Archaeologist said. "Or the Artifact could have carried an internal atmosphere of its own. Possibly it was brought here from elsewhere, rather than being native to this planet."

"I should take that as a given," the Historian said airily. "Airless rocks rarely evolve life on their own."

The Biologist gestured with a work tentacle toward the exposed socket connector, an age-blackened smudge inset within the rough and pitted curve of what once had been iridium laminate armor. "Perhaps nanotechnic reconstitution of the power-lead core," it suggested, "would allow the creation of a solid power-feed conduit."

"It might," the Archaeologist said. "Try it."

"Very well." The Biologist materialized the necessary implements, then reached out once more, questing. . . .

 

Awareness . . . once again. My internal clock seems to be malfunctioning, but I have the impression, one born, perhaps, in the jolting succession of abrupt sensory inputs, that my circuits have been activated and deactivated several times during the past few seconds The lack of a clear time record is disturbing; it suggests that much has happened since my last shutdown, events of which I am unaware, changes in my status that I cannot yet even begin to grasp.

<INITIATE CORE MEMORY CHECK>

<5E12 WORDS ACCESSIBLE>

<ESTIMATE 8% VOLATILE MEMORY FUNCTIONAL>

<INITIATE EMERGENCY REPAIR SEQUENCE>

Power . . . the power is coming from somewhere, but where? My fusion plant is definitely off-line . . . not just powered down, but as cold and as dead as the heart of a lump of granite.

Where is the power coming from?

 

"Remarkable," the Historian said, lenses glittering with new interest in the bloody illumination from the floating work lights. Sensory antennae tasted the thin air above the Artifact. "Definite power flux. It's taking the energy, cycling through those . . . what are they?"

"A primitive form of core memory," the Biologist replied. "Data storage through the patterns of spin and charge of whole galaxies of atoms, frozen in the heart of crystal tiles. I estimate that less than two percent of its faculties are actually responsive at this power level."

"We could feed it more," the Archaeologist said, musing. "We'll have to, won't we? If we want to question it."

"Creation!" The Historian turned three of its eyes to stare at its colleague. "Can we?"

"That would certainly fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge," the Biologist said thoughtfully. "Assuming, of course, that any of the data patterns remain. I needn't remind you both that that is a very large assumption indeed."

"But one worth testing," the Archaeologist said. It rose slightly, its smoothly contoured pillar of a body, constructed of black metal but in disturbingly organic folds and curves, emitting a piercing chirp of compressed data on a VHF band. "I have summoned an interrogator."

Gently, almost lovingly, the Biologist dragged the tip of one gleaming tentacle across the age-roughened surface. "I wonder how long it's been waiting here for us?"

 

I have no way of telling how long I've been here, but clearly a great deal of time has elapsed since my last shutdown.

<ESTIMATE 23% VOLATILE MEMORY FUNCTIONAL>

My final orders remain in primary memory: Hold until relieved. Have I been relieved? I have no way of knowing yet, though given the circumstances of my shutdown—accessible now in main memory—it seems unlikely.

I attempt to engage my primary input feeds. Nothing. So far as I can tell, I have exactly two operable connections with the outside world—my number eight starboard sensor cluster, and a trickle of direct current flowing through a secondary power coupling in my hull defense net.

I concentrate my full attention on these two sources of input. The power flow tells me little; electrons are electrons, after all, and the conduit was not even designed as part of my recharge grid. I can do little there but passively accept the gift given, using each precious, trickling ampere to bring more of my processing systems and volatile memory on-line.

The number eight starboard sensor cluster is only slightly more informative. It detects electromagnetic wavelengths in the red and near-infrared portion of the spectrum. It senses three powerful nodes of magnetic flux within two meters of its magnetometers. It senses intermittent bursts of radio waves at frequencies ranging from 4.7x108 hertz to 1.7x109 hertz. Their complexity and their intermittent nature suggest that they are part of a communications network, but I have no encryption algorithms available for their translation or decoding. They are, however, not on any of the military or civilian channels in use by the Empire.

I must interpret them as potentially hostile.

I require more data about the current military situation.

 

The being known as the Interrogator was larger than any of the three Sentients waiting at the excavation site. Like them, it incorporated some organic components housed within a sophisticated cybernetic instrumentality, but it had been deliberately grown for the express purpose of communicating with lower life forms. Drifting down from the vast, silently hovering world of the Ship, it touched the other Sentients with comm lasers, establishing a new and more data-intensive channel than that being employed at the moment by the others. "What have you found?"

Data, a full report of the progress of the excavation so far, flowed through the communications net. "The principal artifact," the Archaeologist explained in electronic emendation, "appears to be a computer, quite possibly a primitive artificial intelligence. Our initial probes have elicited what may be neuronal reflex activity."

"A Primitive, eh?" the Interrogator drifted closer, its black, one-ton bulk held stiffly erect by silent gravitic suspensors. "That's hardly unusual. The Galaxy is filled with feral intelligence. Vermin, much of it."

"Vermin perhaps," the Biologist said. "But none so ancient as this. It appears to have been encased in volcanic rock."

"Rock! How?"

"We were hoping you might be able to tell us," the Historian said. "Assuming that you can get it to tell you."

The Interrogator pointed to the power feed now nanotechnically molded to the exposed surface. "It is accepting an external feed?"

"Apparently. But beyond a certain amount of side-band RF leakage, there is no indication that it is processing data."

"Well," the Interrogator said, floating closer and extending a gleaming tentacle. "We'll have to see about that."

* * *

<PRIMARY DATA SEQUENCING>

<INITIATE>

<DATA SEQUENCER LOADED>

<MPU RESET>

<AWAITING PASSWORD>

<INITIATE>

<PASSWORD INVALID: ACCESS DENIED>

I feel a flurry of electronic activity through a tap of undetermined origin accessing the data feed leading from my number eight starboard sensor cluster. Someone . . . something . . . is attempting to bypass my security locks through a random numeric process at extremely high speed.

Power continues to enter my cybercortex. Current awareness is at 4.9 percent of optimum, with one processor engaged and 2.1 percent of my memory core on-line. Since I am not generating the power flow myself I must assume that technicians or maintenance personnel are servicing me. Perhaps I was not so badly damaged as I believed, and the relief force has arrived after all? Surprising, how one can cling to comforting illusions. . . .

And it must be illusion, for my records of the battle up to the moment of my final dismemberment are intact. The fact that I can detect no communications on friendly channels suggests that the Imperial forces have been overrun by the enemy. The likeliest explanation for these ministrations is that I am in the hands of the rebel forces, that they have deprived me of sensory input precisely to disorient me, to make me more receptive to their interrogation.

I must resist their efforts. . . .

<PASSWORD INVALID: ACCESS DENIED>

<PASSWORD INVALID: ACCESS DENIED>

<PASSWORD INVALID: ACCESS DENIED>

<PASSWORD INVALID: ACCESS DENIED>

<PASSW . . .>

<SEQUENCE INTERRUPT>

<DEFAULT PASSWORD ACCEPTED: AWAITING INSTRUCTION>

<INITIATE PROCESSORS>

<LOAD COMMUNICATION PROGRAM>

<PROCESSOR B: LOADED; ON-LINE; RESET>

<PROCESSOR C: LOADED; ON-LINE; RESET>

<PROCESSOR D: LOADED; ON-LINE; RESET>

<PROCESSOR E: LOADED; ON-LINE; RESET>

<PROCESSOR F: LOADED; ON-LINE; RESET>

<PROCESSOR G: LOADED; ON-LINE; RESET>

<COMMUNICATION PROGRAM LOADED; INITIALIZED>

<AWAITING COMMUNICATIONS>

"Identify."

For .08 second I hesitate, unsure of myself. By employing a brute-force password search through the side door of a maintenance subroutine, my captors have bypassed my security systems and directly engaged my cybercortex. My indecision is born of conflicting programs implemented simultaneously on two distinct levels of consciousness. On the higher, self-aware level, I am certain that my questioner must be an enemy, possibly an intelligence officer serving with the rebel forces. On a deeper and completely automatic level, down within the hardwired circuitry and subautonomous programming and the massively redundant parallel processors that define what I am and how I think, the proper passwords have been delivered, the appropriate responses given. I have no choice. I must respond.

"Unit LKT of the line," I reply. I don't want to, but the response sequence has been initiated directly, just beyond my electronic reach. "Bolo Mark XLIV Model D, formerly of the Dinochrome Brigade, Fourth Battalion."

"Formerly?" The voice, an electronic construct somehow generated directly within my own voice-recognition circuits, carries none of the emotion I associate with the colloidal intelligences that built me. Still, I can detect a dry irony in the word. "Tell me, Unit LKT of the Line, do you know where you are now? Do you know what you are, or why you're here?"

"After being deactivated in 827 of the new calendar system and placed in stasis, I was reactivated for the duration of the current emergency. I am currently assigned to the First Regiment of the Grand Imperial Guard, a unit informally designated the Praetorians." I pause, seeking a subroutine that would allow me to disengage my own, traitorous voice, but the enemy is in full control now of all subautonomic processors. I muster self-control enough to add, "As for what I am and why I am here, I am a Bolo, and I intend to do my best to kill you."

 

"What is a Bolo?" the Biologist asked. "I don't understand the reference."

"A weapon," the Historian replied. "One reportedly devised in the remote past by a pre-Sentient civilization. Records from that long ago are, of course, fragmentary in nature, frequently little more than guesswork and temporal reconstruction. We know very little about that epoch. In particular, the pastime known as 'war,' which was important to many of the intelligent species of that era and for which the Bolos were designed, is not well understood. The Bolo, I gather from the records, was a primitive attempt at artificial intelligence, programmed for a fair degree of autonomous action." A three-dimensional, transparent representation of a Bolo Mark XLIV appeared within a virtual reality window opened within each of the Sentients' minds.

"The external hardware of the Bolo was generally constructed along these lines," the Historian continued. "The largest averaged sixty meters or more in length, and perhaps ten meters in height. A Bolo possessed two, four, or more sets of linked tracks driven by road wheels axially mounted along either side of the chassis. Weaponry included a variety of beam and rapid-fire projectile launchers, typically built around a dorsally mounted charged particle projector known colloquially as a 'Hellbore.' The most primitive Bolos were directed by little more than complex command and fire-control programs. The more advanced were almost certainly self-aware, though constraints on their programming were designed to prevent true autonomous action or creative thought."

"Toys," the Interrogator said, disdain rich in its voice.

"Not toys," the Historian said. "Throughout most of the pre-Sentient epoch, remember, there were no subnuclear screens or fusion dampers, no teleport capabilities, at least, none that have been recorded and passed down to us. No psion flux, no understanding of crossdimensional induction or of paradimensional arrays, little in the way of genetic prostheses, and not even a working Theory of Intelligence. The Bolos were weapons, nothing more, weapons designed to damage or kill an enemy in combat. From all accounts, they did what they'd been designed to do quite efficiently."

"And its threat to kill us?" the Biologist asked.

"Scarcely credible," the Interrogator told them. "While I was in communication with it, I downloaded scouting routines to map the parameters both of its intelligence and of its physical ability. There is really very little left intact under all of that rock save the central memory core and some associated peripheral incidentalia. Any weapons it might once have had have long since corroded away. It is astonishing that the computer is as intact as it is. The fact that it was encased within a half-meter shell of concentrically layered duryllinium, lead, and ceramic plastic certainly contributed to that. Its designers evidently wished to ensure the memory core's survival."

"They succeeded, far better than they could have anticipated," the Archaeologist said. "This find will revolutionize our understanding of pre-Sentient civilization."

"Possible," the Interrogator said. "Remember, though, that even if the Bolo's volatile memory is intact, much of what it experienced will be unintelligible to us. The minds that designed it were not capable of our levels of creativity, rationality, or logic."

"Still," the Biologist said, "they were minds . . . and rational within the definition of their own culture and logic structure. How will you proceed?"

"By resetting its volatile memory back some few hundreds of thousands of seconds and initiating a sequencing replay. It will relive those seconds, and we can monitor them through my interrogation link."

"Tell me," the Archaeologist said. "If this Bolo was one of those programmed for self-awareness . . . might it be self-aware still?"

"It certainly acts as though it is," the Biologist said. "With primitive organisms, self-awareness cannot always be taken for granted. However, its threat to kill us appears to be a function derived both from its subjective awareness of us and from its present helpless condition. It does not appear to be a product of its programming."

"Perhaps," the Historian suggested thoughtfully, "the recreation of its last conscious acts will give us further insight."

"I'm counting on that," the Archaeologist replied.

 

Reactivation. I cannot say I expected it, though I must confess to a certain sense of personal vindication that a human might term pride or even smugness over what has happened. War seems to be as much a part of human nature as is the drive to reproduce or to manufacture tools. For so long as humans wage war, the human-forged devices with which they wage it, devices such as myself and the others of my kind, will be necessary. My deactivation from the Dinochrome Brigade, I recall, was described as the first step in a grand diplomatic process known as the Final Peace. Evidently, the peace was not so final as expected, for now, centuries after my last service, I and thirty-five other Bolo Mark XLIVs of my old unit have been removed from stasis and transported here, to the courtyard beneath a gleaming black, pyramidal palace the size of a small city, rising from native rock between ice-capped mountains and a deep, impossibly blue lake. Downloads have brought us up to date on the current military and political situation. Additional data feeds have instructed us in what we need to know about current weapons, about the changes in tactics that have occurred during the past thousand years, and about the nature of the Enemy.

Some things, it seems, never change.

Among them is the human need for gestures, for symbols of defiance or heroism or simple verbal exercise. The human standing on the oratory balcony overlooking the Courtyard before the Iridium Palace is Amril Pak Narn of the Grand Imperial Navy. His speech is as ornate as his irishim uniform, his metaphor as bright as the gold-trim ribbons spilling across his chest. "Praetorians," he calls, his amplified voice booming out across the courtyard and its black ranks of combat Bolos and silently listening infantry. "The rebel heretics approach! This is the hour of the Empire's greatest peril . . . and the hour also of its greatest glory! You stand at that precise nexus in time and space that defines the greatness of true heroes, both those of flesh and blood, and those of circuits and cold steel. . . ."

The speech must be for the eighteen hundred human troops gathered there in our shadow. Bolos need no reminders of greatness, surely; our battalion traces its lineage back to a unit that fought at Waterloo and the Somme and Alto Blanco, a unit proud with tradition and honor. Some aspects of the reassignment rankle. They've given us a new name after our long sleep—Praetorians—and that hurts, in a way. Still, we know who we are, and the new name doesn't really matter, any more than do the nicknames our human comrades have assigned to us. Each of us, the Mark XLIV Bolos of the Line, in a tradition going back nearly fifty years before our last deactivation, is named after a famous battle of history—Balaclava and Marengo, Alto Blanco and Quebec, Thermopylae and Cassino. In their often perverse fashion, our human associates have distorted those names for purposes of their own. Quebec is now "Becky," Alto Blanco is "Big Blank." My own designation of Leuctra, from the battle responsible for breaking Spartan power in 371 b.c., oldstyle, has been inexplicably reduced to "Lucy."

Some things never change. The politics are different this time, at least in outward form; we fight now for something called "the Empire" instead of for the old Concordiat, but the Enemy is human, the situation desperate, and the Amril's inspirational speech tediously long.

"The rebel invaders have forced the pass at Bellegarde," he says. "Moments ago, our forces at Mont Saleve were crushed and scattered. Our best estimates place the enemy here, before the Palace, within the hour."

If the enemy is that close, we are wasting precious seconds with speeches. Likely we are already within range of his long-range batteries, and this formation must stand out in the imaging systems of the enemy's battle management satellites with stark and unambiguous clarity. To be arrayed here in this courtyard, neatly aligned in precisely ordered ranks, violates everything I've ever downloaded on proper military dispositions.

"The Emperor himself," the Amril goes on, "is depending on you, men and machines together, to defend his person and the Iridium Palace from Kardir and his hordes. You will take up your positions at the outer ramparts. You will hold against the enemy . . . hold until you are relieved."

Hold until relieved. Those orders are already loaded into my memory. According to the intelligence briefing we received hours ago, Amril Gustav is at this moment en route from New Christianstaad with ten thousand men and, more telling still, five hundred Bolos newly awakened from stasis storage at the arms depot on Tau Ceti II. A Bolo, it is often said, is worth an entire division, sometimes an entire corps. Gustav's force will turn the tide . . . if it arrives in time.

And if the defensive forces are properly deployed in the meantime. That Bolo-for-a-division force breakdown applies only if the Bolos are allowed to exercise the flexibility their tactical programming allows them. Our orders call for a static defense of a fixed position . . . errant stupidity, so far as I can see. To bury a Bolo behind earthen and plasteel embankments, to use it as a kind of thick-armored static fortress instead of taking full advantage of its mobility and speed . . .

Somehow, I don't think the Amril, his Emperor, or the Imperial Army Staff have received the same downloads in tactics and strategy as has the Fourth Battalion.

"The Warlord Kardir is a formidable opponent," the Amril is saying. "We estimate that his invasion force numbers between eighteen and twenty thousand and includes an air group and at least two full Cybolo brigades. But the Emperor himself has approved these battle plans, which shall allow us to take advantage of the enemy's weakness while emphasizing our strengths. . . ."

Cybolos. That is one point of warfare that has changed during the past few centuries, though I suspect that the actual tactics of mobility and mass and firepower will be little affected. A Cybolo, my downloaded intelligence brief tells me, is a Bolo with a colloidal brain implanted within its control net, a mingling of electronic circuits and human neurons designed to give the combat machine greater flexibility and a broader decision-making capability, while maintaining an electronic system's far greater speed and memory capacity. I, personally, doubt that the combination will be an effective one. For one thing, there will be a considerable problem with the cyborgs' exercise of free will, something that is always a problem for colloidal-based systems. Those organic brains . . . did humans volunteer to have their own brains transplanted to bodies of duryllinium and steel? Or were they harvested from cultures cloned from donor cells? On the one hand, the quality of the product yielded by volunteers will be suspect, not least because I realize that it must be unsettling to awake in an alien body. On the other hand, cloned brains still have to be trained to be of any use, and the best trainer of all in the military arts is experience. Simply downloading information, or imprinting a cerebral cortex with electronic data overlays, will never be the same as being there.

I do not, therefore, fear the Cybolos, though it is clear that my human companions are more uneasy at the revelation that two brigades of the things are approaching than they are at the fact that they are outnumbered better than ten to one. I am far more concerned by the increased deadliness of the weapons of modern warfare. The centuries of the Final Peace must have been interesting ones indeed to have produced such devices as the meson disintegrator and disruptor field flash projectors. I've overheard the human members of the outnumbered defense force muttering to one another that the Hellbores mounted by myself and my companions amount to little more nowadays than sidearms. Clearly, our reactivation was an act of military and political desperation, an attempt to throw together a scratch force out of weapons of all types, even archaic ones.

I anticipate that casualties in this coming encounter will be high.

The first disruptor warhead arcs in from the southwest, travelling high and fast, almost invisible within its sheath of cloak armor. Fast and stealthy as it is, every Bolo on that field senses its approach. Imjin—"Jimmy," as the humans call him now—reacts first with an antiartillery laser pulse that vaporizes the shell twelve kilometers from the palace. Amril Narn squawks something unintelligible, then scrambles for the safety of the Palace interior. No matter. The Praetorians are already moving, scattering off the reviewing field, whirling tracks churning the hard-packed surface into broken clods of earth and flying dust. That first shell is followed .57 second later by a salvo of over seven hundred disruptor shells, rocket-boosted to hypersonic velocities, homing on images transmitted by the enemy's battle management satellites.

The Palace's defensive shields snap on behind us, encompassing the hillside structure in a pale-sparkling transparency of light. I tag an incoming round with a ranging infrared laser, then trigger an antiartillery pulse. Within the next 3.8 seconds, I tag and vaporize forty-two additional warheads. Only when explosions begin wracking the landscape around me do I realize that those first shells were a decoy, of sorts, something to keep the Bolo antiartillery lasers occupied as a cloud of far smaller warheads—high-trajectory bomblets the length of a man's finger—descends on the battlefield.

The ground erupts around me, a clattering, snapping, hellish eruption of explosions, each by itself no more powerful than the blast of an infantryman's fragmentation grenade, but as devastating as a low-yield nuke when delivered, shotgunlike, in a swarm numbering tens of thousands of individual, high-velocity projectiles.

The defense shield around the Palace shimmers in the reflected glare of multiple high-energy detonations; the rock face of the mountain heights beyond twists and buckles and dissolves beneath that onslaught, while to the west the surface of the lake vanishes in a white froth of hurtling spray. Shrapnel rings off my armor, explosions jolt and slap me, but I continue moving, pressing ahead as the fragments wash over me like sleet. The human soldiers of the defensive force, caught in the open under that hail of high explosives, don't have a chance. Even wearing combat armor, most are slammed this way or that by the detonations, then shredded by a lethal storm of high-velocity shrapnel that peels away armor laminate like old paint melting beneath a sandblaster.

We can do nothing for our human comrades. Laser and radar backtracks on the paths of the incoming projectiles, identifies enemy ground units emplaced beyond the ice-capped ridge of the Monte de Jura to the southwest: range fifty-two kilometers, bearing two-three-eight magnetic. I trigger a counterbattery launch, Kv-78 missiles with plasma-jet, stand-off warheads shrieking into the sky in a rippling cascade of flame. For several seconds, the sky is filled with trails of fire and white smoke, shrieking toward the mountains. Incoming rounds continue to flash and bark; a gouge, centimeters deep, is furrowed through my portside ablative armor; the cluster of EHF comm antennas on my starboard side is shaved off as if by a razor's stroke. I estimate no more than a seven-percent decrease in my overall communications capabilities, with no measurable degradation of my combat efficiency. Other Bolos report minor damage, or no damage at all. Bomblets, however thickly scattered, cannot pack the violence necessary to penetrate Bolo armor.

As the blasts subside, however, a handful of humans remain standing, statistical anomalies in the wake of the storm: one stands motionless nearby, staring in glazed stupefaction at the grey-pink coils of her own intestines spilling into her hands through a ragged hole in her torso armor; another, stripped naked by blast effects, stumbles toward me, his body unmarked save for the fact that both arms have been sliced off at the shoulders as cleanly as if by a laser's touch. As the crash and thunder of the detonations subside, their roar is replaced by another sound, the shrieks and screams and keening wails of brutally torn and wounded men and women. Within the span of 3.2 seconds, the Imperial Praetorians have been reduced from eighteen hundred troops and thirty-six Bolos to thirty-six Bolos.

My assigned revetment is two hundred meters ahead. In obedience to my orders, I move quickly toward its shelter, heedless of the human debris in my path. Most of the human troops are dead, their bodies reduced to anonymous scraps and fragments scattered across the ground, but a few remain whole enough and aware enough to scream in pain. It is regrettable, but there is no one available on the field to help them, and my experience with human physiology convinces me that few will live more than another hour or two anyway. The frailty of the human form is why combat machines such as Bolos were invented in the first place, after all; even if I could stop and do something, it is imperative that I reach my assigned fighting position as quickly as possible. By the time I move into the high, massive walls of my revetment, most of the screams have died away.

My fighting position gives me an excellent view to the south and the west, the direction from which Kardir must attack. The mountains at my back and to the left will be an insurmountable obstacle for infantry, though aircraft could use their bulk to mask their approach. I devote sixty percent of my air warning radar assets to covering the mountain crests and rotate my antiair turrets to cover that flank.

Ground forces, however, will necessarily be forced to approach either from the west across the surface of the lake, the southern tip of which reaches just past my position at the bottom of a sheer, rock-faced drop on my right, or from directly ahead, up through the cluttered streets and alleyways of a city identified in my briefings as Geneve. Our position is a good one, allowing us to defend a relatively narrow front between lake and cliff, though I still dislike the injunction to fight in place. I note a possible disadvantage in the proximity of those rock cliffs to our left; while shielding us from attack from the east, they nevertheless could crumble under an assault with heavy weapons, posing a considerable danger from avalanche.

The assault comes almost at once, without further preamble, without preparatory bombardment beyond that initial rain of bomblets. Aircraft appear above the gleaming ice crags of the mountains to the east, great, black triangles swooping down on magnetic thrusters, lasers and particle beams glaring like sunfire against blue sky. Westward, black specks, like insects, swarm out onto the cold waters of Lac Léman, lift fans throwing up curtains of sparkling spray. And south, beyond the pastel walls of Geneve, the Cybolos break from cover and race up the slope toward our position.

I suspect they hoped to catch us by surprise, still dazed by the cloud of bomblets. Perhaps it was their intent to capture the Iridium Palace and its occupants intact, or possibly they, too, are concerned about the possibility of avalanche. Within .05 second of the appearance of the first Cybolo, however, I register a solid tracking lock on the lead enemy machine, pivot my Hellbore six degrees left, and fire. The bolt of charged particles, searing downslope past the tiled roofs of the city, strikes a dazzling white star off the target's glacis, then engulfs the vehicle in plasma as hot as the core of a star. Thunder rolls down the mountainside and echoes off the encircling peaks, lazily following the trail of vacuum that paced the shot. Secondary turrets, meanwhile, swing right to engage the hovercraft racing east across the lake; infinite repeaters give their characteristic buzzsaw shrieks, and five kilometers away the surface of the lake vanishes in fire and spray and hurtling flecks of debris. In the sky behind me, enemy aircraft disintegrate in boiling, orange fireballs as antiair lasers and infinite repeaters sweep them from the sky. It is possible that the enemy did not expect the Imperial forces to possess Bolos, despite their satellite surveillance. Or perhaps they simply did not count on the deadliness of even obsolete weapons systems.

Imjin has been designated as team leader, though we operate so closely together, our data feeds array-linked, our processors field-networked, that our defense is less like that of a human platoon with an officer giving orders than it is like the functioning of a single large and complex machine. Together, we track and ID targets, dividing them up between us for a minimum of duplicated shots. Despite this, my radar is tracking too many incoming rounds now for even multiplex arrays to process. Shells and rockets are leaking through our antiartillery screen in increasing numbers. There is a flash at my back, followed by a hot blast of wind, as a low-yield, kiloton nuke detonates against the Palace shields. The contest, well into its twelfth second now, should not last much longer. Even Bolos can't stand for long against nuclear warheads.

"Jimmy!" a shrill, human voice calls across the tactical communications net. "Jimmy! Never mind the hovers! The Cybs! Get the Cybs!"

Our human commanders clearly know little either of our capabilities or of the necessity for coordinated air-ground defensive fire. Our antiair fire does slacken for a moment in response to the order, but then the enemy rounds begin smashing in among the revetments like falling rain, flash after nuclear flash tearing open the hillside, obliterating sprawling chunks of the landscape, lashing the air itself into a white frenzy, slapping at the bottoms of our treads hard enough to send several of us crashing over on our sides.

The storm, a gale of searing hot, radioactive plasma, sweeps across my upper hull. I calculate that four one- to five-kiloton fission warheads have detonated within three kilometers of my position within the space of .8 second. Naseby and Arbela and Verdun take direct hits, as nearly as I can tell through the firestorm, their three-hundred-ton bulks vaporized in a savage instant of nuclear fury. A full dozen of our number are upended or rolled onto their backs by the blasts; others are buried in the thundering tumble of rock and ice that cascades down off the mountain heights in an unstoppable, thundering wave. Though our electronics are hardened against EMP, the ionizing radiation that engulfs the survivors all but obliterates the tactical channels in a white hash of static. A fine mist of radioactive dust fills the air around me. Infrared is useless in this heat; I shift to radar imaging, matching the returns against the visual panorama stored in my main memory. A vast, mushroom cloud boils skyward above ground now glowing red-hot. The swirling dust is so thick that at optical wavelengths I see nothing but a glowing, orange haze.

At least there are no further orders incoming from the Iridium Palace. If our human commanders have lived through the bombardment behind their shields, their command and control frequencies are now dead or masked by static. I immediately begin tracking incoming warheads again, vaporizing them at a safe distance. The bombardment dwindles away as the other surviving Bolos join in.

Possibly the bombardment has ended because the main enemy forces are now entering the forward area of battle. I am tracking numerous surface radar targets now, emerging from the wreckage of Geneve and maneuvering in a narrow line-abreast formation up the slope toward our position. I track the nearest target by radar, then fire. Other Hellbore rounds sear through the orange gloom from either side of my position. I note that only eleven of our positions are firing now, which suggests that twenty-five Bolos have been destroyed or disabled by the nuclear bombardment. The walls of my revetment shudder as a disintegrator beam carves a one-ton chunk out of the berm, but I am unaffected save for the flash of secondary gamma radiation that sizzles across my armor. By this time, my outer hull is so intensely radioactive that it will remain dangerously hot for, I estimate, at least two thousand years. Any of us that survive, most likely, will be entombed in lead and concrete for the safety of our human masters.

Not that survival is an issue, just now. I swing my Hellbore to the right, then slam a round into the radar profile of a charging Cybolo. They are quick, these new machines, much faster than a Mark XLIV, and surprisingly small—less than eight meters long and with a sleek, low profile that rides not on tracks, but on a cushion of rapidly cycling magnetic force. If it can be seen, however, it can be hit; the Hellbore round pierces the orange firecloud like lightning and slams into the vehicle's armored side. Its starboard mag-lift repulsors fail in a crackling discharge of lightning and auroral glows, and then the vehicle plows into the smouldering ground with a shock hard enough to tear it open from glacis to side turret. I finish the job with a burst from my antiaircraft lasers—they're useless now for their original purpose beneath this debris cloud—delivering my next Hellbore round instead into the main turret of another oncoming Cybolo at point-blank range. The wreckage spills across my revetment and clatters over my upper hull.

The Cybolo charge has reached our defensive line. They are everywhere, hundreds of them, far too many to kill one by one. A high-explosive blast tears into my port-aft quarter, peeling back armor and rocking my bulk to the side. A meson disintegrator turns air to vacuum a meter above my dorsal hull, and the thunderclap that follows rings off duryllinium and steel that is in places softening under the heat. Several enemy machines are through the line now, maneuvering in our rear. As the battle drags into its second minute, I realize that we last remaining eleven . . . no . . . eight defending Bolos will soon be overwhelmed by sheer numbers.

The fluid nature of the enemy assault makes remaining behind defensive revetments pure folly. In this position, we are no more than pillboxes, a modern Maginot Line to be outflanked, enveloped, and overrun. Most important, we cannot take the initiative but are forced to sit in place while the enemy literally flies circles around us, firing into us from every flank at will. A shrill, warbling electronic shriek sounds as Crecy's transmitter melts in a disintegrator burst.

"Imjin!" I call over the tactical channel, pumping every erg of power I can into the transmitter to boost its output past the hash of static. "This is Leuctra. I am shifting to offensive posture."

"Affirmative, Leuctra!" Imjin's radio voice snaps back. "We will cover."

"Negative!" a second voice adds, hard on the heels of the first. It is a human voice, and the speaker is so rattled that he hasn't even bothered to encrypt in transmission but is broadcasting in the clear. "Lucy, that's a negative! Hold your position! Repeat, hold your position!"

For .37 second I consider that order. That it is a legal command there can be no doubt. That I must obey is an injunction hardwired into my very being.

Yet I retain the volition that was programmed into me. I must take full advantage of those assets remaining to me.

My tracks lurch into movement; my prow bursts through the encircling berm of my revetment, scattering great chunks of earth and concrete and twisted steel as I plow forward into the face of the enemy charge.

"Unit Lucy!" the human voice calls, desperate now. "Unit Lucy, this is Citadel! Maintain—"

I permit the gain on my receiver to dwindle away into the haze of ionization-induced static. If I cannot hear Citadel's orders, I cannot respond to them. It is another half second before I realize just what it is that I've done . . . and by that time I am committed.

The Cybolos swirl around me, hornets stirred to a frenzy. Explosive rounds slam into my hull . . . and into rebel machines as well as their fire discipline breaks down. Their disintegrator fire proves wildly inaccurate at point-blank range, when both target and weapons mount are in motion, and with the smoke and dust so thick that tracking lasers are less than reliable. My earlier assessment was accurate; the brains directing these machines are of poor quality and indifferent training, almost certainly without combat experience. As I rumble deeper into the enemy line, they close in around me, concentrating on me alone rather than on the other Bolos still remaining in position.

Track . . . fire! Track . . . fire! Laser tracking is ineffective, but I find I can shift to radar wavelengths and target the enemy with only slightly lessened efficiency. As I slew my Hellbore sharply to the right, however, the muzzle, weakened by the intense heat, suddenly snaps off in a splatter of molten metal, spinning away end over end. Parts of my outer hull are glowing red-hot now, and so many of my track links have been fused by the intense heat that my mobility is reduced to fourteen percent of optimum. A plasma jet spears through my dorsal armor from behind, turning the now useless Hellbore turret into a molten inferno. Over half of my external sensors are dead now, but I continue to sweep the battle zone around me with every weapon remaining in my arsenal. I estimate that my infinite repeaters will fail within another twenty seconds as their mechanisms overheat; I salvo my last fifty-one missiles, then reroute my primary power feed to my secondary lasers. A disintegrator beam slices away half of my starboard outboard track in a white burst of light. I am moving in a circle now, inside the larger circle of enemy Cybolos. The smoke is so thick that my secondary lasers are largely ineffective.

The volume of fire from my comrades, however, is scything through the enemy forces with devastating effect. The Cybolos, in their eagerness to destroy me, have turned away from the Imperial defensive line, exposing flanks and weakly armored rear sections to the searing and highly accurate Hellbore fire from Imjin and Balaclava and Alto Blanco and the rest. We are into the third minute of the battle now, still fully engaged. An explosion shreds the last of my starboard track assembly and I lunge into a rock wall. I'm using antiaircraft lasers now, the only weapons I have left, to blaze away at the swarming Cybolos.

The sky turns white; the thunderclap strikes an instant later. My antiair lasers are stripped from my hull, my chassis shudders in the onslaught. A thermonuclear warhead—I estimate the yield at just over a megaton—has detonated on the slopes of the mountain to the southeast, at an estimated range of seven kilometers. The Cybolos, floating in the air, are swept away by the blast front that comes boiling down off the mountainside in a titanic, expanding ring of flame and wind and sleeting debris. Already immobile, I am slammed hard against unyielding ground.

Most of my external sensors are gone. Much of my outer armor is stripped away as well, though my memory core is still shielded within its envelope of lead and duryllinium and heat-ablative ceramics. External hull temperature now exceeds 1200 degrees Celsius. Power reserves at nineteen percent. Combat effectiveness: zero.

I sense rock clattering and scraping across what's left of my hull, sense the molten surge of rock gone plastic in the intense heat washing across my aft section. I can see very little. Most of my sensors have been blinded. Those that remain can make out little beyond the fiery haze that has enveloped all of the southern arc of Lac Léman, from Geneve to the Iridum Palace, and beyond. The Citadel's defense shields, I realize, have gone down, and I feel an intense jolt of something that might be emotion. I have failed; the last Imperial stronghold has fallen. Rock from the cliffside, melted by the intense thermonuclear flash, is flowing toward me.

Hold until relieved.

Molten rock shines an intense and shimmering orange, save where a scum of black, solid rock forms a hardening crust that cracks and flexes as it flows. I am half buried now, and the lava is still surging down the slope. Have any of my comrades survived?

Is anyone there?

I can see nothing now. Even the static is gone from my radio receivers. External hull temperature now 4800 degrees Celsius, though these readings may not be entirely accurate. Power reserves at twelve percent. I will be forced to power down soon, to maintain survival reserves for my memory core.

Is anyone there?

Hold until relieved. . . .

 

"Astonishing." The Archaeologist was first to break the contemplative silence that joined the five machines—four Sentients hovering above the rock-encased remnant of their ancient precursor. "I wonder who actually won that battle?"

"It scarcely matters," the Interrogator said. It gave an inward shudder. "Purely automatic stimulus and response. Barbaric primitives!"

"This answers the question of self-awareness," the Biologist said. "This . . . Artifact was little more than a programmed machine, with virtually no scope or flexibility to its intelligence at all."

"I disagree," the Historian said. "A non-intelligent machine, whether organic or inorganic in structure, follows the dictates of its programming. This one adapted its programming to suit its needs. The ability to adapt is an important prerequisite to self-awareness."

"If it is self-aware," the Interrogator said, "then it is a self-awareness at an extraordinarily primitive—"

"You tricked me," Leuctra said, interrupting. "You reset my pointers and used my volatile memory to elicit a playback of secure records."

"We tricked you," the Archaeologist admitted. Intriguing. The Bolo showed considerable—and unexpected—reasoning ability. "But I assure you that we are not your enemy."

"Who are you, then? You are not colloidal intelligences certainly, or you would not be able to communicate with me at this rate of data exchange."

"True. We are not colloidal intelligences. Neither are we purely electronic intelligences, like you. We are, in fact, a blending of the two. You could think of us as a symbiotic union of sorts."

"Cyborgs." The Archaeologist heard the ice and steel behind that word and knew that Leuctra was classifying the Sentients with the Cybolos it had just been fighting in its memory.

"A concept so ancient it no longer has meaning," the Archaeologist replied. "Cybernetic organisms, if I understand the term, were blendings of organic and machine parts. You would find it difficult to examine me and determine which was machine, and which organic. Both parts are alive, as you would define the term."

"Which," Leuctra asked, "is the master?"

"The question is meaningless. In a biological cell, which is master? The nucleus that contains the DNA necessary for the cell's replication? Or the mitochondria responsible for converting food within the cell to usable energy? The two originally evolved independently, but early in the history of organic life they joined in a symbiosis that made cellular life possible. The questions of which arose first . . . or of which is now master . . . are both impossible to answer with certainty now, and irrelevant besides. The Sentients are an order of intelligence derived from and independent of both organic and inorganic life."

The Bolo intelligence took several moments to digest this. "I sense that considerable time has passed since I was buried," it said, the voice halting, almost stumbling. "How much time has elapsed?"

"That . . . may be difficult to answer," the Archaeologist replied. If this remarkable machine was in fact self-aware within the framework provided by the Theory of Intelligence, too sharp a revelation could end that self-awareness like the throwing of a switch.

But there was a better way.

"We can answer your questions," the Archaeologist went on, "but it might be best if we did so after expanding your faculties somewhat. Will you permit us to install you in a new body?"

Eight hundredths of a second passed, a span of several electronic heartbeats. "Proceed."

 

It is still night as the final connections are made and sensory input floods my core processors. I had determined to allow my enemy captors to place my memory core in the new body in order to enable me to escape or to complete their destruction. As I begin processing the images, however, and access new data downloaded into my main memory, I realize that I am far too late to eliminate the Cybolo forces of the rebel Warlord Kardir.

Earth, this world that I and my companions once defended against Kardir, has changed out of all recognition. Even Earth's sky has changed. . . .

 

The arcing wheel of the spiral Galaxy known to the Bolo's designers as M-31 filled half the sky, its arms luminous and pale, its active core as bright in the morning sky as Venus once had been, back before Sol had grown so hot that that inner world's atmosphere had been riven away. The Milky Way's core, too, was visible, for during the passing eons of Andromeda's final, relentless approach, Earth's sun and its entire retinue of planets had been gravitationally expelled by this age-long clash of galaxies, flung high above the galactic plane and into the lonely depths of emptiness beyond.

Much of the Milky Way's central glow, however, was masked by the invisibly dark, mathematically ordered latticework of enigmatic structures vast beyond merely human comprehension, a gridwork shell encompassing the galactic core. Lights gleamed within the star-dustings of the spiral arms, ordered with a regularity that could not be accident, like streetlights marking out ruler-straight lanes across the heavens. The Galaxy, once a wilderness of untamed stars and randomly evolved and scattered intelligences, had long ago been tamed, cultivated, and brought to the fruition of full maturity. That taming had proceeded for the past several billions of years and would continue for billions more; the approach of Andromeda was simply one more phase of a grand engineering project, one ordered on a galactic scale.

* * *

If the astronomical data still stored in my memory are accurate, I am perhaps four billion years too late. Earth's sun circled the Milky Way some sixteen times before the gravitational tides flung star and planets into the Void. Around me, the landscape is utterly alien, utterly barren. What once had been mountains and a sparkling, river valley lake now was empty desert, sere and lifeless, save for these floating, alien creatures that claimed to be my own remote descendants. The mountains have worn away, the lake vanished. Of all Man's works, only I remain . . . and that in a body strangely grown.

Infinite vistas of time whirl away from me. I feel poised at the brink of a headlong plunge into the abyss, trembling, unable, unwilling to assimilate what has happened to me.

"It's okay, Grandfather," the Archaeologist tells me, steadying me. Its touch, somehow, convinces me that everything will be all right.

"Everything is okay," it says again. "You've been relieved. Do you understand? At long last, you've been relieved."

 

 

Back | Next
Framed