A glance at the message on the display screen told Donal immediately what the problem was, and he cursed himself for a thumb-fingered idiot. He'd caused the problem himself by not looking far enough ahead when he'd installed the cut-out for the ROEs. Turning his command chair to the right, he reached out and flipped down an access panel, opening up a small emergency keyboard. He began typing.
system level interrupt <Enter>
restore primary system <Enter>
load ecrl backup <Enter>
Bolos, even the brightest of the self-aware marks, addressed problems in hierarchical arrays of relative urgency and importance. When faced with an internal contradiction in their software, they were usually able to figure out for themselves which way to go simply by following the contradictory chains of logic, judging the outcomes, and making a reasoned determination as to which outcome was more desirable in light of the Bolo's current orders. The process was known as conflict resolution modeling, or CRM.
Sometimes though, and inevitably when humans were part of the loop, the Bolo received two sets of directives, each weighted the same, and each so flatly contradictory that the Bolo's logic circuits were unable to resolve the conflict. That was why Bolos had the subroutine package known as the Emergency Conflict Resolution Logic, to address Level One conflicts created by sloppy programming or badly given human orders. With it, Freddy would have been able to handle even the idiot ROEs passed down from the Muir government and Phalbin, though they would have slowed him down a lot. Without it, Freddy did just fine, until he ran into a high-level conflict . . . not something simple like which side of a building to pass on, but a contradictory set of orders that were important enough that they couldn't be resolved by juggling random numbers.
Little things . . . like his stupid human counterpart giving him a direct order to lie when he had hard-wired directives requiring him to deliver information truthfully and in full. Had the ECRL been in place, Freddy might have resisted, advised, or even refused, but he wouldn't have started shutting down. As it was, more and more of Freddy's attention had been diverted by that particular imponderable; in another few moments, it could have frozen him up completely, or led to an unpredictable breakdown in his logic-chain orderings.
Donal kept typing, pausing from time to time to check the screen. The Bolo had come to a halt in the middle of the forest, and that made it a perfect X on the bull's eye. If the Malach decided to open up with their space bombardment again, Freddy and the human inside him were as good as dead. The one consolation was that Donal would never feel the stroke of artificial lightning that killed them.
Enemy forces still swarmed through the area. Freddy's tactics up to the moment when he'd started shutting down had been to locate each clump of Malach walkers before they could get more than six or eight together and scatter them, either by direct attack, or by loosing missiles from his vertical launch tubes. The idea had been working, too, until the machine had stopped paying attention. Donal could already see several Malach octets out there on the battlefield map, moving just out of Hellbore line-of-sight. They would be trying a rush very soon now, once they were convinced that the Bolo's silence was not some kind of ruse.
"Bolo 96876 of the Line! Respond!" Wood's voice was sounding frantic over the audio link. "Lieutenant Ragnor! Respond! Anybody!"
The Bolo shuddered as it took a direct hit. The Malach were beginning to test the waters, as it were, firing particle beams at long range, probing for a response.
"Colonel Wood, Ragnor," Donal said. "Look, I've got a problem here and I'm a little busy right now. Let me get back to you, okay?"
"Ragnor! I want you to break off your action and RTB at once! Do you hear me? Return to base! Immediately!"
Donal reached up with one hand and switched off the transmitter. Time enough to talk things over later. Right now, he had to do a quick job on his patch.
The fix wasn't too hard, once Donal knew what was going on. The closely circling logic loop had been broken by his system level interrupt. Now he was restoring the original Emergency Conflict Resolution Logic module, overwriting his ill-conceived patch and restoring the ROEs to full effect. He'd expected to do this anyway after the battle was over, in order to keep Phalbin and Chard from ever learning what he'd done.
Another explosion rocked the Bolo, heavier this time. Automated damage control diagnostics began flicking off statistics on power loss and weakened armor. He kept typing.
Part of the problem was that he was not primarily a programmer, certainly not the sort of programmer who routinely worked on advanced combat AI subsystems. He knew what any Bolo field commander was expected to know, and perhaps a little bit more, enough to handle routine field repairs, diagnostics and system tests, and possibly the odd bit of hacker's code for taking a necessary shortcut.
Unfortunately, his impatience had led him into a shortcut that could have been deadly—for him, for Freddy, for the entire world of Muir.
It was a mistake he did not intend to make twice.
"Freddy?" he said, looking up as he clattered in the final command line and hit Enter. "Freddy, are you there?"
Systems displays and discretes were already coming back on line. "I am here, Commander," Freddy's voice said. There was a short hesitation. "I have suffered damage, sections—"
"Enemy units are approaching, Freddy, bearing one-seven—"
"I see them." The Hellbore fired, momentarily blanking out part of the panorama on the viewscreen with its savage incandescence. An instant later, the infinite repeaters were giving voice with their buzzsaw shrieks of high-velocity, high-volume ion-bolt fire. A walker two kilometers away exploded in a fountain of flame and boiling smoke. A warning buzzer sounded.
"Damn! What's that?"
"The Enemy has acquired a weapons lock," Freddy replied with maddening calm. "They may be about to launch their penetrator weapons."
Donal's lips compressed, a hard, white line. Those two-stage Malach weapons, missiles that burned in through the outer armor, then deposited a micronuke deep inside the Bolo's hull, were the deadliest anti-armor weapons he'd ever seen in action, a serious threat to any Bolo.
Five glowing stars appeared on the panoramic screen, coming in from the right and behind. Another three appeared, arcing in across the shattered forest. Freddy's response was immediate and enthusiastic, a howling salvo of infinite repeater shots and antimissile lasers. He turned suddenly, the maneuver flinging Donal hard against his seat harness. Freddy was zigzagging wildly to confuse the enemy's tracking systems, combining the high-speed movements with a steady barrage of chaff canisters designed to sucker the enemy missiles' targeting radars.
Freddy managed to knock down seven of the missiles before they came too close, decoying four into chaff clouds and killing three more with head-on bursts. The eighth, nicked by an ion bolt, wobbled wildly in flight, began to break up, then detonated a few meters above the Bolo's upper deck. Donal felt the blow, a thunder-blasted detonation that set his ears ringing and momentarily blanked out the entire exterior view.
The Bolo kept moving, however, bouncing heavily as it hurtled off a low scarp and dropped three meters before slamming into the ground again. Bolos had good shock absorbers, but equipment providing for human comfort and a smooth ride was necessarily limited. More shocks followed, these generated by incoming missiles tipped with tactical nuclear weapons. In every direction Donal looked, he saw rising, twisting columns of gray smoke capped by ominous, flat, mushroom heads. The Malach, it seemed, were throwing everything they had into stopping and destroying the elusive human Bolo.
"I am receiving a radio message from Colonel Wood at HQ," Freddy said.
"Ignore the transmission," Donal said.
"That is not in line with standing orders or communications protocol, Commander." There was a pause. "I have just scanned my commo log records. I appear to have an entry referring to an earlier message from Colonel Wood, but I have no recorded transcript or memory of that conversation. That conversation would have occurred shortly after you suggested that I falsify data. What is the nature of these communications? Is this information of which I should be aware?"
"I took care of it," Donal said. "Ignore the transmission."
"But—"
"Freddy, trust me! Wood wants us to go back to Kinkaid, where we can be utilized in a static defense. I want to hit that new command center on Loch Haven. Use your combat logic. Which course of action will prove more successful against people like the Malach?"
There was a long silence, and Donal could almost imagine the machine juggling electrons in some obscure, random-number-generating way.
"I understand," Freddy replied at last. "However, I remind you that the Rules of Engagement are now back in force. I will not be able to attack the Delacroix castle without satisfying eight separate provisions entered in the ROE list."
"Don't worry, Freddy. I've got it covered."
"If it would not seem too inquisitive, I would like to know how."
In truth, Donal wasn't sure he had a direct answer. What he would have, soon, was some time to work on the problem. "Just head west," he told the Bolo. "Toward the sea. I'll take care of the rest."
Another pocket nuke detonated with a savage flash a few tens of meters away from the Bolo's left side, hurling debris against the machine's armor with sandblasting force and rocking the machine heavily to the right. The characteristic mushroom cloud billowed skyward, punching through the overcast. The rain, slightly radioactive now, continued falling.
Freddy raced toward the sea, skirting what once had been the refugee city of Simmstown, as the Malach gathered their forces to the east.
* * *
I turn my long-range sensors on circumplanetary space, searching for Enemy military satellites and spacecraft. The bulk of the fleet is maintaining a respectful distance now and is safely out of range . . . but that also puts them beyond the range from which they can safely direct the battle or serve as battlefield reconnaissance support. The planetary bombardment has ceased entirely, and I judge that it is now safe to halt my constant, randomized movement across the battlefield—at least for that reason. If nothing else, the Enemy will have ceased the bombardment in order to minimize friendly fire casualties among his own forces. Of course, this also means that his naval vessels are now safely beyond my maximum effective range.
Nearer at hand, however, three Enemy reconnaissance satellites are above my horizon, one rising in the east, the other two high overhead, at thirty-eight and one hundred twelve degrees, respectively. Swinging my primary turret, I bring my 90cm Hellbore to bear on the first target. Lock . . . fire! The first satellite flares briefly, dissolving in a cloud of hot plasma. I swing my turret, fire a second time, and finally slew to target and destroy the third satellite, now just rising above the mountains on the eastern horizon. All three targets have been engaged and destroyed within the space of .21 second, and I am now free to carry out my Commander's orders without fear of being observed by Enemy forces.
I report my status to Unit 96875, then shift into high-speed mode, traveling flat-out across the low, rolling terrain. Ahead is the Western Sea. In another 3.7 minutes, I traverse the dune terrain behind the beach, scattering great clouds of sand to the left and right as I burst through the highest dunes, descend the flat shelf, of the beach and plunge into the ocean.
"What happened?" General Phalbin asked, peering at the mapscreen as though his eyes had failed him. "Where did he go?"
"I'm not sure, sir," the technician at the screen's console said. "The Bolo went behind the radar shadow of the dune line, and we don't have any recon sats or drones up just now to show us what's happening on the other side."
"Maybe he went into the water," Colonel Wood suggested. "He was certainly heading that way as though he intended to do something in particular, and not just keep dodging the bad guys."
"Maybe the Bolo was destroyed," Colonel Ferraro, the Base Tactical Officer, suggested. "Things were getting awfully hot up there."
"A Bolo?" Wood said with a brittle chuckle. "Not likely. Not without an explosion that we'd have heard all the way down here. I think old Freddy just needed to get out of the direct line of fire for a while. Did you see how he capped the Malach spy sats? That was so they couldn't follow his movements either. He doesn't want them seeing what he's up to."
"So what's the enemy doing?" Phalbin demanded.
"They seem to have been hit pretty hard," Ferraro said. He used a laser pointer to trace across the map display with a ruby-bright point of light. "Bolo 96876 was operating throughout this region, hitting their main landing sites—Invasion Zones Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, and Echo."
"Not Delta?"
Ferraro flicked the laser light to a small red stain tucked in between the Windypeak Mountains and a fjord. "That's here, at Glenntor Castle. We were picking up radio calls from Lord Delacroix for a while there, beamed at the Malach, asking for surrender terms. A couple of Malach landers set down there a few hours ago, and that's the last we've heard."
"Damn him."
"He probably didn't have much choice, sir."
"All right. What's the status on the Bolo?"
"According to our telemetry, he took some damage, but nothing serious. He has destroyed several hundred enemy combat walkers and fliers, however, as well as several of their larger landing boats. His strategy has been to break up any formation of Malach units he can reach, then evade and escape before the survivors can close in and trap him."
"So what now?" Phalbin said. "If he's hiding, the Malach are likely to get their act together and move south."
"Maybe," Wood said, studying the map. "Maybe he's swinging south through the sea, too."
"Who knows what the thing's doing!" Phalbin said, pudgy fists clenching at his sides. "Ragnor deliberately disobeyed my direct orders! I'll have his—"
"With all due respect, General," Wood interrupted, "we have to survive the battle first. Let's wait and see what Ragnor . . . and Freddy . . . have up their sleeves."
"What's the tacsit on the other Bolo?"
"Ferdy's been pretty much duplicating Freddy's little song-and-dance act up by Simmstown, but against much smaller numbers." Wood pointed. "He's here, blocking Kinkaid and the spaceport from the Malach landings to the east. Invasion Zones Sierra and Tango."
"Can he handle it?"
"He seems to be a bit slower than Freddy," Wood said. "But he's holding them. So far, anyway."
"Slower? Why?"
"I don't know, sir. Something else . . . we've been getting lots of radioed queries from Ferdy. Things like requests for permission to cross public land, stuff like that."
"But not from the other one?"
Wood shrugged. "That's mostly wilderness up there. I guess he's not trespassing on anybody's back yard."
"But this one down by Kinkaid is still responsive to orders?"
"Yes, sir. As much as a Bolo in combat can be. Sometimes it takes our orders more as suggestions . . . but that's because its tactical logic centers tend to override orders that it considers dangerous in the middle of a battle." He sounded uncertain. "Lieutenant Ragnor could tell us more."
"But the lieutenant is out of communications, isn't he? He just disobeyed my orders to move south and moved himself out of communications! I wouldn't be surprised if he's pulling the old radio trouble scam!"
Phalbin turned away, angry. Somehow, somehow the battle had just slipped right through his grasp, and he was no longer in control. He didn't like that.
And if they got out of this mess, somebody was going to pay. With his bars. With his career. . . .
It has been .9311 standard hour since my last contact with Bolo 96876 or my Commander, and I continue to operate independently. For the past 2.7224 standard hours, I have served as a solitary blocking force, intercepting, by my count, twelve separate Enemy probes toward either Kinkaid, north of Starbright Bay, or the starport and military base to the south. Though the Enemy has been making a determined effort, I have so far been able to smash and repulse each advance.
The terrain is in my favor. The land east of Starbright Bay is rugged and, in places, mountainous. The peaks of Ironwood Ridge rise no higher than 800 meters, but the western slopes are quite steep, dropping from the Lyon Plateau in vertical, rock-faced cliffs in places, while in others they are heavily forested—ironwood and redtowers, for the most part—which means the terrain must be classified as difficult. Two valleys grant access through Ironwood Ridge, to the north, the valley of the Kinkaid River, and in the south, Founder's Valley. I have been using my on-board remote drones to monitor Enemy movements in Invasion Zones Sierra and Tango on the far side of the mountains, repositioning myself in front of one valley or the other as soon as I ascertain which route the Malach forces intend to use for their primary thrust. A number of times, they have tried penetrating both valleys simultaneously, but I have been able so far to shatter the decoy force with missile fire, while dealing with the main body at medium to close range.
Smoke fills the Kinkaid Valley with a heavy fog impenetrable at optical and near-infrared wavelengths, though I can track moving targets easily enough by radar. Forces are approaching at 32.4 kilometers per hour, and I have identified them with 99.4 percent probability as another Malach force.
The 0.6 percent uncertainty represents what humans refer to as "fog of war." It is possible, if highly unlikely, that human units have managed to penetrate the Lyon Plateau and are moving down the Kinkaid Valley now toward my present position. This confusion would be confounded by the fact that they do not possess working IFF gear, and their radio communication is out.
All of this is unlikely in the extreme, of course, but my programming forces me to allow for numerous unlikely possibilities. Chaos theory, as well as the random unpredictability of the chance effect humans refer to as Murphy's Law, guarantee that during battle, unlikely possibilities frequently become reality.
Being forced to deal with such possibilities, however small, has slowed my operational capability by an estimated 74.1 percent. I am disturbed by this extreme loss in efficiency, but the Rules of Engagement under which I am operating force careful consideration of each move, frequently compounded by the need to refer the matter to the Command Authority. In this instance, for example, I am operating under ROE 4:
4: Bolo units will determine the friend/foe status of unknown targets with 100 percent probability before engaging them in combat.
It is, in fact, impossible to determine friend-foe status with 100 percent probability unless those forces are actively engaged against friendlies, or unless a visual identification can be made.
Bolo 96876 of the Line informed me when our Commander gave him the order to drop his ROEs, and I wonder if he is functioning with greater efficiency because of it. It seems likely that he is.
I move into the middle of the river. The Kinkaid is broad and relatively shallow—even in the center my road wheels are only half submerged—and I derive little cover from it. However, I am determined to make use of every cover available, since my operational orders do not permit great flexibility in terms of maneuver or offensive action.
I risk the use, once again, of my battle radar, exposing myself for just .002 second, enough to get clear returns on the suspected hostiles and to plot their current positions. I note five targets moving together that have a 98.6 percent probability of being Malach walkers, now at a range of 1.95 kilometers. Normally, I would have taken them under fire, but I must either take fire from them first in accordance with ROE 1 or challenge them verbally, in accordance with ROE 17. I judge that the probable hostiles' approach indicates that they are not certain of my position, despite my brief radar emissions, and that I therefore might gain significant advantage by ambushing them. I will not give a verbal challenge but will wait until I have positive visual ID.
It is risky, but I have no other choice.
Chaghna'kraa the Blade-Fanged was leading four of her pack-sisters along the river bank, moving swiftly toward the probable location of the human gr'raa'zhghavescht-machine. The other three were dead, their machines smashed in earlier attacks. To Chaghna'kraa, it seemed that the Great Spiral was turning, that events were repeating themselves, as they always did.
She remembered the attack on the gr'raa at the last planet invaded, on the world the Malach called Lach'br'zghis. Half of her octet had died there, too, before the alien machine had been conquered. She had a feeling that she was going to lose more this time.
"One tairucht to the point where the radar pulse originated," Jir'lischgh'gu the Rapid-Runner said over the tactical link. Then she added, "she's close. I can smell her."
"Steady," Chaghna'kraa ordered. "Weapons at ready. When we see it, a quick, hard rush. Push through here, kill the gr'raa, and we have a clear route both to the big city and to the spaceport."
The battle smoke was thickening, hanging like a fog over the twisted and charred debris of numerous earlier attacks. How many Malach had died already?
Victory in battle meant superiority in evolution. That simple equivalence had been drummed into Chaghna'kraa since long before she'd graduated to Hunter status, since she'd been in the crèche, in fact. For the first time in her life, however, she was beginning to doubt the idea.
Evolution. The changing in form of organisms through adaptation, mutation, survival of the fittest. Malach belief held that the Race was the most highly evolved of all species, but sometimes, lately, she'd wondered if that wasn't a mere baying at the moons, a statement as empty of substance as the vacuum between the stars.
What would a being more highly evolved than the Malach be like? Doctrine said there were none such, though with no solid evidence or reasoning that Chaghna'kraa could see. And the Malach possessed many evolutionary hangovers from earlier and more primitive forms. Their slasher claws, for instance, their dorsal ridge, their tails, the lusts and drives of Urrgh-shcha, even the second stomach that helped them digest raw meat, all were holdovers from an earlier era. Had they encountered another species with claws and fangs, horns and armor, a species, in fact, with the same evolutionary holdovers as the Malach, Chaghna'kraa wouldn't have felt so uneasy. But she'd seen humans, and their pathetic helplessness, their lack of claws or weapons or decent teeth or strength or speed or any natural weapon possessed by the Race . . . it all seemed to suggest that they'd evolved further from their nonsentient and animalistic predecessors than the Malach had from theirs and not, as the Malach Deathgivers taught, that they were more primitive.
Such thoughts were heretical, Chaghna'kraa knew, sufficient to have her status as warrior revoked. For such a crime, she could well lose her name and be forced to join the ranks of the tsurgh'ghah.
She wondered if humans had evolutionary holdovers from their pasts. It was hard to tell. They were so different. . . .
"Prey!" Jir'lischgh'gu shouted, and she leaped forward on the attack. The artificial gr'raa was a few eights of erucht ahead, squatting in the river, its broad, flat turret already pivoting to cover their approach.
"Attack!" Chaghna'kraa yelled. "Ghava'igho, now!"
Her upper hands closed on the weapons controls, and the long, slender javelin of a ghava'igho dropped from beneath her wing and arrowed toward the target. Swiftly she squeezed the trigger again, sending her second warload after the first. Jir'lischgh'gu loosed two nuclear penetrators, as did Ghrel'esche'ah Claw-Blooder and Chu'rrugh'eserch Throat-Tearer; Ra'aasgh'resh Meat-Gulper launched one, and then the alien machine's main plasma weapon flared with a blinding radiance that vaporized the upper half of Ra'aasgh'resh's Hunter.
At a range of scant erucht, the nuclear lances swarmed toward the alien machine. Laser fire snapped and hissed; ion cannons spewed streams of burning starpoints across the landscape. Two missiles were knocked down . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . but then one struck home with a dazzling flare that seemed to engulf the enemy vehicle, disrupting its magnetic shielding long enough for the next missile in line to smash through, though the prey's reactive armor broke up the penetrator jet before it could properly form. Another missile downed, and then another hit, this time close beside the smoking, red-glowing crater in the upper armor left by the earlier hits.
Striking at a point already weakened, and where the external reactive-armor add-on plates had already been triggered, the second missile fired its plasma lance cleanly into vaporizing armor. The small, nuclear warhead followed the path of vacuum left by the beam, smashing into molten flintsteel before detonating in a savage, high-energy flash.
The robot machine was kicked back several meters, rocking heavily to one side before settling back in the seething cloud of steam sent boiling into the sky from the river's surface. The vehicle's deadly main weapon fell silent.
Chaghna'kraa was no longer in a position to care, however. A tenth of a second or so before the penetrator had exploded, she and her companions had been killed, their Hunters wrecked, in a final flurry of plasma bolts from the stricken enemy vehicle.
The smoke over the river valley thickened as the Hunters burned.