Back | Next
Contents

Chapter Seven

Anything will burn, given a high enough temperature and maximum surface exposure and dispersion. The dust swirling in the air above and around Bravo One and Two, according to spectroscopic analysis, is composed primarily of one- to ten-micron-sized flecks of titanium steel alloy, ferrocrete, concrete, depleted uranium, and ceramplast composites, distributed as an aerosol cloud offering all of the prime requisites for a fuel-air explosive mixture. Though not normally flammable, the touch of fusion fire from a 20cm Hellbore infinite repeater is sufficient to ignite the cloud at temperatures in excess of 5,000 degrees Celsius. 

The extreme radiant heat overloads Bravo One's battle-screens within .08 second, causing operational collapse, and vaporizes some tons of external hull armor, the blast wave peeling it back first in broad, molten strips before it flashes to metallic steam and evaporates. 

The explosion—the equivalent, I judge, of a tactical nuclear device with a yield of approximately 50 kilotons—is not sufficient to destroy a Bolo Mark XXXII, but the blast wave and fireball disorient the targets and sharply degrade their performance. I ride out the initial shock wave, which washes across my hull like a white-hot wall of flame riding hurricane winds, then continue my advance, bringing my Number One primary Hellbore to bear. 

I slam a round into Bravo One, catching it high on the right hull, just below the turret. With battlescreens down and the armor already thinned, the fusion pulse loosed at point-blank range burns through duralloy and armor laminates, spearing through the vehicle from one side to the other. Internal explosions savage the Mark XXXII, and meter-thick armor burns fiercely with a white-hot glare. The enemy machine's turret has jammed; I note that the Bolo is trying to bring its primary weapon to bear by counter-rotating its tracks, but I hit it squarely on the turret with a shot from Number Two primary. 

The second round shreds the right side of the turret, eliciting a fresh round of internal explosions. At the same instant, I track Bravo Two with my Number Three primary and put a five-megaton pulse into its right-front track assembly, just as it rises, nose-high from a mud-filled shell crater. The bolt chewed through cleated track and drive bogie, ripping into the machine's suspension as it skewed right, then slid back into the shell hole. 

I follow up with a barrage from my secondaries, riddling both crippled Bolos with a fusillade of 20cm Hellbore bolts. Chunks of white-hot metal spin wildly through the air, as duralloy is set ablaze by the intense, star-core heat of projectiles of fusion fire. In another two seconds, my Number One primary Hellbore is recharged and ready for the next shot. I track on Bravo One, but the vehicle is a flaming wreck, obviously dead. . . . 

* * *

"Sendee! . . ."

Elken had felt the deaths of both Veber and Sendee. Veber had been a friend, someone he'd not seen in some years, but Sendee . . .

Strange. He couldn't remember any specific link with her from when they were both flesh and blood, but it hurt beyond words in that instant when telemetry relayed the shock and searing blaze of heat cutting through her body . . . and then she was gone, the signal chopped off as though by a knife.

SND 9008988, his beloved Sendee, was dead. . . .

Beloved? Had he truly loved her? How could he have forgotten something like that? . . .

Even as he grappled with that sudden, wild stab of grief, the pain seemed to recede on its own. He had other things to worry about . . . including the sharp realization that he, by splitting his forces, had played into the enemy's hand. Four Mark XXXIIs outmatched a lone Mark XXXIII only if they were working together in close concert. The enemy had managed to maneuver clear of Elken and Palet and to engage Veber and Sendee alone.

"We should withdraw, Palet," he said . . . but the words were more musing than order. He paused, transmitting an update of the situation to the gods. He didn't want to withdraw. He felt responsibility for Sendee's death. All he could think of was to hurl himself at the enemy and burn him down, or die trying.

At the same time, he felt terror. He didn't want to die, but he felt as though his death was inexorably closing in on him, with no possibility of escape.

"We have him!" Palet replied with a shrill cry, vaulting a low and rubble-cluttered ridge just ahead.

Elken followed, cresting the ridge more slowly, sluing over the top just in time to see four fifty-ton grav-floating armored vehicles careen in from the west at high speed. Hellbore fire snapped and exploded, smashing down Palet's battle-screens, shredding armor, punching holes through slab sides with appalling ease.

Elken reversed his right track, pivoting sharply right to put his heaviest armor facing this new threat . . .

Then the Mark XXXIII hurtled in, turrets blazing. . . .

* * *

The enemy Bolos show a definite sluggishness in response time and seem unable to coordinate their maneuvers. The second pair appears over a low ridge just as I give the attack order to a team of four Dragons. Accelerating to my full road speed of over one hundred kilometers per hour, I close the range swiftly, loosing bolts from my Number One and Number Three primaries, holding Number Two in reserve. 

Alpha Two, already damaged by the Dragon pack, explodes in a vivid splash of yellow and orange flame. 

The Dragons peel off from the burning wreckage of Alpha Two, vectoring in now at my command to close with Alpha One from the rear. The enemy Bolo hesitates—a long and painful hesitation that seals its fate. By the time it decides that I am the more dangerous target and brings its Hellbore to bear, its weapon traversing and elevating in a blur, my Number Three turret fires, the recoil rocking me back on my tracks as I twist to the left, seeking to make myself a more difficult target. 

Alpha One fires, but the Hellbore bolt, bright and hot as a tiny sun, skims above my aft deck with meters to spare just as my shot strikes the Mark XXXII squarely on its frontal glacis. 

Battlescreens flash and fail, overloaded; enough energy from my shot spills through to gouge a meter-deep crater in solid block armor. Smoke boils from the wound as flames lick within the enemy machine's heart. I follow up with a shot from Primary Two, just as the Dragons open up from the rear. . . . 

* * *

This time, Elken felt the blasts of point-blank Hellbore rounds personally, not as relayed data. As a Bolo, he was not wired to experience pain, but his human brain accepted the searing heat of the incoming rounds as a dazzling, twisting impact, thrust, and pain that left him reeling.

He could feel control of his drive train failing, could feel the dull burn of flame inside his forward hull. Elken was dying. He knew it. Felt it.

Systems failed . . . hydraulics lost pressure . . . power readings dropped. His main weapon was out of action . . . fire control down . . . battlescreens down . . . power core overloading and threatening to go into auto-shutdown.

He overrode that last, seeking an answer, seeking a way out . . . and then the enemy Bolo's second shot filled his forward viewing arc with sunfire. There was a terrific jolt . . . and blackness . . .

He felt himself screaming as he tumbled into Night. . . .

* * *

My second shot slams into the crater melted by the first, and Alpha One explodes, the detonation sending a shudder through the earth that I feel beneath my tracks and scattering shrapnel across half a kilometer of the battlefield. Thirteen point eight seconds have passed since the first of the four Mark XXXIIs emerged above ground and battle was engaged, an unusually long time for most actions, especially one pitting Bolo against Bolo. 

I close with the wreckage of Alpha One. While the glacis has been blown away and much of the forward third has been reduced to twisted and skeletal ruin, still blazing fiercely, the command center appears mostly intact. I deploy a pair of spiders from a ventral hatch, directing them to pick their way through the debris and attempt to enter the sealed brain center housing. 

This is the armor-shrouded module which contains the primary AI center for the Mark XXXII. Using lasers to slice through ceramplast and titanium steel, the spiders access the circuitry packed within the sleek, gray pod. Feeder conduits snaked from spider bellies, touching contacts, probing the labyrinthine complexities of dense-packed molecular circuitry. 

For just an instant, I sense . . . a personality. It is not, however, as I expected, a Bolo personality, which I would have instantly recognized. This is something different . . . alien, and yet tantalizingly familiar, almost . . . human. 

And then the last trickle of current through the circuit connections fades, and I sense the personality dissolving. There is nothing I can do to call it back. 

I ponder the implications for a full .05 second. Was it a human personality I sensed in the dying Bolo psychotronics pod? Theory has long predicted that it might be possible to electronically copy a human mind, its memories, the very patterns of its consciousness, and download them into appropriate hardware. The ethics of such an operation were long debated, as were the philosophical implications: was a downloaded human personality still human, despite the shape its new body took? 

With the advent of true AI, the question became in some ways academic. It was possible to construct machines, such as Bolos, with minds at least the equivalent of the humans who designed them. They were not human, however, and the type of life they experienced was in no way related to that of flesh and blood humans. Since a copy of a mind was not the original, there seemed to be no point in employing the process—even if it could be achieved—as a means of reaching the ancient Holy Grail of human immortality. 

There is much that might be learned from this wreckage, but the middle of a battle is no place to pursue pure research. I recall the spiders, after placing in the wreckage a recovery beacon. When the Second Wave lands, bringing with it human engineers and salvage experts, they can dissect the wreckage of all four Mark XXXIIs in an attempt to determine just how Aetryx technology has altered the standard design and mentation of these Bolos. 

I sense other Caernan military forces approaching from the east and the north, though I do not detect the characteristic sonic or energy signatures of Bolos. These appear to be heavy grav tanks—"heavy" in this case meaning vehicles in the 100- to 200-ton range, and not anything of Bolo caliber. I deploy my Dragons to skirmish with them, in order to determine their capabilities. 

I begin moving toward that part of the defense compound where the enemy Bolos emerged from underground. Particle beam and laser fire from heavily armored turrets stabs at me from a dozen different towers and gun emplacements, and I return fire with infinite repeaters. A brief, savage lightning storm flares above the hectares of ferrocrete and duralloy slab that is the base compound. I compute from the display so far that the Enemy does not possess sufficient weaponry concentrated in this area to pose a significant threat to my operations. 

The slab that slid aside to release the enemy Bolos has closed over the tunnel again, but I locate the entrance—a target, perhaps, for human troops when they arrive. For the past 425.3 seconds, I have been sampling the radio traffic in the air around me, seeking a means of entering the Enemy's cyberdomain, but so far the encryption has kept me locked out. 

I am acquiring data, however, and may be able to force an entry within the next several hundred seconds. If so, I might be able to find the electronic combination for the tunnel access. I feel sure that entering the Caernan underworld and confronting the Enemy in his yet untouched chthonic strongholds will be necessary in order to secure absolute control over the surface. 

Aircraft are approaching from the west—a flight of four WR-5 Warlocks deployed to my AO by Space Strike Command. They are too late to assist in dealing with the enemy Bolos, but I redirect them toward the new enemy mobile targets and continue dueling with the compound gun emplacements. These will need to be reduced one at a time if this base is to approached by Confederation ground forces and landing craft. 

The operation appears to be going quite smoothly so far. I must guard against overconfidence, of course, but it seems likely that key AOs scattered about the planet's surface will be secure within the next ten hours, allowing the next phase of the invasion to begin a full eight hours ahead of schedule. 

I continue my duel with the base defenses. 

* * *

He awoke, stretching . . . and then the fear hit him in deep, shuddering waves, like the icy surf at Gods' Beach. The last thing he remembered . . . no . . . what was the last thing he remembered? Memory eluded him, like fragments of a dream.

He opened his eyes, then wondered why he couldn't see. He reached out with a trembling, sweat-slicked hand, then realized he couldn't feel anything, that the tremors, the sweat, the cold were all imagined, anchors for the mind adrift within a vast and lightless void.

Concentrating, he summoned memories from deep, deep within. He'd been in a battle of some sort. Yes . . . he'd been . . . he'd been a Bolo combat unit, his brain housed in a mobile armored vehicle the size of a fair-sized building. Before that . . . the memories were still dim, still fragmentary, but there was something about going in for elective surgery . . . a chance at immortality. . . .

What had gone wrong? . . .

Nothing is wrong, a voice, deep and quiet, spoke within the terror haunted depths of his thoughts. All is as it should be. <calm reassurance>

"I can't see," he said, shouting into darkness. "I'm blind!"

You are not blind. Your optical processors are not yet online. <calm reassurance>

The voice of his god! He was not alone after all.

And yet, there was a haunting, fear-rattled undercurrent to the thought, a sense of déjà vu. He was certain he'd had this conversation, this experience before.

The memories continued to surface, growing stronger, clearer, more focused. He had been a Bolo, deployed against an invading, enemy Bolo far larger and more powerful than himself. It had been part of an agreement. If he fought the invaders in this new body, helped save Caern from the beings the gods called Sky Demons, he would get the new and immortal body he'd originally longed for.

He'd gone out . . . with three of his fellows. He remembered the battle clearly, remembered the sharp, psychic and emotional pain when Sendee had been killed. He remembered being terribly afraid that he was about to die, as though he'd been trapped in a box, unable to retreat, unable to advance, and Death himself closing in.

"But I wasn't killed." The last thing he remembered was . . . what? He tried to trace the memories, which trembled on the verge of disintegration, like a dream. He'd felt Sendee die. He'd paused to send the update on the situation to the gods. He'd been about to follow Palet over the ridge. . . .

But he did not remember actually crossing the ridge. His last conscious memory was of sending in the situation update.

You were badly damaged. <compassion> We were able to retrieve your mind/thought patterns and transfer them to another machine body. You do not remember the period when you were unconscious. 

"I . . . see. . . ." He was puzzled. There'd been no immediate threat during those last few seconds of consciousness, no incoming ordnance, no enemy Hellbore fire. Whatever had hit him must have caught him by complete and overwhelming surprise. "So you're sending me out again?"

We must. <sorrowful compassion> The Sky Demon forces have gained footholds on the surface of our world. We must counterattack before they are able to land reinforcements. 

"I understand." He was reviewing the memories that were jumbled in upon his consciousness, like unwelcome intruders. It was a struggle just to make sense of them.

"I made a serious mistake," he said after a moment. "A tactical mistake. I calculated that four Mark XXXIIs were enough to ensure the destruction of one Mark XXXIII. But I divided my forces, sending them against the enemy two and two. He outmaneuvered us and destroyed us in detail, one against two, and then one against two again. He destroyed three . . . no, I guess all four of us. I don't think we inflicted any damage on him at all."

It is vitally important that you learn from your mistakes. <pleased and proud> Do you understand what it was that went wrong? 

"Yes. The problem will be bringing at least four Bolos against a single enemy Bolo all at once, and coordinating our attacks." As he searched, relevant memories, the results of tutorial downloads, arose in his mind. "Perhaps by using TSDS."

He knew the definition of the system resident in his Bolo combat software labeled "Total Systems Data-Sharing," but he wasn't entirely sure how to apply it in practice. He knew—"remembered" seemed the wrong word to use about information that had been fed to him through a data-jacked fiber-optic cable—that TSDS had first been introduced centuries ago, with the Bolo Mark XXI, and that it allowed each unit of a Bolo force to function as a single element of a multiunit awareness. He'd approached that state conceptually during the battle as he'd coordinated with Palet and Sendee and Veber, as they'd discussed plans and shared overlaid tactical views and even felt one another's sensory input, but TSDS would allow the personalities of the separate Bolos to so merge and integrate that for all intents and purposes, they were a single conscious entity.

The thought was a little scary, demanding, as it did, that the members of such a collective mentality surrender so much of their own will, identity, and freedom.

You will do well. <assurance and approval> We want you to lead another combat team.

"Why? I didn't do so well last time."

It is evident that you have learned from your mistakes. You possess leadership capabilities and strength of mind which are necessary for combat leadership and also quite rare. <earnest sincerity> You are among the best human commanders we possess, with the greatest potential. You should feel proud of what you have done already and be prepared to serve with equal valor now. 

Elken didn't feel particularly valorous, or as though he had much in the way of leadership potential. All he could really recall were his almost paralyzing fear . . . and his grief the moment Sendee had died. There was something there . . . something he needed to recall. . . .

I remind you, the god continued, a mellifluous voice in his head, that your final body, and your hope of immortality with the gods, depend on your successful defense of this world. 

Why me? he thought, a little bitterly. But he dismissed the inner cry, and the bitterness, as unworthy. The gods, clearly, knew more and better what they were doing than he. Perhaps there were just some things he wasn't meant to know or understand. "Okay," he said. "If you have another team ready, I'll take them out. We'll try to employ TSDS to hit the enemy from all sides simultaneously."

Light shimmered into Elken's awareness, and the light took form. He was in the armored cavern once again, one among many vast, squat, slab-sided forms.

A Bolo, Mark XXXII.

Move to the gathering area. The others are assembling already. 

Through the long and familiar tunnel, then. He was pleased that his reactions and responses appeared to remain well-tuned, even though his brain had been placed in a different machine body. It felt identical, and he marveled at the gods' skill at wiring a human brain to the psychotronic complexity of a Bolo with such perfect and well-skilled efficiency.

Three Bolos were waiting for him at the staging area in front of the underground mining and ore processing plant at Trolvas. As he reached out electronically to touch their thoughts, he was jolted by an utterly unlooked-for response.

"Sendee!" he cried. And Veber . . . and Palet! They were all here, all alive. "But I saw you all destroyed! I felt you destroyed! . . ."

"It's okay, Elken," Sendee's voice said. "I'm right here. I don't understand it either, but I'm okay."

"We're all okay!" Palet said. "The gods can do anything they want, right? They are the gods, after all!"

"Palet! Veber! How? . . ."

We were able to recover their mind/thought patterns as well. They reside now in new bodies, but they are as you remember them. 

"B-blessed are the gods, for they are holy and most powerful!" The ancient mantra from the Histories of the Way of the Gods steadied nerves jarred by this thunder-striking discovery.

The enemy Bolo is still at the Ghendai Planetary Defense logistics and command control center. <the voice of command> Go, now, and destroy the Sky Demon Machine. 

"Yes, Lord. C'mon, people. Let's go!"

It wasn't until some time later that he realized the irony of calling the three Bolos following him from the tunnel people. . . .

* * *

The god Vulj'yjjrik had been born for this. Literally.

His body massed less than three kilograms, and most of that was in brain and ancillary support organs, all floating in a gelatinous semiliquid within a wormlike, almost mushy body designed to cushion the vital organs against high acceleration.

He was blind, save to the images fed to his brain through electronic implants, deaf save to radio frequencies and computer links. His parasomatic body was almost literally a part of the compact, delta-winged interceptor the enemy referred to as a slash fighter, but which the gods called Beauty of Sharp Change, grown into the command socket just ahead of the powerful triplet of nuclear pulse engines that drove the stubby vessel at accelerations so high even the batteries of maneuvering contra-grav projectors mounted throughout the hull couldn't nullify all of the craft's inertia. A human pilot—or even an Aetryx parasome—would never have survived the accelerative forces leaking past the CG fields during the more extreme of the fighter's maneuvers.

At the moment, his fighter was still residing on its launch rack deep within the bowels of the enormous Aetryx battlecarrier, The Silent Contemplation of Form. To his perception, however, both the carrier and the slash fighter were invisible. Behind him, a titanic scimitar of purest gold and white crystal, was the gas giant humans called Dis, its cloud bands forming roiling, dazzlingly intricate exercises in chaos geometries beneath the blinding glare of the system's sun. On the dark side of the planet, vision sensitive to the near-infrared detected the sullen, deeper glow of the world, and the scattered, popping pinpricks of lightning flares illuminating continent-sized patches of cloud against the night. Alongside, eighty detyk distant, the second Aetryx battlecarrier, The Flexible Vigilance of Anger, climbed with the Contemplation clear of the last thinning edges of the gas giant's outer atmospheric shell of hydrogen and into the clean emptiness of space. Elsewhere in the sky, sunlight sparked and flashed from the battlecarriers' escorts—the strike battlers Hand of the Gods and Seething Lightnings; the fleet penetrators Rapid Thought, High Vengeance, Gathering Storm, and Justice Redeemed; and twenty-four heavy kinetic-killer fleet gunships.

For twelves of da'j'ris, now, the Aetryx battle squadron had been hidden deep within the turbulent and cloudy atmosphere of Dis, held aloft against its massive gravitational pull by straining contra-gravity projectors, shielded from detection by the planet's radar-scattering upper cloud deck and magnetic effects. There, they'd lurked and waited as the Confederation Strike force had entered the system and taken up orbit around Caern, lurked and waited as the invaders had bombarded the planet's surface and sent down their drop pods.

And now it was time to strike back. The battle squadron had powered up and begun fighting up from the dazzling beauty of golds and silver cloudtops, moving onto a course that would put them on a direct intercept vector with the Sky Demon fleet.

All Beauties of Sharp Change, the voice of the Squadron Battle Commander whispered within his thoughts, your courses have been plotted and locked in. The Sky Demon fleet is no longer in orbit but is using its contra-gravity projectors to hover above their landing sites. This could be to our tactical advantage, if we can get among them swiftly, before they realize we are coming. It falls to you, our fighters, to cause as much damage and confusion to the invader fleet as possible. 

We are the gods! The cosmos bends to our will! Stand by to launch! . . . 

Vulj'yjjrik acknowledged the transmission and focused his inner view on the ocher orb of Caern, a bit over a twelve of twelve na-netyk distant, only recently emerged from Dis's shadow. His fighter's computer painted in the positions of identified Sky Demon spacecraft in shimmering hues of ultraviolet. The readout panel projected into his view-bubble by the craft's AI showed systems at blue, drives powered to maximum, launch in twenty-four j'ris. . .

We are the gods! The cosmos bends to our will! 

Sometimes, though, the cosmos needed a nudge to remind it who was in charge. The Sky Demons should never have been allowed this deeply into the Reach. He understood the strategy of letting them begin their invasion operations—strategy and tactics had been hard-wired into his parasome—but it was a costly ruse, one that might render Caern uninhabitable by either species, Aetryx or human.

And just as swiftly, the moral encodings of his parasome, triggered by his critical anger, arose to bring him peace. The gods would be victorious. They always were. And it was not the place of a single god parasome to question the tactics of the Circle of Gods, or the parasome from whom he'd descended.

It was right that the Aetryx fleet remain hidden, while the full scope of the Sky Demon's strategy unfolded, to be analyzed by the Circle of War.

Now, with the enemy fleet's attention focused fully on the battle over Caern, the carriers emerged with their escorts, rising from the gas giant atmosphere on a trajectory that put them directly against the disk of Sallos as it slowly rose above the giant's limb.

With luck, the invaders would never see their doom approaching until it was too late. . . .

 

Back | Next
Contents
Framed