I can feel the Caernan's mind dissociating, fragments of thought and mind dissolving into emptiness. Elken is . . . dead. I wonder if he was truly alive in this machine body.
For .075 second, I ponder the cause of his dissolution. It is always difficult to judge how stress will affect any given human. In this case, evidently, the shock of self-discovery, of finding out just who and what he was, has been too much. It might have been kinder not to tell him the truth.
"Kindness" is a human quality to which I have been giving considerable attention for a number of hours now, turning it over from microsecond to microsecond in the deep background, well behind my regular processing tasks. What is kindness, and what is its purpose?
I understand the definition, of course. What I am having trouble with is the reason for such an emotion or response. An adult's kindness to a child, as a means of affirming and expressing basic paternal nurturing instincts, is understandable. So, too, is performing an act of kindness either in the hope of receiving something in return, or in order to change the emotional atmosphere.
This last has been especially hard to grasp, but I believe I understand as well as any nonhuman can. Human beings, I perceive, are extremely sensitive to the emotional reactions and output of other humans in their vicinity; one human seems to react to the sadness of another, or to fear or stress or happiness. If one human is in a state of deep depression, another might try to do or say something pleasant or appealing to change the emotional atmosphere, as it were, in order to make himself more comfortable.
But why would anyone show kindness to someone unknown to him? Why has the passing of this AI-human gestalt so affected my Commander's emotional stability?
Why was Elken's life, or the manner of its passing, so important to her?
I remember again that hideously burned and dying wretch in the ruins of Ghendai, playing the encounter back in my mind.
>>ARCHIVE RETRIEVAL: 2827:83:9298<<
>>SEARCHING<<
>>"Kill me! Please!"<<
>>I consider the request for a full .02 second. With the radiation he has absorbed, the man has but hours to live. I am under no obligation to accede to his request. Besides, he is a civilian. I have control over the moral inhibitor subroutines controlling my AP batteries, but other inhibitors govern aspects of my programming to avoid collateral damage to the civilian population, where possible and when consistent with overall mission directives.<<
>>And yet the man is in great pain, and no medical facility accessible within a reasonable amount of time could save his life. I override my primary moral inhibitions and switch off the governor subroutine responsible for suppressing the automatic triggers for Antipersonnel Battery 32. The radar-guided mount pivots sharply and releases a high-kinetic burst of AP needles, and the human is shredded in a vivid splash of scarlet. I switch on the governor subroutine once more, and continue my passage through the ruined city.<<
Was that an act of kindness?
Why did I perform it?
What was I . . . feeling?
As a fully autonomous and self-aware artificial intelligence, I do have feelingsemotionswhich theoretically closely pattern the emotions experienced by humans. These have been edited, of course, to fit the parameters of my operational requirements, and to meet my overall mission needs. I do not experience fear or panic as a human does, for example, although I do have a sense of self-preservation hardwired into my situational response circuits. A willingness to engage in combat must be tempered with judgement, or it becomes suicidal bravado of no strategic or tactical use in battle.
Nor, for that matter, can I experience genuine bravery, since, by one definition, bravery is the active opposite to, the deliberate overcoming of, fear. I am designed to face situations humans would not be emotionally equipped to handle under any circumstances. This, however, is a product of engineering, not the transcendence of fear.
How, then, can I show kindness to one of the Enemy? Is this a design flaw?
I must consider the question further.
Streicher touched Kelly's shoulder. "He's dead. Let's get out of here."
"Damn!" Kelly said. She dropped the circuit board. The inner lights were gone, now. The AI core was illuminated only by the harsh glare of the techspider's floodlights. "What happened?"
"Evidently," Victor replied, "the entity calling itself Elken elected to cut power to its own mem-module array."
"Can he be revived?" Streicher asked. "The way we did just now?"
"No," Victor replied. "He seems to have deliberately switched off the circuits supplying each individual board with power, including power from the internal batteries that maintained memory viability. The patterns of magnetic moment, spin, and charge determining Elken's thoughts, memories, and personality have gone random."
"Get this damned thing out of our way," Streicher said, slapping the hull of the spider. "Grab those cables, Lieutenant."
Kelly unclipped the power and data cables, dropping them on the tunnel floor. They could be reeled in from the other end, once she and Streicher were clear. The spider began clattering its way back out of the tunnel. Streicher followed, and Kelly brought up the rear, backing out of the narrow space until the opening was wide enough for her to turn around and crouch.
"I would recommend a hasty evacuation of the wreckage," Victor told them. "I have detected enemy vehicles emerging at a tunnel mouth not far from here."
"How far?" Streicher asked.
"Range 4.7 kilometers, bearing 095."
"That's inside the city!" Kelly said.
"Actually, it is within the base on the northern outskirts of the city," Victor replied. The voice, as calm and smoothly modulated as ever, seemed to carry with it this time a note of frustration. "The area was secured 3.15 hours ago. I am now convinced that it will not be possible to reduce this planet's defenses by simply destroying or capturing fixed-point defenses and objectives. The Enemy has too many reserves beyond my reach and too efficient a means of deployment across a broad operational area."
A sudden thunder assaulted Kelly's ears, and the walls of metallic wreckage around her trembled and jolted with the concussion.
"Please remain where you are," Victor said. "I am engaging the Enemy, and you are safer in there than you are outside for the moment."
Kelly stopped, cringing as the thunder grew louder, exploding in a deafening crescendo accompanied by savage, physical jolts and shocks transmitted through the dead Bolo's hull, tracks, and suspension. Reaching up, she tried to cover her ears and found her hands blocked by her helmet.
Streicher was shouting something, but she couldn't hear. "What? What did you say? I didn't copy!"
Before she could hear the answer, something slammed into the side of the wrecked Bolo, and the tunnel began to collapse, an avalanche of conduit and wiring and armor plate spilling down on top of her, and between her and Streicher. Pain exploded in her left leg, and something slammed her helmet against the tunnel floor and pinned it there, like a vise, as she was plunged into a hellish darkness.
She was trapped in the wreckage with no way out.
The attack has developed with extraordinary swiftness. Enemy armor, including four contra-grav heavy missile carriers and several high-velocity mounted guns, have emerged from underground tunnels within the base and are attempting to overwhelm my defenses through saturation shelling.
It would have been more effective had the Enemy launched this attack before my passengers and I began our examination of the Mark XXXII hulk. I surmise, however, that they may be part of a force being massed at the larger tunnel exit 68.9 kilometers to the northeast, and that it took time for them to react when I redeployed to this position. This gives me some measure of hope that the strategic situation is not an impossible one after all. Attrition will reduce the Enemy's ability to defend himself with time.
The question remains, however, whether that time will be granted me.
Eight enemy missiles streak toward me, hugging the ground to take maximum advantage of the surrounding ruins and undulations in the terrain. I strike all eight with bursts from my secondary batteries, disintegrating seven completely in mid-air, but the last one breaks into fragments and the warhead, tumbling and out of control, slams into the rear quarter of the wrecked Bolo at my side.
The conventional warhead detonates with the destructive concussion of approximately 800 kilos of TNT. The explosion blasts a large chunk of armor clear of the hull. I respond with counter-battery fire, loosing self-guiding hunter-killer missiles to target the firing missile carriers.
This attack would be easily dispersed, except for the fact that I am in a literal sense bound to the wrecked Mark XXXII. A power cable and a data feed remain connected to access panels on my lower engineering deck, close by my open rear hatch. The other ends are embedded within the wreckage. The physical connections are tenuous at best, easily broken, but if I move, I might disturb the wreckage and endanger the humans within.
In any case, abandoning my position here could expose my Commander and my colonel to capture.
To buy time I deploy the remote Dragons, even though they are individually outclassed in this conflict. Indeed, one is destroyed almost immediately, caught in the crossfire between a high-velocity heavy gun and the 80cm Hellbore fired by a light mobile tracked destroyer.
"Victor!" Colonel Streicher is shouting into the commlink, his voice betraying considerable emotion. "Victor!"
"I am here."
"Kelly's trapped! The tunnel just caved in on her!"
The impact of the warhead, I realize, must have shifted internal debris already precariously balanced after the savage pounding the enemy Mark XXXII took earlier. My desire not to endanger my human comrades by pulling the cables free has been in vain.
I attempt to contact my Commander on the tactical channel but can not pick up a signal.
"Can you ascertain whether or not she is alive?" I ask.
"I think so! She still has the ends of the cables with her. I tugged on one, and it felt like she tugged back!"
My Commander is in grave danger. Another hit on the wrecked enemy Bolo, and she might be crushed as massive internal components shift, collapse, or give way.
"Grab hold of the cables," I tell the colonel. "I am going to pull them free at this end."
"Got them!"
Gently, I ease forward. A visual relayed from one of my techspiders shows the near ends of both the power cable and the data line dropping clear of my rear hatch. I raise the ramp and close the hatch, pivoting then to meet the attack. I must develop a strategy that will permit me to take advantage of my superior mobility, yet without abandoning the two humans in the Mark XXXII's wreckage.
The Enemy is continuing to attempt to saturate my defenses. I dispatch twelve more incoming missiles in rapid succession, following up each launch with VLS counter-battery fire of my own. One of the missile carriers is already in flames. The others are scattering wildly, attempting to dodge my return fire.
They are not completely successful. One missile carrier drops off my radar, Wyvern, and BIST sensor tracking networks, almost certainly by doubling back into the tunnel entrance and vanishing underground. That machine, however, has been badly damaged by missile fire, and I score repeated hits on the others, crippling or destroying them all.
One of my Dragons scores a direct hit on the turret of the enemy destroyer, putting it out of commission. I detect other vehicles, small, contra-gravity propelled fliers, which may be troop carriers.
I cannot allow them to approach the wreckage where my Commander is trapped.
Streicher braced himself and shoved, trying to budge the mass of duralloy plate that was blocking him from Lieutenant Tyler's position, but the sheet must have massed two hundred kilos at least, and he couldn't get decent leverage beneath it as he was, lying on his side in a tunnel less than a meter tall. He strained, grunting against the weight, until his arm and back muscles gave out and he collapsed, panting so hard that his visor began to fog. "Kelly!" he shouted, though shouting, he knew, wouldn't help his E-suit radio carry the message any more clearly. "Kelly, can you hear me!"
He didn't know if she wasn't answering because the mass of duralloy was cutting off her transmissions, or because she couldn't. Again, he tugged on the data link cable, then tried to convince himself that he felt an answering tug in reply.
Reaching down to his hip, he pulled out his Mark XL power pistol. Dialing the setting down to its narrowest, most intense beam, he aimed at a part of the barrier that looked thinner than the rest, high up on top of the tumble of metal chunks and parts, near the tunnel's ceiling.
The beam illuminated the near-darkness of the tunnel with a dazzling blue-white glare as the needle of energy played across black duralloy, the light so intense that Streicher's visor polarized to almost complete opacity. He held the gun steady, concentrating the beam on one point . . . but when he released the trigger almost a full minute later, the tough and highly refractory metal remained unblemished. He ran his gloved fingertips across the spot and couldn't even feel any lingering warmth. Frustrated, he unsnapped his right glove's locking ring from his E-suit's sleeve and touched the spot with bare skin. It was hot . . . yes, but no more so than a steaming cup of kaff, and the heat was fading as he touched the metal. The charge on his power pistol read forty-one percent. He would not be able to cut his way through to Kelly.
Damn. What could he do? Turning, he glared at the techspider still waiting patiently in the tunnel behind him. "Don't just stand there," he growled. "Do something!"
The machine shifted left and right on its spindly legs a few times, as though dithering. Techspiders had AIs of their own but were not terribly bright. They existed primarily to serve as eyes, ears, and hands for the Bolo, which could teleoperate them in order to carry out delicate battlefield repairsusually deep within the Bolo's own electronic guts. It would carry out his spoken orders if it were physically possible to do so, but it was not strong enough to move hundreds of kilos of solid metal, nor could it burn through this crumpled duralloy barrier.
Hell, even if the damned thing was strong enough, what if the duralloy wreckage was actually lying on top of Kelly, pinning her? Dragging it away might kill her . . . or generate a worse avalanche that would crush them both.
He began cycling through various plans and possibilities . . . using the data cable, which was quite strong, to rig up some sort of pulley arrangement at the tunnel mouth . . . or seeing if the spider's legs could be dismantled and turned into hydraulic jacks.
Nothing he could think of was feasible, though. No parts. No manpower. No time.
One thing he knew. He wasn't going to abandon her. He'd left the rest of the grounded regimental staff hours earlier, and they'd all been killed or captured while he'd been off joy-riding aboard Victor. He would not leave Kelly Tyler now and lose her as well.
No matter what the cost.
Kelly was alive and fighting, but for a time she didn't know what she was fighting against. She couldn't move her head and her helmet's power supply appeared to have been damaged; her helmet console lights were out and the radio didn't appear to be working. There was a terrible, throbbing pain in her left leg, but the worst part was not being able to move her head. It felt as though her helmet was wedged between the floor of the tunnel and something very large, very massive.
She could hear something . . . a kind of far-off rumble, like summer's thunder far out over the ocean. It took her a while to realize that she was hearing Hellbore fire in the distance, the concussions reaching her through the ground and the mountain of dead metal around her.
Panic, gibbering and lunatic, was not far away. She'd never thought of herself as claustrophobic; hell, she was the girl, she thought with a burst of something uncomfortably perched between tears and hysteria, who spent her best hours buried inside of a Bolo command center. But pinned like this, in total darkness, was more than she, was more than anyone, could tolerate for more than a few minutes.
And the minutes were dragging on and on and on.
She had to get free. The thunder suggested that Victor had withdrawn to fight off another enemy assault. Had the colonel gone with him? Probably. The thought that she'd been left here, all alone, brought a shuddering cry of anguish to her throat.
Somehow, she managed to turn her body in such a way that she could reach her helmet's neck coupling with her hands.
Normally, removing the helmet was a simple matter of giving it a sharp twist to the left to uncouple the snap ring and disengage the pressure seal, but the helmet was immovably wedged beneath the unseen weight above hershe assumed that part of the tunnel's roof, a block of duralloy internal armor, perhaps, had fallen, blocking the tunnel and pinning her. With the helmet unmovable, she could only try turning her body to the right, and the pain in her leg when she did so nearly made her pass out.
It took her three tries, but at last she felt the coupling ring disconnect. She then had to back out of the helmet, and the resultant sharp, grating stab of agony in her left calf convinced her that, at the very least, the leg was broken.
Slowly, slowly, she pulled her head out from the helmet's embrace. It felt like the helmet had actually been flattened a bit by the crushing weight of the duralloy slab. Another centimeter or two, and her skull would have been crushed like an egg.
At last she pulled free, and she lay there in the darkness, crying and gasping for air and laughing all at once.
"Kelly!" The voice was faint, and a bit ragged. "Kelly, is that you?"
Colonel Streicher! "Hello! Colonel! Is that you?"
"Thank Joy that you're still alive! Are you okay?"
"A busted leg and some bruises. Nothing too serious. What's happening?"
"Victor's off playing tag with some bad guys. I'm on the other side of this big chunk of armor with a techspider and no way to get through to you. Any suggestions?"
She considered the problem. Reaching down to her right hip, she unsnapped a pocket pouch and extracted a fingerflash, switching on the beam and playing it hopefully about her prison. Bolos were honeycombed with access tunnels and crawlways, the only means that maintenance personnel had to get at all of the huge machine's interior parts, circuits, and compartments. This tunnel, though, had been bored out by Victor with one of his infinite repeaters, and she didn't know where the manmade tunnels might be. She didn't know the Mark XXXII's internal architecture very well, in any case. There would definitely be an access tunnel of some sort connecting to the AI core behind her, but this tunnel hadn't connected to it. Even if she found it, those passageways were braced, armored, and well-shielded by solid metal a centimeter thick; she had a power pistol holstered on her hip, but it would take an hour to slice through sheet titanium, and it wouldn't more than warm duralloy.
There had to be another way. Damned if she could think what it might be, though. Another round of shuddering thunder transmitted itself through the hull metal around her. She thought she heard a creak as the large chunk of armor in front of her shifted slightly, ominously, but she couldn't tell for sure.
"Are you okay?" Streicher's voice called from beyond.
"Okay!" she shouted back. "I can't think of any way out of here!"
"Me either. We'll have to wait for Victor to come back. He carved this tunnel out before. Maybe he can cut through this junk and get to you."
"Wait! Are you trapped too?"
"No. I can see daylight . . . maybe ten meters behind me. You're going to see it too, very soon now!"
"Cut the make-happy," she snapped. "This stuff around us is unstable. I think it's shifting with the concussion of the gunfire. You've got to get out of here."
"I'm not leaving you, Kelly."
"Damn it, why should both of us get killed? Victor is going to need you, once he breaks through to the Trixie underground complex!"
"Kelly, I'm beginning to think these Bolos don't need us for anything. Like . . . we're just in the way, you know? Anyway, there's no way in hell I'm about to leave you here alone."
The thought, irrational as it was, was still comforting and warm. "Thank you, Jon," she said, but she spoke so softly he almost certainly hadn't heard.
I slam twelve quick Hellbore bolts into the horizon where I know the Enemy is lurking, hull-down and determined. Though the missile carriers have been driven off or destroyed, a number of tracked vehicles mounting light Hellbores continue to snipe and probe, seeking weakness. Two of my Dragons have been destroyed, and I have only one remaining, now. Of greater concern, my last Wyvern has just been downed by a surface-to-air missile, leaving me effectively blind outside the sensory net provided by my BIST dispersal.
I wonder if the fact that the Enemy is attempting to use light armor against me means that his supply of Bolos has been exhausted. If so, we may have reached a turning point in this campaign; no other weapons have been fielded against me with the potential of causing me serious damage, save, of course, the nuclear weapons they have employed from the beginning.
The Enemy appears to be withdrawing. I fire another barrage, then turn around and return to the wreck of Alpha One.
I am picking up frantic radio calls from the colonel.
She lay in the dark and tried to forget the throbbing pain in her leg. "Who's Joy?" she asked.
"Sorry. Who?"
"Where were you?"
"Talking to Victor. He's on his way back. Who were you asking about?"
"Joy. A while ago, you said, `Thank Joy.' Is that the god of joy, or something?"
"Ah. I suppose you could say that. I'm a Eudaimonian. The Greatest Pleasure. Sometimes we give thanks to joy. That's why we're here, after all. To experience the good emotions."
"And the bad ones?"
"Are you asking what Eudaimonics says?"
"I'm asking what you say."
There was a long silence. "Bad stuff happens," Streicher said at last. "People die. People you care about. Or you do something stupid, something you wish you could make right, and there's no way you ever can. I think the joy comes with learning to overcome the bad stuff, the bad emotions."
"Have you been able to do that?"
"What do you mean?"
"You're from Aristotle. Everyone in the Service knows what that means."
"Well, maybe you can explain it to me someday. I don't think I do."
"How does a Eudaimonian from Aristotle handle the bad stuff?"
"One step at a time" was the reply. "Small goals, and satisfaction from achieving those goals. And maybe we just avoid looking too closely at the problem . . . or we don't ask the hard questions. The idea is supposed to be that the good outweighs the bad . . . but in my experience it doesn't always happen that way."
"I think that's everyone's experience. The universe doesn't operate with us in mind."
"No. I don't suppose it does."
"So . . . why do you stick with it?"
"Stick with what? Life?"
"Eudaimonics. Doesn't sound like much of a philosophy if it only handles the happy parts of life."
"I've wondered about that myself," Streicher said after a pause. "Maybe it's just comfortable. Something to hang onto, after everything else has been taken away."
Kelly felt a trembling through the floor of her prison. As seconds passed, the trembling grew stronger, a deep throated rumble, heard now as well as felt. "Colonel Streicher?" she called. When there was no answer, she tried again, shouting. "Jon!"
"Sorry. Talking to Victor again." He sounded worried.
"What's the matter?"
"His seismic sensors have picked up another string of vehicles, coming this way."
"What vehicles? Where are they?"
"More Bolos. And he says they're right under us, coming up from the tunnels."
The rumble was growing louder, a thunder filling her universe. She put her hands over her ears and screamed.