I have detected the seismic signature of enemy Mark XXXII Bolos, emerging on the surface not far from the wreck of Alpha One. I must consider the possibility that, again, the Enemy has used expendable light armor as a diversion, to pull me out of position. The question is whether they are targeting my Commander and the colonel deliberately, hoping to capture them, or if their emergence so close to their position is coincidental.
They may know the two are in Alpha One's wreckage. Small robotic scouts or their equivalent of BIST sensors could have observed my Commander and the colonel as they entered the Mark XXXII. Still, it seems unlikely that a major thrust would have been organized just to effect the death or capture of two officers. Synchronicities unrelated to one another do occur, a fact that alone dictates that warfare will ever be an art, not a true science.
In any event, it scarcely matters. I have pinpointed a tunnel exit 2.7 kilometers from the Alpha One wreck. At least six Mark XXXII Bolos are emerging, deploying through the ruined base in the general direction of the hulk. Their vector will place them at the wreck site before I can reach it.
This presents me with a serious tactical and ethical dilemma. Both my Commander and the colonel in charge of the 4th Regiment are in serious danger. While I have defeated four enemy Bolos at a time in several previous engagements, my assessment of the Mark XXXII's combat capability, coupled with the Enemy's obvious mastery of the learning curve in deploying his combat units, convinces me that I cannot take on six of these combat units simultaneously. My own combat effectiveness has been degraded by an estimated 12 percent, due to damage already accrued and to the depletion of my on-board stores of expendable munitions and teleoperated remotes.
My best combat option would be to retreat. If the Enemy follows me, I might find opportunities to split individual Bolos or small groups off from the main body and defeat them in detail. By fighting a delaying action, I might be able to hold them long enough for Invictus and Ferox to move up in support. At their current position, they could be here in 59.5 minutes.
I consider briefly the possibility that they could use their contra-gravity projectors to fly to my position in less time but discard it. The Enemy's use of nuclear warheads against airborne targetsand the fact that contra-grav travel requires such high expenditures of energy that battlescreen and defensive weaponry would be partially powered downwould make them far too vulnerable.
So help cannot arrive in less than nearly one hour. By moving toward their current position, I might halve the rendezvous time, as well as draw the Enemy's forces out of position.
But I have a clear responsibility for Lieutenant Tyler and Colonel Streicher. Where is my duty best served?
While considering this dilemma, I engage all of my remaining contra-gravity units, spin around to a heading of 248 and increase my velocity to maximum.
I race toward the Enemy, weapons at full readiness.
Elken wasn't certain what to make of this new turn of events. He'd awakened a short time before, deep within the caverns of the gods, finding himself incarnate not in a body of flesh and blood, but within a Bolo Mark XXXII, a 21,000-ton mountain of duralloy armor and high-tech weaponry. He'd gone to sleep expecting immortality . . . but he hadn't thought that immortality meant a body like this.
He was shocked to learn that several hundred cycles had passed since he'd entered the Hall of the Immortals, seeking to join Sendee in her new life.
Far more shocking, however, was his encounter with . . . himself.
Or, more properly, himselves. Five other Mark XXXII Bolos squatted in the vast assembly hall of Trolvas, and as he established a communications link with each, he realized that each of them was a mirror of himself.
We have made copies of your mind and memory, of your personality, his god told him. <confidence and power> You will be able to work closely together with these, your brothers, without the personality difficulties experienced with the Total Systems Data-Sharing gestalts.
"But . . . but which of us is the real Elken?" he demanded, his electronic voice a wail of confusion and loss.
In one sense, it doesn't matter. <self-confidence in highly technical matters too complex to explain> Still, if it makes things easier for you, you are the original LKN 8737938.
But Elken wondered if that was true. What were the gods telling those other Elkens at that moment? He wanted to find out, compare notes.
For the first time in his life, Elken wondered if the gods dealt with their people honestly. It was a disturbing, a terrifying thought. If the gods themselves could not be trusted . . .
Within you reside the memories of other Elkens, other Elken copies. Learn from their experiences. Use their accumulated experience to defeat the Sky Demon invaders.
More copies. Was he the original, the real Elken? He had to know. He opened a communications link with one of the other Elken-Bolos . . . and found he could not phrase the question.
It wasn't that he forgot or was distracted. He knew what he wanted to do, what he wished to say, but something unseen was blocking him from forming and transmitting the question. He struggled with this for .04 second, before the desire itself faded from his thoughts. After all, it wasn't important. The god himself had said that it didn't matter in the long run.
Fourteen minutes later, the six of them were emerging from a concealed tunnel in the ruins of the supply depot at Ghendai. An enemy Bolo, a Mark XXXIII, was engaging local forces in that region. Intelligence accumulated in previous attempts suggested that six Mark XXXIIs would have little difficulty defeating a lone Mark XXXIII, especially since the enemy machine was already damaged and appeared to be operating without support.
TSDS was engaged, but, as the god had promised, there were none of the gestalt problems encountered by earlier Elken copies. He felt like . . . himself, but somehow distributed among six bodies, racing out to deploy on the flat ground southwest of the supply depot.
The feeling was exhilarating, a heady sense of unbounded power and freedom. Even as he deployed, though, he felt again a nagging sense of curiosity.
Was he the original Elken? How would he know if he wasn't? With the original's memories, he might well be a copy. Only a copy . . . and as such, what would happen to him?
It doesn't matter, one of his brothers said, an echo of himself over the TSDS link.
The gods know what they are doing.
But if we're copies, we could be simply discarded. We won't have immortality.
We won't see Sendee again. . . .
It doesn't matter!
It does matter!
Pull together! The link is fragmenting!
Don't argue! We need to focus on the battle, on the enemy!
Agreed! We destroy the Sky Demon Bolo. The rest can wait!
Intelligence says that there are human soldiers inside the wrecked Bolo up ahead. The enemy machine will deploy to protect them.
We can use that to our advantage.
The enemy Bolo is moving toward us.
Steady. Meet him together, as a unit. . . .
As a unit . . .
Elken thought of himself as "Elken One," for clarity, and of the others as Elkens Two through Six. Curiously, they all thought of themselves the same way, but there was no internal confusion. They fired their main batteries together, as a single unit. . . .
The explosion of sound from outside rang through the wreckage, a shuddering, rippling wave that Kelly could feel as the armor and internal machinery shifted all around her. There was a grating squeak, and then the huge mass of duralloy blocking her way out shifted. Her E-suit helmet, still trapped between the armor and the tunnel floor, popped with a crack like a gunshot, splintering into tiny shards. If her head had still been trapped there . . .
Another hard jolt sent more debris tumbling from the tunnel roof, and it felt as though the entire wreck had just tilted precipitously to the left. Kelly lay flat, arms grabbing protectively across her neck and the back of her head.
"Colonel! Colonel Streicher!"
There was no answer, and no way to tell if he could even hear her above the din.
I am hit and badly. The concentrated Hellbore fire from six Mark XXXIIs slams into my outer battlescreens. For .28 second, the screens shunt that torrent of energyapproaching thirty megatons per second of firepowerinto my screen storage capacitors or bleed it off into air and ground in lambent sheets of fusion fire. Inevitably, my dual-ply battlescreens overload and collapse, and for a fractional instant, some of that firepower washes across my war hull.
I am already in motion, however, moving back and to the right as quickly as howling tracks can move me. I take advantage of a still-standing tower and a high berm within the ruins, using them for cover as I continue to retreat. I had not expected the Enemy to fight with this degree of unity or cohesion; I have underestimated the Enemy, always a serious error in war.
The Enemy's fire continues to seek me as I back through the ruins, smashing aside the tower, dissolving the duralloy berm in a staggering chain of high-energy explosions. My middle primary weapon turret is hit. The 200cm gun barrel sags, then shatters as the liquid nitrogen within its coolant circulation pipes flash-heats to white-hot plasma. I continue to take damage as, .49 second later, a trio of fusing cryo-H projectiles penetrate the mid-turret and rip it to blazing fragments. Another four bolts slam into my left flank, gouging deep craters and trenches through solid duralloy.
My protective awareness circuits have kicked in with the strong suggestion that I continue withdrawing. The Enemy has deployed near the wreck of Alpha One, however, and my Commander is in danger. In fact, returning fire may put her in danger as well. I have few options but death, or retreat.
I call for help, linking with both Ferox and Invictus. Invictus, I believe, should remain in the vicinity of the mountainside tunnel entrance, but he can lend considerable fire support with his Vertical Launch System. Ferox acknowledges my call and begins coming south.
It will be nearly an hour before he can arrive, however, in a battle that at the moment promises to last no more than five or six seconds.
My speed has been reduced by 36 percent, my primary firepower by a full 33 percent. Nevertheless, I bring both remaining Hellbores to bear on one of my attackers, hoping to wear them down one by one. I fireand score a direct and crippling hit.
But the others are closing on my position fast.
Colonel Streicher crawled to the entrance of the tunnel, clinging to the lip of the opening as he peered out into the holocaust which was an all-out Bolo battle. Hellbore blasts ignited the sky in dazzling light, repeatedly turning his visor opaque with the sheer fury of the fusion discharges. Lesser weapons burned streaks and slashes of lightning across a sky gone mad, as missiles and the deadly touch of Hellbore plasma bolts caused the earth itself to erupt in nightmare, incandescent fury. The raw, pulsing, thunderous noise threatened to deafen him, even with his helmet on. Unable to see more than flashes of blinding light, unable to hear anything but the ocean surf's steady roar of thunder, he ducked back into the tunnel, crawling swiftly to the place where it was blocked. It looked as though the armor plate had shifted a bit, settling even more solidly into place.
"Kelly! Can you hear me?"
He didn't hear any response at first, but he decided that it was because of the background roar. He tried boosting the output of his suit's external speaker, turning a shout into a booming amphitheater's boom.
"Kelly! Are you okay?"
"I'm okay!" he heard her reply, her voice faint. He had to use his suit's communications filtering program to edit out most of the gunfire and selectively amplify only her voice. After a couple of tries, her voice was fairly clear. "What's going on?"
"Hard to tell," he told her. "A big fight, but I couldn't make much sense of it. I saw at least three enemy Bolos, though, and from the racket they're making, I think there're more than that."
"Any sign of Victor?"
"He'd be over the horizon, Kelly. I couldn't see him. He sure as hell is still in the fight, though."
He stretched his legs out wearily, leaning his back up against the fallen armor plate. With the electronic filters in place, the booming and crashing outside was stepped down to a dull, almost muffled roar. There was nothing to do but wait this out.
He thought about the turquoise pill in his pocket. It was inside his E-suit, but the air was good. He could unseal long enough to grab the pill from his tunic pocket, unlock his visor, and down the thing.
Curiously, though, he didn't want it. Oh . . . the hunger was there, certainly, that gnawing hunger that wasn't real hunger that was the mark of euph addiction. But that was purely physical. What he didn't feel right now was the emotional need, and that surprised him. What had changed?
Well, the nature of the stress had changed, certainly. The two of them might be about to die at any momentone stray Hellbore shot from that mêlée outside would demolish this wreck and them with itbut it wasn't the same as the stress he'd felt in command of the regiment, giving the orders that would decide the outcome of the battle.
Giving orders that might result in the scorching of a green and beautiful world, like Aristotle.
Was that what drove his need for euph? The thought that he was somehow playing out what happened on Aristotle . . . but in reverse, with him as conqueror and destroyer, this time, rather than as helpless inhabitant?
It was at least something to think about.
As he played with the thought of that blue pill in his mind, though, the old hunger began to increase. Roughly, he pushed the thought away. Later. There'll be plenty of time for that later. . . .
The thunder outside grew more intense. . . .
"None of us really know what the original Aetryx are like," Tami Morrigen was saying. "Five years on this planet, and we never really got to know them."
"How is that possible?" Carla Ramirez asked. "I mean . . . you must have negotiated with them for trade rights. And you said they didn't allow you to deal with the human population directly."
"Yeah, except for the trolls," Tami's daughter, Marta, said. "They let us deal with them."
"And a few assigned to us as servants, don't forget," Sym Redmond added with a dry smile.
They'd been sitting in the large room talking for what seemed like many hours. Carla was surprised when she queried her implant and learned that only fifty-two minutes had elapsed since she'd been brought to this cell after her brief interrogation.
"The Aetryx are extremely . . . " Tami paused, searching for the right word. "Plastic," she said finally. "I don't mean they change their shape like amoebae, or anything like that, but from what we've been able to learn, they don't have the same sense of body identity that we do. For them, a body is just a kind of vehicle, a way to get around, a way to sense the world. They see nothing odd about becoming a crane . . . or an aircraft . . . or downloading themselves into a completely alien body shape. It's not the outward form that's important. It's what's inside. The mind. Maybe the soul, though we don't know what kind of religious beliefs or philosophies they hold.
"What they do seem to believe, in their exchanges with others, is the old human idea of a place for everything, everything in its place . . . no, more than that, a tool for everything, and every tool in its place. And they don't mind redesigning themselves, or others, to create just the perfect tool."
"Redesign? How?"
"You've seen the Diplomat form," Pityr Morrigen said. "In the interrogation room? He would have been the one running things."
"Yeah. A kind of a spidery body, but upright in front, like a centaur." She shuddered. "And a kind of a human face."
"Right," Tami said. "We think they know how to work the DNA from one species into another, to create hybrids with the features of both. Or maybe they just reshape the DNA of any given species. Either way, they can literally build a whole new subspecies for a specific purpose. The Diplomats were given our faces, so we could pick up on their expressions as well as the language. And maybe because proto-Aetryx voices can't produce human sounds. To me, the protos' speech sounds like chirps and warbles and poppings. I couldn't begin to imitate it."
At Carla's curious expression, Tami added, "The original of any species is the prototype. That's how it translates from the Caernan, anyway. Protohumans are the original model, like us."
"But take some of our DNA and change it . . ." Carla said, nodding.
"And you get trolls," Marta said, completing the thought. "Or worse."
"We think there are something like thirty or forty distinct species of Aetryx," her father added. "The proto-Aetryx are kind of built along the Diplomat's body plan, but without the upright torso, or the human face. They seem to just make new species whenever there's a need. The Diplomats first appeared when we made contact, five years ago. I don't know, maybe they'd been around before, because of the native humans here, but the impression we had is that they were designed and grown, on the spot, to talk to us. All of our negotiations for trade rights and market access have been through them. They're damned sharp traders, too."
"But . . . there's more to making a diplomat than, than just growing one. People have to be trained for that kind of thing, educated . . ."
Sym Redmond took up the thread. "What they do is download memories . . . personality . . . character traits and habits. They can record all of that. You saw them do it just now, in the interrogation room. Right? If you need a new traittalking to offworlder humans, sayyou create a primitive Diplomat and have him go talk to the humans. He learns the language, some of the thoughts and ideas, the expectations.
"Then he goes back home, and what the proto-Aetryx do is program a newer-model Diplomat, the Diplomat Mark II, say, with the memories of the Mark I Diplomats who've gone before. If the first models made mistakes, the newbies learn from them. And this process is going on all the time, and very quickly. By this time, we must be up to Mark XX or so."
"It means their society is fluid, and very resilient," Tami said. "They can learn frighteningly fast, and they rarely make the same mistakes twice.
"It also meanswe're not entirely sure about this, we're just guessing, butit may also mean that they are effectively immortal. When one body starts to wear out, grow old, they download to a new one, fresh grown to order. They're good with computers, with machines of all types, but they're very, very good with biological systems. We think they've been breeding human subtypes here for five hundred years. The trolls. A few other subspecies we've seen. There are warriors as well. We assume there are others, though we never saw them."
"The Diplomats are for dealing with us, you see," Redmond put in. "That's their place, dealing with outsiders. God forbid that any other Trixie bioform have contact with wild humans!"
"You don't sound like you approve of them, Mr. Redmond. Or their culture."
"I don't, Major. I most definitely do not." He glanced at the door. "Why do you think we were feeding intelligence back to Primus and the Army? The humans here are treated no better than slaves, and the fact that they've been conditioned to think of their masters as gods doesn't change that one bit."
"Gods? Tell me more about that." She'd heard about that in the preinvasion briefing, but it still seemed too bizarre to be believed.
"There are a dozen different religions on Caern, Major," Pityr Morrigen said. "Yenno, Tharsee, Ivadda. Those are the biggest three. I guess. But they all focus on the idea that humans were created by the gods, and for the gods' service."
"Then . . . does that mean they've forgotten that humans colonized this planet, hundreds of years ago?" Carla was wondering if there was a handle here, a way to manipulate the Caernan human population. She knew of several cases in the history of the Human Diaspora across the galaxy where human colony worlds had been cut off and forgotten for long periods of time, then recontacted. In most cases, those worlds maintained some knowledge of their past and their origins, and most were delighted to find themselves part of a larger, wider, brighter and more powerful civilization than they'd previously enjoyed.
If the Caernan humans were happy though, and if their view of history was controlled by the Aetryx, that approach might not work. For deliberately isolated and provincial cultures, the larger outside universe usually seemed terrifying because of the threat it implied for the existing social and philosophical order.
"They do seem to remember Earth," Redmond said. "They have what they call the Histories, which sound like a pretty complete set of electronic and paper-media records dating back at least to the first colonizers, and maybe even way back before that, to Old Earth herself. A kind of military-religious order called the Brotherhood keeps those records, studies them, interprets them. They see themselves, the Caern humans, as special. An elect saved from hell, which, for them, is the empty space between the stars."
Carla nodded. She'd heard of this sort of thing before. The Caernans definitely would feel threatened by whatever lay outside their tightly bounded little world. "And the rest of Humankind?"
"The un-elect. The unsaved, still adrift between the stars and up to no good. They call us `Sky Demons.' "
"So the Caernans are the chosen elect," Carla said, thoughtful. "And they're so grateful for the honor, they do whatever the Trixies say. . . ."
"That's about the size of it," Tami said.
"How did you learn this much about them, then?" Carla wanted to know. "You said they didn't allow Caernan protohumans to talk to you.
"Like I said, they did assign us servants," Redmond said. "We think they were carefully conditioned, maybe by giving them downloaded Diplomat memories. Ours was a young man named Veejay. He was really there to keep an eye on us, of course, and he didn't tell us much . . . but we learned a little, just listening to him talk about his gods. The servants were the only protohumans they allowed into the Compound."
"Compound?"
"The Foreigners' Compound," Redmond said. "Yeah, they made sure we stayed in our place, in a special compound reserved for offworlders, staffed by trolls and Diplomat Aetryx. It was more like a prison, though it was comfortable enough."
"They established six Compounds around the planet," Pityr added. "Ghendai was the main one, the place where we established our first trade mission five years ago. They also had one in Othelid, up on the Vortan Coast; in Mellanid, near the north pole; in Dravinnir Ka and Ghartoi, on the other side of the planet; and at Thedmirinid, near Caern's south pole."
"We were evacuating our compound just before the invasion," Tami said, "when they captured us and brought us here. We don't know what happened at any of the other compounds. They were all supposed to try to get away in small ships, to rendezvous with your fleet in orbit. We don't know if any of the others made it or not."
"I don't think they did," Carla told her. "At least I didn't hear of any. If your servants were there to watch you, though, I don't see how any of you could have made preparations to leave without it being known."
"That's what we thought," Tami said. "They were always six steps ahead of us."
"Every aspect of a Caernan's life is dictated by his `god,' " Redmond added. "They can't sneeze without permission."
" `God'? Only one?"
"Every Caernan has a particular god who looks out for him." Tami sighed. "We used to joke about it, inside the Compound in Ghendai. It was like the Trixies kept humans as pets. We're not sure, but we think each Trixie has several dozen humans all his own, maybe even as many as several hundred. They maintain very close control of their pets. Again, we're not sure, but we think they put implants into the brains of human newborns. They're taken from their mothers, you see, and raised in crèches. According to our sources, they actually hear the voices of their gods in their heads and get a feeling for emotion, attitude, that sort of thing."
"Sounds a lot like our implants," Carla said. "But used to maintain control, instead of as a communications device."
"Sure," Sym Redmond said. "Control the communication, what you tell a person, and restrict him from outside sources, and you control him."
"I don't understand." Carla shook her head. "How can people just let themselves be led into slavery like that?"
"It's not slavery to them," Tami told her. "It's religion, the comfort of knowing who and what you are, and what the gods have in mind for you in a confusing world . . . and maybe it's a chance at immortality as well."
"Chains are chains," Carla replied, "whether they're locked on your body, or on your mind."
Elken realized that the enemy Bolo was hurt and hurt badly, but he also knew that the enemy's retreat and apparent loss of firepower could be a trap of some sort. The combat memories of previous incarnations of himself showed that the invader machines demonstrated considerable cunning. Outnumbered, they would attempt to split the opposition and defeat it piecemeal; cornered, they used remote combat units to deceive, misdirect, and harry from the rear.
They also appeared to have an exact knowledge of their own capabilities and a fair assessment of the capabilities of their opponents. Make a single mistake, and the invader Bolos pounced on it like a snapjaw on a pollet, biting hard and never letting go.
He continued moving forward, laying down a thundering barrage of Hellbore and missile fire, forcing the enemy Bolo back step by step. The surrounding forest, ignited by the Hellbore fire, burned fiercely, driving up his hull temperature and filling the air with boiling clouds of black smoke. Visibility on all wavelengths was sharply impaired, but he could continue to track the enemy machine by the magnetic trace of its hull, its mass, its seismic signature, and by the ionization trails and shock waves of its continuing volleys of missile launches and heavy gunfire. The Sky Demon machine was fighting with ferocious savagery, using the splintering ruin of the forest, the folds and ridges of the ground, and even the smoke to maximum effect both for concealment and for cover from the incoming barrage.
Still wary of a possible trap, Elken slowed his advance, probing ahead at a dead crawl, continuing to maintain a heavy bombardment of the Mark XXXIII's position.
One of his brothersElken Number Fourwas savaged by a rapid-fire volley from the enemy concentrating solely on him. Both of Four's right-side track assemblies were blasted to pieces and his main turret was ripped away, leaving him helplessly turning in the dirt. The enemy began concentrating on Elken Number Six, then, but by this time the invader had suffered so much damage that the outcome could not long remain in doubt.
Elken felt a wild jubilation. He'd not thought it possible, but they were actually going to win! . . .