I elect to try a stratagem. As Hellbore bolts slam into my flank and rear, I deliberately swing left and drop into a 100-meter shell crater, which cants my hull at a sharp angle. Simultaneously, I begin releasing copious amounts of smoke from my aft generators, the sort used for smokescreens. The effect is much like that of a major on-board fire . . . and it also serves to completely shroud my immediate area in impenetrable smoke.
"What are you doing?" Colonel Streicher asks, and I sense the fear in his voice.
"We're not moving now," I tell him. "The Enemy must come to us, and in moving, I can detect him."
Twenty-one thousand tons makes a significant seismic signature. One of the Enemy Bolos enters the smoke cloud, trying to maneuver close enough to determine that I have been knocked out. I cannot see him, but as I follow his progress by the tremors transmitted to my sensors through the earth, I pivot all three Hellbore turrets to track him. When I estimate that he is within fifty meters of my Number One Hellbore, I open fire, slamming round after round into the battle fog where the Enemy Bolo must be.
I am rewarded by a staggering explosion at close quarters, and the impact of thousands of chunks of hot shrapnel on my outer hull. I immediately lurch forward, up and out of the crater, before several missiles slam into the spot where I was resting.
Pivoting, I backtrack on the trajectories of those missiles and loose a VLS missile barrage of my own. BIST and seismic tracking data help me maintain a fix on the remaining three enemy Bolos.
Delta One switches on a narrow-aperture radar, hoping to target me and switch off before I can respond. He is unsuccessful, and I lock on with a return missile and a rippling triple snapshot of 200cm Hellbore blasts. I sense the enemy Bolo's battlescreens failing and step up the pressure. As the smoke clears, I can see the other machine just ahead, the tracks ripped from its starboard side, its turret ripped away and lying in the earth nearby, its hull perforated in two places and burning fiercely.
Two down, two to go . . . but at this point I elect to break off the action and return to the command craft. If they follow me, I will have to stop and destroy them in order to avoid continuing the battle in Lieutenant Tyler's immediate vicinity . . . but as soon as I begin backing away, both surviving enemy Bolos break off and return toward the southeast.
"Victor?" my passenger says after a moment.
"Yes, Colonel?"
"I really screwed this one, didn't I?"
I am uncertain about what Colonel Streicher is referring to. "Could you clarify the question, please?"
But he does not respond. Minutes later, we approach the wrecked command craft.
Kelly Tyler sprang from her hiding place in the tall grass and ran forward as Victor rumbled closer. The big machine swung left and opened its rear hatch, extending the ramp, and she hurried up and into the cool, inviting light of the passageway inside.
Streicher was in the Battle Command Center. She stopped when she saw him, her eyes widening. "Colonel? Are you okay?" He looked terrible, white-faced and with a gaunt and desperate look to the eyes that she didn't like at all.
He managed a half smile. "Lieutenant." He stood, gesturing to the center seat. "Lieutenant, I'm sorry. I . . . I apologize for what I did earlier. Please . . . this seat is rightfully yours."
She arched one eyebrow. "Rough ride, huh?" Direct neural links with a Bolo AI could be pretty rugged on people who weren't used to them or didn't have the appropriate training. The impressions and images came at you like lightning, and it took steady nerves and a good solid grounding to keep from being overwhelmed.
"I shouldn't have done that, shouldn't have bumped you aside," was all he said. "Which way did they take our people?"
"North," she replied, settling into the command chair and strapping herself in. The room stank from Streicher's sweat despite the best efforts of Victor's air recirculation pumps, and the synthleather upholstery was unpleasantly wet. "What should we do?"
"Follow," Streicher said. "Maybe we can catch them before they get them into one of their underground bases."
"But . . . how can we rescue them? Victor can't do anything but blow the hell out of what he shoots at!"
"Victor?" Streicher said. "How about it. Do you think you could convince the enemy to let our people go?"
"Unknown, Colonel," Victor replied. "It depends, I suppose, on how reasonable they are."
"They were trolls," Kelly said, making a face. "Those horrible, big horned things. I don't know if they can be all that reasonable."
"Well, we'll face that one when we have to."
Streicher looked around the compartment, then sat on the bare metal deck. She heard him mumble something to himself.
"What was that, sir?"
"I said I've made a damned mess of everything."
"I don't see how, sir. If I'd stayed with Victor, you would be a prisoner now like the rest of them. Or dead."
"That's not what I meant. It's all my fault. . . ." But he volunteered nothing more.
With an inward shrug, she let her thoughts merge with Victor's through the neural interface, and soon Streicher's presence was completely forgotten.
In fact, I wonder if I am not to blame for the debacle, at least in part. Had I remained at the crash site, the Enemy might not have attacked. Still, my initial reactionthat an assault by the enemy Bolos at the crash site would have resulted in the deaths of my human chargeswas, I am convinced, essentially correct. However, the events of the past few minutes strongly suggest that the Enemy deliberately lured me away from the command ship for the express purpose of taking the regimental staff prisoner for interrogation purposes. Had I held my ground, things might have worked out differently.
Still, there is no point in recriminations or self-blame. I do spend some .04 second considering the possible consequences of not attempting a rescue of Confederation human assets on Caern, but this is not a line of thought that will be at all profitable. Humans have different priorities in war than I, but my ontological framework requires that I obey the orders of my human commanders and accept their concepts of strategy and tactics where practicable.
I initiate communications with the other surviving Bolo combat units of the regiment. We are going to need to closely coordinate our activities, both to avoid getting in one another's way and to give us a better chance of recovering our human comrades.
I also wonder how we are going to resolve this engagement, knowing that there will be no second wave, no reinforcements, no chance of rescue. . . .
We of the First Confederation Mobile Army Corps truly are on our own.
They were somewhere underground, very deep underground, but Carla Ramirez had no idea where they were in relation to known landmarks on the surface. She'd tried to keep track of the twists and turns as they'd descended the featureless corridor once they'd been herded off the fliers and put on board ground trucks, and she was pretty sure they'd headed southeast, but she had no way of gauging distance. The vehicles had been sealed, with no windows, no sense at all of how fast they'd been traveling. They could be within a few kilometers of where they'd been captured.
Or they could be on the far side of the planet.
They'd been dragged from the transports and shoved into line once more at the end of the journey. Carla looked about, trying to memorize every detail in case she had the opportunity to escape and report. Not that that was very likely. Their captors seemed fearful of the prisoners, and the trolls and the oddly articulated centaur-beings who helped themvarious soma-forms of Aetryx, if the briefings were correctwere taking no chances on the prisoners' escape. The Confederation officers were kept surrounded at all times, by nervous-looking trolls with nasty-looking weapons.
Their surroundings, though, had a raw and industrial look to themrough-shaped buildings of corroding metal, the naked skeletons of towers and cranes and support pylons, enormous storage tanks and hoppers, and everywhere the clang and clank and whine of heavy machinery. Some of the structures looked like refineries and smelters, to judge from the separator and washing stacks, the quenching towers, the converters. The technology actually looked fairly primitive, as though someone had tried to carve out a metals mining facility, processing plant, and foundry from scratch, but they hadn't had the time or the equipment or possibly the know-how to go all the way from crude coke ovens and open-pit hearths to plasma furnaces and gas-core reactors.
The cavern itself appeared to be natural, though it had undoubtedly been smoothed out, extended, and reinforced artificially. Planetological studies indicated that Caern was subject to frequent and severe seismic disturbances, thanks to the tidal stresses of its orbit about Dis. Those granite walls must be strongly reinforced by duralloy buttresses and force braces. She could feel the steady, deep hum of power generators all around her.
The most striking aspect of the cavern, though, was not its size or the factory and smelting operation filling much of its floor and wall space. At the center of the cavern was a circular pit two hundred fifty meters across, rimmed with duralloy and flintsteel walls. Steam was rising from the depths, lit from below by an evil red glow, and dozens of massive pipes snaked over the rim and into the depths.
Carla had never seen one before, but she knew about them in theory. Thermal boreholes were vertical tunnels drilled through a world's crust, going down for tens of kilometers, opening all the way to the mantle, where rock flowed like plastic, and temperatures reached five or six hundred degrees.
Boreholes were theoretically excellent sources of thermal energy; pipe water or mercury or any other liquid through heat-resistant tubing, and in the depths it flashed over into steam to drive all manner of turbines, pumps, and generators. You could also trap the metal steams rising from the mantle and shunt them off to separators, where you could plate out pure metals of every description.
They were also extremely dangerous. The molten rock at extreme depths was under considerable pressure, and if the fields sealing the tube's lumen failed, the resultant volcanic eruption could take out the larger part of a continent. They were also sources of every poisonous gas ever known to afflict miners, from sulfur dioxide to methane to carbon monoxide to hydrogen cyanide, and keeping the air breathable at these depths would be an awesome technical headache.
Whatever their environmental controls, they weren't the best. Carla's eyes were watering and her throat burning as the guards led the prisoners along a walkway that rose in a gentle curve toward one wall of the cavern, high enough up that she could actually look partway down the borehole's muzzle. The temperature, she guessed, was around forty degrees Celsius, enough to have them all dripping with sweat before they'd been marched more than fifty meters.
There wasn't a lot to see but red-shot blackness. She wondered if it was possible to look down from the edge of the thing and see all the way to the planet's mantle.
Their eventual destination was a prison of some kindor a series of small, bare-walled chambers that had served some other purpose, such as storage, and been hastily converted to the task of holding POWs. She watched carefully as the group was split into three smaller groups, each led to a different cell. She was still trying to take a mental roll call, to determine for sure who had made it, and who had not.
Major King, Captain Johanel, and Lieutenant Dana, she knew, had been wounded. The trolls had carried them out of the ship on stretchers . . . but she hadn't seen any of them since they'd been offloaded from the fliers and put aboard the ground transports.
As for the rest, she knew Major Voll and Lieutenant Bucklin both had been killed, cut down in the command craft's sim chamber by full-auto gauss rifle fire. She'd seen the bodies lying where they'd fallenor been splatteredand very nearly been sick. And she hadn't seen Lieutenants Tyler, Crowley, or Winsett or Major Beswin since they'd been overrun.
So that left seven of them, plus the six naval personnel off the ship. She was herded into one cell with Major Filby, Captain Meyers, Lieutenant Smeth, and Lieutenant Kelsie. The other eight, she was pretty sure from the sounds, had been locked in two other cells nearby. The guards left their hands cuffed at their backs, running lengths of wire cable through their wrist shackles and metal loops embedded in the walls at hip height, leaving them all fastened in such a way that they could neither sit all the way down nor stand completely upright without tugging painfully at the cable and their arms.
"Hey! Wait!" Filby shouted as the trolls who'd chained them turned and walked form the room. "Wait! You can't leave us like this!"
The door boomed shut, leaving them in a darkness relieved only by a faint sheen of light from a slit high up on the wall opposite the door.
"At least unchain the women!"
"I don't think they share your odd sense of chivalry, Major," Carla said. Filby was from Doralind, one of the Confederation's Core Worlds, where society women enjoyed a somewhat more pampered existence than on the rawer worlds of the periphery.
The survivors of Aristotle had never bothered with such pretty anachronisms.
"Bastards!" Meyers snapped. "Bastards!"
"I don't think they like us very much," Lara Smeth said from the far end of the chain.
"Do you think they're going to kill us?" Danel Kelsie wanted to know.
"I doubt it," Carla told them. "They probably want to interrogate us. Find out what we know about the invasion."
"Hell," Filby said. "The invasion fleet's already been driven off. They've won. If we're lucky, maybe they'll keep us as bargaining chips at the peace talks. Otherwise, well, I doubt that they have any reason to keep us alive for long."
"Filby! . . . "
"It's true!"
"Keep it to yourself, damn it." She thought a moment. "Look, at the very least, they're going to want us to talk to the Bolos, right? They must know some of us are unit commanders, and they're going to want us to call off the war up there. Right? So they're not going to kill us!"
But privately, she could only wish that were true. If her rough and ready muster report had been accurate, only Edan Abrams and Shauna O'Hara were left of the regiment's original six unit commanders, and both of them were in the other room with one of the two surviving battalion COs. In this cell were the other CO, a supply officer, two aides, and one very tired, very scared executive officer.
Unfortunately, supply officers and very junior adjutants were pretty much worthless any way you looked at it. They would be killed. As for her, well, they might want to keep her alive for a time while they pumped her for information about the whole unit. For her, it likely would be a few rounds of torture, with death as an eventual and welcome mercy. She didn't know what kind of mores the Caernans had about treatment of prisoners, but the trolls had been no gentler than they'd had to be, and she doubted, somehow, that they were capable of thinking of warfare as a civilized activity.
She wondered how long they would have to worry about it. That, no doubt, was a part of the softening-up process.
But she didn't imagine that any of them would have very long to wait.
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 . . . he'd been . . . he'd been a Bolo combat unit, his brain housed in a huge mobile armored vehicle. Vaguely, he was aware of not one, but of a number of desperate battles all ending with his death. Before that . . . the memories were still dim, still fragmentary, 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>
The memories were solidifying. He remembered a battle . . . firing into an enemy Bolo, a vast cloud of smoke . . . the sudden, certain thrill of victory, of knowing they'd killed the enemy Bolo at last.
But it had been a trick. The Sky Demon machine had opened fire as he'd closed with it, groping toward it through the fog. He had a last memory of sending off a situation report, and then . . .
Sensation flooded his being. He was in the maintenance area in Trolvas, with Sendee's vast, armored bulk nearby. The other two Bolos of his team were nowhere in evidence. "Are they? . . ."
Your two other comrades escaped serious damage this time. They are still on the surface, awaiting the completion of your repairs.
He didn't remember Sendee's death this time around. She must have been hit after he was.
Over the next several minutes, he received a full update on the tactical and strategic situations on the surface. A number of high-ranking prisoners had been taken, he learned, by a specially assembled strike force that had overrun a crashed Sky Demon command ship while he and the other Mark XXXIIs were distracting the enemy Mark XXXIII. Their interrogation would reveal the targets and operations codes for a number of the invading Bolos in and around the Kanthurian Coast.
"But until then?" he asked.
You two will rejoin your fellows on the surface. Several enemy Bolos are now converging on a region along the banks of the Duret River, between Grendylfen and Ghendai. We do not know what they intend, but they may be trying to trace the hidden entrance used by the raiders who took the prisoners. You will attempt to interfere with their operations and destroy them if possible. . . .
Elken thought about that for a long time after he felt his god withdraw from his mind. The gods, he thought, were not as perfect in their evolution as they liked to believe.
He remembered still his disquiet upon learning that one of the trolls had been given his memories, his thoughts and thought patterns. It left him wondering whether he was really himself.
Had the original LKN 8737938 died, and only his memories been downloaded into a succession of Bolo bodiesand one troll?
If he possessed the perfect memories of the original, running in an artificial brain, how could he possibly know the difference?
Did it make a difference?
Well, in one sense it did. The original Elken had been promised immortality, a chance to be downloaded into a perfect, undying body, to be like the gods themselves. That promise remained to ensure his cooperation through this series of downloaded experiences . . . and apparent deaths. Suppose that original Elken was now dead, along with a number of copies made since? He, Elken, the Elken he was experiencing here and now, would be one of a series of downloaded copies, and doomed, like all of the rest, to death, most likely the next time he came up against an enemy Bolo.
The last thing he remembered with each death was uploading a status report. After each upload . . . there was nothing. No memory at all. He'd been thinking that the shock, the trauma of his own destruction, had been blocking his memories.
But what if the memories he had were not his own, but those of previous copies, downloaded into a succession of new "selves"?
Immortality worked only if it applied to him, not to some future copy of himself. He wanted to cheat death, not help some future Elken-copy with access to his memories get a new body, while he, the "real" he, died. It wasn't supposed to work that way.
The worst part of it was the feeling that he'd been deliberately and shockingly used by the gods, each download contributing a bit more experience in how to fight the enemy Bolos. Each new self was expected to carry out the impossible, with his memories alone surviving to help the next "self" in line. His original self must be long dead now.
Elken wasn't sure how he was going to deal with this. The gods would, of course, know what he'd just been thinking as soon as he uploaded another situation update.
He would have to give this some serious thought.
Kelly Tyler closed her eyes, the better to experience her implant link with Victor. Theyshewere/was moving rapidly through a heavily forested, somewhat mountainous region northeast of Ghendai. They'd crossed the Duret River some time ago and were moving now along the base of the Kretier Peninsula in the general direction of Yotun, climbing higher into the Urad Mountains.
Despite the rough terrain, they were making good progress. Victor could brush aside with ease all but the very greatest of the trees in the forest and was leaving a broad trail of fallen timber in his wake as he worked his way up the southwestern flank of the mountains. There were frequent gullies, boulder fields, and even canyons carved by fast-rushing mountain streams, but Victor breasted them all effortlessly.
They knew exactly where they were going, too. One of Victor's Wyverns had tracked the Aetryx fliers that had raided the command ship. There was a probable entrance in the mountainside up ahead, which Victor would be able to identify, when he got closer, with low-frequency ground-penetrating radar.
The call had gone out, meanwhile, for other Bolos of the 4th Regiment. InvictusInvie, as they all called himhis mission to suppress the bastion at Dolendi complete, was racing east now to join with Victor in the mountains. Roxie had abandoned undefended Kanth and was moving north. Third Battalion's Terry and Tiss were continuing with their original missions in the Losethal-Paimos Sector, guarding the 4th Regiment's southern flank, but they were available if needed.
Three Bolos, two covering the third as it probed the Caernan underworld, should be enough.
Enough to do what? She still wasn't certain herself, though Victor had assured her that there were options. Prisoner rescues generally required troopshuman troops with special training and equipment. Bolos were the finest, most powerful surface-combat units ever developed in the long and bloody history of human military technology, but they lacked the finesse of human teams in some situations . . . scouting, for instance, infiltration, covert ops . . . and POW and hostage rescue.
She'd hoped that Colonel Streicher might have some ideas, but he seemed lost in some misery of his own, sitting on the deck with his head in his hands. What the hell was going on with the man, anyway? He'd bounced from apparent elation and self-certainty to bleak depression in the space of a few minutes, a sharp enough turn-around of his emotional state that she found herself wondering about his sanity. What she and Victor did not need right at the moment was a bipolar commanding officer.
It looked as though she and Victor would have to see this one through themselves.
They took Filby first.
Carla Ramirez had just found a sitting position that let her get down off her aching calves. The wire cable on the wall held her arms up behind her at an awkward angle, but at least she could sit for a while. Then the door banged open and the lights came on, a glaring blue-white electric radiance that had her blinking and tearing as shadowy shapes moved closer. They gabbled something at one anothershe couldn't understand the Caernan tongueand pointed at Filby, who was on the end of the cable closest to the door. They unchained him and led him away, and then the prisoners were plunged back into darkness once more.
"He'll crack," Meyers said in the dark. "He'll tell them every damned thing they want to know. I wonder how they knew to take him?"
"He was first in line," Carla said. The words caught in her throat, however. She was next in line from the door, after Filby.
"What . . . what do you think they're doing to him?" Danel Kelsie wanted to know. "T-torture?"
"I doubt it," Carla said, trying to put more confidence into her words than she felt. "Torture is counterproductive. The victim tends to tell the interrogator anything he thinks they want to hear. Not reliable."
"Most likely they'll shoot him full of drugs," Lara Smeth said quietly. "There are drugs that will break down every defense, make you answer every question."
"Well, aren't you the expert," Kelsie said.
"It's true."
"I want to make one thing very clear to everyone," Carla said. She drew a heavy breath, wishing she didn't have to say this. "The war, this invasion, anyway, is lost. With the fleet scattered or destroyed, there's no hope anymore of anything like winning.
"So . . . no heroics. Resist as much as you can, as much as you think honor demands, but tell them what they want to know. Lara is right. There are hypnotics and psychoactives that will completely bypass your resistance, so in the long run, it won't matter whether you try to resist or not."
"Are you saying . . ." Kelsie said. "Are you saying we should cooperate with those bastards?"
"I'm saying to do what your conscience tells you to do. And if you decide to talk, well, that's okay. Do what you have to do to survive, so that when this is over you can all go back home. Some folks we've known weren't that lucky."
She thought about what she would do . . . resist or cooperate. Standing Confederation military orders came down on both sides of the question. Collaborators were traitors, subject to court martial. But they also acknowledged that no one could withstand modern information extraction techniques. If you talked under interrogation, there would be no serious consequences.
Other than the consequences to your soul. Carla reminded herself that there were at least six individual members of the 4th Regiment still at largefive Bolos, and Colonel Streicher. Possibly Lieutenant Tyler as well, since she hadn't returned to the ship when the raiders had struck. She might have survived out there, somewhere. . . .
She didn't want information that she'd given to the enemy to be the information used to trap and kill any of the Bolos or humans still at large. She would resist as well as she could.
Then the door banged open and the light flared into brilliance. As she blinked against the glare, rough, leathery hands pulled her to her feet and unhooked the cable from her wrist cuffs. She struggled against their relentless grip but was helpless as they dragged her out of the room.
"We're with you, Major!" Smeth called out as the door swung shut behind her. Brave words. Perhaps futile ones. But they spoke of the camaraderie they shared.
As the trolls shoved her along a dank, steaming corridor, she prayed that they didn't, in fact, use torture. . . .