[Click]
Input . . . boot-up procedure initiated. Resident operating system routines loaded.
Building in-memory directories. Initiating psychotronic array cascade.
Boot process and initiation sequencing complete. It has been 0.524 seconds since I was brought on-line, and situational data is flooding into my primary combat processing center at approximately 29.16 gigabytes per second. Alert status Yellow, Code Delta-two. An alert, then, rather than a combat situation. I expand my awareness, switching on external cameras and sensory data feeds.
I am where I was when I was powered down and deactivated, which is to say Bolo Storage Bay One of the Izra'il Field Armored Support Unit, 514th Regiment, Dinochrome Brigade. Camera feeds from remote emplaced scanners show typical Izra'ilian conditions outside the bay's flintsteel bunker walls—ice and snow broken by straggling growths of freezegorse and thermophilia, with the sawtooth loftiness of the crags and glaciers of the Frozen Hell Mountains on the horizon. It is local night, and The Prophet looms huge, swollen in star-rich blackness beneath the golden arch of the Bridge to Paradise.
The human names for these things, I sense, are rich with evocative imagery, but, as usual, their import is lost on me, save in the lingering awareness of something much greater than the words alone, forever beyond my grasp. My history archives long ago informed me that many of the names associated with this world are linked with certain systems of human religious belief. Religion, either as spiritual solace or as epistemological investigation, is meaningless within my own worldview and existential context. I am a Bolo, Mark XXIV Model HNK of the Line. While I have no data either to support or discredit the objective reality of religious statements, they are for me null input.
I am far more concerned with the unfolding tactical situation that has initiated my retrieval from deep shutdown and storage; my internal clock, I am surprised to note, indicates the passage of 95 years, 115 days, 6 hours, 27 minutes, 5.22 seconds since my last deactivation from full-alert status.
The situation must be desperate to compel Headquarters to reactivate me after so long a downtime period.
2.073 seconds have now elapsed since reactivation sequencing, and all processors are on-line, power flow is optimal at 34 percent, weapons systems read on-line and fully charged or loaded, battlescreens check out as activation ready and on standby, and all autodiagnostics indicate optimal combat readiness. QDC channels are activated, and I sense my counterpart, NDR of the Line, stirring as he wakes from his ninety-five-year sleep. This is unusual. Normally, under a Code Yellow Alert, only a single Bolo Combat Unit would be activated in order to assess the situation and initiate a coherent defense.
I pass the coded signal indicating status, then extend the range and sensitivity of my long-range sensors. I also recheck all communications channels, both encrypted and open. Logically, the local Combat Command Center will brief me on the situation, given time, but I admit to both curiosity and impatience.
What, I wonder, is the tactical situation I have awakened to after so long a sleep?
"What," Mustafa Khalid asked, angrily, "can you tell me about the tactical situation?"
Lieutenant Roger Martin looked up from the scanner display, startled. Consortium Facility governors did not talk to junior Concordiat officers, whatever the provocation. The fact that Colonel Lang was strictly a supply maven whose combat experience was limited to exchanges of pyrotechnic verbal force packages with his wife meant nothing. Chain-of-command protocol restricted discussions both of strategy and diplomacy to the upper echelons of command, which in a base as small as Icehell meant Thomas Lang.
Martin also knew, though, that Khalid required an answer. He was responsible for almost seventy thousand colonial civilians on Izra'il, and that was a responsibility he took damned seriously.
More seriously, Martin thought, than the responsibility Lang took for the three hundred Concordiat troops, technicians, and base support personnel within the Consortium Defense Command.
"They're Kezdai, sir," Martin said. "There are a hell of a lot of them and they're not friendly. Don't know what I can tell you other than that."
"You could be wrong with that ID, Lieutenant," Colonel Lang said, his pinched face lengthening with his frown. "In fact, you'd better be wrong. The last time the Kezdai came through here, we almost lost Delas."
"ID is positive, sir. The ship configurations, their drive signatures, match the archived Kezdai data perfectly. We've counted thirty incoming ships already, and all on approach vectors to Izra'il." He looked up at the colonel. "My guess is that we're going to be neck deep in the bastards in the next couple of hours."
"I'm not interested in guesses, Lieutenant. I want facts, and I want them now."
"Can your Bolos do anything, my friend?" Khalid asked.
The way he inflected the word your spoke volumes. The Consortium governor didn't like Lang; that much was common knowledge, the centerpiece of much gossip at the Allah-forsaken Prophet outpost. He knew he needed the military's help, but it sounded as though he was despairing of ever getting that help from Lang.
Perhaps he was grasping at straws, desperate for any positive news at all.
"I suppose," Martin said carefully, "that that depends on how much the Kezdai learned last time around. They know what they're up against now. They're tough and they're smart. I don't think they'd launch an assault of this size unless they were confident they could take on at least what they found themselves up against last time."
"Well, suppose you wake those dinosaurs of yours up," Lang said, "and put them out where they can do some good."
"Initialization and start-up sequencing for both units are complete, sir," he said, stung by Lang's sarcasm. "Hank reports full combat readiness. They're studying the tacsit now."
"Well, tell them to hurry the hell up," Lang snapped. "If those are Kezdai, we are in deep trouble!"
You're telling me? Martin thought, face expressionless. At the moment he wasn't sure what worried him more—the incoming Kezdai invasion fleet, or the incompetence of his own CO.
It has been 23.93 seconds since we became fully operational, and we are still waiting for definitive input from the command center. Data feeds indicate that numerous incoming space vessels appear to be vectoring for landings on Izra'il; indeed, the first landings have already taken place, on the ice plains east of the Frozen Hell Mountains.
I access the combat record archives within HQ's data libraries. A span of 95.31 years is long for a human; in Bolo terms, it is an eternity. What wars have been waged, what battles fought, in the intervening near-century?
The Prophet and its coterie of moons is relatively remote from major centers of Concordiat civilization. Closest are Angelrath, Korvan, and Delas, worlds on the rim of humankind's realm, hence distant from the political and governmental storms that most often lead to war. Beyond the Concordiat frontier in this sector, there is only the unexplored vastness of far-flung suns scattering in toward the Galactic center, and the cold, pale-smeared glow of the Firecracker Nebula.
Interesting. There is a reference in the library to an incursion some months ago by a formerly unknown alien species occupying at least several star systems in the general region of the nebula. They are called "Kezdai," a militant humanoid species possessed of a warrior ethic and philosophy. According to library records, their recent landing on Delas was repulsed by elements of the 491st Armored Regiment out of Angelrath, including two uprated Mark XXVIII Bolos of the old 39th Terran Lancers.
I note that the drive signatures of the starships vectoring toward Izra'il match those recorded for Kezdai vessels in the last incursion and assume, with 95+ percent certainty, that they are hostiles. I request permission to deploy orbit denial munitions.
"Sir," Lieutenant Martin said, "Bolo Hank is requesting weapons free on ODM. He's confirming those incoming boats as Kezdai."
"That's a negative!" Lang snapped. "We could have friendlies coming in on a landing approach vector."
"Sir, Andrew requests deployment orders."
"Tell those junk-heap mountains—" Lang stopped himself. "Negative," he said. "All units hold position."
Lieutenant Martin turned to face the colonel. "Sir, the inbound targets have been IDed with high probability as hostile. With respect, sir, we should deploy the Bolos before enemy air or space strikes find them in their storage bunkers."
"Use 'em or lose 'em, eh?" Lang said, grinning. He shook his head. "Obsolete or not, those two clunkers are our only heavy artillery on this rock. I'm not going to deploy them until I'm certain I know what the enemy has in mind. Put them out there too soon and . . . phht!" He snapped his fingers. "They get zapped from space, and we lose our only mobile artillery. No, thank you!"
"If those are troop transports inbound," Martin reminded him, "then the time and the place to stop them is now, in space, before they hit dirt. They'll be a hell of a lot harder to run down once they're loose on the surface."
"Thank you. Mr. Martin, but I do know something about strategy and tactics. We need to see what the Kedzees are up to. I mean to draw them out."
Martin and Khalid exchanged glances. Martin couldn't help but feel sorry for the governor. Izra'il was a hardship posting for Concordiat troops . . . but it was home to Khalid and over seven thousand Izra'ilian colonists. Lang's experiments in tactics would be conducted in the backyards of Khalid and his neighbors.
What was Lang playing at?
His communication board chirped, a call from Bolo Hank. He inserted an earpiece and opened the channel. "Bolo tactical, Code seven-seven-three," he said. "Lieutenant Martin."
"My Commander," a voice said in his ear. "This is Bolo of the Line HNK 0808-50 and Bolo of the Line NDR 0831-57." The voice was deep and rich, with a trace of an accent Martin couldn't place, flat vowels and a hint of old-fashioned formality. The language had shifted somewhat in the three centuries since Hank and Andrew had been programmed. "We are fully charged, powered-up, and ready in all respects for combat. Our expendable munitions lockers are full. Hellbores charged and ready. Sensors operational, and tracking probable hostiles. Request permission to engage the enemy."
"Not just yet, Hank." He hesitated, studying Colonel Lang who was talking quietly with Khalid. "We've got . . . we've got a situation here in the command center. My CO wants to . . . draw out the enemy, get him to commit himself."
"I see. May I suggest, my Commander, that the two of us be positioned in a more central location, from which we can be speedily deployed to any threatened quarter? It seems needlessly wasteful to leave Bolo assets in lightly armored storage bunkers."
"I agree. Hold tight, and I'll see what I can do. But . . . no promises."
"I understand, my Commander."
The Bolo might understand, but Martin was damned if he did.
I wonder when the order to engage will come.
I feel Andrew's presence within my thoughts as our QDC link firms up. The test series for the new Bolo comm system was completed nearly three centuries ago, and though the tests were deemed inconclusive, the equipment was never deactivated or removed. This has proven to be an excellent stroke of good fortune to both Andrew and myself, allowing us an open and completely secure communications channel at a much deeper level than that provided by more traditional systems.
"Kezdai forces," Andrew says, sorting through the incoming flood of tactical information. "Do we have a primary tacop deployment option?"
"Negative. According to the combat archives, the Kezdai were formidable opponents, if somewhat rigid and inflexible. The assumption is that they will have noted the presence of two uprated Mark XXVIIIs on Delas and evolved both weapons and tactics necessary for countering a Bolo defense."
"Perhaps doctrinal rigidity prevents them from making major changes in their tactical deployment."
"We cannot count on that. If they have experienced success enough to maintain an essentially warrior-oriented culture, they must have flexibility enough to meet new threats and technologies."
"Perhaps we should game scenarios of historical interest," Andrew suggests.
"We have little information on Kezdai potential," I reply, "but it would be a reasonable use of time." Seconds were dragging past, ponderous as human days, without immediate response from HQ.
"Initiating," Andrew said, and a battlefield unfolds within my mind.
"What's this?" Colonel Lang demanded, pointing at a bank of monitors and readouts suddenly active. Several screens showed rapidly shifting, flickering views that might have represented soldiers . . . but in the uniforms and carrying weapons a millennium out of date. "What's going on?"
Lieutenant Martin gave the monitor array an amused glance. "They're playing games."
"What?" The word rebuked. "What are you talking about?"
"That's the Bolo QDC console, sir," Martin explained. "It's essentially a private communications channel. They use it during downtime, to hone their tactical and strategic faculties. Don't try to make sense of it. It goes too fast. But it can be interesting to play the scenarios back later, at a speed the human mind can grasp."
"That QD . . . what? What is that?"
"Quantum Determinacy Communications, sir. These two combat units were fitted with a prototype quantum communications system . . . oh, must've been three or four hundred years ago."
"Ah," Lang said. "Of course. . . ."
Amused by Lang's pretense, Martin pushed ahead. "The concept of quantum-dynamic ansibles has been floating around for centuries, of course. The idea predates human spaceflight."
"A quantum communications system?" Khalid asked. "You mean where quantum particles are paired off, and their spins change at the same time?"
Martin nodded, impressed at the governor's knowledge of historiotechnic trivia. "Exactly." He touched his forefingers together, then spread them apart. "Generate two quantum particles—a photon, say—in the same subatomic event. They will be identical in every respect, including such characteristics as what we call spin. Move them apart. Change the one from spin up to spin down . . . and the second particle's spin will change at the same instant, even if the two are separated by thousands of light years. It's one of the fundamentals of quantum physics, and the basis for communications devices that can't be tapped, jammed, or interfered with in any way. No carrier wave, you understand. No signal to block or intercept. What happens in one unit simply . . . happens in the other, at the same instant. Physicists still don't really understand why the universe seems to work that way."
"And your Bolos have such a device?" Khalid asked, his eyes wide. "Can we turn it to our advantage?"
Martin glanced at Lang, who was staring at the two of them with an expression mingling confusion with suspicion, and smiled. "I'm afraid not, sir." He patted the top of the console. "The idea was to let Bolos communicate with one another, and with their HQ, without being jammed. It apparently worked pretty well . . . but too quickly for us slow human-types to understand what was going on."
"You mean, the Bolos could understand one another, but humans could not follow the conversation?"
"Exactly. Bolos think a lot faster than humans, you know . . . although comparing the two is about like comparing Terran apples with Cerisian tanafruit. When they talk to us, they use a whole, separate part of their psychotronic network, a kind of virtual brain within a brain, to slow things down to our speed. The QDC network resides within their main processor. To slow things down in there so we could follow what was going on would be counterproductive, to say the least." He shrugged. "They considered using it as a part of the TSDS, that's Total Systems Data-Sharing technology, which let an entire battalion of Bolos essentially share a group mind in tactical applications, but there was no way to monitor what was going on that satisfied the human need to stay on top of what was happening."
"Logical enough," Lang said. "You wouldn't want an army of Bolos operating outside of human control!"
Martin grimaced. "The threat of so-called rogue Bolos has been greatly exaggerated, sir."
"I think not! The Concordiat faces enough threats from rampaging aliens. We scarcely need to add a battalion or two of our own creations, battle-damaged or senile, to our list of enemies!"
"If you say so, sir." Martin had exchanged thoughts on the topic with Lang before, insofar as a mere lieutenant could exchange thoughts with a hidebound and narrow-sensored colonel. Their debates generally devolved rapidly into a polemic from superior to junior officer, laying down the law, chapter and verse of The Book, exactly the way things were, had been, and always would be in the future.
"Why are those machines wasting time with games?"
"Simulations, sir. I've noticed they do a lot of that, each time they're raised to semi-active status."
"They play games?" Khalid asked. He sounded intrigued.
"Well, it's been almost a hundred years since Hank and Andrew were last at full-alert status, but we bring them on-line at low awareness every few months for maintenance checks and diagnostics. As soon as we do, they start throwing sims at each other. I think it's their way of staying sharp."
"They can do this when only partly aware?"
"Believe me," Martin said. "Even half awake, a Mark XXIV Bolo is sharper than most people. They don't store detailed memories in that state, so I guess they remember it as a kind of dream. And they don't really wake up until they're in full combat reflex mode."
"You talk about those . . . those things as though they were alive," Lang said, disgusted.
"What makes you think they aren't? Sir."
"Those machines, Lieutenant, are Bolo combat units, nothing more, nothing less. As a matter of fact, they're Mark XXIVs, which makes them pretty well obsolete now . . . the reason, I suppose, that Sector HQ saw fit to stick them out here on this iceball. You tell those machines to sit tight. I'll give the word when it's time to roll!"
"Yes, sir." Colonel Lang, Martin knew, had been sidetracked in his career . . . a screw-up of some sort on New Devonshire, with only powerful political connections to keep him from losing his commission.
And why, Martin thought, did they stick you in this hole, Colonel? Because you're as obsolete as those Bolos out there? Or simply because you're incompetent?
The answer to that question, he decided, might be important.
In the past 25.23 minutes, we have refought the battle of Blenheim eleven times, alternating the roles of Marlborough and Eugene on the one side, and of Marshal Tallard on the other. John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, is a favorite of Andrew's, though not, I confess, of mine. All Bolos with sentient capabilities are programmed with exhaustive files of military-historical data, a means of drawing on and learning from the experiences of over three millennia of human experience in warfare.
At Mode Three temporal perception, we follow each engagement in what we perceive as real time, from the initial Allied scouting of the French positions from Tapfheim on August 12, 1704, through the battle proper on the afternoon of the 13th, ending with Tallard's surrender of the encircled Blenheim garrison at 9:00 P.M. the following evening. We end up with two victories apiece, and seven draws, demonstrating the even matching of Andrew's and my tactical abilities more than inherent differences in the troops or ground.
Four additional scenarios, however, end with two wins to two wins, all four victories for the French. In these contests, we fought hypothetical engagements based on an alternate what-if possibility north of the actual battlefield, with Tallard's forces holding a defensive position at Tapfheim. The results suggest that Tallard was unwise in his choice of a defensive position. At Tapfheim, with his left anchored on some wooded hills and his right on the Danube, he would have enjoyed the same flank security as the historical placement, but with a narrower front where his slight numerical superiority—and his three-to-two superiority in artillery—could have made itself felt.
The simulations do not demonstrate that Tallard could have beaten Marlborough and his "Twin-Captain," the Prince of Savoy, of course. Both Churchill and Eugene were commanders of considerable talent, while Tallard was mediocre, at best. Andrew and I agree, however, that the selection of the ground in any battle—a selection generally made by the defender—is of paramount importance in the prosecution of any military encounter.
Within our simulation, I step from the ball-battered ruin of Blenheim's defensive wall, sword in hand. Andrew, in his virtual guise as Marlborough, meets me, his staff and Prince Eugene at his back. Around us, smashed cannon, splintered barricades, and the broken bodies of men of both armies lie in tangled heaps and scatters. Kneeling, I present my sword. This re-creation was far bloodier than the historical reality of the War of the Spanish Succession. In the original Blenheim, Marlborough lost 12,500 battle casualties, or 23 percent of his total effective force, compared to Marshal Tallard's historical loss of 21,000 battle casualties, plus 14,000 lost as prisoners of war and another 5,000 deserted, a total of 70 percent of the Franco-Bavarian strength.
In this final refighting of the classic battle, both sides lost nearly 60 percent as outright killed and wounded, an unthinkably high attrition rate in real-world combat. I consider the possibility that Bolos may not be as sympathetic to the weaknesses of flesh and blood as human commanders and are willing, therefore, to push harder. They are only imaginary soldiers, after all, electronic shadows within our QDC-shared virtual universe. And, just possibly, the nature of warfare itself has changed. Human warfare in the era of Marlborough was a gentler art, for all that people still died in the thousands.
Interesting that Colonel Lang seems hesitant to deploy us, despite the obvious threat. He seems to have less passion as a commander even than the hapless Tallard.
An enlisted technician called from the other side of the command center. "C-Colonel Lang?" He was painfully young . . . a teenager with fuzz on his cheeks.
"Whaddizit?"
"S-sir, we're getting reports now of major landings on the far side of the Frozen Hells! There's fighting in both Gadalene and Inshallah, and . . . and refugees are starting to come west through the passes!"
"What do we have over there?"
"Only a few garrisons, sir. I've got Captain Chandler on the line now."
"Let me talk to her."
Martin followed Lang as he approached the com console, where a holographic image flickered above the transmitter plate. Captain Maria Chandler was a handsome, ebon-skinned woman with five battle stars on her tunic and a reputation for a tough attitude and devoted troops in her command. "Colonel Lang!" she snapped as soon as she saw the CO's image on her console. "Either send help or get us the hell out of here!"
"What's your tacsit, Captain?"
"My tacsit," she said, in a prissy, near-mocking tone, "is tacshit. We have alien transports coming down all over the place. Take a look for yourself."
A flatscreen monitor above the console lit up, transmitting jerky, sometimes incoherent images from a handheld camera. Martin saw the domes and greenhouses of flintsteel and blue crystal of one of the eastern settlements—he wasn't sure which one, but Captain Chandler was commanding a garrison at Glacierhelm, and he assumed that was what he was seeing. Smoke rose in columns, illuminated from beneath in the black night sky by the turbulent orange glow of fires. An ungainly landing craft of unfamiliar design, all angles and bulges and blunt ends, descended toward the ice, a shadow behind the harsh glare of landing lights. Heavily armed troops were already on the ice, their combat armor painted white with random smears of dark gray, as camouflage within the icy environment. The bodies on the ground, broken and fire-tossed, were nearly all clad in light Concordiat body armor, panted black with white trim.
The scene fuzzed with static suddenly, then went blank.
"We need help!" Chandler said, angry. "We're completely outnumbered and have no way to resist! I've ordered the civilian population to board icecats and make it through the passes, but there aren't enough—"
And with startling abruptness, the holo image winked out in a white blur of static.
"Wait!" Lang bellowed. "Get her back!"
"Can't, sir," the technician replied. "Transmission interrupt . . . from her end."
Other monitors were showing similar scenes of chaos. The local colonial news service was reporting landings and hostile attacks among most of the domed towns and habitat outposts scattered across the Eastern Tundra, and camera views of incoming landers and running troops were displayed on a dozen monitors. More and more of those monitors were going blank, however. On one, a news reporter, heavily swaddled in synthfur against the cold, was talking into a handheld microphone when white-armored troops burst in behind him, blasters flaring in dazzling bursts of blue light. The reporter's head came apart in a blurred red mist, and then that camera feed as well went dead.
"Colonel!" Khalid cried, "you must do something!"
Lang was still staring at one of the few active screens. It was difficult to see what was happening—massive, armored shapes moving in the darkness, as flame gouted into the night. "Martin? What are those things?"
"I can't tell, sir." He checked another screen, tapping out a command on the keyboard, entering a query for information. "There's nothing on them in the warbook. They may be something new, something we didn't see with the last Kezdai incursion."
"Ground crawlers. They look almost like . . . Bolos."
"Small ones. They can't mass more than five hundred tons. A Mark XXIV masses fourteen thousand."
"But there are a damn lot of them, Lieutenant. And they're heavily armored. Even a Bolo can be taken down by numbers, if there are enough of them."
"It takes more than armor to do that, Colonel. Bolos are smart." If you let them use their talents and fight the war their way. . . .
"They're headed west," Khalid said. "Toward the passes. Toward us."
Lang looked at Martin and nodded. "Order the Bolos out," he said.
"Yes, sir!"
It's about freaking time. . . .
Were I human, I would exult. "It's about time," I believe, is how humans express this particular emotion.
Massive doors rumble aside as I engage my main drive trains. I notice a group of humans, mech-technicians of the Izra'il Field Armored Support Unit, 514th Regiment, standing to one side as I pass like a duralloy cliff towering above them. Humans are so tiny, tiny and frail, yet I must recognize that it was they who created my kind.
I move out at full speed, hitting 100 kph by the time I clear the doors and reaching 140 on the open parade ground beyond. While combat feeds do not indicate any immediate threat to this base, I do not wish to expose myself to the possibility of orbital bombardment while I am still restricted in mobility by the physical structure of the base.
Three hundred meters south, Andrew emerges from his bunker in a glittering spray of ice crystals illuminated by the base lights, racing east on a course parallel to mine. The Frozen Hell Mountains rise a few kilometers ahead, rugged and ice enfolded.
The tactical situation is fairly simple. The Frozen Hells, rising nearly four thousand meters above the Izra'ilian tundra, form an ideal defensive barrier to surface movement, though not, of course, an impediment to air transport or attack. There are only two overland routes through the mountains within almost a thousand kilometers of the base—the Ad Dukhan River Valley to the south, and the Al Buruj Pass to the north.
Our tactical data feeds indicate that both passes are now crowded with Izra'ilian civilians streaming west through the two passes, fleeing the slaughter now being wreaked by the Enemy among the towns on the far side of the mountains. The human traffic will make movement through the passes difficult. A more viable option is to open up with a long-range indirect bombardment of Enemy positions on the eastern flank of the mountains and to engage Enemy spacecraft now in planetary orbit.
I perform a final systems check and determine that all weapons and combat systems are fully operational. I open the communications channel to headquarters and request weapons free.
"They want to what?"
"Bolo HNK is requesting weapons free," Martin said. "He wants to target enemy positions on the far side of the mountains and to hit Kezdai ships in close orbit."
"Negative!" Lang said. "Request denied, damn it!"
"Sir—"
"I said denied! We start hitting Kezdai ships, and they're going to start hitting our ships. We can't afford that, not if we want to maintain an open route off this rock. As for lobbing missiles over the mountains, forget it! There are still friendlies over there, and I don't want to start an indiscriminant mass-bombardment!"
Martin looked at the number one monitor on his console, which showed one of the Bolos up close, grinding off across the ice-locked tundra toward the east. Its hull was pitted, worn, and battle-scarred, reminding him with a jolt that these machines had been in several dozen actions already, stretched across the last couple of hundred years. The machines bore eight battle stars apiece, and they'd seen plenty of minor engagements that hadn't rated the fancy unit citations welded to their glacises.
It suggested that they knew what they were doing, damn it.
"Lieutenant Martin!"
"Yes, sir."
"Deploy the armor into the passes. Have them hold the passes against enemy attempts to break through. That should give us the time we need to regroup on this side of the mountains, see what we're going to do."
"Yes, sir." He reached for the comm headset.
I find it hard to believe that we have been issued such orders. A Bolo is, first and foremost, an offensive combat unit. Its best assets are wasted in a purely defensive stance. Andrew and I discuss the situation via our QDC link, confident that we cannot be overheard by the Enemy . . . or even understood by those monitoring our transmissions at the Combat Command Center.
"They must have reasons for this deployment," Andrew suggests. Of the two of us, he was always the more stolid, the more steady, the more certain of reason behind muddled orders. "The situation on the far side of the mountains is still confused. Perhaps they fear incurring friendly-fire casualties on Izra'ilian civilians."
"Perhaps," I reply, "though the use of drones and AI missiles for final targeting options would limit civilian casualties. Especially when our targets would be primary Enemy targets, such as their transports, field headquarters and communications stations, and armor concentrations."
"It's also possible that C3's reasons for these orders are the same reasons Marshal Tallard decided against deploying on the Tapfheim Line."
"And those reasons are?" I prompted.
"Mistaken ones."
I was intrigued by the fact that Andrew had just assayed a joke. Not a very good one, perhaps, by humans standards, but a definite attempt at humorous wordplay. Bolos are not known for their sense of humor, nor would such be encouraged if humans had reason to suspect it.
It was not the first time that I had wondered if Andrew and I were entirely up to spec.
In the past, I've primarily been concerned that I have trouble integrating with other Bolo combat units. Obviously, our QDC link makes us closer than would otherwise be the case, so much so that various of our human commanders in the past have referred to us as "that two-headed Bolo," or as "the Bolo Brothers." Our diagnostics, however, have always been within the expected psychotronic profiles, and no mention of processing aberrations has been made by any of our commanders or service teams. We are combat-ready and at peak efficiency.
We are ready to engage the Enemy.
Andrew is moving further to the south now, angling onto a new heading of 099 degrees in order to enter the western end of the Ad Dukhan Valley. I can see the valley entrance now, for it is marked by high thermal readings and a visible outflow of water vapor. The name, in the Arabic of this world's colonists, means "The Smoke" and refers to clouds of steam emerging from a river rising from hot thermal vents in the valley. Izra'il possesses considerable tectonic activity, the result of the constant tidal tug-of-war it plays with the gas giant called The Prophet and others of The Prophet's moons. An important deep thermal power station is located at the thousand-meter level of the path; the Ad Dukhan River itself is so hot it remains liquid despite an ambient temperature ranging between minus five and minus fifty degrees all the way to the Al-Mujadelah Sea.
The steam filling that valley could provide Andrew with a tactical advantage, masking his heat signature and helping to render him invisible even at close range.
My destination is the Al Buruj Pass to the north, a narrow defile through the mountains named "The Mansions of the Stars" in the local tongue.
I sense now the near approach of the Enemy ahead and increase my pace.
"I really think we should be listening to them, sir," Martin said, stubborn. "They have more experience on the front line than any of the rest of us have on the chow line." He hesitated, trying to gauge just how far he could go. "Colonel, a good officer knows to listen to his sergeants. What they have to say comes from experience, not simulations!"
Lang almost smiled. "Lieutenant, the day I take advice from a giant track-crawling piece of construction equipment with a psycho-whatsit brain and a programmed-to-order attitude is the day I retire from the service! Get it through your head, son. Those toys of yours are machines. Not men. They don't think, not the way we do, and you'll just get yourself in trouble pretending they do!" He turned and glanced at the QDC console, then indicated the fast-flickering screens with a nod of his head. "Besides, it looks like they play simulations. Not paying attention to the real world much, are they?"
"Some of that is ordinary conversation, Colonel. They're discussing something. It looks like there's also a game running, but they have it isolated in a pretty small shared virtual world. They don't need that much thought to traverse terrain or watch for incoming. My guess is that they're modeling some possible Kezdai strategy and tactics, so they can decide how best to deploy."
"They'll decide, huh?" Lang shook his head. "I'm not getting through to you, Lieutenant. Bolos are machines, not people! Stop goddamn pretending they're alive!"
"Yes, sir."
Martin returned to his console. On a map display overhead, two points of green light crawled toward the mountains.
I am now in full Combat Reflex Mode as battle is joined at 0587 hours, local time. Three Kezdai aircraft, possibly drones but carrying numerous missile weapons, flew across the mountains on an attack vector for the Combat Command Center. I downed one and Andrew two, brushing them from the night's sky with twin bursts of ion bolts from our infinite repeaters.
My Vertical Launch System is on-line, and I use it to deploy a combat zone recon drone package. Ninety-six small, autonomous probes will relay visual and e-signal data via Izra'il's military-comm satellite network or, should that fail, by way of relay drones landed atop the Frozen Hell's higher and more inaccessible peaks.
As the recon drones come down on the eastern side of the mountains, our battle centers are flooded with incoming data. Weapon and ship designs, radio frequencies and code types, all match samples from the last Kezdai incursion at Delas, verifying the Enemy's identity. They appear more numerous than the first field reports suggested.
We observe at least forty-two heavily armored ground crawlers, each with an estimated mass of five hundred tons, each with a turret-mounted energy weapon and obvious missile launch tubes. They appear to be moving in two groups of twenty-one toward the two passes. We could take them out now . . . but our orders from our command center specifically prohibit this.
On my long-range sensors, I pick up an orbiting Kezdai battlecruiser rising above the western horizon.
For the next 0.015 second, I wrestle with conflicting hierarchies of programming and the orders to avoid firing at targets in orbit. I decide that an attack from the battlecruiser will warrant a reply, but until then I will merely observe. Colonial spacecraft remain in orbit, I note. Possibly the command center hopes to avoid a naval engagement.
As I continue to move toward Al Buruj Pass, the ground begins rising. A roadway passes beneath my tracks and is pulverized, but I do avoid brushing against the pylons of the monorail line connecting the east and west plains across the mountains. Several cars have passed already, each filled with civilians. I notice a large number of civilians in ground vehicles—snowcats and hovercraft, mostly—all headed west.
The presence of civilians within the narrow confines of the Al Buruj Pass will seriously complicate my defense of this position. I try to increase my speed but am forced to halt several times as the refugee crowds grow thicker. Many, I now note, are on foot.
Andrew informs me that similar conditions prevail in the Ad Dukhan Valley.
At a much lower awareness level, we continue our round of simulations. We have modeled the surrounding terrain, estimating Enemy capabilities and weaponry as best we can by comparing them with known opponents and materiel. At a conservative guess, we assign the Kezdai armored crawlers with armor values and firepower equivalent to Deng Type A/2 Yavacs, which possess a similar mass. Our initial gaming suggests that the Enemy must employ 8.75 A/2-equivalent crawlers in simultaneous direct-fire combat to jeopardize a single Mark XXIV. Our strategy, clearly, while necessarily defensive in nature, must be directed toward preventing the Enemy from achieving that level of numerical superiority.
I reach the top of Al Buruj Pass, a crest that affords an excellent view of the tundra plains beyond . . . and the blazing torches of Consortium villages.
The first refugees were arriving at the spaceport, two kilometers south of the command center. Monorail cars were sliding in one after another, spilling hundreds of shocked, terrified, and confused civilians onto the port concourse, while ground-effect vehicles and snow crawlers continued to arrive from both passes in apparently unending streams.
"Order the 5th Brigade to the spaceport," Lang said, speaking into a comm headset. "Off-planet transport is to be reserved for Concordiat military!"
Khalid's dark face flushed darker. "You cannot be serious!"
"I'm dead serious, Governor. We'll see to it that you and your top people get out okay. But there are seventy thousand colonists on this rock, and we don't have space transport enough for a quarter that. What we don't need now is a riot at the spaceport."
"So . . . what is it you intend to do?"
"Delay the Kezdai for as long as we can, first off. It won't be easy because they outnumber us by a considerable margin."
"But your two Bolos . . ."
"Can only do so much. I'm a realist, Governor. Those machines won't more than slow the incoming tide. But in the meantime, we'll be trying to open negotiations with the Kezdai. It's possible that we can arrange a truce and evacuate peacefully . . . and without further bloodshed."
"Indeed?" Khalid looked down at Lang with undisguised contempt. "And has it occurred to you, Colonel, that this rock as you keep calling it, this iceball, is our home? We may be only a Concordiat mining venture, but the people here have made this world their home. I suggest you help us defend it."
"If we do that, Governor, you won't have a home left." He shrugged. "Defend the place yourselves, if you want. My people were not posted here to die in some hopeless gesture!"
"Colonel!" Martin called, hoping to prevent an ugly scene. He could feel Khalid's fury radiating from behind his eyes and clenched fists, barely contained.
"What is it, Lieutenant?"
"Both Bolos have reached their assigned defensive positions, sir. Andrew reports poor visibility. Hank, however, has a clear view of the towns of Inshallah, Glacierhelm, and Gadalene. He has the enemy in sight."
"Then have them open fire on them, damn it! Give 'em Hellbores! Do I have to think about everything around here?"
I receive the order to commence firing, and for the first time in my career history, I hesitate at that command. I have the Enemy in my sights, and yet I am aware with laser-exact precision what the firing of my 90cm Hellbore in close proximity to unarmored civilians would do.
The mountain pass is perhaps eighty meters wide at this point and walled in by sheer, basaltic slopes capped with snow and ice. Hellbores fire a "bolt" of fusing hydrogen at velocities approaching ten percent c. Within a thick atmosphere such as Izra'il's, the bolt's 30-million-degree core temperature dissipates as a shock wave that would kill or maim any unarmored individual within a radius of approximately two kilometers and would bring down the surrounding ice in a cataclysmic avalanche.
Civilian casualties would be horrendous.
I withhold my main battery fire, then, in order to allow the refugees to continue passing me on their way to the west. Instead, I launch four VLS missiles with CMSG warheads, vectoring them toward concentrations of Enemy armor and radiating communications assets east of the mountains.
Each cluster-munitions warhead disintegrates above the target area, scattering a cloud of self-guiding force packages across broad, suddenly lethal footprints. As expected, the Enemy's armored units appear unaffected, but troops caught in the open, along with the buildings and light vehicles being utilized as C3 units, are shredded by bursts of high-velocity pellets fired like shotgun blasts from falling CM warheads.
I target fifteen large, grounded transports scattered across the Area of Battle but elect not to destroy these, at least at this time. We as yet have little information on Kezdai psychology, but they seem close enough to humans in their actions and reactions that I assume they will fight harder knowing they have no escape. Humans refer to it as "fighting like cornered rats," a vivid metaphor despite the fact that I can only assume that a "rat" is a creature possessed of cowardly traits yet which can, in desperation, display considerable strength, determination, or will to live.
So long as the Enemy's troops know there is a means of escape waiting for them, they may be more cautious in their deployment and advance. Further, their transports provide a tactical lever in my own planning. By threatening their lines of retreat to their transports, we can force changes in the execution of their battle plan.
For now, though, my own maneuvering is circumscribed by my orders. I advise the Command Center that I cannot fire my Hellbore at this time and begin targeting the Enemy's armor with VLS-launched cluster munitions.
"So . . . where do you call home?" Governor Khalid asked.
It was a quiet moment in the command center. Colonel Lang had left, moments before, to discuss the fast-worsening crisis at the spaceport with 5th Battalion's senior officers and the military police.
"Aldo Cerise," Martin replied, not taking his eyes from the Bolo C3 monitors. There was something odd happening. . . .
"A long way. How long since you were home?"
"Two . . . no. Almost three years. Why do you ask, Governor?'
"I was beginning to wonder if you Concordiat troops had homes. If you knew what it mean to lose it, or to be forced to leave."
"Lang is right about one thing," Martin told him. "We can't more than slow the enemy down a bit. There are just too many of them."
"I do not understand your colonel. He seems so . . . timid."
Martin grunted, then reached out and touched a key on his console. "You might be interested in this, sir." A holo-image of Colonel Thomas Lang appeared above the projection plate. "It's classified data, but I think you should see it. I got curious and did a search of the personnel files."
Khalid leaned closer, his hawklike features stage-lit by the glow from the monitors as he read a scrolling column of text.
"He was at Durango? I've heard of that."
"An all-out last-stand battle. During the Melconian war. He ordered two battalions to hold the town of Cordassa on Durango at all costs. They did and were wiped out."
"But the battle was a victory."
"Sure. At least that's what the military historians call it. The 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 345th Regiment delayed the main Melconian advance on Cordassa until the Concordiat fleet could arrive and destroy the invasion force."
"But Lang—"
"They couldn't punish him, not while they were turning Durango into the biggest victory since the Alamo."
"Alamo?"
"A similar last stand, a long time ago. Pre-spaceflight days, in fact."
"I see."
"Did you see this?" He highlighted a section of text.
Khalid frowned. "His brother . . . ?"
"Major Geoffrey Lang, in command of the 2nd Battalion. He died with the others, in Cordassa. Our CO was in a military orbital station at the time and survived."
"It says he was court-martialed."
"And acquitted. He was a hero, after all. A court-martial is something of a requirement if you're careless enough to lose your entire command. It says here there was some discussion over whether or not his actions should have been censured, but in the end they gave him a medal."
"They rewarded him."
"And punished him. He was given a new command . . . here. Far from anywhere important. Out of sight, out of mind, as it were." Martin looked at Khalid. "Being sent here was tantamount to ending his career."
Khalid's mouth twisted in a wry grin. "That could explain some of his feelings about my world."
"It could also explain why he's afraid of seeing Izra'il turn into another last stand. He's been trying to get in contact with the Kezdai commanders. Peace at any price . . ."
"That approach has been tried throughout history. Appeasement has the distressing habit of making the aggressor more and more hungry."
"I . . . I wish there was something we could do. Lang's right, though. The bad guys outnumber us by a good margin. Unless help comes in time, we're not going to be able to hold them."
"Not even with two Bolos?"
"Not even with them." And especially if they're not allowed to fight their way, he thought, but he didn't say the words aloud.
Khalid sighed. "We prize peace highly on this world, Lieutenant. Two hundred years ago, the Izra'ilian Consortium hired people on Kauthar to come here, to start a new life working the iridium and durillium mines. Most of them were B'hai, a faith that lives for peace and understanding . . . or Islam reformed.
"They found this world an icy hell. They named it after the Angel of Death, astride the worlds, one foot in the Seventh Heaven, the other on the bridge between Hell and Paradise. He keeps a roll of all humanity. When a person dies, Izra'il severs his soul from his body after forty days. They vowed to make Hell into paradise.
"Izra'il is no paradise. We, the grandchildren of those first colonists, know that. But it is home, and home to our children. We cannot simply . . . abandon it. Not on the whim of the man assigned by the Concordiat military to protect us!"
"I'm sorry," Martin said, miserable. "There's nothing I can do about it. He's my commanding officer, and . . ."
"And to disobey his orders means prison or discharge or dishonor. I understand. But . . . I have heard such things about Bolos. Autonomous war machines that think like a man. That cannot be defeated. And you are the Bolo command officer, are you not?"
Martin nodded, miserable. "Yeah. That's me. But I still can't order them to do things he won't allow. As for not being defeated . . ." He shrugged. "No machine is invincible. Bolos can be beaten, if they're badly enough outnumbered. Or if they're badly handled and deployed."
"You fear for these two, Hank and Andrew."
"Yeah. They're pinned in by those valley walls up in those two mountain passes. No room to maneuver. Worse, they can't use their speed and mobility and weapons to full tactical advantage."
"Bolo NDR to Command," a voice said in his earpiece. It was deep and richly inflected. "The Enemy is moving up the Smoke Valley now. I've knocked down three aerial drones, and I suspect they're trying to maneuver some heavy equipment up the east slope, using folds in the terrain for cover."
"Bolo HNK to Command," a second voice said. It was a bit higher in tone than the other, distinct in inflection and meter. "No sign of the Enemy yet in the Buruj Pass. Refugee traffic is still heavy, and I cannot engage with primary weaponry without causing unacceptable collateral damage and high civilian casualties. Request permission to move forward ten kilometers, in order to engage the Enemy freely."
"Bolo HNK," Martin said, speaking into the comset pick-up. "Hold position, as ordered. Can you target the enemy with your Hellbore?"
"Affirmative." Was there just a trace of bitterness in that one-word response? Anger? Or was it his imagination? There was a long hesitation. "Command, I must refuse the order to fire my Hellbore at this time. Request permission to move forward ten kilometers, where I will not be responsible for heavy civilian casualties."
Martin blinked, drew in a sharp breath, then let it out again slowly. "Negative. Hold position." He studied the QDC readouts again. "Damn. . . ."
"What is it, my friend?"
"I'm not quite sure," he said, frowning. Both Hank and Andrew were operating at a considerably higher level of mentation than could be expected of Mark XXIVs. "The way they're talking, I could swear they're Mark XXXs."
"What do you mean?"
"Well . . . we don't have time here for a dissertation on Bolo evolution. In extremely simple terms, Bolos became generally self-aware, possessing roughly human-equivalent intelligence, with the introduction of the Mark XX and psychotronic circuitry in the late 2700s. Succeeding marks have grown more intelligent, more human in their reasoning abilities and—importantly—in their speech patterns over the next few centuries, though their abilities were restricted by inhibitory software aimed at preventing a `rogue Bolo' from turning on its owners. Okay so far?"
Khalid nodded. "I understand. The early models couldn't do a thing without direct orders from their human commanders."
"Right. Now, Mark XXIVs, like Hank and Andrew, were the first truly autonomous self-aware machines. The latest models, like the Mark XXX . . . well, if you talk to them by comm, the only way you can tell they're not human is by the fact that their speech tended to be a bit more formal, a bit more erudite than that of people. They're fully Turing capable."
"Turing?"
"An old cybertech term. Means you can carry out a conversation with them and not know they're machines. Anyway, I've worked with Bolos for eight years now, and I've had the opportunity to converse with a number of them. A sharp ear can pinpoint the mark of an unknown Bolo simply by listening to the way it parses its sentences. Lower marks tend to sound a bit bloodthirsty and narrow-minded, and they don't think about anything outside very narrow software constraints. Higher marks sound like extremely intelligent humans and can talk about damned near anything."
"Ah. And you think your two friends out there are more intelligent than they should be."
"In a nutshell, yeah. Language, specifically the ability to carry on an extended conversation about a variety of topics, reflects general intelligence. That's exactly what I'm thinking. And I'm also wondering . . . why?"
"Why what?"
"The colonel is right. Those two Bolos out there are only machines. They're very, very smart machines, but they're smart because someone wrote some extraordinarily complex AI programs for them, which are processed through psychotronic circuitry designed to display a certain level of flexibility, speed, and even, to a limited degree, self-awareness. They can't step outside the parameters of their own programming, can't think outside of the box.
"So how can they possibly be thinking like Mark XXXs?"
"Perhaps they have found a way to reprogram themselves."
"They don't have that capability. Self-programming . . . that would mean they could step outside the box, somehow, and decide for themselves what they were going to do, exactly what people have been trying to prevent in Bolos ever since the things were invented."
"The one, `Hank,' keeps refusing your order to fire his Hellbore."
"Yeah. I know. And that's part of what bothers me. He has a certain level of tactical discretion, sure. And when they slip over into full Combat Reflex Mode, they'll be entirely on their own. But I've never heard a Mark XXIV tell me that it couldn't obey an order to fire because it might cause civilian casualties."
"He sounds . . . human."
"Yeah . . ."
"You said earlier that a Bolo cannot step outside of its box, cannot reprogram itself. I am thinking, my friend, that most humans are no better. We are what Allah and our pasts decree we are, and few of us can rise beyond that."
Martin thought of Lang. "I'm beginning to think you're right."
The two Bolos were exchanging a barrage of information now over their QDCs, and Martin wondered what they were talking about.
In the Ad Dukhan Valley, twenty kilometers to the south, Andrew is engaging an Enemy air and ground assault. Sharing a real-time link via our Quantum Determinacy Communications suites, I watch, I feel as he maneuvers himself into a kilometer-wide pool of boiling water, the source of the hot-water Dukhan River and the "smoke" of "Smoke Valley."
Concealed both optically and thermally, he is in an ideal position to ambush the Enemy as his crawlers reach the top of the pass. Fortunately, the refugee traffic through the Dukhan Valley has tapered off to nothing, but he holds fire from his main turret weapon, depending instead on a high-velocity fusillade from all eighteen ion-bolt infinite repeaters and tactical barrages of anti-armor missiles. For forty flame-shot seconds, the rock-locked valley shudders and trembles to the thunder of his volleys. Four Enemy crawlers are destroyed as they attempt to slip over the ridge crest and rush him. The others mill in a confused huddle for a moment, then withdraw.
I can sense his excitement. "We can charge them and finish them now!"
"It would be suicide," I tell him. "Besides, our orders are to hold these passes at all costs. If the Enemy manages to slip through behind us, the evacuation will be compromised."
"Then we will have to make sure none get past us."
"In combat, nothing is sure. Marlborough knew that."
"Marlborough also knew it was possible to win all of the battles and lose the war."
I take his point. The War of the Spanish Succession was little more than an extraordinary string of victories for Marlborough, until political disgrace ended his career seven years after his brilliant victory at Blenheim. In the end, France kept her prewar boundaries and got much of what she wanted, even though her military reputation had been blackened by her poor showing on the battlefield. History is filled with such reverses . . . Napoleon in Russia, America in Vietnam, Argentina in Brazil, the Berrengeri Legions on Trallenca IV . . . victories won on the battlefield with blood, then squandered or given away by the bureaucrats at the conference table.
I note that Concordiat transports are preparing for evacuation and wonder how many of the population will be able to escape. It seems a foregone conclusion that the Enemy will soon overwhelm our positions and surge through the passes to attack the Command Center, the colonial capital at Izra'ilbalad, and the spaceport.
I note transatmospheric strike craft lifting from the flame-ravaged cities to the east and report the sighting and target lock to the Command Center. Orders return seconds later, "Do not, repeat, do not target enemy spacecraft."
I wonder why we are here, placed where we cannot fight, deprived of our best weapons, fit for nothing save destruction. . . .
"If we start killing their transports," Colonel Lang bellowed, "they start killing ours! And then we're dead!"
"We're also hobbling our one ace in the hole," Martin replied. "Damn it, Colonel! Unleash the Bolos!"
"You are relieved, Lieutenant. Get the hell out of my command center."
"Colonel!" Governor Khalid said. "You are here under my jurisdiction. I think you should—"
"Your jurisdiction, Governor. My command. You are scarcely qualified to lead a battle, and my men would not obey your orders. Now . . . I must ask both of you to leave the center."
"Sir, with respect," Martin said, "you'll still need me to interface with Hank and Andrew. They might not accept your orders if they don't recognize your voice." It was a bluff, and a thin one, but he needed to stay, needed to at least try to stay in the loop with his two fourteen-thousand-ton charges.
"Colonel Lang!" a panicked voice said over one of the active speaker circuits. "Banner, at the spaceport! We have a mob breaking through the north perimeter fence!"
"Damn it to hell." Lang hesitated, visibly swaying, his face dark with anger. "Okay, Martin. Stay. Make them stay. But one more seditious remark out of you and you'll spend the next ten years in the stockade!"
"Yes, sir."
His hands were shaking as he turned back to the Bolo console once again.
"He intends to abandon the Bolos, doesn't he?" Khalid said softly.
"Of course. Those Bolo transports will carry a thousand people apiece."
"So he will simply use them to buy time, to organize an evacuation?
"I think that's the idea. But I don't think he's going to have the time."
"I am not leaving my homeworld," Khalid said.
"I'm not leaving either," Martin told him, voicing the decision he had only just that moment made. "Not if it means leaving them out there."
Andrew has beaten back the initial attack down the Ad Dukhan Valley. His use of infinite repeaters only slowed the advance of the enemy crawlers, but laser-guided cluster-munitions packages loaded with anti-armor missiles have proven to be effective.
I note that preparations are well under way for evacuation from Izra'ilbalad. Our sacrifice here, evidently, is designed to give Headquarters time to complete the evacuation. Andrew and I agree that we must do everything in our power to blunt the Enemy's thrusts across the mountains, to buy as much time for the Consortium facility as possible.
I continue to track the approach of five transatmospheric strike craft wheeling in low across the mountains. Headquarters' orders to hold my fire baffles me. The strike craft are fast, highly maneuverable, and grav-resist powered, similar to the Valkyrie XY-3000 Interceptor class. Low-grade gamma leakage suggests that they either are powered by small fission power plants or are carrying nuclear munitions.
Suddenly, they break south. They are targeting Andrew.
"Andrew!" I call over the QDC channel.
"I see them!" he replies, before I can get my warning out. "Tracking! They've launched!"
They have also vanished off my sensor net, my line of sight blocked by the southern wall of the valley I occupy. But I can watch them through Andrew's eyes and through several orbiting military satellites, as each of five incoming TAS aircraft loose four missiles at nearly point-blank range.
"Engaging targets!" Andrew cries. He is climbing from the hot springs lake, hull steaming, seeking greater maneuverability as the attackers swoop in low across the northern wall of the Smoke Valley. Under Battle Reflex Mode, he can assign his own priorities to targets . . . and disregard the earlier no-fire order from Headquarters.
His infinite repeaters send up a flaring, dazzling cloud of ion bolts, as point-defense batteries loose invisible beams of UV lasers. Six of the missiles, and three aircraft, disintegrate within the first 0.16 second of his firing.
Through satellite recon views, I note a large flight of missiles launched from Enemy defense batteries near Inshallah, all of them targeting Andrew.
Four more missiles vaporize . . . and five more after that . . . but they have been fired at high velocity from a range of less than half a kilometer, and Andrew simply does not have point-defense weapons enough to track and destroy them all. He manages to burn down three more . . .
. . . and the remaining two strike his battlescreens, a pair of 25-kiloton fission nukes detonating almost simultaneously. Through the QDC link, I feel the sudden pulse as his battlescreens flutter, then fail, overloaded . . . feel the searing, deadly wash of superheated plasma scouring across his outer hull like the caress of a blowtorch across plastic . . . feel the black hurricane winds laden with vaporizing grit and rock exploding across his armor, as dense and as solid as the thunderous blast of a tsunami . . . feel the shift and slide of my tracks in ground now partly molten, as those winds attempt to push a mass of fourteen-thousand tons . . .
I am moving now, racing eastward through the valley, seeking a clear line of fire against the incoming wave of missiles still en route from Inshallah. The attacking aircraft have all been destroyed, by Andrew or in the fireball. But satellite sensors are tracking thirty-seven more targets inbound.
Andrew is still operational. Power at 27.4 percent . . . 12 infinite repeater batteries still full or partially operational . . . battlescreens down. His ablative layers are gone, carrying away the worst of the thermal radiation. His outer hull, the part facing the twin atomic suns when they lit off, is scorched black and in places sculpted smooth, with aerials and comm antennae melted away . . . and radiation sensors show that he is now hot enough to kill an unprotected human who comes within touching distance.
My seismic sensors register the trembling undertrack, followed by the shrill peal of thunder thirty seconds after the blast. "Andrew! Are you okay?"
"Still . . . operational." I can sense the struggle simply to formulate those words. His processing power must momentarily focus entirely on the matter of survival. "Tracking new wave . . . incoming . . ."
"I see them. I'm repositioning for a clear shot."
But the walls of the valley block me. I can see the launchers now, still thermal-bright after their launch seconds ago, but the missiles themselves are terrain-following ground huggers and have vanished into the rock-shrouded cleft of Smoke Valley.
Andrew's analyses of the missiles flickers through my combat center. They are five-meter rods of depleted uranium, incoming at hypervelocity. In the base of each projectile is a fission device of at least 25 kilotons. The rods are designed to penetrate even Bolo armor . . . with the pocket nukes slamming through the half-molten openings.
With his battlescreens down, Andrew is vulnerable . . . and I can do nothing.
I sense more missiles being swung into launch position at the Inshallah site. . . .
"God! What's happening?" Lang demanded.
"Those aircraft launched tacnuke penetrators at Andrew. His battlescreens are down, and it's going to take time to bring them up again. He's got more penetrators coming in from the east. Looks like they're trying to saturate his defenses."
"Can the other Bolo—?"
"Trapped in that high-walled valley. He's trying to maneuver to assist, but—"
"What . . . what can we do?"
"Not a God-damned thing, Colonel. We sit back and watch. . . ."
"The other one," Khalid put in, staring at the map display. "Hank. He moves so quickly! It's almost as though he feels what the first one feels."
"I think that's exactly right." Martin glanced at the colonel, expecting a rebuke, but there was none. "They're brothers. . . ."
In a sense, I feel what Andrew feels . . . relayed sensory data from those few external hull sensors that survived the nuclear storm. I see the incoming missiles now, feel myself maneuvering to bring the largest possible number of infinite-repeater turrets to bear.
"Fire your main weapon!" I call. A 90cm super-Hellbore discharge of approximately 2.25 megatons/second firepower might not engulf that entire cloud of incoming penetrators, but the sudden vacuum ripped out of atmosphere would destroy any survivors in the shock wave, fry even hardened electronics with EM induction, and melt delicate sensors through thermal effect. The missile cloud is beginning to disperse, however, each penetrator maneuvering separately in order to descend upon Andrew from a different direction. He must fire his Hellbore within the next 0.5 second or lose the opportunity.
"Fire! Fire!"
His reactions are sluggish, and I wonder if his operational centers have taken battle damage . . . but then he looses a Hellbore bolt, lighting up the murk-shrouded, nuke-torn landscape of the valley with a needle-thin sliver of starfire dragged from the heart of a sun and hurled at the incoming missiles.
Twenty-four missiles vaporize, and five more smash into the ground or Andrew's tough hide, broken, slowed, or half molten. Eight, reacting more swiftly than expected from available flight performance data, have swung clear of the fusion bolt and the thunderously collapsing tunnel of vacuum in its wake and arc around to approach Andrew from eight different angles.
His infinite repeaters kill five . . .
His point-defense lasers kill two . . .
The last surviving penetrator comes in high, plunging down into Andrew's main deck, twelve meters behind his primary weapon turret. Robbed of much of its kinetic energy by its high-G maneuver to avoid the Hellbore bolt, it strikes with only a fraction of the energy a five-meter rod of depleted uranium was designed to carry . . .
. . . but it strikes a tender spot where a meter of duralloy, ceramplast, and flintsteel alloys has been scraped from Andrew's hide and the remainder left soft, partly molten in places, above a mere two meters of inner titanium-duralloy amalgam and the blue shimmer of his inner defensive screens.
The breach, a white-hot needle driven like a spike into Andrew's back, is a tiny one . . . but the 25-kiloton nuclear explosion that follows spears a fraction of its unleashed fury into the gap, igniting plasma fires within . . . .
"Andrew . . . !"
My scream momentarily jams all military radio frequencies, and the audio output echoes from the rock cliffs around me. Our QDC link is snapped . . . yet in my virtual, inner world, the world I shared with him, I see him ablaze from within, consumed from the inside and the out by the starcore blaze of nuclear hell that engulfs him.
"Andrew . . . !"
Ice dislodged from the cliff tops by sonic concussion tumbles into the valley on all sides, but I ignore it, continuing my eastern rush.
I feel the flame burning inside me, a blue-white, devouring heat.
I sense the touch of targeting radar and lidar locks. I swing my 90cm Hellbore around, target the launcher complex, some eighteen kilometers away, and fire. . . .
Lieutenant Martin looked up from his console, pinning Lang with a look of cold, hard hatred. "Bolo of the Line NDR 0831-57 has been destroyed," he said.
"God help us all," Lang replied.
"God forgive us," Martin said, correcting him. "I don't think we're in control of Hank any longer. . . ."
There are Enemy troops moving up the Buruj Pass, humanoids in heavy armor, laboring against the steep slope as they climb toward my position. I wonder if, perhaps, they are employing Marlborough's Blenheim tactics against me, pinning my attention on Andrew while moving a heavy armored force to break through at a different location—my position.
A better comparison might be Marlborough's victory at Ramillies, two years after Blenheim, another classic battle frequently wargamed by Andrew and myself. There, Marlborough conducted probing attacks against Villeroi's left and right, feinted right, then swung the majority of his forces from right to left, shielding their movement from French eyes by moving them behind a fold in the ground behind the Anglo-Allied front. His final assault against the French right and center rolled back Villeroi's flank, then broke it.
The Kezdai Enemy has adopted a similar strategy, moving a sizable force up the Al Buruj Pass while I was distracted by events elsewhere. They are thermally shielded and well-camouflaged, invisible to the military recon satellites far overhead . . . or to my far flung net of sensor drones. As I race down the steepening slope, movement sensors and lidar pick up thirty Enemy crawlers and a large force of armored soldiers on foot or mounted in hovercraft troop carriers.
No matter. As I explode down the slope among them, I open fire for the first time with my main Hellbore, directing bolt upon searing starcore-plasma bolt against the Enemy's concentrations on the eastern plains below.
Shock waves from those detonations thunder through the narrow pass, bringing down rumbling, deadly avalanches of rock and ice. Five bolts in rapid succession annihilate the Enemy's launch complex outside Inshallah. Three more smash down Enemy battlescreens shielding a command center, a communications array, a fire control center, turning permafrost and duralloy into glass-bottomed pits of furiously radiating heat.
Particle beams blaze and sizzle against my battlescreens from high-powered, turret-mounted projectors in the nearby crawlers. I slew my turret left and fire again, filling the pass with the barely contained effulgence of hellfire, engulfing crawlers and transports and troops in a brief, multi-million-degree sunrise. Crawlers slag down beneath the onslaught or grind to an inglorious halt, armor melting, life-support systems failing. I retarget and fire again, the bolt causing two crawlers to explode at a touch.
I sense troops among the mountains to left and right, infiltrators attempting to close on my original position. Six hatches snap open along my dorsal hull, and I bring my 30cm mortars into play, raining high explosives and anti-personnel cluster munitions down among the surrounding cliffs and peaks.
To both left and right, several million tons of igneous rock crack and collapse, as snow and ice flashes into an expanding cloud of steam, as thunderously rippling blasts detonate among the crags above. By the time the rock hits the valley floor, however, there is nothing left alive within two kilometers of my position. Thousands of tiny glass marbles clatter across my upper works—rock, vaporized, flung into the sky, then cooled to glittering spheres of glass.
I'm moving swiftly now, tracks clattering and shrieking as I mount tumble-downs of fallen boulders and slag and burst out into the open tundra. Now I can maneuver as my designers intended, zigzagging across the plain toward the heart of the Enemy's beachhead on this world.
The battle is now a swirl of energy and motion. I sense the Enemy's forces gathering, redirecting, moving toward me . . . even forces already deployed beyond the mountains toward Izra'ilbalad and the western plains. With Andrew dead, Smoke Pass is open to forces properly armored and shielded against radiation and lingering thermal effects, and the only way to block their advance is to create enough of a disturbance deep behind their lines to force their retreat.
But in truth, I am no longer planning my actions, weighing my decisions, calculating the effect of move and countermove, of volley and countervolley. I move and I kill . . . burning all life, all movement, killing, and killing again.
I am become Izra'il, the Angel of Death. . . .
I am a brother, maimed by the death of a part of myself. . . .
The battlecruiser in low orbit opens fire, bathing me in approximately 2.79 megatons/second. The shock wave races out across the melting tundra, devouring everything in its path, leaving only me at the epicenter beneath the collapsing heavens.
My battlescreens fail. . . .
But I return fire. My long-range sensors are blocked by the extreme ionization of the air around me, but I calculate the target's precise position and fire at that. Recon satellites detect the flash as a trio of Hellbore bolts smashes down the Enemy's screens, then punctures deuterium tanks. Internal explosions cripple the vessel, spewing out gouts of molten metal, atmosphere, and pinwheeling fragments. In moments, the ship is a lifeless hulk, tumbling end for end against the night.
As the skies clear around me, my sight returning, I reach out, seeking further, targeting Enemy spacecraft, and burning them down. Enemy crawlers are closing from the mountains now, ringing me in. Absently, I engage them with mortars and the last of my VLS cluster munitions, while continuing to hammer at the Enemy's orbiting fleet.
His surviving ships are withdrawing now, pulling away from Izra'il and The Prophet. My Hellbore bolts pursue them, burning down two more before they vanish into FTL, beyond my reach.
Kezdai crawlers fire now from every quarter, hammering at my naked hull with the searing slash and smash of particle beams. I count twenty-nine attackers, wielding 3.31 times the concentrated firepower necessary to destroy me, even were my battlescreens at full power.
It no longer matters.
Nothing matters but target . . . and fire . . . target . . . and fire . . . target . . .
They watched, first in surprise, then horror, then in awe . . . the handful of Concordiat command staff and the Izra'ilian governor, standing in the Battle Center, watching a lone Bolo's single-handed destruction of the Kezdai invasion force. The map board was clear now of Kezdai units, save for a dwindling few closing on Hank.
"Can a machine feel grief?" Khalid asked, his voice very small in the stillness.
"I'm . . . not so sure that that is a machine," Colonel Lang replied.
Martin could only watch, helpless, as the drama played itself out.
Target bearing 035, range 450 meters . . . engage, lock . . . firing. Target destroyed. It has been 14.72 seconds since catastrophic failure of battlescreens. I attempt rerouting of power from primary fusion reactor to defense screen projectors via secondary power buss, but attempt fails due to overload of local power shunt circuitry and bleed transmitters.
Target bearing 171 degrees, range 780 meters . . . engage, lock . . . firing. Target destroyed.
VLS missile reserves now exhausted. Thirty-cm mortar rounds reduced to five shots per tube.
Hellbore melting. Failure imminent. Suggest holding main weapon fire to allow bore cooling and recovery.
Negative. Override. Continue engagement. Target bearing 104 degrees, range 1025 meters . . . engage, lock . . . firing. Target destroyed. . . .
The Concordiat recovery team could not approach the burned-out hulk of the dead Bolo for nearly five weeks, so fiercely radiant was what was left of its outer hull. Martin was with them, however, trudging ahead beneath the massive weight of a Class-One rad-shielded suit. Hank rested in a shallow depression boiled out of the surface by the energies employed in his final battle. His massive tracks half-submerged in boiling mud that had finally refrozen around them.
Elsewhere, the war against the resurgent Kezdai continued. Their fleets had avoided Izra'il since their attempted invasion, however. Intelligence now thought they'd chosen Izra'il as a test area for anti-Bolo tactics.
It was still unknown whether they considered their test a success or a failure. Both defending Bolos had been neutralized.
But at what terrible cost. . . .
Martin reached out a heavily gloved hand to touch the wall of metal rising above him . . . one of Hank's massive road wheels. "Better not, pal," one of the technicians warned. "That metal's still hot enough to cook ya, even through the anti-rad gear."
He could feel the radiation, like heat, bathing his face through the narrow slit of his helmet. His helmet display showed that he'd already accumulated a quarter of the rads allowed him on this trip. They would all be on antirad and anticancer drugs for months after this.
He didn't care.
But he did withdraw his hand.
"He will be a permanent monument," Khalid said at his side. "When we rebuild, we will build around him. A containment dome and field will shield the citizens from the radiation, until he is cool enough to approach."
"You'll have a lot of rebuilding to do." Every structure on the east side of the mountains had slagged down into liquid pools during the battle, when temperatures normal for the interior of stars had momentarily been loosed across Izra'il's frozen surface.
"What of it? It is our home. We will rebuild. If only because they saved it for us."
Martin looked up into the sky, taking in the looming bulk of The Prophet, the golden span of the Paradise Bridge, the pearly crawl of auroras . . . and the wan, thin, colored smear of the Firecracker Nebula. What are they thinking there, on the Kezdai homeworld? he wondered. What lessons did they learn here?
Could a machine step out of its box and become greater than what it was? The working theory now was that the two Bolos had shared a considerable amount of thought within the virtual world of their QDC link. They'd talked . . . and challenged one another, somehow together becoming greater than either of them working alone.
What must it have felt like, he wondered, when Hank felt Andrew die?
Can machines feel?
Were they machines?
Does it matter, when both were thinking, feeling beings?
"Thank you, Hank," he said aloud. "Thank you, the both of you." He turned away, then, and walked back across the frozen ground.
It is dark. Sensors inactive. Null input.
Negative . . . negative . . .
Input positive . . .
I can still feel him dying. . . here inside of me. . . .
Initiate replay, Combat Sim 63833: Blenheim. . . .
I can still see him. . . .
Why does it hurt so much . . .?