Chapter 7
A minor malfunction in Secondary Fire Control has caused Number Four Hellbore’s first shot to miss, requiring a second shot to complete target destruction. This is embarrassing but not critical, and has no significant impact upon projected energy consumption.
I descend at the maximum safe rate, however, for my counter-grav systems are energy intensive. Even with Battle Screen and Main Battery off-line, free flight requires no less than seven-two-point-six-six percent of total power plant capacity, but without reactor mass I have no power plant, and even so short a flight has reduced my endurance on Reserve Power to only nine-point-seven-five hours at full combat readiness. As I cannot replenish my power reserves until sunrise, which will not occur for another eight-point-eight-six hours, I must be frugal in future expenditures, but the shuttles’ destruction has been well worth the energy cost. The Enemy has lost a major striking force, and, still more valuably, the shuttle commander’s report to his mother ship has provided me with much information. I have not only discovered the position of the Enemy’s main force but succeeded in invading his com net by piggy-backing on the command shuttle’s transmissions, and I consider what I have learned as I descend.
I am not surprised by my ability to invade the shuttles’ com net. The Enemy’s obvious underestimation of the threat he faces made the task even simpler, but a Kestrel-class shuttle’s computers are totally outclassed by those of any Bolo, much less a Mark XXXIII. What does surprise me is the ease with which I invaded the far end of the link. The AI of an Imperial heavy cruiser, while not the equal of a Bolo, should have recognized my touch. It would be unlikely to prevent me from gaining initial access, but it should have detected my intrusion almost instantly and sought to eject me. More, it should have alerted its command crew to my presence, and this AI did neither. The destruction of the shuttles has terminated my invasion by removing my access channel, yet there is no sign the Enemy even realizes I was ever there.
I am puzzled by this . . . until I study the data I have obtained. The brevity of my access—little more than twelve-point-three-two seconds—precluded detailed scans, but I have obtained five-two-point-three-one percent of the Melconian cruiser Starquest’s general memory, and what I find there explains a great deal. After over fifty standard years of continuous operation without overhaul or refit, it is amazing that her AI continues to function at all. Despite all Starquest’s engineers have been able to do, however, her central computers have become senile, and the failure of her AI to prevent or recognize my access was inevitable in light of its deterioration.
Having determined the reasons for my success in penetrating the Enemy’s data systems, I turn to analyzing the content of that data as I descend past nine thousand meters.
Rorie Deveraux climbed shakily out of the bunker and leaned against the blast wall as he watched the huge shape settle to earth. Its angularity combined with its sheer size to make it look impossibly ungainly in flight, for it had no lifting surface, no trace of aerodynamic grace. Nothing which looked like that had any business occluding Ararat’s stars, and the silence with which it moved only heightened its implausibility.
But for all that, Rorie knew what it had to be, and he swallowed as it touched down just outside the perimeter fence. It dwarfed the steading structures, bulking against the rising moons like some displaced hillside, and for just an instant, it simply sat there—a black, weapon-bristling shape, edges burnished with the dull gleam of duralloy in the moonlight. He stared helplessly at it, wondering what he was supposed to do next, then jumped despite himself as the Bolo’s running lights snapped on. In a single heartbeat, it went from a featureless black mountain to a jeweled presence, bedecked in glorious red and green and white like a pre-space cruise ship tied up to a dock in the middle of a prairie somewhere, and Rorie drew a deep breath.
Whatever else, that ancient war machine had just saved his steading and family from annihilation. The least he could do was go out to meet it, and he started the long hike from his bunker to the gate nearest their . . . visitor.
It took him twenty minutes to reach the gate. They were easily the longest twenty minutes of his entire life, and once he got there, he realized he still had no idea what to do. He shifted from foot to foot, staring up at the Bolo’s armored flank, then froze as fresh light blazed underneath the behemoth. It streamed through the chinks between the inter-leafed bogies to cast vast, distorted shadows over the grass, making him feel more pygmy-like than ever, and something inside shouted for him to run. But he stood his ground, for there was nothing else he could do.
Wind whispered over the war machine’s enormous hull, but there were other sounds, as well, and his head rose as movement caught the corner of his eye. He turned, and his jaw dropped as an utterly familiar young man in worn riding clothes led an equally familiar horse forward out of the shadow of one towering tread.
“Hi, Rorie,” Jackson said quietly. “Look what followed me home.”
I watch my new Commander greet the older Human. Their discussion allows me to deduce a great deal about both my Commander and the newcomer—who I quickly realize is his brother—and I note both their names, as well as their obvious affection for one another. Yet even as I do so, I am simultaneously busy analyzing the data I have obtained from Starquest.
I am struck by the dreadful irony of what has transpired here. I remain ignorant of virtually all data concerning the presence of Humans on Ishark, yet the parallels between their circumstances and those of Commander Tharsk Na-Mahrkan’s “flotilla” are inescapable, and it is obvious from the captured data that Starquest and her consorts can go no further. Whatever the Enemy might prefer to do, he has no choice but to remain here, and he knows it. His initial and immediate move to eliminate the competing Human presence was thus not only logical but inevitable . . . as is the proper Human response.
The most cursory analysis makes that clear, yet I experience an unfamiliar distaste—almost a hesitation—at facing that response. In part, my confusion (if such is the proper word) stems from the unrepaired physical damage to my Personality Center and Main CPU, yet there is more to it, for the reconstructed portions of my gestalt impel me in conflicting directions. They are repairs, patches on my personality which form pools of calm amid the complex currents of my life experience and memory. They do not “belong” to me, and the raw edges of their newness are like holes in the individual I know myself to be. I see in them the same immaturity I have seen in many Human replacements, for they are unstained by all I have done and experienced, and in their innocence, they see no reason why the logical, militarily sound option for dealing with the Enemy should not be embraced.
Yet those same patches have had another effect, as well. I am no longer the Bolo half of Operation Ragnarok’s Team Shiva. Or, rather, I am no longer solely that Bolo. In reconstructing my gestalt, CDC has reached back beyond Ragnarok, beyond my own first combat mission, beyond even the destruction of Terra, and it has pulled my entire personality with it. Not fully, but significantly. I am no longer part of Team Shiva, for I have lost too much of my experience-based gestalt, yet I retain all of Team Shiva’s memories. In a very real sense, they are now someone else’s memories, but they permit me to see Team Shiva in a way which was impossible for me before my damage, and what I see is madness.
I give no outward sign to my new Commander and his brother, but recollections of horror flicker through me, and the curse of my memory is its perfection. I do not simply “remember” events; I relive them, and I taste again the sick ecstasy as my fire immolates entire cities. There is a deadly allure to that ecstasy, a sense of freedom from responsibility—a justification for bloodshed and butchery. And it is not as if it were all my idea. I am, after all, a machine, designed to obey orders from duly constituted Command Authority even if those orders are in fundamental conflict with the rules of warfare that same Command Authority instilled into me. I tell myself that, for I cannot face any other answer, but the patched portions of my gestalt echo an earlier me not yet stained by massacre and atrocity, one for whom the concepts of Honor and Duty and Loyalty have not yet been poisoned by hatred and vengeance, and that earlier self is appalled by what I have become.
I sense my inner war, the battle between what I know must be done and the images of Melconian mothers and their pups exploding under my fire—between my duty as Humanity’s warrior . . . and my warrior’s duty to myself. Only the damage to my psychotronics has made the struggle possible, yet that makes it no less real, and nothing in my programming or experience tells me how to resolve it. I cannot resolve it, and so I say nothing, do nothing. I simply stand there, awaiting my new Commander’s orders without advising him in any way, and the shame of my frozen impotence burns within me.
Tharsk Na-Mahrkan looked around the briefing room and saw his own shock in the flattened ears of his senior officers. Three quarters of the flotilla’s assault shuttles had just been wiped away, and none of them knew how it had been done.
They should have. Tharsk’s decision to land over the curve of the planet from the nearest Human settlement had put whatever had happened beyond Starquest’s direct sensor horizon, but they had the telemetry on the original flight leader and his section’s destruction. They knew what sort of weapons had been used—the emissions signature of a Hellbore was utterly distinctive—but they had no idea how those weapons could have been employed so. Starquest’s AI was little help, for it was weary and erratic, its need for overhaul so great Tharsk had ordered it isolated from the general net three years earlier. In its prime, it had been able to identify Human ship types by no more than the ion ghosts of their drive wakes and analyze Human intentions from the tiniest scraps of intercepted com chatter. Now all it could do was tell them almost querulously what they already knew, with no suggestion as to how ground-based weapons could lock onto and destroy twenty-six widely dispersed shuttles flying at twice the speed of sound and less than a hundred meters’ altitude. Tharsk had become accustomed to the creeping senescence of his technology, but the chill it sent through his bones this night was colder than any he had felt since Sunheart’s destruction, and it was hard, hard, to set that chill aside and concentrate on his officers’ words.
“—can’t have been a ground-based system!” Durak Na-Khorul was saying hotly. “The main formation was over eight hundred kilometers northeast of Flight Leader Ukah’s destruction, and Hellbores are direct fire weapons. Name of the Nameless, just look at the terrain!” He stabbed a clawed finger at the map display on the main screen above the table, its features radar-mapped by the shuttles on their flight to destruction. “Look right here—and here, as well! These are intervening ridge lines with crests higher than the shuttles’ altitude. How in the Fourth Hell could a Hellbore shoot through a mountain to hit them?!”
The engineer glared around the table, lips quivering on the edge of a snarl, and answering tension crackled. Tharsk could taste it, yet he knew—as Durak surely did—that the engineer’s anger, like that which answered it, was spawned of fear of the unknown, not rage at one another.
“I agree with your analysis, Sir,” Lieutenant Janal said finally, choosing his words with care, “yet I can offer no theory which answers your question. Starquest’s database was never well informed on the Humans’ ground systems, and some of what we once had on their planetary weapons has been deleted to make space for data more critical to the flotilla’s operational needs. Nonetheless, all that we retain agrees that the Humans never employed Hellbores beyond the five-centimeter range as airborne weapons, while our telemetry data makes it clear that these weapons were in the twenty-centimeter range. They must, therefore, have been ground-based.”
“But—” Durak began, only to close his mouth with a click as Tharsk raised a hand. All eyes turned to him, and he focused his own gaze upon the tactical officer.
“What sorts of systems might we be looking at?” he asked quietly.
“Sorts of systems, Commander?” Janal repeated in a slightly puzzled tone, and Tharsk bared the very tips of his canines in a mirthless smile.
“I don’t doubt your conclusions as to the type and size of weapons, Janal. What I need to know is how mobile they’re likely to be . . . and how well protected.” He felt the watching eyes narrow and allowed a bit more of his fangs to show, expressing a confidence he was far from feeling. “We’re here now,” he continued levelly, “and our vessels are too worn to go further. If we can’t run, our only option is to fight, and for that we need the best information on our enemies in order to employ our own resources effectively.”
“Yes, Commander.” Janal’s voice came out husky, and he cleared his throat as he punched additional queries into the system. No one else spoke, but there was no real need for them to do so, for they knew as well as Tharsk how thin their “resources” had just become. With the loss of Flight Leader Ukah’s entire strength, they retained only ten shuttles, twenty-one assorted light mechs, and enough battle armor for little more than a battalion of infantry. Aside from Starquest’s ability to interdict incoming missiles, that was all they had, and it was unlikely to be enough.
“First, Commander,” Janal said finally, eyes on his flatscreen, “the Humans mounted Hellbores of this weight as main battery weapons in their Type One armored personnel carriers and Type Two light manned tanks as well as in the secondary batteries of their late model Bolos. In the absence of fusion power signatures on our flight in we cannot face Bolos, and their light manned armor should have been unable to coordinate their fire as precisely as appears to have been the case here.
“Assuming that the weapons were not, in fact, vehicle-mounted, we are left with several types of support weapons which might fall within the observed performance parameters, but all are relatively immobile. That immobility would make it difficult for the enemy to bring them into action against us here, as we would be given opportunities to destroy them on the move at relatively minor risk. However, it would also mean that our shuttles were engaged by at least two defensive positions, since no support battery could have relocated rapidly enough to engage at two such widely separated locations. From the threat assessment perspective, and given that our shuttles were tasked to recon and/or attack the smallest of the hostile emission sources, fixed defenses of such weight would certainly suggest much heavier ones for their important centers.
“Of the support weapons which our pilots might have encountered, the most likely would seem to be the Type Eight area defense battery, as this normally operated off capacitors in order to reduce detectibility. Next most likely would be the Type Five area defense battery, which—”