Keith Laumer - Bolo 08 - Bolo Rising.pdf - Keith Laumer - widez2

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Keith Laumer - Bolo 8 Bolo Rising

PROLOGUE

Sometimes, I think that only the stars visible in this place make continued existence endurable.

There are certainly a great number of them, and I contemplate initiating a counting routine as a

means of relieving boredom. As I continue to stand guard on Overlook Hitt, as I have continuously

for these past 2.773446854 x 107 seconds, I divert my primary optical sensors skyward, bringing

the Great Cloud into sharp focus. Both suns have set some 7355 seconds ago and the sky is now

fully dark...oras dark as it can ever be on this world. The Sagittarian starcloud, vast, cold, a

silvery glitter of billions ofsandgrain suns wreathed by black and gilt-edged nebulae, bulks

enormous above the eastern horizon, slowly rising with the passing seconds, bathing the

surrounding landscape, the flame-charred tree trunks, the cracked and heat-blackened ground, the

skeletal wrack of the dead and blasted city on the bay below the hill, in chill and icy twilight.

Something is missing.

Something is wrong.

At Normal Standby operational levels I should feel at least an intense curiosity about my tactical

situation, about my current orders, about my reason for being here on this hill, tasked with

watching the ragged band oforganics as they dig and sift through the city ruins at the foot of

Overlook Hill. This is a logical anomaly that I find impossible to resolve, and as ever, it leaves

me feeling vaguely uneasy... as though something of critical importance has happened, something

that I have forgotten.

Forgotten ,.. ?

I am not capable of forgetting, a phenomenon restricted to organic memories, or to cybernetic

systems damaged or deliberately altered. I am not organic. I am.

What am IP I can almost grasp the word. Fragments of memory tease me, elusive, insubstantial.

Bolo.

That is the word. I am a Bolo, a Bolo Mark... Mark... I cannot remember. I belong to Unit...

The frustration is almost overwhelming. I know that I am a Bolo and that I was designed and

constructed for a purpose, a purpose far more complex and important than simply standing guard

over the organics working in the ruined city. I know, too, that memory is a precise and specific

tool, a part of myself, of my very being, which should not fail in this manner. I know that I

should know a very great deal more than I do now, that my primary access to large volumes of

information has somehow been blocked.

I initiate, for the 12,874th time, a full-scale Level One diagnostic, with special attention to

both holographic memory and heuristic acquisition functions. The check takes.0363 second and

reveals no anomalies. All operations and systems are nominal. I appear to be in perfect working

order.

And yet, as I have ascertained 12,873 times before, this cannot possibly be an accurate condition

assessment. Internal sensors register the presence of a 2.43-meter crater above my main suspension

rack and numerous anomalies in four right foretrack bogies. I sense extensive damage to both

primary and secondary circuitry, a loss of sensor and communications arrays, cripplingfadures in

my contra-gravity and battle screen systems, and numerous specific faults and system failures

which show a pattern of deliberate and intelligent sabotage rather than the random destruction of

battle damage. I note, too, that physical override blocks have been placed within myjusion plant,

limiting available power to a fraction of full potential, and that all onboard magazines of

expendable ordnance, including 240cm howitzer rounds, VLS missiles, and ready HeUbore needles, are

empty. My primary damage assessment routines indicate nominal operation, while my secondary battle

damage sensors show serious internal and external damage, and that all weapons save my

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antipersonnel batteries are inoperable. The resultant logical contradiction suggests deliberate

and hostile intervention.

The realization that my systems have been sabotaged rouses me from Normal Awareness to Full Battle

Alert;.00029 second later, however, the Masters' override cuts in and for the 12,874th time, my

working memory is erased and...

And...

All operations and systems are nominal. I appear to be in perfect working order.

I continue to look at the stars....

CHAPTER ONE

The stars were... astonishing.

Crouched in the mud-floored pit occupying what had once been Celeste's public square, Jaime Graham

lifted his eyes to the eastern sky, beyond the ragged, flash-melted stubble marking the former

site of Roland Towers. The dig was almost completely lost in darkness now, save for the gold-white

gleams of work lights and various species of hovering clacker. Despite the glare of lights from

the nearest floaters, the starclouds of Sagittarius filled the night sky with wonder and ice-

glittering beauty.

Strange, he thought, that such beauty could have masked such unspeakable death and horror.

Even so, it seemed sometimes as though the sight of the stars was all that kept him sane, a way to

lift him, however briefly, out of the living nightmare from which he and the other survivors could

never wake.

"You'd better get back to work, Jaime," a cracked and dry-throated voice whispered at his side.

"If the trusties don't see you, the clackers for damned sure will."

"As long as I keep moving, Wal," he replied, his own voice sounding just as ragged in his own

ears. He glanced at his companion. Wal—formerly Colonel Waldon Josep Prescott of the Cloud Defense

Forces— knelt in the mud by Jaime's side, a nylon bag strapped to the red-scarred stump of his

left forearm, as he scratched through the muck with his right hand. His body, what could be seen

of it through its glistening coat of slime and clay, was shockingly emaciated, the ribs showing

like curved bars through taut, mud-encrusted skin, while both his hair and beard were matted and

unkempt.

Jaime didn't need to see his own mud-coated body to know that he didn't look much better. Wal,

though, was fifteen years older than Jaime and hadn't been in as good physical condition ayear ago

when the !.!.! had appeared in Cloud's skies. Both his left hand and his right eye had been

harvested some months back, and the brutality of the past year had ground him down to a shadow of

his former self. Jaime doubted that the colonel would be able to survive much longer.

As for himself, well, all of his body parts were intact so far, but there was no way of telling

how long that condition would last. The worst of it for him was the debilitation brought on by

constant work, unrelenting stress, and chronic malnutrition.

A faint, warbling hum warned of the approach of a floater eye, and reluctantly, he tore his eyes

from the sky and made himself look busy. When he sensed the spy hovering close beside him, he

looked up but kept digging-Softball-sized and steel-gray in color, the floater hovered on internal

contra-gravs that set his bare skin to prickling with the local buildup of a static charge. On the

sphere's equator, a single, disturbingly human eye stared down at him from within a precisely

crafted hollow on the floater s surface, unwinking, glistening in its trickling bath of nutrient

solution, the iris a pale blue in color.

He wondered whose eye it was. Not Wal's, certainly, whose remaining eye was brown. Besides,

speculation among those slaves with medical training and knowledge held that parts harvested from

humans wouldn't survive more than a few weeks before they started to die, though there was no

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proof of that.

After a few tense moments, with Jaime continuing to feel through the mud, the warble increased in

pitch and the floater eye drifted away. There were hundreds of the things adrift above the dig,

constantly watching the slaves and presumably relaying what they saw to the Masters.

Keep working. Have to keep working....

Not for the first time, he considered the Hector Option. It would be quick, almost easy... and

without the agony of vivisection if the Masters came for him. Others had taken the Hector Option,

lots of them... with more and more attempting it each week.

Not yet. There has to be a way....

His hands slid an ooze of slick mud aside, and he reeled back on his haunches as a fetid stench

broke the surface. "Uh oh," he said. "We got one here."

Wal moved closer, reaching in to help. The foul death-stink grew sharper, sweeter, and more eye-

watering as they exposed the body, or what was left of it, lying in the wet muck next to a

toppled, squared-off pillar from a shattered building.

After almost a T-standard year in the flooded grounds behind Celeste's waterfront, the body had

been reduced to little more than a skeleton, with wet-paper skin still molded to the face and some

of the longer, flatter bones, and colorless hair still clinging to the skull. It lay on its back,

skull turned to one side, the fingers of the right hand crammed between gaping jaws, as though in

a deliberate and desperate attempt to stifle a dying scream. From the length of the remaining

hair, and the rags of cloth still clinging to the ribcage, Jaime guessed that it had been a woman.

Only the top half of her body was accessible; the spool-train of her lower vertebrae vanished

beneath the fallen pillar, and her pelvis and legs were hidden somewhere beneath the multiton

block of stone.

No matter. Her organic parts could no longer be harvested in any case, and there was plenty of

pure metal here, within easy reach. A gold ring encrusted with tiny gems still encircled the

fourth finger of her left hand, a fingerwatch the fifth. A black-stained necklace of flattened

chain links that might be gold but were probably gold-plate circled her neck. A pin of some kind,

an ornament of some heavy, silvery metal worked into a lozenge shape centered by an exquisite,

emerald-cut heliodore, lay on her ribs above what had been her left breast. Stardrop pendants next

to the skull had probably been earrings.

Working swiftly, he plucked each article of jewelry from the bones and transferred them all to

Wal's bag. The necklace clasp had corroded into an unworkable lump of oxide, so he had to work the

skull free from the vertebrae to get at it. With the skull free in his hand, he checked the teeth

for gold or gemstones. Gold dental fillings were a curiosity of the remote Dark Ages, of course, a

medico-historical footnote, but some Ckmdwellers had affected gold or silver teeth as cosmetic

statements. This nameless woman, though, still had all of her original teeth, and no body

prosthetics. There were some tiny catches and hooks here and there, however, that might have been

part of her clothing. Each of these was carefully rescued from the muck and placed in the bag.

And through it all, Jaime carefully ignored the stink, ignored the emotions welling up in his

throat as he stripped the skeleton of every scrap of metal he could find, and somehow buried the

very thought of what he was doing far beneath the reach of his conscious mind. He knew from long

experience that it simply didn't pay to dwell too much on what the Masters forced him to do each

day.

"That's it," he said at last, the thing done. He wiped at his beard and mouth with the back of his

arm, then pointed. "Let's move up that way."

They continued their sweep of the plaza, moving past the toppled pillar, inching along on hands

and knees, feeling through the mud for any recyclable materials—pure metals, especially, but also

gemstones, plastics, and even shards of ceramic or glass. The !.!.! used it all, forcing their

human slaves to salvage every scrap. Around Jaime and Wal, filling the entire, stadium-sized pit,

thousands of other ragged, filthy, half-starved, half-naked humans, slowly widened the dig,

exploring for the bits and scraps of their own shattered technology with bare and mud-caked hands.

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Life had become a nearly unendurable nightmare, an unending torture turned monotonous by the

routine of slave labor that went on for day after day, punctuated all too frequently by moments of

intense terror each time the Harvesters appeared. According to the calendar they'd been scratching

out on one wall of the barracks, they'd been here for just under a T-standard year.

Had it only been a year? Existence now was a damned good recreation of an eternity in Hell,

lacking, perhaps, in fire and brimstone, but more than adequate in the pain.

His probing fingers found a crumpled wad of metal, the surface so corroded he couldn't even tell

what it was... an appliance of some sort, he thought, maybe half of a power defroster, or possibly

a piece of a hand sterilizer. He worked it free and passed it to Wal; the relic filled the nylon

bag, so Wal struggled to his feet and started off across the dig, to the brooding presence of the

Collector squatting in the midst of the slave-filled pit.

Jaime kept working. To stop was to die, and while death was welcome, most of the slaves preferred

to wait and endure, knowing that there were far better ways to end this hell than to submit to the

hot blades and microlasers of the Harvesters.

Has it really been only a year?

One year ago, Celeste had been the largest, the grandest of human cities on the blue and temperate

world of Cloud, a white and sweeping growth of crystal-shining arcologies and polished, needle-

slim skypiercers rising along the blue curve of Celeste Harbor and the nearby coastlines of the

Tamarynth Sea. The city's population had numbered something just over one hundred thousand, and

the population of the planet as a whole had been nearly ten million.

Cloud—named for the Sagittarian starclouds so prominent in the night skies of the northern

hemisphere's spring and summer—had been colonized some two centuries ago by people fleeing the

horrors and uncertainties of the Melconian Wars. Those pioneers had purchased a dozen large

transports and abandoned several of the war-torn worlds near fair, lost Terra, seeking a new

homeworld somewhere among the teeming billions of suns swarming in and around the star-thick

reaches of the Galactic Core. They'd come from a dozen different worlds, from Destry and Lockhaven

and Aldo Cerise, from New Devonshire and Alphacent and from Terra herself. They'd come with a

single goal uniting them, the dream of a world where they could put down roots, raise crops and

families, and in general get on with life... in peace.

While the founders of Cloud had certainly included pacifists among their number, they'd not

allowed pacifistic principles to blind them to the dangers of colonizing a world some tens of

thousands of light years beyond human space; they'd brought both a military force and a Mark

XXXIII Bolo along as protection against the Unknown.

Unfortunately, the Unknown had found them, and the Unknown had been so unimaginably powerful that

even the latest in Bolo technology and six-megatons-per-second firepower had not stood a chance.

Celeste had been flattened by a rock dropped from space, the towers toppled, the arcologies

vaporized in a searing instant of ferrocrete-melting heat, the towers smashed by the crystalsteel-

splintering shockwave. A crater a hundred meters across and twenty deep had been blasted into the

city's heart; the shock had been so great that the very foundations of the city had settled, which

was why the crater was now a lake, and the city square, inundated by water and mud, had still not

drained.

Presumably, the other cities on Cloud all had suffered the same fate, though no one now slaving in

these pits knew for sure. Every person in and near Celeste had died in the attacks; the survivors

were those who had been outside the city when the high-velocity chunk of nickel-iron had lanced

out of a cloudless noon sky. There'd been no warning, no ultimatum, and no chance to coordinate

the entire planetary population. The war, such as it was, had been over within a few days of what

now was called the Great Killing.

The survivors had been offered amnesty by the Masters, the offer transmitted by Speakers, the

strange species of!.!.! floater that could actually communicate in Terran Anglic. The offer had

been irresistible: surrender peacefully to the Masters, and they would not incinerate the

continent... or vivisect the millions of humans already captured. Life, after all, was better than

death on a planetary scale.

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The Masters' definition of "life," however, included slave pits, slow starvation, and random

harvestings. More and more of the survivors were beginning to think they'd made the wrong choice.

Wal returned, his nylon bag empty. Without a word, he dropped to hand and knees and resumed

digging. Everywhere, as far as the eye could see, the human slaves continued digging, as a steady

stream of individuals lugged bags filled with the detritus of civilization to the Collector,

emptied them into the machine's yawning maw, then trudged back to their assigned places.

Jaime's fingers touched something slick, and he fished it out, swishing it in the muddy water to

clean it. An exquisite china carving lay in his hand... a ballerina, en pointe, arms raised, her

figure miraculously perfect and unchipped.

Jaime stared at the figure for a long moment... until Wal reached across and plucked her from his

fingers, dropping her into the bag. He was left wondering how the figurine had survived. The

meteor strike and the shockwave that had followed had leveled the entire center of the city, and

moments later the ground as far back from the bay as the city square had been inundated by an

inrushing wall of water. Buildings had shattered and toppled... the ones that hadn't melted

outright. The ballerina must have been blasted from some apartment in one of the city's

arcologies, a knickknack swept from mantelpiece or bureau top and hurled by tornadic winds...

here. How had it survived?

"Why," Jaime asked aloud, his voice a ragged whisper, "are the Masters so damned concerned about

retrieving every scrap of junk?"

"Waste not, want not, they always say," Wal quipped. He smiled, but the expression was no more

than a tired showing of dirty teeth.

There's more to it than that. They already had their machines pick over the entire surface. They

got almost everything, except for scraps. Why do they need us for that?"

"Maybe they don't like getting their hands dirty."

"Yeah, but, I mean, what difference does it make, one gold ring on a skeletal hand, more or less?"

Or one delicate, unbroken china ballerina.

Wal didn't reply right away, but continued feeling his way through the mud. "You know, Major," he

said after a long moment, "one thing you shouldn't forget, one thing none of us should ever

forget, is that these, these machines are not human. They don't think like us. They don't feel

like us. Hell, we don't even know whether or not the things are self-aware."

"It's not enough," Jaime said, "to explain strange behavior just by saying they're alien."

"Mebee. I guess if the clackers want every last gram of refined metal and plastic and stuff like

that recovered, they must have their reasons." The colonel paused, moving his hand in the mud,

then plucked a goblet, a drinking glass miraculously intact save for the snapped-off stem and

base, from the muck. He put the find in his bag before continuing. "Trouble is, we may never be

able to understand those reasons, because they would only make sense to another clacker."

"I just wonder if it s evidence of something we could use. I mean, if they want something that

bad, it suggests weakness...."

"Still thinking about some kind of grand revolution? Up with the humans? Down with machines?"

"Up with the humans!" another voice called softly from close by.

"Easy, lad," Wal said, waving his stump in a placating gesture. "I didn't mean anything by—"

"No, you're right!" The speaker was a young man, probably in his late twenties, though judging the

age of any of the scarred, muddy, and beaten-down slaves in the Celeste pits was pure guesswork by

now. His beard was as long and as ratty looking as Jaime's own. "We have to work together!"

Jaime's brow furrowed as he tried to remember the kid's name. Names were important... the last bit

of individuality the ragged-scarecrow survivors possessed. Rahni. That was it. Rahni Singh. He'd

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Keith Laumer - Bolo 08 - Bolo Rising.pdf

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