BOLD RISING
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright й 1999 by William H. Keith, Jr.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form,
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises P.O. Box 1403 Riverdale, NY 10471
ISBN: 0-671-57779-4 Cover art by Charles Keegan First printing, December 1998
Distributed by Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020
Printed in the United States of America
PROLOGUE
Sometimes, 1 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
2 William H. Keith, Jr.
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.
