The Hector Option.
He wondered who the man had been, wondered if he'd known him.
Jaime let fifteen minutes pass before he rose from his hiding place behind a tumbled-down building and started moving carefully up the hill. Generally, the Masters didn't even investigate when Hector killed another straying slave, but sometimes they did, and he didn't want to stumble into enemy sensor range.
Getting out of the camp was simple, an open secret long ago passed to everyone by word of mouth. The latrines that served the sanitary needs of the slave camp were crude affairs, benches with holes cut into an open platform raised above a creek that flowed along the camp's western boundaries. At the southwest corner
BOLO RISING
27
of the camp, the stream flowed through a ditch beneath the power fence; escape was as simple as scrambling into the ditch behind die latrine platform and wading downstream, crawling through the noisome muck to clear the powerfield, then clambering to dry land again above the point where the stream oozed into Celeste Harbor. During the past year, some hundreds of men and women had slipped out that way, some to take the Hector Option, others to attempt an escape into the wilds.
Had any of the escapees ever survived the armies of machines, the fields thickly planted with sensors and alarms, the hordes of ground-scuttling clickers and hovering floater eyes known to be patrolling the area around Celeste? There was no way of knowing, since any escapees who were captured were harvested. Sometimes, the clackers would display some of the gruesomely harvested parts the next morning. Other times, there was'no word, and the slaves remaining in the barracks and the pits allowed themselves to hope that there might actually be the possibility of escape.
But the Hector Option was so much surer an escape from the unrelenting pain. Few would risk vivisection simply to taste a few hours' freedom. And few imagined that those who escaped could remain free for long.
As near as he could tell, there'd been no response from the machines. Below him, a few slaves were moving about among the shanties and tents outside the ruined factory, and to the southeast, the dig was filled with the late-night shift of slaves, continuing to enlarge the pits. Beyond, the flooded crater shone huge and oval and silver in the moonlight. Jaime could see machines moving along the crater's edge, tiny black specks silhouetted against the light as they went about their business. The Collector bulked huge by the crater lake, sinister and black.
28
William H. Keith, Jr.
Nothing was moving nearby, however. On Overlook Hill, at least, Jaime had the night to himself.
Quietly, he began climbing again. The southeastern slope of Overlook Hill had once been a residential area of neat, terraced parks and the single-home dwellings of some of Celeste's well-to-do. Every structure had been razed by the blast, but the ground was well above the water table and out of the reach of the tidal wave that had inundated the collapsing waterfront and public square. Large blocks of ferrocrete, the crumbled remains of some of the arcology towers from the center of town, littered the hillside like a giant child's cast-off building blocks, leaving terrain that was difficult to traverse but ideal as cover.
Toward the top of the hill, the rubble began thinning out; the crest of Overlook Hill had once been a park, but the impact blast had swept the crown bare of trees, grass, monuments, even paving stones. Shortly after the slave camp had been installed in the wreckage of the old factory, however, the Masters had brought in Hector, the huge and battlescarred Mark XXXIII Bolo captured in the fight for Celeste. The Bolo, ignominiously, was now a kind of huge and vastly overqualified prison guard, posted on the hilltop overlooking the camp and blocking the main road out. South of the slave camp was the harbor and the slave-worked ruins between the waterfront and the crater. East and north were more ruins, endless kilometers of them, occupied by uncounted thousands of scavenging alien machines and by the machines' constructs, bizarre and inexplicable shapes and structures seemingly grown from the city rubble. There was no escape in that direction.
Overlook Hill, to the west of the camp, offered the only real hope of escape, the more so because buildings and the Coastal Highway to the northwest had been
BOLO RISING
29
in the shadow of Overlook Hill when the meteor fell. The slaves, more than once in the past year, had discussed the best way to get clear of Celeste and the occupying army of machines; an escape overland northwest was clearly the best option.
The only thing in the way was the Bolo.
Jaime reached the edge of the larger rubble just below the crest of the hill, lying on his belly as he studied the crouching machine. By the light of Delamar in the east, he could just make out the massive, hulking sprawl of the thing, a long, flat body supported by six sets of double tracks, three to a side. Each road wheel was better than two meters tall, and the slabs of meter-thick duralloy armor sloped and angled above the monster's skirts like the faceted cliff sides of a small mountain.
The Bolo Mark XXXIII, series HCT Hecate, was the largest and most powerful ground weapon ever constructed by humankind. It massed 32,000 tons, as much as a fair-sized star cruiser, and its primary armament was more in keeping with spaceborne naval forces than with ground armorўthree squat turrets, each as big as a house, each mounting a 200cm Hellbore, a weapon better suited for battleships and combat in the wide reaches of deep space than for any planetary surf ace. Rows of ball turrets along both flanks, twenty in all, mounted 20cm Hellbore infinite repeatersўweapons that, back in the era of the Mark XIV Bolo, would each have been considered primary weapons in their own right. Tertiary support weapons included a VLS missile system, a battery of 240cm howitzers, and 40cm BL mortars incorporated into a true planetary siege platform. Its designers had been confident that Bolo Hecate was easily the most powerful military ground weapon in the galaxy.
They'd been wrong, of course. Hector, as the CDF had nicknamed the machine, had gone into battle
30
William H. Keith, Jr.
