against the clacker landing boats hours after the destruction of Celeste and had ceased operations only minutes later. The enemy had taken Hector out with terrifying ease. More terrifying still had been the ease with which they'd circumvented the Bolo's programming, turning it from a human weapon into one of their mindless, mechanical creatures, an automaton hooked into the Master's planet-girdling, cybernetic web. Hector was back in service now, but he was working for the enemy. Humans who approached too closely, or who tried to escape past the Bolo, were chopped down by hypervelocity antipersonnel flechettes.
Clearly, the clackers could have reduced Hector to scrap if they'd wanted. Was there another clue here to the enemy's weakness? Jaime wondered. That monster on the hilltop represented 32,000 tons of duralloy, ceramplast laminates, and other high-tech materials, including refined metals ranging from steel to appreciable amounts of technetium, praseodymium, and ytterbium. Simply by junking that one Bolo, captured during the Battle of Celeste, the enemy could have won far more purified metals and other materials than they could ever hope to salvage by slave labor from the muck and rubble of the city.
Was it possible that they recognized the Bolo as kin, as a fellow AI machine? Did they have rules about killing other sentient machines? Could they be affected by sentiment, or was it something more practical than that?
That hardly seemed likely, but Jaime was determined to find out.
The Bolo was a good hundred meters from the edge of the rubble field; Jaime knew from experience that he would be challenged at fifty meters ... or if he tried to move past the Bolo and on toward the northwest. Walking in what he hoped was a casual
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fashion, empty hands in clear view, he started for the monster.
With each step, the Bolo loomed larger, a smooth-surfaced, artificial mountain, all angles, curves, and duralloy teardrops. The Mark XXXIII's stats, long ago committed to memory, simply could not do justice to the sheer monstrous bulk of the thing. One-hundred-twenty meters long, thirty-eight meters wide, with three massive main-armament turrets rising from a main deck twenty-five meters above the ground, the Bolo was more like a huge, squat, elongated buildingў hell, like an armed and armored townўthan a fighting vehicle. Thirty-two thousand tons. It was outmassed by heavy cruisers, battleships, and naval transports, but as a mobile weapons platform, well, nothing else on land even came close.
Damn. How had the clackers taken down a Mark XXXIII so easily?
He reached the Line, a perimeter fifty meters from the Bolo's hull made all too visible by the stains and bones of past visitors to this place. There was a small ridge here, formed from piled-up bones and decayed flesh, an artificial ridge marking the line, sharp and crisp on the side facing the Bolo and splashed out in a thinning slope downhill. What was left after someone took the Hector Option wasn't worth salvaging by * clackers, and the parts were left to rot where they fell. The stench of death was thick and throat-catching here. The hot taste of fresh, coppery blood overlaid and mingled with the sweeter musk of older decay.
The most recent addition to the hillock of bones lay a few meters to Jaime's right. The suicides bare legs and hips lay steaming on the cool ground, bloody at the top but almost intact, but everything from the navel up was simply gone, smeared into a fresh, bloody spray down the eastern side of Overlook Hill, There wasn't much that was recognizable; Jaime did see a
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William H. Keith, Jr.
disembodied right hand nearby, the fingers still locked clawlike around a branch from a long-dead tree.
Novel approach, he thought wryly. Attacking a Bolo with a club.
The Bolo Hecate's primary AP weapons were lateral banks of mag-driven railguns, each firing a cluster of needle-slender, steel-jacketed slivers of depleted uranium with a muzzle velocity in excess of three kilometers per second. Five hundred needle-darts, shotgunned into a human target at that velocity left very little behind that was recognizably human.
"Halt," the Bolo said as Jaime reached the line, its voice a rich, pleasing tenor with the distinct overtones and inflections of human speech. "Identify yourself."
He heard the whir of servo motors as the snouts of a hah0 dozen AP weapons tracked his movement, heard the rising whine of superconductor coils powering up to max. The slightest of electronic twitches from the behemoth squatting above him on the hilltop, Jaime knew, and his remains would be splashed across the slope at his back in a brutally unrecognizable smear.
"Major Jaime Graham, First Armored Assault Brigade, Cloud Defense Force," he announced in as clear a voice as he could muster,
"Present code authorization."
"Authorization Code Tango," he replied. He tried ' to keep the quaver out of his voice. Three-three-seven Victor Delta niner. Maintenance."
"This unit is not scheduled for standard maintenance," the Bolo said. The words were stiff, and a bit formal. As human as the voice might sound, there was no mistaking the AI, the machine mind behind the words.
"Override Security Alpha," Jaime recited. Alita had drilled him in the protocol repeatedly ever since he'd first dared approach the beast. She'd been Hector's
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