"Jeff Fowler? He was the Bolo's human counterpart. The commander.'"
"Someone you knew?"
She shrugged, a small, lost movement of her shoulders. "Jeff and I were ... lovers. I wasn't military," she added quickly, answering his immediate question. "I was a civilian, a cyberneticist, working at Chryse."
"A cyberjock! On the Bolo staff?"
She nodded.
"So you know how his AI works."
"Well, after a fashion. Don't get excited, though. I don't know how the clackers got control of Hector, and I don't know what they've done to him since." She turned slightly, looking up at the mountain of black metal above her. "I don't even know if the clackers ... made him one of themselves, somehow."
"They're not listening in on us right now, if that's what you mean," Jaime told her. "I've been up here several times before, and while I haven't gotten very far with my conversations with Hector, he's never called for the guards to come get me. I think they just set him up here, wound him up, and let him go. Maybe they get periodic updates, I don't know. But we're safe enough for the moment." "Safe . . ." She shuddered.
"Alien concept. I know." He studied her narrowly. Her hair, he thought, was blond, though it was hard to tell through the dried, caked-on mud. Her eyes had a dull and listless look .. . but there was a spark
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of keen intelligence there, a life that existence in the slave camp haa not entirely extinguished. "You don't really want to kill yourself."
She looked at him, one eyebrow arched. "Don't I? What gives you such dazzling insight? You don't even know me."
"I know that if you had to work so hard to get your courage up, then you must've been having second thoughts, plenty of 'em. Like me."
"You?"
"First time I came up here, oh, must've been six weeks ago, or so, I came for the same reason you did. To take the Hector Option."
"What happened?"
He pursed his lips, then pointed. "I stood on that heap of bones, right over there, for ten, maybe fifteen minutes, trying to work up my courage to step across, and all the time wondering when some damned floater was going come up behind me, throw out a tentacle, and drag me down for a quick vivisection. I thought about afl the people who'd come up here before me and left nothing behind but bones and some stains on the ground. Mostly, I guess I thought about the Bolo. His challenge was so ... I don't know. So flat. Lifeless. Not at all like he was before The Killing."
"You did know Hector then, before . . ."
"Oh, yes. I was CO of Second Battalion, First Armored Division. I didn't work with the Bolo Corps directly that much, but I was based at Chryse, and I got to talk with Hector a couple of times." He smiled gently. "I probably met your Captain Fowler, though I don't remember the name now. Good bunch of people. Anyway, I stood there on the bone hill and thought that if I could find out how the machines had changed Hector, how they'd rewired him or whatever, maybe I could figure out how to fix him."
'Tes? Then what?"
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William H, Keith, Jr.
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