Together, they started back down the hill.
CHAPTER THREE
they made their way together back down the hill. They saw no one, though once, for several heart-pounding minutes, they lay crouched in the shadows of a gaping, stone-walled basement after Jaime heard the distinctive clink of metal scraping stone. After wading up the sewage ditch and back within the invisible walls of the compound, they took a few moments to wash themselves off in the stream above the latrine, removing the worst of the stench clinging to their bodies. The idea was to slip back into the barracks without attracting attention to themselves. There were almost certainly informers among the slaves ... or, at the least, minute and easily concealed listening devices.
At the entrance to the wrecked factory building, they touched hands lightly, then went their separate ways. Jaime sank onto his rag pile gratefully; the climb up and down Overlook Hill took a lot out of him, and the longer he worked in the dig, he knew, the weaker he would become. The knowledge lent a definite urgency to any timetable the tiny conspiracy decided to adopt.
He was awakened before dawn for the next work
44
BOLD RISING
45
shift and spent the next twelve hours in the mud west of the crater, digging for bits of glass, plastic, and technology. Most of the time, though, his mind was back on Overlook Hill, studying the problem of what Hector had become ... and how the small but growing band of military and civilian personnel could fix him.
The suns were still up when the shift ended, and Jaime and several thousand other men and women trudged the three kilometers back to the barracks. Chow time was not scheduled until after suns-set; the conspirators, Jaime, Alita, Dieter, and Wal, all met by the eastern wall of the old factory, and this time Shari Barstowe joined them.
When he introduced her, he didn't tell themўand she did not volunteerўthat he'd met her on the bone pile at Hector's fifty-meter line.
"So you're telling us that Hector remembers some stuff, but not anything about the battle, or him getting taken over," Dieter said, thoughtful. "That's pretty weird. How could the Masters know our programming methods, how could they know Hector so well that they could reprogram him that way?"
"Bolobotomy," Wal said.
"I beg your pardon?" Dieter said.
"Sounds like Hector's received a Bolobotomy."
"Like a human lobotomy? He had part of his brain chopped out?"
"Well, not quite that," Shari said. "Remember, you can't just carve a piece of a Bolo's memory out with a filleting knife."
"That's right," Alita said. "Holographic memory."
"You just lost me," Jaime said. He made a swishing motion above his head with his hand. "Right over."
"Yes, well," Shari said. "Do you understand the concept of holographic memory?"
Jaime frowned. "I know what a holograph is."
"Yeah," Wal added. "A three-D comm transmission."
46
William H. Keith, Jr.
"That's not what I'm talking about."
