And yet, as I have ascertained 12,873 times before, this cannot possibly be an accurate condition assessment. Internal sensors register the presence of a 2.43-meter crater above my main suspension rack
BOLO RISING
and numerous anomalies in four right foretrack bogies. I sense extensive damage to both primary and secondary circuitry, a loss of sensor and communications arrays, cripplingfadures in my contra-gravity and battle screen systems, and numerous specific faults and system failures which show a pattern of deliberate and intelligent sabotage rather than the random destruction of battle damage. I note, too, that physical override blocks have been placed within myjusion plant, limiting available power to a fraction of full potential, and that all onboard magazines of expendable ordnance, including 240cm howitzer rounds, VLS missiles, and ready HeUbore needles, are empty. My primary damage assessment routines indicate nominal operation, while my secondary battle damage sensors show serious internal and external damage, and that all weapons save my antipersonnel batteries are inoperable. The resultant logical contradiction suggests deliberate and hostile intervention.
The realization that my systems have been sabotaged rouses me from Normal Awareness to Full Battle Alert; .00029 second later, however, the Masters' override cuts in and for the 12,874th time, my working memory is erased and . . .
And...
All operations and systems are nominal. I appear to be in perfect working order.
I continue to look at the stars. . . .
CHAPTER ONE
The stars were . . . astonishing.
Crouched in the mud-floored pit occupying what had once been Celeste's public square, Jaime Graham lifted his eyes to the eastern sky, beyond the ragged, flash-melted stubble marking the former site of Roland Towers. The dig was almost completely lost in darkness now, save for the gold-white gleams of work lights and various species of hovering clacker. Despite the glare of lights from the nearest floaters, the starclouds of Sagittarius filled the night sky with wonder and ice-glittering beauty.
Strange, he thought, that such beauty could have masked such unspeakable death and horror.
Even so, it seemed sometimes as though the sight of the stars was all that kept him sane, a way to lift him, however briefly, out of the living nightmare from which he and the other survivors could never wake.
"You'd better get back to work, Jaime," a cracked and dry-throated voice whispered at his side. "If the trusties don't see you, the clackers for damned sure will."
"As long as I keep moving, Wal," he replied, his own voice sounding just as ragged in his own ears. He
BOLD RISING 5
glanced at his companion. Walўformerly Colonel Waldon Josep Prescott of the Cloud Defense Forcesў knelt in the mud by Jaime's side, a nylon bag strapped to the red-scarred stump of his left forearm, as he scratched through the muck with his right hand. His body, what could be seen of it through its glistening coat of slime and clay, was shockingly emaciated, the ribs showing like curved bars through taut, mud-encrusted skin, while both his hair and beard were matted and unkempt.
Jaime didn't need to see his own mud-coated body to know that he didn't look much better. Wal, though, was fifteen years older than Jaime and hadn't been in as good physical condition ayear ago when the !*!*! had appeared in Cloud's skies. Both his left hand and his right eye had been harvested some months back, and the brutality of the past year had ground him down to a shadow of his former self. Jaime doubted that the colonel would be able to survive much longer.
As for himself, well, all of his body parts were intact so far, but there was no way of telling how long that condition would last. The worst of it for him was the debilitation brought on by constant work, unrelenting stress, and chronic malnutrition.
A faint, warbling hum warned of the approach of a floater eye, and reluctantly, he tore his eyes from the sky and made himself look busy. When he sensed the spy hovering close beside him, he looked up but kept
digging-Softball-sized and steel-gray in color, the floater
hovered on internal contra-gravs that set his bare skin to prickling with the local buildup of a static charge. On the sphere's equator, a single, disturbingly human eye stared down at him from within a precisely crafted hollow on the floater s surface, unwinking, glistening in its trickling bath of nutrient solution, the iris a pale blue in color.
6 William H. Keith, Jr.
He wondered whose eye it was. Not Wal's, certainly, whose remaining eye was brown. Besides, speculation among those slaves with medical training and knowledge held that parts harvested from humans wouldn't survive more than a few weeks before they started to die, though there was no proof of that.
After a few tense moments, with Jaime continuing to feel through the mud, the warble increased in pitch and the floater eye drifted away. There were hundreds of the things adrift above the dig, constantly watching the slaves and presumably relaying what they saw to the Masters.
Keep working. Have to keep working. . . .
