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Depilatories had given out, and every man in the camp now sported the same shaggy growth of beard. Spratly's uniform, like most everyone else's, had eventually succumbed to the constant wet and heat, and he made do now with cut-off shorts or a breechcloth or sometimes nothing at all.
Worse, the escape committee had fallen apart when one of the members, Dewar Sykes, had turned, becoming a camp trusty, a turner. Spratly had been lucky. All he'd lost had been an eye, and Wal Prescott, his second-in-command, had lost an eye and a hand. Half of the other members had been harvested completely, not just trimmed, and in the long months of dying since that time, few had dared raise the subject of escape again.
"So you think you have a handle on that damned traitor machine?" Spratly asked.
Traitor. Jaime knew that General Spratly had never fully trusted the colony's Bolo, and he viewed the terrible ease with which it had ceased operations at Chryse to be proof that it had sided with die machine invaders, an act of deliberate and calculated treachery.
"Our . .. friend is pretty sick," Jaime said. "But I've found someone in the camp who might be able to help."
"That monster is no friend . .. !"
"Valhalla will have no hope of success without him, General. If we can .. . make him feel better, we have a chance."
Operation Valhalla was the plan the freshly captured troops of the First Armored had cobbled together during their very first week in the camp, a few days after Chryse. They'd still been thinking of the invaders as organic creatures, beings who used machines to wage their wars. The startling reality, that the Invaders were machines pursuing some kind of twisted parody of Darwinian evolution, had not yet sunk in. The plan
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had called for slipping a technical team out of the camp, trekking overland north to the Chryse battlefield where Hector lay disabled, reactivating him, and using his considerable firepower, the firepower of a planetary siege unit, to ... what?
Escape from the camp, certainly, but then? Some of the conspirators had claimed that a reactivated Hector could lack the invaders clean off the planet. General Spratly, and others, had pointed out that if the invaders had been able to take down a Mark XXXIII Bolo with such remarkable ease once, they would be able to do it again a second time.
A few days later, Hector had rumbled ponderously out of the north and taken his position atop Overlook Hill, a position he had not abandoned in nearly a year. Humans who tried to approach him or move past the hill were killed. Somehow, the invaders had suborned him. And Operation Valhalla, named for the place where fallen warriors feasted in the Norse afterlife, had been dropped.
"I can't say that I'm pleased at the prospect," Spratly said after a long silence. He scratched at his belly thoughtfully, where an angry red rash was spreading across his hairy skin. "He is a machine, after all. Lake them."
"Exactly. He is a machine, which makes him more trustworthyўif we can find out what they did to him and correct itўthan any human." Pointedly, Jaime stared at Captain Pogue, then at the other staff officers. There was no reason to suspect that any of the men were camp informers. Jaime was simply reminding the general that men placed in such stressful conditions were capable of anything. Extreme situations did extreme things to people, and to their minds. "I'm going to need if, though, to carry this thing off."
Spratly's face worked unpleasantly. "For what?'
Jaime didn't answer right away, considering his
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response carefully. If there were listening devices planted in the hut... or hovering just outside with sensitive electronic ears, the !*!*! might learn enough about what the two human slaves were talking about to intervene. They couldn't risk losing it.
A sharp whistle sounded from outside, Dieter's warning. The whistle meant a floater was moving into the area. It was time to end the interview, at least for
now.
"I don't really know, General," he said, answering Spratly s last question as honestly as he could. "We need more information. Some of us will try to get that, tonight. To learn how to apply... it to best advantage."
