"Hello, Hector," Jaime called. There was no reply, nothing to hear at all save the whistling of the night wind across cold metal.
"Let me try," she said.
"Be my guest."
62
William H. Keith, Jr.
"Hector," Shari called. "Your unit has won some prestigious battle honors over the years. I wonder if you can recite them for me?"
There was a sound . . . not words, but a kind of far-off creak, like the moving of a rusty door, and then a rapid series of clicks. This was followed by a tiny, high-pitched electronic squeal, rapidly cut off. She wondered if the great, metal beast was in pain.
"You are a Mark XXXIII Solo," she said, pressing ahead, "last and greatest of the Dinochrome Brigade. Your name is Hector. Do you remember your unit? Do you remember your adopted unit?"
Again, a series of clicks echoed from the interior of the dark machine, clicks that increased in frequency and pitch until they whined like a rusty hinge. They ended with a single, loud pop, echoing hollowly.
"What the hell is that?" Jaime wanted to know. He sounded worried.
"Relays closing," Shari replied. "He's trying to answer, but it's not getting through."
"It sounds like something's broken in there."
"Damn, a monitor and a data feed jack would be real useful right now," Shari said. She felt frustrated, and helpless. "I'd give just about anything to know what Hector was thinking right now."
I stop, clearing my circuits, resetting aU switches to zero, and try again. Each time I reach for the required information within my main storage banks and begin to assemble a reply, there is a brief span, several milliseconds of lucidity, and then the information fades once more beneath the shifting, blurring surface of my memory.
Two organics stand 5.3 meters in front of the leading edge of my glacis. I have to struggle to retain even the word they use to describe themselves: humans. They are ... alien, somehow, organic life forms utterly
BOLO RISING
63
unlike myself, and yet I can't help but feel an odd, inexplicable putt, something akin to camaraderie, as one of the beings, the one identifying itself as Technician Barstowe, calls out to me.
"Bolo! What is your unit?"
My . . . unit?
The information is there, in my main storage, it is there. Bolo HCTofthe Line, Mark XXXIH, 6th Mobile Starstrike Regiment, the Indomitables, on special deployment with the Third Terran Colonizing Fleet and the 1st Armored Assault Brigade at Cloud, Western Arm, 212th Sagittarian Sector. . .
And with that information comes a flood of other data, memories long hidden, or deliberately suppressed by... by...
I can feel the Interloper moving to cut me off from the inflow of data, can feel it deleting material from my working memory. I attempt to create and store a backup, but the Intruder is already there, a virus reading each character string and changing it almost as soon as 1 pass it on to the storage subdirectory.
I can feel my memories being rewritten, edited as I view them.
But, however briefly, 1 can live those memories again, and I feel a surge of emotion. I first achieved full consciousness at the Durandel Bolo Assembly Plant, on Luna, Lot 5, Series A Number 28373. The 6th Mobile Starstrike was commissioned as a regiment of twenty-four Mark XXXIII Bolos on Earth, on 26 June, A.E. 1477. We served together in the campaigns on Marxis, Carragula, and Jorgenson's Worlds, and helped lift the Siege of Proximo. I was deployed independently to Aldo Cerise, and when the Melconians' Khalesh allies assaulted nearby Grauve, I took part in the stand that broke the Khal Dependency. At the Third Battle of Sardunar, I held off superior Melconian forces, including a triplet of heavy battlers then entering orbit,
