GED took a half second more to scan the hill west of the camp; the huge, warm mountain of the captured human war machine remained in place, unmoving. There were no anomalous heat sources on the hill at the moment. Several other orbiting Masters had detected organics on that hillside outside the walls of the camp, and all IR scans were tasked with checking for escaped humans. The suicide of a few organics, more or less, was of no particular concern to the !*!*!, particularly when most were individuals too broken in will to be useful to the Prime Code, but the number of slaves who made that trip and killed themselves had been growing lately, and it might soon
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be necessary to shut off that particular means of culling
The captured machine was alone for the moment. That group of nine humans, though, would have to be investigated.
GED9287 opened the channel to the Primary Web.
CHAPTER FIVE
"Look," Jaime said. "It must be nearly time for the next shift to hit the pits. Are we going to do this thing, or not?"
"Well, I don't know, Jaime," Wal said. "You still haven't told us what happens after we recruit your Boio friend,"
"We blow the damned cluckers to hell. At least we blow them off the face of Cloud."
Wal shook his head. "It's not that easy, Jaime, and you know it. The I*!*! knocked the Bolo out at Chryse. They'll do it again. They defeated the entire CDF in a couple of days . . . and that was when the CDF had men, weapons, hovertanks . , . We were an army, for God's sake! Now what do we have? A few thousand pathetic, ragged refugees, half-starved, unarmed. Think, Jaime, think\ Do you want to see the entire camp slaughtered? Is that what you want? Because that's what's going to happen if you see this through!"
"I thought you were on my side in this!" Jaime cried.
"When it was just a few of us sneaking out, yeah. We might be able to hide out up in the mountains, or in the deep forest. But you're talking about trying
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to defeat the !б!б! on their own terms. I'm sorry, but I never signed on for thatl"
"What if there were a way for us to get off the planet?" Jaime asked. He rubbed at his beard thoughtfully. "If we could fight the machines off, get some ships ..."
"What ships?"
"Actually, I was thinking about the Tolun."
Wal's eyebrows crept high up on his forehead. "What makes you think they'll deal with the likes of us?"
"They'll deal with anybody. Everyone knows that."
The Tolun were nonhumans, members of a very old species that maintained a trading and mercantile empire across much of this region of space.
"There's an enclave of Tolun at Staraown," Dieter pointed out.
"There was an enclave there," Zhou said. "What makes you think the damned machines didn't smash them too, when they smashed us?"
