military force and a Mark XXXIII Bolo along as protection against the Unknown.
Unfortunately, the Unknown had found them, and the Unknown had been so unimaginably powerful that even the latest in Bolo technology and six-megatons-per-second firepower had not stood a chance. Celeste had been flattened by a rock dropped from space, the towers toppled, the arcologies vaporized in a searing instant of ferrocrete-melting heat, the towers smashed by the crystalsteel-splintering shockwave. A crater a hundred meters across and twenty deep had been blasted into the city's heart; the shock had been so great that the very foundations of the city had settled, which was why the crater was now a lake, and the city square, inundated by water and mud, had still not drained.
Presumably, the other cities on Cloud all had suffered the same fate, though no one now slaving in these pits knew for sure. Every person in and near Celeste had died in the attacks; the survivors were those who had been outside the city when the high-velocity chunk of nickel-iron had lanced out of a cloudless noon sky. There'd been no warning, no ultimatum, and no chance to coordinate the entire planetary population. The war, such as it was, had been over within a few days of what now was called the Great Killing.
The survivors had been offered amnesty by the Masters, the offer transmitted by Speakers, the strange species of!*!*! floater that could actually communicate in Terran Anglic. The offer had been irresistible: surrender peacefully to the Masters, and they would not incinerate the continent... or vivisect the millions of humans already captured. Life, after all, was better than death on a planetary scale.
The Masters' definition of "life," however, included slave pits, slow starvation, and random harvestings. More and more of the survivors were beginning to think they'd made the wrong choice.
BOLO RISING
11
Wal returned, his nylon bag empty. Without a word, he dropped to hand and knees and resumed digging. Everywhere, as far as the eye could see, the human slaves continued digging, as a steady stream of individuals lugged bags filled with the detritus of civilization to the Collector, emptied them into the machine's yawning maw, then trudged back to their assigned places.
Jaime's fingers touched something slick, and he fished it out, swishing it in the muddy water to clean it. An exquisite china carving lay in his hand ... a ballerina, en pointe, arms raised, her figure miraculously perfect and unchipped.
Jaime stared at the figure for a long moment. . . until Wal reached across and plucked her from his fingers, dropping her into the bag. He was left wondering how the figurine had survived. The meteor strike and the shockwave that had followed had leveled the entire center of the city, and moments later the ground as far back from the bay as the city square had been inundated by an inrushing wall of water. Buildings had shattered and toppled ... the ones that hadn't melted outright. The ballerina must have been blasted from some apartment in one of the city's arcologies, a knickknack swept from mantelpiece or bureau top and hurled by tornadic winds . . . here. How had it survived?
"Why," Jaime asked aloud, his voice a ragged whisper, "are the Masters so damned concerned about retrieving every scrap of junk?"
"Waste not, want not, they always say," Wal quipped. He smiled, but the expression was no more than a tired showing of dirty teeth.
There's more to it than that. They already had their machines pick over the entire surface. They got almost everything, except for scraps. Why do they need us for that?"
12
William H. Keith, Jr.
"Maybe they don't like getting their hands dirty."
"Yeah, but, I mean, what difference does it make, one gold ring on a skeletal hand, more or less?" Or one delicate, unbroken china ballerina.
Wal didn't reply right away, but continued feeling his way through the mud. "You know, Major," he said after a long moment, "one thing you shouldn't forget, one thing none of us should ever forget, is that these, these machines are not human. They don't think like us. They don't feel like us. Hell, we don't even know whether or not the things are self-aware."
"It's not enough," Jaime said, "to explain strange behavior just by saying they're alien."
"Mebee. I guess if the clackers want every last gram of refined metal and plastic and stuff like that recovered, they must have their reasons." The colonel paused, moving his hand in the mud, then plucked a goblet, a drinking glass miraculously intact save for the snapped-off stem and base, from the muck. He put the find in his bag before continuing. "Trouble is, we may never be able to understand those reasons, because they would only make sense to another clacker."
"I just wonder if it s evidence of something we could use. I mean, if they want something that bad, it suggests weakness. . . ."
"Still thinking about some kind of grand revolution? Up with the humans? Down with machines?"
"Up with the humans!" another voice called softly from close by.
"Easy, lad," Wal said, waving his stump in a placating gesture. "I didn't mean anything byў"
"No, you're right!" The speaker was a young man, probably in his late twenties, though judging the age of any of the scarred, muddy, and beaten-down slaves in the Celeste pits was pure guesswork by now. His beard was as long and as ratty looking as Jaime's own. "We have to work together!"
