"Do you think our friends are going to try to follow us in?" Alita asked.
"I don't know. The ones small enough to make it
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aren't very smart. But they might try something, so we'd best move fast."
"They've got. . . they've got to be thinking we're going to try to get the Bolo operational again," Shari said. Her breaths were coming in short, sharp gasps, but she seemed to be trying hard to focus her total attention on the larger problem at hand. 'They could be calling in their bombardment ships."
"That'll take time," Jaime replied. "We can still do this."
Minutes later, the meter-high tunnel opened into a broad, tall corridor, the main access passageway, Alita said, from the Bolo's rear entrance. Their goal was just ahead, behind a massive duralloy door marked Battle Center.
Though they were descended from the manned tanks of Terra's ancient military history, every Bolo since the Mark IV had been autonomous to the point that it required no human crew members. Even so, all Bolos retained a vestigial remnant of their manned ancestors in the Battle Center, a control room, of sorts, buried behind meters of lead and neutron dense-pack shielding deep, deep within the huge machine's inner war hull. There, a Bolo's human commander could ride into combat in relative safety; a direct hit by a thermonuclear weapon might leave the Bolo's outer hull both thermally incandescent and highly radioactive, but the human passenger would be safe ... at least for as long as his stores of food and water held out.
Alita touched an access panel, and with a grumbling whine, the vault-massive door slid open.
The stench inside was sickening, a rolling, palpable wave of sick-sweet decay, of coppery blood, and stale, old mustiness. "Oh, God!" Alita said, holding her hand across her nose and mouth. "What on Cloud .. . ?"
Shan's eyes opened wide and she stumbled forward,
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face pale, holding herself up against the door frame, ignoring or not even noticing the smell. "Shari," Jaime called. "I don't know if you shouldў"
"Jeff!" Her scream was despair and revelation and confirmation all in one shriek of pain. "No, Jeff. . . \"
"Alita," Jaime said, gently guioUng Shari back from the door. 'Take care ofў"
"No!" Shari pulled free and pushed her way into the room. Jaime exchanged dark glances with Alita, then followed.
The Battle Center was a circular, low-ceilinged room with a central, heavily padded seat enclosed by a C-shaped console. Overhead, a transparent, hemispherical bubble surrounded seat and console, the main screen for the center's 360б combat display. Two observer seats were set outside the bubble against the rear bulkhead. Other bulkheads were set with lockers for the supplies necessary for human passengers.
On the deck, just behind the command chair, was a grisly reminder that Hector had seen combat. A body . . . no, pieces of a body, were scattered about on a large, brown stain on the white, matte-plastic surface of the decking. Another stain covered the seat, where the straps of the safety harness remained intact and still buckled, and still another was splashed with gory abandon across the rear inside of the bubble display. The body itself appeared to have literally been torn apart, though about all that was left now were bones, the smell, and some dried muscles tightly wrapped in parchment skin. The uniform ripped by whatever had shredded the body, had once been standard CDF utilities. The rank tabs on the collar, though, were missing.
Also missing, strangely enough, was the man's head.
Still, Jaime had no doubt that the body was that of Captain Jeff Fowler. Shari was convinced of it, in any
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case, and she'd told him that Fowler had been Hector's commander.
