There was no immediate reply, and she wondered if the huge machine was simply ignoring her backseat driving. The slope of the deck grew steeper, and she clung to the chair back for support. A moment later, the Bolo's prow struck the water's surface, sending up an enormous wall of white spray, though she scarcely felt the impact.
"I could give you the engineering particulars," Hector's voice said as water boiled up across the forward half of the display. "However, I see from your personnel files that you have little experience with engineering or mathў"
"You don't need to be so condescending, damn it!"
"I apologize. I was merely observing that your field
BOLO RISING
135
of expertise lies in psychotronics and AI psychology, rather than in engineering or physics, and wished to explain in a mode that you would readily comprehend.
"Perhaps I can explain by a historical analogy. In 3198, on New Devon, a Bolo Mark XXVIII, Unit LNE Triumphant, was deactivated after the final engagement of the Fringe-Worlds War against the Xalontese. Since its hull was dangerously radioactive, it was encased in a three-meter shell of reinforced armorcrete, then buried two hundred meters underground behind a rubble-filled tunnel capped by fifty centimeters of compressed concrete.
"Seventy T-standard years later, construction work in the vicinity activated the Bolo's battle reflex circuits. Though it was operating on Final Emergency Power, Unit LNE was able to smash free of the radiation shield, then tunnel by brute force through the rubble and up to the surface of New Devon. The Mark XXVIII massed only fifteen thousand tons, of course, but it was operating on lower power reserves than I am now. Suffice to say that even a few hundred meters of mud will offer less of an impediment than two hundred meters of hard-packed rubble and high-R concrete shielding, so long as my tracks can reach a solid base."
"Oh . . ." was all she could say.
She wondered, though, what had happened to that Bolo reactivated on New Devon. She'd heard about similar cases before, of Bolos gone rogue or incompletely or incompetently deactivated. Such spawned endless horror stories that continued to provide ammunition for the human opponents of unsupervised psychotronic AIs.
There were some who'd survived the Great Killing who hinted darkly that the !*!*! must have evolved from something very much like Bolos, that they'd destroyed their makers and continued to direct their own evolution.
136
William H. Keith, Jr.
As water exploded across the display dome, she decided that this Bolo was certainly taking a hand in its future, forming its own plans and carrying them out with no further input from the humans who'd started this chain of events at all. Despite all she knew about psychotronics, it was a little terrifying to watch the Boio working on its own.
CHAPTER NINE
/ have reached the harbor and entered the water Despite my reassurances to Technician Barstowe, I note with relief that the silt on the harbor bottom is only two to three meters deep, and that beneath that is a fairly stable layer of clay. The water itself is no more than ten meters deep, enough to cover my track assemblies and my lower banks of antipersonnel weapons, but not deep enough to begin flooding my interior through the breach in my hutt. Flooding would have been difficult to clear and would have forced the humans aboard me now to remain inside one of my self-contained environmental compartments.
As it is, I have no trouble achieving traction enough to continue moving south into the harbor and am in no immediate danger ofbecoming mired. While I did not doubt my ability to extricate myself eventually, I had no direct means of establishing the depths of either the water or the mud beneath, and traversing mud deeper than my own height would have required a great deal of time, almost certainly more time than is available to me now.
Resistance in my immediate combat area has all but ceased, though I* f* I flying machines continue to circle
137
138
William H. Keith, Jr.
at a range of Jive to ten kilometers While these are easily with range of my AP mass drivers, I elect to hold my fire, preferring to save my remainingflechette canisters for more threatening targets
Another threat is developing, however, one which will not be vulnerable to hypervelocity flechettes. I am now tracking three separate, very large targets in near-Cloud space, almost certainly large /*/"/ fortress-ships of unknown but certainly enormous potential. These, I deduce, are the most serious immediate combat threat and must be neutralized as swiftly as possible. I am mindful of the damage I suffered at Chryse when I was attacked by Enemy vessels smaller than these.
I probe the Enemy's communications network, looking for weakness, a point of entry, and find none. All Bolos since the Mark XXVI have incorporated both the technology and the programming necessary for breaking an opponent's data net, both to secure electronic intelligence and, in some cases, to disable or confuse the Enemy's defenses by hacking past his security to implant false data or commands within his computer network. Though my experience with the 1*1*1 has familiarized me with the Enemy net and communications protocols, their security algorithms and access codes appear to be constantly changing, offering me no point of entry. In any case, that particular tactic would be risky in the extreme since, at this point, they must know considerably more about my operating system and data net than I know about theirs. Opening direct access to the 1*1*1 computer net, their Primary Web, as they refer to it, would leave me vulnerable to electronic takeover or disabling.
