Bolos were programmed to obey the human assigned as their commander. The trick was getting them to accept a particular human's credentials, since they were also programmed to reject the enemy's attempts to deceive them. A lot depended now on just how smart this Bolo was in human terms ... and on how able it was to formulate its own goals, mate its own decisions, and set its own course.
"Normally, I would require formal authorization from a higher command authority," the Bolo told him. "However, the tactical situation on Cloud has changed drastically. I surmise that all higher command authority has been eliminated, and that we are essentially on our own. Is this correct?"
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"Affirmative," Jaime replied, his voice catching at his throat. "All military and governmental authority on Cloud has been completely wiped out. It's up to us to build them up again, from nothing."
"I understand, my Commander," the Bolo said, and Jaime suppressed a small start of excitement at its use of the formal title.
"I need a tactical update, please."
A portion of the display screen wiped clear, replaced by a window showing a three-dimensional topological map of the immediate Celeste area. Several hundred red dots were visible, most at the camp or scattered about the pits in the central portion of the city. These are all!б!б! machines detectable within five kilometers," Hector said. "Their armament consists of electrical discharge capacitors and light lasers, the equivalent of hand-held human weapons. None represent a threat to us."
The window cleared, replaced by a graphic representation of the world of Cloud, a blue square flashing to mark the location of Celeste. The sphere dwindled until the smaller, cratered globe of Delamar came into view, then smaller still to include Triste, Cloud's second moon. Three red triangles were visible well beyond the orbit of Delamar, with streaming tails showing their vectors. All three appeared to be accelerating toward Cloud.
"These three vessels represent the most immediate and direct threat," Hector said. 'They are of a class the !"!"! refer to as Type II fortress/battlers. Each masses roughly four point three million tons and is more powerful than the largest human dreadnought by perhaps two orders of magnitude. Ships of this class were responsible for the bombardment of Cloud and the destruction of Clouds cities. I estimate that the nearest will be in firing position within another thirty-eight point seven seconds."
BOLO RISING
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"City killers," Jaime said softly. He'd not seen those monsters when the !б!б! first attacked Cloud, but he'd heard about them from survivors who'd tracked them inbound on radar or glimpsed them on surveillance images from orbital drones.
In fact, it had only been later, in the slave camp, that he'd learned anything at all about the terror weapon the !б!б! had used against Cloud's major cities.
Absolutely basic to any tactical consideration of warfare was the concept of the high ground. Get above the enemy, and you had an immediate, tremendous advantage. The !б!б! held the high ground of space, perched high up in Cloud's gravity well where they could quite literally fling rocks at the humans trapped on the world's surface below. Though Cloud's human defenders had gathered pathetically little intelligence on the invaders before The Killing, they thought that the enemy's fortress/battlers possessed mass drivers something like Hector's main AP weapons, but vastly larger and more powerful. Meteor guns, some of the defenders had called them, but that scarcely did justice to their power and reach. The !*!*! weapons could magnetically hurl one-ton chunks of nickel-ironўdirt-common in any asteroid beltўwith almost pinpoint accuracy at velocities measured in the tens of kilometers per second.
Jaime didn't need to rely on Hectors math processors to calculate the energies involved. One ton of rock augering in at 100 kilometers per second brought with it a potential kinetic energy of roughly five million megajoules . . . the destructive power of one thousand tons of detonating high explosives.
A one-kiloton explosion put the weapon into the realm of tactical nukes; according to some of the stories floating around the camp just after The Killing, the !*!e! could tailor the size of their blasts by adjusting the size and the incoming velocity of their city-busters.
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The one that got Chryse, some estimated, had been on die order often megatons, ten thousand times more powerful than a one-loloton blast.
"The first enemy ship has reached its firing position," Hector announced. "Brace yourselves. Things are about to get interesting."
Jaime wondered what just what it was that constituted interesting for a Bolo. . . .
VAL812-928782 was a late-model four-brained !*!"! that had been a battler/fortress for well over 3 x 1018 nanoseconds. Plugged into the monster TIG232 Series 34 dreadnought, it had been part of the fleet that had captured the organics' starship Empyrion, wresting from the strange creatures the secrets of their computer technology. It had fought in the line at Jalachaad and lost two banks of foldspace facilitators at Corowyth.
Like the vast majority of !б!0!, it had little of what humans might have called imagination. It did what. higher authority directed it to do, and it did it very efficiently.
Its current orders had directed it to attack a particular target at a particular set of coordinates on the recently secured planet of Cloud. Though still some ninety thousand kilometers from the planet, too far to receive a direct optical view, it could see images relayed by !б!*! intelligence satellites in low-Cloud orbit snowing the target area clearly, a swampy ruin beside a narrow-mouthed harbor. Squarely in the center of the harbor, a machine of some kind, a very large machine, appeared to have just shrugged off the attacks of a swarm of smaller !*!╚!.
