"You're getting at something," Wal suggested.
"Maybe." He scooped up the last of me rice and chewed thoughtfully. "Maybe," he said again after a long pause, "I'm going out to see Hector tonight."
"You think that's wise, Major?" Alita said. "With Delamar coming upў"
"The clackers can see in the dark," he reminded her. "I'll be no safer with a moon and the starclouds up than I would be on a pitch-black cloudy night. Sometimes, I think they know ... and don't care."
"Enough people go up the hill to take the Hector Option," Wal said, ^feah, you could be right."
Alita laid one slim hand on Jaime s arm. "You ... will come back?"
24
William H. Keith, Jr.
"I'll be back," he told her. "I'm not ready to option out yet."
Inside, though, he wasn't as confident as he sounded. One of these days, he was pretty sure he would take the Hector Option.
It was, everyone agreed, the best, the cleanest ending available in this nightmare of filth, suffering, and death.
CHAPTER Two
Until now the night has been silent, but I am now detecting motion and the crackle of dry brush coming up the hill from the east. My port-side thermal sensors focus on the anomaly, resolving it as an organic, a human male who has worked his way through the power fence encircling the encampment and is jogging toward my position with evident determination. I track the target until it reaches my preset defensive perimeter, at a range of fifty meters.
"Halt," I command, the words part of an old, old sentry routine left intact by the Masters for this purpose. "Identify yourself."
There is no answer, but the organic has stopped at the fifty-meter perimeter. It is breathing hard; I sense the pounding of its heart, the puffs of hot air escaping from its lungs at one-second intervals. It is staring up at me, its eyes great, dark patches in the livid reds and yellows of the thermal image of its face. It is carrying something which takes me .0032 second to identify: a piece of wood, probably a piece of a tree branch, massing eight hundred grams and measuring no more than half a meter in length. Its tracks, visible as a succession of fading green footprints on the cooler
25
26
William H, Keith, Jr.
ground behind it, mark the unsteady lurchings of its run up the hill. The organic, I realize, is operating at the very limits of its endurance.
"You are not authorized to be here," I tell it. "Return to your assigned quarters immediately."
In answer, the organic screams, a 102-decibel shout that conveys no useful information. At the same instant, the target raises the branch, brandishing it as it steps across the fifty-meter perimeter line.
My response is automatic. My number one port-side antipersonnel battery fires, a single short, sharp pulse of electrical power energizing the railgun's magfield along superconducting tracks.
The scream cuts off instantly.
The night is silent once more.
Jaime heard the slave's shriek of rage and frustration and terror in the darkness at the top of the hill, and he heard the ringing chink as the Bolo triggered a round from one of its lateral A-P batteries, chopping off the screamed challenge as abruptly as if flicking off a switch.
