"Keith Laumer - Bolos 8 - Bolo Rising" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laumer Keith)

The latrines that served the sanitary needs of the slave camp were crude affairs, benches with
holes cut into an open platform raised above a creek that flowed along the camp's western


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boundaries. At the southwest corner

27 of the camp, the stream flowed through a ditch beneath the power fence; escape was as simple as
scrambling into the ditch behind die latrine platform and wading downstream, crawling through the
noisome muck to clear the powerfield, then clambering to dry land again above the point where the
stream oozed into Celeste Harbor. During the past year, some hundreds of men and women had slipped
out that way, some to take the Hector Option, others to attempt an escape into the wilds.

Had any of the escapees ever survived the armies of machines, the fields thickly planted with
sensors and alarms, the hordes of ground-scuttling clickers and hovering floater eyes known to be
patrolling the area around Celeste? There was no way of knowing, since any escapees who were
captured were harvested. Sometimes, the clackers would display some of the gruesomely harvested
parts the next morning. Other times, there was'no word, and the slaves remaining in the barracks
and the pits allowed themselves to hope that there might actually be the possibility of escape.

But the Hector Option was so much surer an escape from the unrelenting pain. Few would risk
vivisection simply to taste a few hours' freedom. And few imagined that those who escaped could
remain free for long.

As near as he could tell, there'd been no response from the machines. Below him, a few slaves were
moving about among the shanties and tents outside the ruined factory, and to the southeast, the
dig was filled with the late-night shift of slaves, continuing to enlarge the pits. Beyond, the
flooded crater shone huge and oval and silver in the moonlight. Jaime could see machines moving
along the crater's edge, tiny black specks silhouetted against the light as they went about their
business. The Collector bulked huge by the crater lake, sinister and black.

Nothing was moving nearby, however. On Overlook Hill, at least, Jaime had the night to himself.

Quietly, he began climbing again. The southeastern slope of Overlook Hill had once been a
residential area of neat, terraced parks and the single-home dwellings of some of Celeste's well-
to-do. Every structure had been razed by the blast, but the ground was well above the water table
and out of the reach of the tidal wave that had inundated the collapsing waterfront and public
square. Large blocks of ferrocrete, the crumbled remains of some of the arcology towers from the
center of town, littered the hillside like a giant child's cast-off building blocks, leaving
terrain that was difficult to traverse but ideal as cover.

Toward the top of the hill, the rubble began thinning out; the crest of Overlook Hill had once
been a park, but the impact blast had swept the crown bare of trees, grass, monuments, even paving
stones. Shortly after the slave camp had been installed in the wreckage of the old factory,
however, the Masters had brought in Hector, the huge and battlescarred Mark XXXIII Bolo captured
in the fight for Celeste. The Bolo, ignominiously, was now a kind of huge and vastly overqualified
prison guard, posted on the hilltop overlooking the camp and blocking the main road out. South of
the slave camp was the harbor and the slave-worked ruins between the waterfront and the crater.