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

that one Bolo, captured during the Battle of Celeste, the enemy could have won far more purified
metals and other materials than they could ever hope to salvage by slave labor from the muck and
rubble of the city.

Was it possible that they recognized the Bolo as kin, as a fellow AI machine? Did they have rules
about killing other sentient machines? Could they be affected by sentiment, or was it something
more practical than that?

That hardly seemed likely, but Jaime was determined to find out.

The Bolo was a good hundred meters from the edge of the rubble field; Jaime knew from experience
that he would be challenged at fifty meters... or if he tried to move past the Bolo and on toward
the northwest. Walking in what he hoped was a casual

31 fashion, empty hands in clear view, he started for the monster.

With each step, the Bolo loomed larger, a smooth-surfaced, artificial mountain, all angles,
curves, and duralloy teardrops. The Mark XXXIII's stats, long ago committed to memory, simply
could not do justice to the sheer monstrous bulk of the thing. One-hundred-twenty meters long,
thirty-eight meters wide, with three massive main-armament turrets rising from a main deck twenty-
five meters above the ground, the Bolo was more like a huge, squat, elongated buildingтАФ hell, like
an armed and armored townтАФthan a fighting vehicle. Thirty-two thousand tons. It was outmassed by
heavy cruisers, battleships, and naval transports, but as a mobile weapons platform, well, nothing
else on land even came close.

Damn. How had the clackers taken down a Mark XXXIII so easily?

He reached the Line, a perimeter fifty meters from the Bolo's hull made all too visible by the
stains and bones of past visitors to this place. There was a small ridge here, formed from piled-
up bones and decayed flesh, an artificial ridge marking the line, sharp and crisp on the side
facing the Bolo and splashed out in a thinning slope downhill. What was left after someone took
the Hector Option wasn't worth salvaging by. clackers, and the parts were left to rot where they
fell. The stench of death was thick and throat-catching here. The hot taste of fresh, coppery
blood overlaid and mingled with the sweeter musk of older decay.

The most recent addition to the hillock of bones lay a few meters to Jaime's right. The suicides
bare legs and hips lay steaming on the cool ground, bloody at the top but almost intact, but



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everything from the navel up was simply gone, smeared into a fresh, bloody spray down the eastern
side of Overlook Hill, There wasn't much that was recognizable; Jaime did see a disembodied right
hand nearby, the fingers still locked clawlike around a branch from a long-dead tree.

Novel approach, he thought wryly. Attacking a Bolo with a club.

The Bolo Hecate's primary AP weapons were lateral banks of mag-driven railguns, each firing a