"Yeah. Sure. Get out of here."
He hunched his shoulders against the wind and turned to go. Overhead, one of the tall native conifers cracked with a report like gunfire. Bradley jumped and went down flat in one of the old war craters. Kalima started to laugh- Then froze. The tree crashed down, broken halfway up its immense length. The trunk smashed against the old wall. A sixteen-foot section cracked, slipped sideways along an ancient fissure in the battered flintsteel casing, and began to fall-directly toward them.
"Run!"
Bradley rolled, came up faster than she would have thought possible, and launched himself straight at her. His tackle brought her down, almost in the shadow of the Bolo"s treads. Screaming metal and the sound of falling concrete and flintsteel filled her ears. But they weren"t crushed.
She looked up and gasped.
The wall had fallen against the h.e.l.lbore gun barrels. The Bolo had swivelled them to catch the wall.
"Run! Quick!"
Bradley grabbed her hand and hauled her up. She dove for cover behind the Bolo and hauled him with her. Overhead, the ma.s.sive h.e.l.lbore gun barrels caught the glint of winter sunlight. They groaned, then moved a few inches as the ancient turret rotated the barrels out from under the wall. The broken section crashed down right where they"d been standing.
In the immense silence which followed the thunder of falling debris, Bradley stuttered, "It s-s-saved our lives."
Kalima just nodded, jerkily, unable to find her voice at all. She placed a shaky hand against the Bolo"s fender and leaned her forehead against it.
"Oxygen," the Bolo"s metallic voice said, twice.
"Oxygen?" Bradley repeated. "What"s he mean?"
She thought about it. She was getting better at interpreting Gonner"s inscrutable messages. "Oxygen"s a gas. Can"t see it, but you need it to survive. Can"t see it! Of course. It"s clear. He just said, "All clear." "
"Oxygen," Gonner said again, confirming the guess. "Hold. Hold."
"Job well done, Unit Six Seven Zero GWN. Yes, continue to hold position. Report any Enemy activity detected."
"Hold, hold, hold."
Bradley mouthed, "Wow!" soundlessly.
That was when she noticed the rip in his therma-suit. He"d torn it down the shoulder at some point during their scramble for safety. She reached out to see how bad the damage was and was shocked speechless when he flinched in pain.
"Ow! Dammit, don"t look!"
"Hey! Sit still! You"re hurt."
"Am not," he growled, sounding genuinely dangerous.
"Then how come I see bruises and . . . and welts . . ."
The bruises were liver-colored, at least several days old, not new injuries from the falling wall. The implications. .h.i.t Kalima hard. Bradley didn"t say anything.
"Your dad?"
He stared coldly into the distance.
"Bradley-"
"He"s not my dad."
She opened her mouth; then shut it again. This was getting deep, a little too fast.
Bradley"s face had flushed; he wouldn"t look at her. "Mom died before you got here and . . . he . . . never knew she slept around. He thought I was his kid. We did that genetic experiment in school last week? Well, I"m not. He always was mean to me, but . . ."
Despite the extreme chill of the frozen ground, she discovered a need to sit down beside him. "I didn"t know. I"m sorry."
"Don"t be. I"m just Bradley the Pig." He stood up and shoved gloved hands into his pockets. "Gotta go," he mumbled.
"Wait."
He stopped without turning around.
"You wanna see the pa.s.senger compartment?"
"I-" He stopped and didn"t say anything for a moment. Then, very low, "Later?"
"Sure."
He took off at a dead run.
Above her head, Gonner"s metallic voice broke the silence. "Brimstone."
Brimstone. She thought about that for a little while. Then said, "Yeah, Gonner, you"re right."
She wished she could ask the Bolo for advice on what to do next.
-10-.
Brad avoided Kalima Tennyson for several months. He was ashamed, without quite knowing why, and was grateful that she said nothing. He wanted to talk to her and ask her more questions about the Bolo, but didn"t quite have the nerve. They"d both turned fourteen and she was pretty by any standards and smarter than he was, and the Bolo thought of her as its commander.
He avoided home, too, as much as possible.
Brad spent a lot of time working with the nursemaid dogs Kalima"s mother had bred. The animals fascinated him. One of the young b.i.t.c.hes which had been born on the ship, before Kalima and her mother had arrived, had littered, giving him a chance to work directly with new pups. They were smart, even at a young age. They matured more slowly than normal dogs, which meant they stayed longer than normal dogs at the age when learning came most easily. By springtime, the pups were barely a third grown and had already learned the coded verbal "language" by which the nursemaid dogs communicated with their human charges.
He found himself spending most of his spare time at the nursery, watching the dogs watch the kids, and discovered that he enjoyed playing with the little ones. Their older brothers and sisters stopped calling him "Pig" and started listening when he told stories about the Deng war and the colonists" last stand on Donner"s World.
His grades in history and biology improved dramatically.
His "dad" still hit him regularly, but Brad found ways to avoid home most hours of the day.
Spring had melted gloriously into early summer, leaving gra.s.s knee-deep in the wide, crater-scarred valley, when Kalima appeared at the nursery.
"Bradley?"
He glanced up, surprised to hear her voice.
"Yeah?"
"Uh . . . Can we talk?"
"Sure." He retrieved the ball with which he"d been playing catch and tossed it over to little Joey Martin, then said to Ganesha, "Gotta go. Your turn to play fetch."
The dog panted happily and chased down the ball.
"What"s up?"
She didn"t answer, just led him a roundabout trip through the woods behind town, over the ridge that separated the new colony from the ruined one, and headed for the Bolo.
"Kalima?"
"I started to think you"d never ask to see inside him. So I thought I"d offer again."
"Really? Are you serious?"
She glanced over her shoulder. "I never joke about Unit Six Seven Zero GWN."
He hurried to catch up. "Thanks. I mean it."
They walked in silence for a few minutes, toward the broken wall which had nearly killed them.
"I heard some of your stories about him," she said at length.
He flushed and stared at the ground. "I did some reading."
"I know. You"re good. The little ones really love it. I liked listening, too."
Brad couldn"t remember the last time someone had told him he was good at anything. And Kalima had liked something he did. His whole face went hot, clear down into his neck.
They arrived at the shattered gate and stood gazing up at the Bolo for a moment.
"He"s bigger than I remembered."
She looked over at him. "You didn"t come back out?"
He ducked his head. "You said he wouldn"t know me. I ain"t stupid, Kalima."
"Didn"t say you were. C"mere." She grabbed his hand and dragged him closer. "Unit Six Seven Zero GWN, this is Bradley Dault. He is my friend."
The huge h.e.l.lbore guns shifted. Brad wanted to break and run, but held his ground. The guns circled, lifted two degrees, then halted.
"That"s his salute," Kalima whispered.
"Oh. Uh . . ."
He saluted awkwardly, after disengaging his hand from Kalima"s grip. "Bradley Dault, sir. Pleased to meet you. And, uh, thanks for saving my life, you know, last winter."
"Oxygen."
All clear.
"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."
"Unit Six Seven Zero GWN, I"m bringing Brad aboard for observation."
"Hold. Hold."
Brad grinned. "Thank you, sir!"
They climbed, Kalima going first. The hatch didn"t creak when she opened it.
"You"ve been working on him."
She nodded. "Every chance I get. I read everything I can find. Dad left me some stuff and the library"s got a little, but most of the stuff I really need"s cla.s.sified. He was hurt pretty bad. I can"t fix everything."
He understood the frustration in her voice. He wanted, very badly, to see this machine at its full fighting potential.
Then they climbed into the turret and he forgot everything else. "Wow!"
The inside of the Bolo wasn"t anything like he"d imagined. He"d thought it would be a vast s.p.a.ce, filled with glowing lights, ranks and banks of instruments. The interior was crowded, with scant room for a pa.s.senger in a small compartment in the center, under the turret. Crawl s.p.a.ces snaked off to allow maintenance access. Battle damage was visible even this deep inside the Bolo, in the form of blackened boards, tangled wires and conduit cables, cracked and darkened crystal components. Daylight flickered through one crawls.p.a.ce, where something had blown completely through the armor.
"Whew! He really got ripped apart, didn"t he? No wonder they gave him that medal."
Kalima had hunkered down in one of the crawl s.p.a.ces, leaving the observer"s chair for him.
"Unit Six Seven Zero GWN, activate observation screens."
Two dull panels flickered, then a view of the valley sprang up in full color on one. Ranges and other esoteric data he didn"t understand appeared along the edges of the screen. The other view was aft, into the battered compound the Bolo had tried to defend.
"Am I asleep?" Bradley wondered aloud. "This has gotta be a really great dream."
Kalima just grinned. "That"s how I felt, first time I got a look around inside."
"I"m scared to touch anything," he admitted with a rueful grin.
She just nodded. "Me, too. I study like crazy, then ask him all the questions I can think, and try to figure the answers ten different ways before I touch anything. I don"t want those h.e.l.lbore guns to discharge and I don"t want to fry any more of his psychotronic circuits."
"Is there any way to get him talking right again?"
She looked unhappy. "Let me show you."
He got down on hands and knees and followed her toward the distant light pouring through the hull.
"See that?"