"Thank you, sir," the soprano voice said, and Merrit breathed a sigh of relief as the power rifle politely deflected itself from its rock-steady bead on his head. The red warning light below it didn"t go out, nor did the weapon retract into its housing, but he recognized tentative acceptance in its change of aim. Of course, none of that explained how such an early mark of Bolo could be doing all this. It should either have activated and obliterated him upon arrival or waited pa.s.sively for him to activate it. This controlled, self-directed response was totally outside the parameters for a Mark XXIII.
"Query: Have you been a.s.signed as my Commander?" the soprano voice asked, and he nodded.
"I have."
"Identifier command phrase required."
"Leonidas," Merrit replied, and held his breath, then- "Unit Two-Three-Baker-Zero-Zero-Seven-Five NKE of the Line awaiting orders, Commander," the voice said calmly, and the red light on the power rifle went out at last.
- 4 -.
The depot"s main vehicle chamber was a vast, dim cavern, yet for all its size and cool, gently circulating air, Merrit felt almost claustrophobic as he stared up at the first Bolo Mark XXIII he"d ever seen. He"d studied the readouts on the model in preparation for this a.s.signment, but aside from a handful buried in the reserve forces of smaller sectors, the Mark XXIII had been withdrawn from service thirty years before. None of which made the huge war machine any less impressive.
The Mark XXIV and XXV, the only Bolos he"d ever served with, were both at least a thousand tons lighter than this. They were only marginally less heavily armed, yet the molecular circuitry and smaller, more efficient power plants which had come in with the Mark XXIV allowed more firepower to be packed into a less ma.s.sive hull. But Bolo XXIII/B-0075-NKE was far older than they, and measured almost seventy-five meters from its clifflike prow to the bulbous housings of its stern anti-personnel cl.u.s.ters. Its interleaved bogie wheels were five meters in diameter, and the tops of the ma.s.sive, back-to-back turrets for its twin eighty-centimeter h.e.l.lbores towered thirty meters above the fused ceramacrete of the chamber floor.
It was immaculate, like some perfectly preserved memorial from a lost era. The hexagonal scales of its multilayered ceramic antiplasma armor appliques were the mottled green and brown of standard jungle camouflage, though Merrit had always questioned the practicality of applying visual camouflage to fifteen thousand tons of mobile armor and weaponry.
He walked slowly around the huge fighting machine, noting the closed ports for its lateral infinite repeater batteries and thirty-centimeter mortars, the high-speed, multibarrel slug throwers and laser cl.u.s.ters of its close-in anti-missile defenses, and the knifelike blades of its phased radar arrays. Optical pickups swiveled to watch him as he circled it, and he smiled--then stopped dead.
He stepped closer, brow furrowing in perplexity, but the incongruity didn"t go away. According to the readouts he"d studied, the Mark XXIII had nine infinite repeaters in each lateral battery, and so did XXIII/B-0075-NKE. But there was an extra six or seven meters of hull between InfRpt Three and Four. For that matter, the Bolo"s aft track system had three extra bogies, which suggested that it was at least ten or twelve meters longer than it was supposed to be.
He reached out for a handhold and climbed up the hull-mounted rings to the carapace of the missile deck between the twin h.e.l.lbore turrets. He paced it off, placing his feet carefully between the slablike armored hatch covers of the vertical launch missile system, then stopped and scratched his head with a grimace. No doubt about it; XXIII/B-0075-NKE was a good fifteen percent longer than any Mark XXIII should have been. Someone had grafted an extra eleven meters into her hull just forward of her VLS.
"Zero-Zero-Seven-Five?"
"Yes, Commander?" The politely interested soprano voice still seemed totally inappropriate coming from a Bolo, but Merrit had other things to wonder about at the moment.
"Tell me, Zero-Zero-" he began, then paused. "Excuse me. Central has no record of what Major Stavrakas called you, Zero-Zero-Seven-Five."
"I am called "Nike," Commander."
" "Nike," " Merrit murmured. "G.o.ddess of victory. An appropriate name for a Bolo, Nike."
"Thank you, Commander. I have always liked it myself, and I am pleased you approve."
Merrit"s eyebrows rose afresh at the unprompted, very human-sounding remark. A Mark XXIII should have been capable only of previously stored courtesies (outside Battle Reflex Mode, at least), yet he was beginning to suspect what lay behind those responses. It wasn"t possible, of course, but still- "Tell me, Nike, what exact mark of Bolo are you?" he asked.
"I am a Bolo Invincibilis, Mark XXIII, Model B (Experimental), Commander," the soprano voice replied.
"Experimental?" Merrit repeated.
"Affirmative, Commander."
"How experimental?" he prompted tautly.
"I am a prototype." The Bolo sounded calmer than ever beside the tension in his own voice. "As part of the Enhanced Combat Capabilities Program, my Command Center and Personality Integration psychodynamics were fitted with a secondary decision cortex with experimental interfaces and increased heuristic capacity to augment autonomous and discretionary functions."
"A brain box," Merrit whispered. "Dear G.o.d, that must be it. The first brain box ever fitted to a Bolo!" He went to his knees and rested one hand almost reverently on the ma.s.sively armored deck.
"Excuse me, Commander, but the meaning of your last comment is unclear."
"What?" Merrit shook himself, then raised his head and smiled into the nearest optical head. "Sorry, Nike, but I had no idea I"d find this. You"re the "missing link." "
"I fear your meaning continues to elude me, Commander," the Bolo said a bit reproachfully, and Merrit grinned.
"Sorry," he said again, and seated himself on the bracket of a turret-mounted whip antenna. "You see, Nike, before you came along--for that matter, for something like thirty years after you came along, now that I think about it--Bolos were self-aware, but their full autonomous capabilities were available to them only in Battle Mode. They were . . . circ.u.mscribed and restricted. Are you with me so far?"
"Yes, Commander."
"Of course you are!" Merrit chuckled and patted the leviathan"s armored flank. "But that"s because you were the next step, Nike. We knew the first experimental work had been done here in the Ursula Sector just before the Quern Wars, but the Quern got through to Ursula during the First War. They shot up Bolo Central so badly that most of the original research and hardware was destroyed, and then the pressure they put on us deferred the whole program for over thirty years, until after the Third Quern War. We needed more Bolos as fast as we could get them, so the official Mark XXIIIs were simply up-gunned and up-armored Mark XXIIs to simplify series production. But you weren"t, were you? G.o.d! I wonder how your programming differs from what they finally mounted in the Mark XXIV?"
"I fear I can offer no information on that subject, Commander," the Bolo said almost apologetically.
"Don"t worry about it, Nike. I"m sure we can figure it out together once I dig into the depot records. But what I can"t figure out is what you"re doing here? How did you wind up on Santa Cruz?"
"I was deployed directly from Ursula Central."
"I know that, but why?"
"I was selected for extended field test of the new and enhanced systems and software," the soprano voice said. "As such, I was mated with an automated repair and maintenance depot designed to support the test program and further field modifications. Santa Cruz had been selected as the test site well before the planet came under threat from the Quern, for which reason it had been equipped with proper landing field and other support facilities. At the outbreak of hostilities, my deployment was simply expedited. The test program was postponed, and I was placed on immediate active duty under the command of Major Marina Stavrakas, senior project officer for Project Descartes."
"She was the project chief for Descartes?!"
"Affirmative, Commander."
"My G.o.d," Merrit breathed. "They managed to reconstruct maybe twenty percent of the Descartes Team"s original logs after the wars, but they were so badly damaged we never knew who"d headed the team in the first place. She was brilliant, Nike--brilliant! And she ended up lost and forgotten on a farming planet in the middle of nowhere." He shook his head again, eyes bright and sparkling with a delight he"d never expected to feel in this a.s.signment, and stroked the Bolo"s armored flank again.
"I wonder what she tucked away inside you? Somehow I can"t quite picture the woman who headed the original Descartes Team not tinkering a bit once she"d figured out Central had "lost" her. She did continue the project on her own, didn"t she?"
"Affirmative, Commander," the Bolo confirmed calmly.
"Well, well, well, well," he murmured. "I can see this a.s.signment is going to be lots more interesting than I expected. And-" a devilish twinkle had replaced the cold weariness in his eyes "-I don"t see any reason to share my discoveries with Central just yet. After all, they knew where you were and forgot about it, so why remind them? They"d just send out rafts of specialists to take you away from me. They might even decide to take you apart to see just how you tick." He shook his head and gave the armored hull another pat. "No, Nike. I think you can just go on being our little secret for a while longer."
-5-.
"Well?"
The silver-haired woman behind the immense desk was perfectly groomed, and her face was the product of the sort of biosculpt available only to people for whom money truly was no object. Unlike the nondescript, somehow subliminally seedy man in the uniform of a Sternenwelt Lines purser, she was perfectly suited to the elegant office, yet there was a coldness in her eyes, and her smile held a honed duralloy edge that beaded the purser"s forehead with sweat.
"I"m sorry, Madam Osterwelt," he said, "but they won"t sell." The woman said nothing, only gazed at him, and he swallowed. "I upped the offer to the maximum authorized amount," he said quickly, "but only three or four of them were even interested."
"You a.s.sured us that your local knowledge of the sector suited you for the job. That we could rely upon your good offices to attain success." The woman"s mild tone was conversational, and he swallowed again, harder.
"I was certain they"d sell, ma"am. We were offering them ten years of income for a successful melon grower!"
"An attractive offer," the woman conceded. "Yet you say they refused it. Why?"
"I-I"m not certain, ma"am," the purser said unhappily.
"They must have given some indication," she pointed out, and he nodded.
"As near as I could figure it out, they simply didn"t want the money, ma"am. I talked to old Esteban, the yokel who runs the field, and he just said his wife, his father, and his grandfather were all buried in the plot behind his house. That . . . that was fairly typical of what all of them said, ma"am."
"Parochialism," the woman said distastefully. She shook her head, and her tongue made a clicking sound against her teeth. "Regretfully typical of these untutored frontier people. I suppose I ought to have expected it--and you should have antic.i.p.ated it as well, Mister Bergren." She c.o.c.ked her head. "I fear you"ve served us less than satisfactorily in this matter."
"I did my best, Madam Osterwelt!"
"I"m sure you did. That"s the problem." The purser wilted before the chill dispa.s.sion of her voice, and she made a weary shooing motion with one hand. "We"ll be in touch, Mister Bergren."
The purser withdrew with obvious relief, and the woman pressed a stud on her desk panel. A discreetly hidden door opened silently within twenty seconds, and an athletic young man walked in.
"Yes, Mother?"
"You were right about Bergren, Gerald. The man"s an utter incompetent."
"Is he?"
"Utterly," she sighed. "How fortunate that no one knows he was acting for us. In fact, I think it would be a very good idea to take steps to ensure that no one ever does know he was representing our interests."
"I"ll see to it," Gerald said, and she smiled at him.
"A good son is a mother"s greatest treasure." She sat back in her chair and folded her hands atop the desk while she gazed across the office at the subtly shifting patterns of a light sculpture. "Still, incompetent as he may be, he has put his finger on the nub of the problem, dear. Farmers can be the most stubborn people in the galaxy, and frontier people cherish such boringly predictable attachments to their land. I"m afraid that if they refused the price we authorized him to offer, it"s unlikely they"ll sell to anyone."
"We"ve had that problem before, Mother."
"I realize we have, dear, but alternative methods can be so . . . messy." She pouted at the light sculpture, then sighed again. "Do you know, the most provoking thing of all is that they don"t even have any idea why we want their little dirt ball."
"No one does yet, Mother. That"s the whole point, isn"t it?"
"Perhaps. But I really think I might not mind as much if I were up against an opposition that understood the rules of the game--and the stakes, of course."
"Mother," the young man said patiently, "their system is the only logical place to become the primary transfer node for the jump points serving three entire sectors. You know it, I know it, and whenever Survey gets around to releasing its new astrography report, every major shipping line will know it. Does it really matter whether they know it or not?"
"Don"t forget who taught you everything you know, dear," his mother replied with an edge of tartness. "It"s really very unbecoming for a son to lecture his mother."
"Was I lecturing?" He smiled and shook his head. "I didn"t mean to. Why don"t we think of it as a case of demonstrating I"ve done my homework?"
"You got that from my genes, not your father"s," she said with a laugh, then shook her own head. "Still, you"re quite right. All that matters is making certain GalCorp owns the only habitable real estate in the system when the time comes. All of it." She brooded at the light sculpture for a moment longer before she shrugged. "Well, if we have to be messy, I suppose that"s all there is to say about it. Who do you think we should put in charge of it?"
"Why not me?"
"But you"ve never done any, um, field work, dear."
"Which doesn"t mean I can"t handle it. Besides, we ought to keep the command loop on this one as secure as possible, and every young man should start at the bottom. It helps him appreciate the big picture when he finally winds up at the top. Not-" he smiled again "-that I have any desire to wind up at the top for many more years, Mother."
"Wisdom beyond your years," she murmured. "Very well, it"s your project. But before you take any steps, be sure you research the situation thoroughly. This sort of thing is seldom as simple as it looks at first glance, and I don"t want my only son to suffer any unpleasant surprises."
"Of course not, Mother. I"ll just pop out to Ursula and spend a few weeks nosing around Sector Central. I"m sure I can find some generous soul with the access to provide the information we need. Who knows? I may even find the ideal people for that messy little job we discussed."
- 6 -.
One week after his arrival on Santa Cruz, Paul Merrit sat back in the comfortable crash couch and rubbed his chin with something very like awe. The screen before him glowed with a complicated schematic any Bolo tech would have given ten years of his life to study, and its design was over fifty years old. Fifty years! Incredible. Working all by herself, with only the resources of a single automated maintenance depot--admittedly a superbly equipped one, but still only a single depot--Marina Stavrakas had developed Nike"s brain box design into one that made the newest Mark XXV"s look clumsy and slow.
He tilted the couch back and crossed his legs. More screens and displays glowed around him, filling Nike"s fighting compartment with a dim, shifting luminescence. There were more of them than there would have been in a more modern--well, recent--Bolo. Nike was a modified Mark XXIII, after all; humans needed broader band data interfaces than any Bolo did, and Nike"s basic technology was eighty years old, without more recent updates in human-machine information management systems. But for all that, the compartment was surprisingly s.p.a.cious. Not only had Nike been the first fully autonomous Bolo, whether anyone knew it or not, but she"d also been the first to incorporate molycirc psychotronics. It was very early generation stuff, considerably bulkier than its more modern equivalents, but Stavrakas had used it in some amazingly innovative ways. What she might have accomplished with the current technologies scarcely bore thinking on.
He turned his couch and keyed another screen to life. A forty-nine-year-old time and date display glowed in one corner, and the white-haired woman who appeared on it sat in the same crash couch Merrit now occupied. She was far frailer and older than the single, poor-quality flatpic of Major Stavrakas he"d found in Central"s surviving records, but her olive-dark eyes were still sharp and alert. He"d already played the recording three times, yet he felt a fresh sense of respect, coupled with a regret that he"d never known her, as she began to speak.
"Since you"re viewing this--whoever you are--" she said with a wry smile, "someone must"ve finally remembered where they parked Nike and me. I suppose I should be a bit put out with the Brigade and the Navy, but from the little Jeremiah and I have picked up over the all-units channels, we a.s.sume the Quern got through to Central." Her smile faded, and her voice-a soprano remarkably similar to Nike"s-darkened. "I further a.s.sume the rest of the Descartes Team must have been lost at the same time, since they all knew where I was."
She cleared her throat and rubbed her temple with one fragile, veined hand.
"Jeremiah"s offered to use the commercial bands to request a relief ship with a proper medical officer, but I turned him down. However much he may grump and grouse, Santa Cruz is his home now. I know he really loves it here, and so do I, I suppose. Besides, from the bits and pieces we can pick up, the Quern are still operating in some force in the sector. Given their native habitat, I doubt they"d care much for Santa Cruz"s climate, and I suppose that"s the main reason they"ve never paid us a visit. On the other hand, they might just change their mind if they started intercepting transmissions from us. Nike"s good, but I"d just as soon not match her against a Quern planetary a.s.sault force. Even if she won, there wouldn"t be very many surviving Santa Cruzans to cheer for her when it was over."
She lowered her hand and smiled again.
"Actually, it hasn"t been a bad life. A little lonely, sometimes. Thanks to all the Descartes security, most of the locals never even knew Nike and I were here, and those who did know seem to have forgotten, but I had dear Jeremiah. He and I accepted long ago that we"d become permanent residents of Santa Cruz, and in addition to him, I had Nike, my work, and plenty of time to spend with all three of them. And, of course," her smile became an impish grin, "no bra.s.s to give me a hard time! Talk about research freedom-!"
She chuckled and leaned back to fold thin arms across her chest.
"Unfortunately, it would appear I"m finally running out of time. My family"s always been p.r.o.ne to heart trouble, and I"ve had my warning. I"ve discussed it with Nike--she tends to worry, and I"ve made it a habit to be honest with her--and she understands the depot doesn"t stock the sort of spares I need. I"ve also made arrangements to put her on Autonomous Stand-By if--when--the time comes. I"m certain someone somewhere else has picked up where the Descartes Team left off. By now there"s probably a whole new generation of autonomous Bolos out there, but now that you"ve come to relieve me, I think you"ll find Nike still has a few surprises of her own. Take care of her, whoever you are. She"s quite a girl. I"m sure my tinkering is going to raise a few eyebrows--Lord knows the desk-jockeys would tear their hair at the mere thought of some of the capabilities I"ve given her! But I"ve never regretted a single facet of her design. She"s unique . . . and she"s been more than just my friend."
The old woman on the screen sighed. Her smile took on a curious blend of sorrow and deep, abiding pride and affection, and her voice was very soft when she spoke again.
"When forty winters shall besiege thy brow, And dig deep trenches in thy beauty"s field, Thy youth"s proud livery, so gazed on now, Will be a tatter"d weed, of small worth held: Then being ask"d where all thy beauty lies, Where all the treasure of thy l.u.s.ty days, To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes, Were an ill-fitting shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty"s use, If thou couldst answer "This fair child of mine Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,"
Proving her beauty by succession thine.
This were to be new made when thou art old, And see thy blood warm when thou feel"st it cold."
She blinked misty eyes and nodded to the pickup, as if she could actually see him, measure him, know the innermost, most secret part of him.
"A tiny misquote, perhaps," she said quietly, "but I think Shakespeare would forgive me. Take good care of my child, whoever you are."
The screen blanked, and Merrit shook his head, "You must have been quite a girl yourself, Major," he murmured.