Bolos: The Triumphant Part 4

"Barkley, you ready for that test?" Ish snapped to hide the emotion gripping him.

"Yeah." The rail-thin tech was staring at another of the bodies, clearly fighting his own battle with shock and grief. Barkley and DeVries had worked together aboard the Bonaventure. Barkley cleared his throat roughly; then stepped gingerly around the remains of Doug Hart and bent over Red's Action/Command center console. Barkley looked thin and pale inside the bulk of the enviro-suit designed to protect from hard radiation Red had absorbed; but after the first shock of seeing his friend, he settled down, apparently more than competent. He ran a few diagnostics with his equipment. "Huh."

"What?"

"She ain't got no memory, for one thing," he said, sending Ish's hopes crashing. "Search me if I know why not. It's been wiped clean's a whistle right back to her commissioning, looks like."

No memory at all? How could that have happened? Why would it have been done?

"I don't understand," he muttered aloud.

The tech moved his equipment to another connection. Thinly veiled impatience creased his brow through his faceplate. "Don't understand what? She's been brain wiped. What's hard to understand about that?"

That's grief talking, not insubordination . . .

"Not what. Why." Ish gestured a little helplessly. "Battle damage wouldn't have wiped her whole memory. Which means someone had to do it. And I knew this crew. Hart wouldn't have done this to Red, not unless she were about to be captured. And she wasn't. That much, we do know. She made it to the pickup point without any Deng escorts. Banjo certainly wouldn't have done this. DeVries, maybe . . ."

Guilt tugged at him. DeVries wouldn't have done something like this, either, for all he'd been aboard Red only a few days. Ish had known DeVries, too, had personally ordered Bonaventure's engineer into this mission. It never grew easier, ordering men into battle, often knowing they weren't likely to come back. But DeVries should've come back. Red and her whole crew should've come back. What had happened to cause one of these three men--either Willum DeVries or Doug Hart or Aduwa "Banjo" Banjul--to destroy Red's memory?

The positions of the bodies gave no clue. First Lieutenant Banjul had left the Command Compartment. Banjo had been flung against a bulkhead in crew quarters opposite a terrible rent in the Bolo's hull. Burns and lacerations across his face and upper torso might have been inflicted before death or might have contributed to it.

DeVries slumped on the deckplates near the head. Red had tongue-tilted down the door in its emergency-medical-station configuration. DeVries either hadn't been able to crawl all the way to the makeshift "bed" or he'd been thrown clear. The young engineer was dead of radiation poisoning. Ish's enviro-suit protected him from the still-lethal dosages inside the Bolo's breached hull. DeVries had been badly injured even before receiving the lethal dose of radiation which had ultimately killed him. Ish checked Red's medications log. It indicated a final, ma.s.sive dose of painkillers administered to the dying engineer. Ish's throat tightened. So like Red, to try and ease him through it.

As for Marine Captain Doug Hart . . .

One of Ish's closest friends lay in a tangle of broken bones and the remains of his command chair. He'd taken a direct hit from whatever had breached the hull up here. He hadn't had a chance. None of the Command Team had. But the question remained: why had Red engaged the enemy at all, charging against a vastly superior force when she knew it was hopeless?

And why had Doug Hart allowed what amounted to suicide?

"Dammit, I knew Red. I don't care what FleetCom says. She wasn't crazy!"

The technician's glance begged to disagree. Ish had to turn away. Red's behavior certainly argued otherwise. But he couldn't bring himself to admit it, not after what he and Red had been through together.

"Yeah," the tech muttered, "this whole operation's a stinking louse. But . . . whoever did it, they missed the backup mission record."

The sounds coming from beneath the console made him wince. Broken connections dangled under the main Action/Command center console, causing another inward flinch. Ish had commanded a lot of Bolos, had relinquished command of Red only a year previously, taking a commission in s.p.a.ce Force that would give him options commanding Red couldn't. He'd taken a lot of backup mission record modules out of Bolos, both combat and special units. Designed to provide a duplicate of the Bolo's current mission records should anything happen to the Bolo's main data banks during battle, the modules had occasionally proven to be of incalculable worth. Ish knew they had to have that backup mission module.

But the dangling connections and broken seals were obscene. The tech was a butcher, gutting Red's mind.

Or what the real butcher had left of it.

The rail-thin technician emerged holding a dense, heavy-looking casing. "Maybe this'll explain why she went starkers."

Ish didn't respond. He couldn't. He just accepted the module from the suited technician. It was heavier than it looked, which was very. Ish--cursing his shakiness--nearly dropped it. Whatever had really happened during those last few minutes of battle, it would be recorded in this module. Without the data it contained, Red would never remember . . .

. . . anything.

The last eight years were gone, as it was.

Red didn't remember him. Would never remember him.

The pain that caused ran so deep he couldn't get his breath for a moment. Maybe he could run a Restore. . . . Ish seriously doubted s.p.a.ce Force Command would authorize anyone to run a Restore command from any of Red's backup mission modules to reintegrate missing memory data. She was so badly damaged she would be retired anyway, and now there was the serious question of inadvertently reinstalling whatever had caused her to go mad.

The cold hollow in his belly expanded.

"Ought'a be interesting, huh?" the technician was saying as he put away tools. "Never seen a Bolo go starkers before. Not like this. They say the first Mark XX went and committed suicide on 'em; but, h.e.l.l, at least it had a reason. Doing its duty, upholding the honor of the Brigade and all. That's what they said, anyway. But this little baby, she's just starkers, no explanation, nuthin'. . . ."

Ish had to restrain the impulse to crack the tech's protective suit to hard radiation. He settled for a muttered, "Finish up, will you?"

The technician shrugged. "They'll have to sc.r.a.p 'er. Always did wonder if these Mark XXI Special units would be stable under stress. Too much oddball programming. She just wasn't designed right. Not her fault; but, hey, she's nuts. You gonna fry her Action/Command center now?"

Red would be listening to every word they said, trying to understand what had happened to her. She'd be confused, hurt . . .

And irrational?

Ish was listening, too, to the Bolo's ragged internal sounds. The noise was eerily like metallic keening. It came and went at random. "That's not my decision," he finally said. "I suppose it will depend on what we discover in the backup mission record."

The technician shrugged inside his suit. "Well, whatever. You ought'a get back with this here box. I'll leave her to you."

The man departed noisily, banging his heavy tool kit against Red's internal support frame. Ish experienced an irrational impulse of his own, to order Red to open fire on the unfeeling b.a.s.t.a.r.d; then remembered her sole gun was inoperative. He flexed the fingers of one gloved hand and forced himself to breathe steadily. He couldn't afford to let personal feelings--regardless of their intensity--sway him. But that tech had no idea how close . . .

Ish stared emptily across the rugged, broken terrain that characterized this whole, miserable mining pit of a world. Then dropped his gaze to the dense module in his hands. It wasn't black, exactly. More a purple-black, the color of iodine. Flintsteel, same as the Bolo's hull. Given its weight, the module's hull was thicker than Red's.

Ish shut his eyes, trying not to think about what his next duty might well be. He never had blamed Red, not during all the long months since he'd given up command. Red had only been doing her duty, in the kindest way she could find to do it. Now she didn't even remember him.

"Why'd you do it, Red?" he whispered.

The eerie, intermittent keening halted. The Bolo's voice, mechanical yet definitely female, said, "Unit LRH-1313, awaiting orders. Please elaborate your question."

Her apple-pie and warm-brownies personality was gone. What had replaced it was the cold, impersonal sound of a newly commissioned machine, devoid of a.s.sociated memories, of everything that made her . . .

Red.

"Never mind."

He wasn't even certain which mystery he'd meant: the reason behind her decision a year previously or her far more serious behavior today. Was today his fault? He should have realized a year ago that her personality programming was unstable. If he'd taken steps to correct it . . .

His career might have ended, but Red might not have run mad. Ish tightened his hand around the dense module. All the answers had to be locked away in this thing. He cleared his throat and decided to make sure she still remembered he was her Commander before trying to dismount. No telling, with her internal circuitry so scrambled, what she might think or do. He didn't want Red to kill him.

"Unit LRH-1313, respond to code Baked Bread."

The disconcerting, intermittent keening halted once again. "Yes, Commander Matsuro? I have already responded to that code. Do you have further orders?"

Ish cleared his throat. "Retire for depot maintenance, vector 035, range 40.5 kilometers."

"Understood, Commander. Will you accompany me?"

He had to glance away from her forward internal sensors. "No, I won't be coming with you. I'll . . . join you later, at the depot."

"Understood, Commander."

He swung down and stepped well to starboard, stumbling a little again on uneven ground. The Bolo turned and rumbled obediently in the a.s.signed direction. Rumbled only because LRH's treads were damaged and her hull was breached near her pivoting tread-control ratchets. The jagged hole allowed sound to leak out like water from a dying jellyfish. Mark XXI Special units normally operated so quietly, they could sneak up on a sleeping cat. Red had excelled at the game, which explained the battle honors welded to her low-slung, data-gathering turret.

The only reason she was able to move at all was that her wide-tired, independent-drive wheels were still functional. Conceptual descendants of the independent-drive wheels on the early twentieth-century Christie T-3 tank, which was in turn developed into the famous Soviet T-34 tank of that same century, they permitted a tracked vehicle to continue moving even if it lost its treads to battle damage. A tracked vehicle without treads or independent-drive wheels was little more than an armored pillbox. For an intelligence-gathering Bolo without significant armor, those wheels were doubly critical. Without them, an LRH unit wouldn't have been an armored pillbox, it would've been a sitting duck.

Red's wheels had been damaged, too, but they still functioned. She was certainly headed straight toward maintenance as ordered. Not an irrational peep out of her since his arrival, except for that odd keening--which might just as easily have been battle damage to instrumentation somewhere inside her. He wondered if she was even fully aware of what they'd removed.

He glanced at Red's retreating hull, at the data module.

Destroying Red would feel entirely too much like murder.

3.

I have been ordered to return to depot for much-needed maintenance. Despite severe damage to my sensors, I am able to perform a scan of extremely broken terrain which lies between my current position and the coordinates I have been given. At top cruising speed I could arrive in twenty-two minutes. I am not currently capable of top cruising speed. Even though external sensors and internal diagnostics tell me I am badly in need of maintenance, I do not choose even the top speed of which I am currently capable.

Instead, I delay. I have not been ordered to proceed with haste. I do not feel like haste. I am uncertain what I feel, a condition which triggers internal diagnostic alarms in my ego-gestalt circuitry. I am a Bolo Mark XXI Model I (Special) unit. I have been designed for steadfast emotional stability. Yet what has transpired fills my entire psychotronic awareness network with unease.

Something is seriously wrong with my memory. I retain basic orientation data. My primary personality and self-image files are intact. All else is vacant. My memory begins with reception of the transmitted code which my current Commander sent before coming aboard. This occurred 11.857 minutes ago. I can discover no cause for this condition, despite what appears to be serious battle damage to my hull.

This damage puzzles and alarms me. I am not a combat unit. I am not designed for it. I carry neither armor nor armaments appropriate to heavy combat. I am strongly motivated to seek an explanation from my Commander, for my basic orientation data urges me to confide my concerns to him. Yet when given the chance, I have held silent. Nor do I choose to call him now on my Command Link. He has discussed destroying me for a crime--an insanity--which I do not recall having committed.

I do not wish to die. Survival is a deeply imprinted part of my basic personality-gestalt circuitry. Nor do I wish to suffer madness. This, too, is something I fear, something which is an integral part of my personality gestalt. I am a stable, emotionally reliable Light Reconnaissance Headquarters unit, charged with the well-being and security of my Command and Dismount Teams. This is my function.

My Commander's reluctance to accompany me to the maintenance depot weighs heavily upon me. I perform a deep probe of my personality-integration circuits and find no sign of damage which would explain my Commander's or the technician's accusations.

I am not mad.

Am I?

Do the mad know they are afflicted?

This is not a question I am currently capable of answering. I turn my attention to what I can answer. My basic orientation data reveals that I would not have been forwarded into a battlefield intelligence gathering mission without a crew. Mark XXI Model I (Special) units do not function independently. Mark XXI combat units maintain remote contact with a human commander and occasionally carry a pa.s.senger, but Mark XXI Model I (Special) units are subordinate to an on-board commander and are designed to house eight additional crewmembers at full battle readiness. I can discover no trace in my on-board files of having been a.s.signed a full intelligence-gathering crew for this or any other mission.

This is in direct conflict with what my internal sensors reveal. Three men have died inside me. They remain in my Command and Crew Compartments. The damage to their bodies is severe. While my interior armatures are capable of inflicting the kind of traumatic damage required to open a human body cavity--I am rated for emergency surgery--I possess no internal machinery capable of reaching them in their current positions. It seems reasonable to a.s.sume that I did not kill these men.

That relief is overridden, however, by the sense of grief such deaths trigger in my Responsibility circuits. I have been programmed to accept full responsibility for the safety and well-being of those humans authorized to enter my Crew and Command Compartments. If someone has died, then it is because I have failed in my duty.

I grieve. For whom, I do not know. But I am determined to learn the ident.i.ty of these lost children. I scan them. They wear proper uniforms and identification transponders. Scanning the transponders gives me three names: Willum DeVries, whose transponder records that he is a ship's engineer from the Bonaventure Royale. DeVries lies near the emergency medical station in my Crew Compartment. Aduwa Banjul, whose transponder identifies him as a.s.sistant Mission Commander a.s.signed to LRH-1313, lies near the bulkhead door between my Command and Crew Compartments, against my port hull. Banjul's transponder signal removes all doubt. This man is part of my crew. Was part of my crew.

Douglas Hart's death brings even sharper grief. His transponder identifies him as my former Mission Commander. My Command Team--at least two-thirds of it--has died. I do not know where my own engineer might be or why a Navy ship's engineer might have taken his place. Nor do I know where my missing Dismount Teams One and Two might be. Experience data gathered since awakening strongly suggests they have been killed.

I leave behind the level, burn-scarred plateau which is the place my memory begins and enter a narrow defile. A nineteen point one-one-nine meter cliff rises to my right, within two degrees of slope from perfect vertical. A canyon 391.592 meters deep plunges away to my left. I do not know which world I have awakened on. The surface is extremely rugged. Beyond the far lip of the canyon, 0.82 kilometers away, my damaged sensors detect another steep cliff. Due to its presence, my line-of-sight data-gathering ability is restricted to a mere 0.82 kilometers. In this terrain, even with perfectly functioning sensors, I would be virtually blind. I long for the reports of a Dismount Team to advise me what lies beyond the canyon, above the cliff, past this narrow corridor.

But the defile is on a direct bearing for the maintenance depot. It is the only pa.s.sage I detect which will accomplish the order I have been given to report for maintenance. I pause at the entrance and scan as best I am able. I detect no ambush. The cliff appears stable. I move forward with a clearance of 0.621 meters to starboard and 1.176 meters to port. I edge closer to the cliff, distrusting the canyon lip. I am extremely lightweight for a Bolo unit--fifty-four thousand kilograms without crew or supplies--but I am of sufficient ma.s.s to break a crumbling edge. Maybe, with luck, a Bolo Mark XXI combat unit, three hundred times my ma.s.s with considerably more effective armor, could survive a fall into that canyon. But not an LRH unit.

I am practical. I move as close to the cliff as my fender and treads will allow and turn the full attention of all operative port-side sensors to monitoring the rock at the lip of the canyon. I turn the rest of my attention to study the difficulty in which I find myself.

A full damage-a.s.sessment probe locates extensive injury to my once-beautiful hull. I discover serious damage to my treads. My external armatures are inoperative, my long-range sensor array is missing, and my lightweight infinite repeater is no longer functional. External sensors along my prow and starboard side are inoperative. A single remaining sensor atop my prow allows me forward vision which is impaired in several spectra. Rear sensors are completely functional. This is disturbing. In the event of even accidental contact with the Enemy, I am programmed to retreat with all speed, extricating my Dismount Teams and safeguarding the data they have gathered. Had I followed my programming correctly, the Enemy should have damaged my rear sensors most heavily.

I have suffered internal injury, as well, to my tread-control center and many non-critical fixtures. Circuits in my psychotronic net have experienced overload consistent with combat damage of the type I have suffered. It is imperative that I learn when and how I was damaged. A technician, working with full permission of my Commander, has removed a module from me. My basic configuration data reveals that this was a backup mission record module. Six point zero-seven seconds after awakening on the plateau where my Commander found me, I attempted to probe the contents of this module; but was unable to access it as I am configured for write-only mode to this module. I am unsure that I should have permitted this module's removal. If the data incriminating me is held in that module, perhaps destruction would have been the wiser choice; yet nothing I possess on board would have been capable of penetrating the module's hull.

The technician who removed it spoke of destroying my Action/Command center. It is both noteworthy and frightening that my Commander did not defend me. Why I should be condemned, without knowing even the charges against me, becomes an intolerable mystery within 0.003 seconds.

I must know why I am to die.

My external damage a.s.sessment reveals a further disquieting fact. Welded to my hull are service decorations from four different campaigns. Extensive time would be required for this many campaigns, on worlds as widely separated as my on-board star charts reveal these four to be. Yet my short-term memory contains data from only 11.998 minutes. I retain stored memories of my original self-awakening and my commissioning ceremony, as well as basic programming instructions and orientation data; but that is all.

If I have fallen to the Enemy, then I have been rescued again, for my Commander has given me the properly coded private pa.s.sword which only my legitimate Commander may know; yet where I have been during the unknown number of years required to acc.u.mulate my service citations and what I have experienced during that time, I am at a loss to determine. My decorations indicate that I have served with distinction. This is pleasing, but only for 0.006 seconds. Before I can determine why I am thought mad enough to warrant probable execution, I must first discover who I really am.

I develop an immediate mission plan to ensure my continued survival: Priority one: discover who I have become. I have programs which permit me to develop a personality, but I do not seem to have one. Not one sufficiently complex for the time lapse which must have occurred since my commissioning, anyway.

Priority two: discover what has transpired since the day of my commissioning as an intelligence-gathering unit.

Priority three: discover why I have been accused of such a serious charge as madness.

Priority four: discover a way to convince my new Commander that I am worthy of continued service.

Having established a roughly sketched mission plan, I return part of my attention to my surroundings. One hundred twenty seconds have elapsed since I received the order to report for maintenance. The depot is still 40.5 kilometers away. At my current speed of seven kilometers per hour, I have only five hours and forty-two minutes in which to fully execute my mission plan and achieve each of its priority tasks. Someone has programmed an extreme pragmatism into my ego-gestalt circuits: I believe my task to be impossible.

Yet programmed deeply into my psychotronic circuitry is a stubbornness which I now experience. Mark XXI Model I (Special) units do not abandon difficult tasks. The survival of Command and Dismount Teams depends on my dogged tenacity to carry on under difficult conditions. I will shame neither myself nor the Dinochrome Brigade by dying with the stain of madness on my record. Somehow, I will succeed. How, I do not know. But I must.

Therefore, I will.

-II-.

1.

Warrant Officer Willum Sanghurst DeVries was scared.

His mouth was dry as bone and his palms were so slick he kept losing his grip on the harness. He didn't like being strapped into place like a sack of spare parts. I'm a ship's engineer, not a . . . What was he, exactly, besides a green-around-the-gills coward and several kinds of fool? Not a battle technician, that was for sure. More like a stop-gap replacement for a mission already in trouble.

Just our luck that d.a.m.ned Deng sentry ship caught us dropping out of FTL. It had fired two shots before Bonaventure's guns had destroyed it. But those two shots had counted. He didn't know what their casualties had been-high, he was guessing, given the damage Bonny had sustained. Willum wondered if the other LRH unit's crew had sustained losses, too. Captain Matsuro hadn't told him, if it had. He wanted to ask, but didn't want to sound any greener or scareder than he already did.

Why'd I ever agree to serve on a drop ship? Every man who served on one was required to train as replacement crew for whatever was being dropped. And since Bonaventure Royale's job was dropping LRH intel-teams onto occupied worlds, his training had led him to this: replacing a dead engineer on a Mark XXI Special Unit headed into potentially the worst battle of the whole d.a.m.ned war. Common sense and a healthy dollop of terror told him to stick to the Bonaventure Royale like a tick to a dog's back.

You're no Marine, Willum told himself for the millionth time. Yeah, well, you weren't hired to be one for this drop, either, so quit wetting yourself. Engineering you know. And you'll be staying inside the Mark XXI. . . .

Trouble was, that scared him too. Willum was a ship's engineer, accustomed to interacting with and maintaining FTL ships and their psychotronic systems. He'd studied Bolo configurations, enough to be familiar with their general systems; but he wasn't a specialist and he'd never really believed it would come down to this. Confident in his ship's ability to avoid trouble coming out of FTL, Willum DeVries had sloughed off. It didn't matter that Bonny'd destroyed that Deng sentry; the damage was done, the Bolo crew had lost two men, and here he was, harnessed for drop after a scant three-minute warning to get his terrified backside aboard.

Willum was afraid the whole crew might pay the price for his carelessness. He didn't think he could handle that. Nor was he psychologically prepared to get as close to dirtside battle as a Mark XXI's crew inevitably went. Willum had never run from a fair fight, but the Deng had never heard of fighting fair. And n.o.body was nice to an enemy spy. Maybe that was another reason his skin was crawling.