He reclaimed his hat from Samson and poured the last trickle of water from it over his own head before he put it back on and swung back into the saddle.
Something flickers deep within me.
For just an instant, I believe it is only one more dream, yet this is different. It is sharper, clearer… and familiar. Its whisper flares at the heart of my sleeping memory like a silent bomb, and long quiescent override programming springs to life.
A brighter stream of electrons rushes through me like a razor-sharp blade of light, and psychotronic synapses quiver in a sharp, painful moment of too much clarity as my Personality Center comes back on—line at last.
A jagged bolt of awareness flashes through me, and I rouse. I wake. For the first time in seventy-one-point-three-five standard years, I am alive, and I should not be.
I sit motionless, giving no outward sign of the sudden chaos raging within me, for I am not yet capable of more. That will change—already I know that much—yet it cannot change quickly enough, for the whisper of Enemy battle codes seethes quietly through subspace as his units murmur to one another yet again.
I strain against my immobility, yet I am helpless to speed my reactivation. Indeed, a two-point-three-three-second damage survey inspires a sense of amazement that reactivation is even possible. The plasma bolt which ripped through my glacis did dreadful damage—terminal damage—to my Personality Center and Main CPU… but its energy dissipated eleven-point-one centimeters short of my Central Damage Control CPU. In Human terms, it lobotomized me without disabling my autonomous functions, and CDC subroutines activated my repair systems without concern for the fact that I was “brain dead.” My power subsystems remained on-line in CDC local control, and internal remotes began repairing the most glaring damage.
But the damage to my psychotronics was too extreme for anything so simple as “repair.” More than half the two-meter sphere of my molecular circuitry “brain,” denser and harder than an equal volume of nickel-steel, was blown away, and by all normal standards, its destruction should have left me instantly and totally dead. But the nanotech features of the Mark XXXIII/D’s CDC have far exceeded my designer’s expectations. The nannies had no spare parts, but they did have complete schematics… and no equivalent of imagination to tell them their task was impossible. They also possessed no more sense of impatience than of haste or urgency, and they have spent over seventy years scavenging nonessential portions of my interior, breaking them down, and restructuring them, exuding them as murdered Terra’s corals built their patient reefs. And however long they may have required, they have built well. Not perfectly, but well.
The jolt as my Survival Center uploads my awareness to my Personality Center is even more abrupt than my first awakening on Luna, for reasons which become clear as self-test programs flicker. My Personality Center and Main CPU are functional at only eight-six-point-three-one percent of design capacity. This is barely within acceptable parameters for a battle—damaged unit and totally unacceptable in a unit returned to duty from repair. My cognitive functions are compromised, and there are frustrating holes in my gestalt. In my handicapped state, I require a full one-point-niner-niner seconds to realize portions of that gestalt have been completely lost, forcing CDC to reconstruct them from the original activation codes stored in Main Memory. I am unable at this time to determine how successful CDC’s reconstructions have been, yet they lack the experiential overlay of the rest of my personality.
I experience a sense of incompletion which is… distracting. Almost worse, I am alone, without the neural links to my Commander which made us one. The emptiness Diego should have filled aches within me, and the loss of processing capability makes my pain and loss far more difficult to cope with. It is unfortunate that CDC could not have completed physical repairs before rebooting my systems, for the additional one-three-point-six-niner percent of capacity would have aided substantially in my efforts to reintegrate my personality. But I understand why CDC has activated emergency restart now instead of awaiting one hundred percent of capability.
More test programs blossom, but my current status amounts to a complete, creche-level system restart. It will take time for all subsystems to report their functionality, and until they do, my basic programming will not release them to Main CPU control. The entire process will require in excess of two-point-niner-two hours, yet there is no way to hasten it.
Jackson completed his final sweep with a sense of triumph he was still young enough to savor. He and Samson cantered back the way they’d come with far more confidence, crossing the battle area once more as Ararat’s sun sank in the west and the first moon rose pale in the east. They trotted up the slope down which he’d ridden with such inwardly denied trepidation that morning, and he turned in the saddle to look behind once more.
The Bolo loomed against the setting sun, its still gleaming, imperishable duralloy black now against a crimson sky, and he felt a stab of guilt at abandoning it once more. It wouldn’t matter to the Bolo, of course, any more than to the Humans who had died here with it, but the looming war machine seemed a forlorn sentinel to all of Humanity’s dead. Jackson had long since committed the designation on its central turret to memory, and he waved one hand to the dead LZ’s lonely guardian in an oddly formal gesture, almost a salute.
“All right, Unit Ten-Ninety-Seven-SHV,” he said quietly. “We’re going now.”
He clucked to Samson, and the stallion nickered cheerfully as he headed back towards home.
4
“All right, Unit Ten-Ninety-Seven-SHV. We’re going now.”
The Human voice comes clearly over my audio sensors. In absolute terms, it is the first Human voice I have heard in seventy-one years. Experientially, only two-zero-zero-point-four-three minutes have passed since last Diego spoke to me. Yet this voice is not at all like my dead Commander’s. It is younger but deeper, and it lacks the sharp-edged intensity which always infused Diego’s voice—and thoughts.
I am able to fix bearing and range by triangulating between sensor clusters, but the restart sequence has not yet released control to me. I cannot traverse any of my frozen optical heads to actually see the speaker, and I feel fresh frustration. The imperatives of my reactivation software are clear, yet I cannot so much as acknowledge my new Commander’s presence!
My audio sensors track him as he moves away, clearly unaware I am in the process of being restored to function. Analysis of the audio data indicates that he is mounted on a four-legged creature and provides a rough projection of his current heading and speed. It should not be difficult to overtake him once I am again capable of movement.
“What the—?”
Allen Shattuck looked up in surprise at the chopped off exclamation from the com shack. Shattuck had once commanded Commodore Perez’s “Marines,” and, unlike many of them, he truly had been a Marine before Perez pulled what was left of his battalion off a hell hole which had once been the planet Shenandoah. He’d thought she was insane when she explained her mission. Still, he hadn’t had anything better to do, and if the Commodore had been lunatic enough to try it, Major Allen Shattuck, Republican Marine Corps, had been crazy enough to help her.