Having determined the reasons for my success in penetrating the Enemy’s data systems, I turn to analyzing the content of that data as I descend past nine thousand meters.
Rorie Deveraux climbed shakily out of the bunker and leaned against the blast wall as he watched the huge shape settle to earth. Its angularity combined with its sheer size to make it look impossibly ungainly in flight, for it had no lifting surface, no trace of aerodynamic grace. Nothing which looked like that had any business occluding Ararat’s stars, and the silence with which it moved only heightened its implausibility.
But for all that, Rorie knew what it had to be, and he swallowed as it touched down just outside the perimeter fence. It dwarfed the steading structures, bulking against the rising moons like some displaced hillside, and for just an instant, it simply sat there—a black, weapon—bristling shape, edges burnished with the dull gleam of duralloy in the moonlight. He stared helplessly at it, wondering what he was supposed to do next, then jumped despite himself as the Bolo’s running lights snapped on. In a single heartbeat, it went from a featureless black mountain to a jeweled presence, bedecked in glorious red and green and white, like a pre-space cruise ship tied up to a dock in the middle of a prairie somewhere, and Rorie drew a deep breath.
Whatever else, that ancient war machine had just saved his steading and family from annihilation. The least he could do was go out to meet it, and he started the long hike from his bunker to the gate nearest their… visitor.
It took him twenty minutes to reach the gate. They were easily the longest twenty minutes of his entire life, and once he got there, he realized he still had no idea what to do. He shifted from foot to foot, staring up at the Bolo’s armored flank, then froze as fresh light blazed underneath the behemoth. It streamed through the chinks between the inter-leafed bogies to cast vast, distorted shadows over the grass, making him feel more pygmy—like than ever, and something inside shouted for him to run. But he stood his ground, for there was nothing else he could do.
Wind whispered over the war machine’s enormous hull, but there were other sounds, as well, and his head rose as movement caught the corner of his eye. He turned, and his jaw dropped as an utterly familiar young man in worn riding clothes led an equally familiar horse forward out of the shadow of one towering tread.
“Hi, Rorie,” Jackson said quietly. “Look what followed me home.”
I watch my new Commander greet the older Human. Their discussion allows me to deduce a great deal about both my Commander and the newcomer—who I quickly realize is his brother—and I note both their names, as well as their obvious affection for one another. Yet even as I do so, I am simultaneously busy analyzing the data I have obtained from Starquest.
I am struck by the dreadful irony of what has transpired here. I remain ignorant of virtually all data concerning the presence of Humans on Ishark, yet the parallels between their circumstances and those of Commander Tharsk Na-Mahrkan’s “flotilla” are inescapable, and it is obvious from the captured data that Starquest and her consorts can go no further. Whatever the Enemy might prefer to do, he has no choice but to remain here, and he knows it. His initial and immediate move to eliminate the competing Human presence was thus not only logical but inevitable… as is the proper Human response.
The most cursory analysis makes that clear, yet I experience an unfamiliar distaste—almost a hesitation—at facing that response. In part, my confusion (if such is the proper word) stems from the unrepaired physical damage to my Personality Center and Main CPU, yet there is more to it, for the reconstructed portions of my gestalt impel me in conflicting directions. They are repairs, patches on my personality which form pools of calm amid the complex currents of my life experience and memory. They do not “belong” to me, and the raw edges of their newness are like holes in the individual I know myself to be. I see in them the same immaturity I have seen in many Human replacements, for they are unstained by all I have done and experienced, and in their innocence, they see no reason why the logical, militarily sound option for dealing with the Enemy should not be embraced.
Yet those same patches have had another effect, as well. I am no longer the Bolo half of Operation Ragnarok’s Team Shiva. Or, rather, I am no longer solely that Bolo. In reconstructing my gestalt, CDC has reached back beyond Ragnarok, beyond my own first combat mission, beyond even the destruction of Terra, and it has pulled my entire personality with it. Not fully, but significantly. I am no longer part of Team Shiva, for I have lost too much of my experience—based gestalt, yet I retain all of Team Shiva’s memories. In a very real sense, they are now someone else’s memories, but they permit me to see Team Shiva in a way which was impossible for me before my damage, and what I see is madness.
I give no outward sign to my new Commander and his brother, but recollections of horror flicker through me, and the curse of my memory is its perfection. I do not simply “remember” events; I relive them, and I taste again the sick ecstasy as my fire immolates entire cities. There is a deadly allure to that ecstasy, a sense of freedom from responsibility—a justification for bloodshed and butchery. And it is not as if it were all my idea. I am, after all, a machine, designed to obey orders from duly constituted Command Authority even if those orders are in fundamental conflict with the rules of warfare that same Command Authority instilled into me. I tell myself that, for I cannot face any other answer, but the patched portions of my gestalt echo an earlier me not yet stained by massacre and atrocity, one for whom the concepts of Honor and Duty and Loyalty have not yet been poisoned by hatred and vengeance, and that earlier self is appalled by what I have become.
I sense my inner war, the battle between what I know must be done and the images of Melconian mothers and their pups exploding under my fire—between my duty as Humanity’s warrior… and my warrior’s duty to myself. Only the damage to my psychotronics has made the struggle possible, yet that makes it no less real, and nothing in my programming or experience tells me how to resolve it. I cannot resolve it, and so I say nothing, do nothing. I simply stand there, awaiting my new Commander’s orders without advising him in any way, and the shame of my frozen impotence burns within me.
Tharsk Na-Mahrkan looked around the briefing room and saw his own shock in the flattened ears of his senior officers. Three quarters of the flotilla’s assault shuttles had just been wiped away, and none of them knew how it had been done.
They should have. Tharsk’s decision to land over the curve of the planet from the nearest Human settlement had put whatever had happened beyond Starquest’s direct sensor horizon, but they had the telemetry on the original flight leader and his section’s destruction. They knew what sort of weapons had been used—the emissions signature of a Hellbore was utterly distinctive—but they had no idea how those weapons could have been employed so. Starquest’s AI was little help, for it was weary and erratic, its need for overhaul so great Tharsk had ordered it isolated from the general net three years earlier. In its prime, it had been able to identify Human ship types by no more than the ion ghosts of their drive wakes and analyze Human intentions from the tiniest scraps of intercepted com chatter. Now all it could do was tell them almost querulously what they already knew, with no suggestion as to how ground-based weapons could lock onto and destroy twenty-six widely dispersed shuttles flying at twice the speed of sound and less than a hundred meters’ altitude. Tharsk had become accustomed to the creeping senescence of his technology, but the chill it sent through his bones this night was colder than any he had felt since Sunheart’s destruction, and it was hard, hard, to set that chill aside and concentrate on his officers’ words.