My mandate is clear, in one point, however. I am to destroy enemy installations wherever I find them. I pulse infinite repeaters, blowing apart the artillery that stands silent guard over the now-breached Gap. Before the pieces have spun away to strike the ground, I move forward again, easing my bulk through the fender-scraping turn that leads into the main gorge of Klameth Canyon. I squeeze through the narrows, crushing the highway bridge that crosses the Adero River to gain the main canyon floor, then halt.
Not because I need to assess battlefield terrain. I know what Klameth Canyon looks like and I am “viewing” it through the dual system of recorded terrain from the Deng War correlated to the IR images from my real-time sensors. That is not why I come to a complete, stunned halt. No one is shooting at me, because there is no one alive to do the shooting.
I do not count the seconds that tick past. I am too appalled to count seconds. I am too busy trying to count bodies. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. The canyon floor is carpeted with them. My weapons systems twitch in a sudden, involuntary spasm that originates from that deep, murky tangle of experience data recorded during my long service to the Brigade. Every gun barrel on my warhull jumps twenty centimeters, an eerie sensation reminiscent of descriptions I have read of epileptic seizures. I do not know why my weapons twitched uncontrollably. I know only that my enemy lies dead before me and that I have absolutely no idea why. Nor do I understand what I am doing here, since the rebellion is effectively over.
On the heels of this thought, I receive another communique from Sar Gremian.
“You stopped. Why?”
“There is no point in continuing. The rebellion is over. The enemy is dead.”
“The hell it is. Don’t let all those dead criminals fool you. The commodore’s in there somewhere, alive and devious, playing dead to lure you into his gun sights. We know he imported antivirals and biochem suits from Vishnu’s weapons labs. He’s got artillery plastered all over that canyon, manned by crews with plenty of protective gear. This rebellion is far from over. You are going to end it, my friend. So get the hell in there and end it.”
I do not move. “What did you use to kill the civilians in this canyon?”
“Civilians?” A cold laugh — ice cold — runs through my audio processors like needle-sharp spears. “There aren’t any civilians in that canyon. That’s a war zone, Bolo. The Joint Assembly passed the legislation declaring it and President Santorini signed it. Anyone loyal to the government was ordered to leave a week ago. Anybody still in that canyon is a rebel, a terrorist, and a condemned traitor.”
I find it difficult to believe that young children and infants are guilty of committing terrorist acts, yet I see heat signatures with distinct, sharply defined outlines that correspond to the correct size and shape for human toddlers and infants. Children this young are not criminals. Jefferson’s assemblymen may draft as many pieces of paper as they like and Vittori Santorini may sign them to his heart’s content, but a piece of paper declaring that the sun is purple because they find it convenient to insist that it is purple does not, in fact, make the sun purple.
The sun is what it is and no decrees — legal or otherwise — will alter it into something else. These children are what they are and no mere edict declaring them to be terrorists can alter the fact they are physically incapable of doing the physical acts necessary to be classified as a terrorist.
These thoughts send tendrils of alarm racing through my psychotronic neural net. These are not safe thoughts. I fear the destabilizing effect such thoughts have on my decision-making capabilities. This would not be an opportune moment for the Resartus Protocol to kick in, depriving me of any independent action. There is no one on Jefferson qualified to assume total command of a Bolo Mark XX. I cannot allow my processors to go unstable enough to invoke the Protocol. But a faint electronic ghost whispers along the wires and circuits and crystal matrices of my self-awareness synapses, repeating a faint echo that never quite fades away into silence: “Stars are not purple,” that voice whispers, “and infants are not terrorists…”
Sar Gremian has not yet answered my main question. I reiterate my query. “What did you use to kill the people in this canyon?”
“I don’t see how that’s any concern of yours. They’re dead. You’re not. You ought to be happy. You can do your job without having to worry about half a million terrorists trying to kill you.”
“Wind dispersal patterns will carry the substance far beyond the confines of these canyon walls. Civilians in other communities — loyal towns as well as Granger-held canyons — are at lethal risk. My mission is to defend this world. If you have released something that threatens the survival of citizens loyal to the government, you have compromised my mission. This is critical need-to-know data.”
“You’re getting mighty big for your britches,” Sar Gremian snarls. “You’ll be told what you need to be told. Get in there, curse you, and get busy finding and killing Grangers.”
I do not budge from my position. “I will continue my mission when I have received the mission-critical information I require. If the information is not provided, I will remain where I am.”
Sar Gremian’s vocabulary of obscenities is impressive. When he has finished swearing, he speaks in a flat, angry tone. “All right, you mule-headed, steel-brained jackass. There’s no danger to towns downwind because the shit we released has an effective duration of only forty-five minutes. It’s a paralytic agent, gengineered from a virus we bought from a black-market lab on Shiva. We paid a shitload of money for it, to get something that would kill quickly and degrade fast. The virus invades the mucous membranes and lungs and tells the nervous system to stop working long enough to cause catastrophic failure of the autonomic nervous system. The stuff can’t reproduce and it’s gengineered to die exactly forty-five minutes after exposure to oxygen. There are no towns close enough to Klameth Canyon for the live virus to reach and still be lethal. It’s safe, easy to use, and damned effective. Does that answer your goddamned question?”
I cannot argue with its effectiveness, given the carnage that lies ahead of me. As for the rest of it, I will have to take it on faith, since I have no way to prove or disprove it. I therefore move cautiously forward. The silence in the canyon is eerie. Motion sensors detect the movement of wind through vegetation, which shows up as dark masses against the hot glow of sun-warmed stone. Trees and crops sway gently, providing the only motion I am able to discern. Even the pastures are still and silent, their four-footed occupants lying sprawled as haphazardly as the humans who once tended them.
With Klameth Canyon’s herds lying dead and no one available to harvest the crops in these fields, hunger will bite deeply during the coming winter. I do not believe POPPA’s leadership has reckoned the full cost of what they have wrought here, today. Even after one hundred twenty years in service to humanity, I still do not understand humans, let alone the human political mind.
I traverse the first long stretch of the canyon floor, passing nothing but dead refugees, dead fields, and dead farmyards. Power emissions are normal, with various household appliances and farm equipment giving off their typical power signatures. I detect no sign of communications equipment of the kind used by guerilla forces and find no trace of heavy artillery, with its unique and unmistakable power signature.