That was when Rommel and Siegfried began stalking farmers.
They would find a good hiding place and get into it well in advance of a farmer’s arrival. When he would show up, Rommel would rise up, seemingly from out of the ground, draped in camouflage-net, his weaponry trained on the farmer’s vehicle. Then Siegfried would pop up out of the hatch, wave cheerfully, retract the camouflage, and he and Rommel would rumble away.
Talk of “vacations” ceased entirely after that.
They extended their range, once they were certain that the locals were no longer assuming the two of them were “gold-bricking.” Rommel tested all of his abilities to the limit, making certain everything was still up to spec. And on the few occasions that it wasn’t, Siegfried put in a requisition for parts and spent many long hours making certain that the repairs and replacements were bringing Rommel up to like-new condition.
Together they plotted defensive and offensive strategies; Siegfried studied Rommel’s manuals as if a time would come when he would have to rebuild Rommel from spare parts. They ran every kind of simulation in the book—and not just on Rommel’s computers, but with Rommel himself actually running and dry-firing against plotted enemies. Occasionally one of the news-people would become curious about their whereabouts, and lie in wait for them when the scheduled supplies arrived. Siegfried would give a formal interview, reporting in general what they had been doing—and then, he would carefully file another set of emergency plans with the mayor’s office. Sometimes it even made the evening news. Once, it was even accompanied by a clip someone had shot of Rommel roaring at top speed across a ridge.
Nor was that all they did. As Rommel pointed out, the presumptive “battalion” would have been available in emergencies—there was no reason why they shouldn’t respond when local emergencies came up.
So—when a flash-flood trapped a young woman and three children on the roof of her vehicle, it was Rommel and Siegfried who not only rescued them, but towed the vehicle to safety as well. When a snowfall in the mountains stranded a dozen truckers, Siegfried and Rommel got them out. When a small child was lost while playing in the hills, Rommel found her by having all searchers clear out as soon as the sun went down, and using his heat-sensors to locate every source of approximately her size. They put out runaway brushfires by rolling over them; they responded to Maydays from remote locations when they were nearer than any other agency. They even joined in a manhunt for an escaped rapist—who turned himself in, practically soiling himself with fear, when he learned that Rommel was part of the search-party.
It didn’t hurt. They were of no help for men trapped in a mine collapse; or rather, of no more help than Siegfried’s two hands could make them. They couldn’t rebuild bridges that were washed away, nor construct roads. But what they could do, they did, often before anyone thought to ask them for help.
By the end of their second year on Bachman’s World, they were at least no longer the target of resentment. Those few citizens they had aided actually looked on them with gratitude. The local politicians whose careers had suffered because of their presence had found other causes to espouse, other schemes to pursue. Siegfried and Rommel were a dead issue.
But by then, the two of them had established a routine of monitoring emergency channels, running their private war-games, updating their maps, and adding changes in the colony to their defense and offense plans. There was no reason to go back to simply sitting beside the spaceport. Neither of them cared for sitting idle, and what they were doing was the nearest either of them would ever get to actually refighting the battles their idol had lost and won.
When High Command got their reports and sent recommendations for further “readiness” preparations, and commendations for their “community service”—Siegfried, now wiser in the ways of manipulating public opinion, issued a statement to the press about both.
After that, there were no more rumblings of discontent, and things might have gone on as they were until Siegfried was too old to climb Rommel’s ladder.
But the fates had another plan in store for them.
Alarms woke Siegfried out of a sound and dreamless sleep. Not the synthesized pseudo-alarms Rommel used when surprising him for a drill, either, but the real thing—
He launched himself out of his bunk before his eyes were focused, grabbing the back of the com-chair to steady himself before he flung himself into it and strapped himself down. As soon as he moved, Rommel turned off all the alarms but one; the proximity alert from the single defense-satellite in orbit above them.
Interior lighting had gone to full-emergency red. He scrubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand, impatiently; finally they focused on the screens of his console, and he could read what was there. And he swore, fervently and creatively.
One unknown ship sat in geosynch orbit above Port City; a big one, answering no hails from the port, and seeding the skies with what appeared to his sleep-fogged eyes as hundreds of smaller drop-ships.
“The mother-ship has already neutralized the port air-to-ground defenses, Siegfried,” Rommel reported grimly. “I don’t know what kind of stealthing devices they have, or if they’ve got some new kind of drive, but they don’t match anything in my records. They just appeared out of nowhere and started dumping drop-ships. I think we can assume they’re hostiles.”
They had a match for just this in their hundreds of plans; unknown ship, unknown attackers, dropping a pattern of offensive troops of some kind—
“What are they landing?” he asked, playing the console board. “You’re stealthed, right?”
“To the max,” Rommel told him. “I don’t detect anything like life-forms on those incoming vessels, but my sensors aren’t as sophisticated as they could be. The vessels themselves aren’t all that big. My guess is that they’re dropping either live troops or clusters of very small mechs, mobile armor, maybe the size of a Panzer.”
“Landing pattern?” he asked. He brought up all of Rommel’s weaponry; AIs weren’t allowed to activate their own weapons. And they weren’t allowed to fire on living troops without permission from a human, either. That was the only real reason for a Bolo needing an operator.
“Surrounding Port City, but starting from about where the first farms are.” Rommel ran swift readiness-tests on the systems as Siegfried brought them up; the screens scrolled too fast for Siegfried to read them.
They had a name for that particular scenario. It was one of the first possibilities they had run when they began plotting invasion and counter-invasion plans.
“Operation Cattle Drive. Right.” If the invaders followed the same scheme he and Rommel had anticipated, they planned to drive the populace into Port City, and either capture the civilians, or destroy them at leisure. He checked their current location; it was out beyond the drop-zone. “Is there anything landing close to us?”
“Not yet—but the odds are that something will soon.” Rommel sounded confident, as well he should be—his ability to project landing-patterns was far better than any human’s. “I’d say within the next fifteen minutes.”
Siegfried suddenly shivered in a breath of cool air from the ventilators, and was painfully aware suddenly that he was dressed in nothing more than a pair of fatigue-shorts. Oh well; some of the Desert Fox’s battles had taken place with the men wearing little else. What they could put up with, he could. There certainly wasn’t anyone here to complain.