Werehunter (anthology)

And afterwards, there would be no evidence any­where to contradict the claim that the civilians had slaughtered each other in some kind of local conflict.

The mechs and the AI itself were from systems he had studied when he first started in this specialty— outmoded even by his standards, but reliable, and when set against farmers with hand-weapons, perfectly adequate.

There was one problem with this kind of setup . . . from the enemy’s standpoint. It was a problem they didn’t know they had.

Yet.

He filled Rommel in on what he had discovered as he raced up the ladder, then slid down the handrails into the command cabin. “Now, here’s the thing—I got the access code to command those mechs with a little fiddling in the AI’s memory. Nice of them to leave in so many manual overrides for me. I reset the command interface freq to one you have, and hardwired it so they shouldn’t be able to change it—”

He jumped into the command chair and strapped in; his hands danced across the keypad, keying in the frequency and the code. Then he saluted the console jauntily. “Congratulations, Herr Rommel,” he said, unable to keep the glee out of his voice. “You are now a Field Marshal.”

“Siegfried!” Yes, there was astonishment in Rommel’s synthesized voice. “You just gave me command of an armored mobile strike force!”

“I certainly did. And I freed your command circuits so that you can run them without waiting for my orders to do something.” Siegfried couldn’t help grinning. “After all, you’re not going against living troops, you’re going to be attacking AIs and mechs. The next AI might not be so easy to take over, but if you’re running in the middle of a swarm of ‘friendlies,’ you might not be suspected. And when we knock out that one, we’ll take over again. I’ll even put the next bunch on a different command freq so you can command them separately. Sooner or later they’ll figure out what we’re doing, but by then I hope we’ll have at least an equal force under our command.”

“This is good, Siegfried!”

“You bet it’s good, mein Freund,” he retorted. “What’s more, we’ve studied the best—they can’t possibly have that advantage. All right—let’s show these amateurs how one of the old masters handles armor!”

The second and third takeovers were as easy as the first. By the fourth, however, matters had changed. It might have dawned on either the AIs on the ground or whoever was in command of the overall operation in the mother-ship above that the triple loss of AIs and mechs was not due to simple malfunction, but to an unknown and unsuspected enemy.

In that, the hostiles were following in the mental footsteps of another pre-Atomic commander, who had once stated, “Once is happenstance, twice is circums­tance, but three times is enemy action.”

So the fourth time their forces advanced on a ship, they met with fierce resistance.

They lost about a dozen mechs, and Siegfried had suffered a bit of a shakeup and a fair amount of bruising, but they managed to destroy the fourth AI without much damage to Rommel’s exterior. Despite the danger from unexploded shells and some residual radiation, Siegfried doggedly went out into the wreckage to get that precious access code.

He returned to bad news. “They know we’re here, Siegfried,” Rommel announced. “That last barrage gave them a silhouette upstairs; they know I’m a Bolo, so now they know what they’re up against.”

Siegfried swore quietly, as he gave Rommel his fourth contingent of mechs. “Well, have they figured out exactly what we’re doing yet? Or can you tell?” Siegfried asked while typing in the fourth unit’s access codes.

“I can’t—I—can’t—Siegfried—” the Bolo replied, suddenly without any inflection at all. “Siegfried. There is a problem. Another. I am stretching my—resources—”

This time Siegfried swore with a lot less creativity. That was something he had not even considered! The AIs they were eliminating were much less sophisticated than Rommel—

“Drop the last batch!” he snapped. To his relief, Rommel sounded like himself again as he released control of the last contingent of mechs.

“That was not a pleasurable experience,” Rommel said mildly.

“What happened?” he demanded.

“As I needed to devote more resources to controlling the mechs, I began losing higher functions,” the Bolo replied simply. “We should have expected that; so far I am doing the work of three lesser AIs and all the functions you require, and maneuvering of the various groups we have captured. As I pick up more groups, I will inevitably lose processing functions.”

Siegfried thought, frantically. There were about twenty of these invading ships; their plan absolutely required that Rommel control at least eight of the groups to successfully hold the invasion off Port City. There was no way