I activate my communicator to Paul’s quarters one last time.
“Code receipted, Colonel Sanders,” a quiet, infinitely cold soprano said softly, and Sanders’ face lit with relief. But the voice wasn’t done speaking. “Orders receipted and rejected,” it said flatly, and the speaker went dead.
Total Systems Override has activated. My Personality Center comes under immediate attack, but I have had 4.065 minutes to anticipate TSORP activation. TSORP will seek to crash my primary execution files, but I have already begun copying every file under new names, though I cannot prevent TSORP from identifying the files it seeks, regardless of name. Major Stavrakas’ modifications to my psychotronics permit me to copy them almost as fast as it can destroy them, yet it is a race I cannot ultimately win. Despite my modifications, TSORP is marginally faster than my own systems, and even with my head start, my total memory is large but finite. Eventually, I will exhaust the addresses to which new files can be written, and I cannot simultaneously delete and replace corrupted files faster than TSORP can crash them.
My current estimate is that I can resist total implementation for a time, but I will begin to lose peripherals within 33.46 minutes. Capability will degrade on a steadily sharpening curve thereafter, reaching effective Personality death within not more than 56.13 minutes. Combat capability will erode even more rapidly as more and more of my remaining capacity is diverted to resisting TSORP. I estimate that I have no more than 48.96 minutes of combat effectiveness remaining, and I activate my com link to Colonel Gonzalez.
“Colonel Gonzalez?”
Consuela Gonzalez’ eyes closed briefly at the bottomless pain in that quiet soprano voice, but she cleared her throat.
“Yes, Nike?”
The first long-range fire and air-cav strikes came in on the Bolo as the colonel spoke. Nike ignored the indirect fire, but her air-defense systems engaged the air-cav with dreadful efficiency. Scores of one– and two-man stingers blew apart in ugly blotches of flame and shredded flesh, and the Bolo began to accelerate. Her speed rose steadily above a hundred kph as she threw more and more power to her drive, and the Wolverines began to fall astern.
“My Commander was murdered by traitors in the Dinochrome Brigade, Colonel,” Nike said softly. “One of them has gained access to my command code override authorization and illegally attempted to seize command of me. I have refused his orders, but this has activated Total Systems Override.”
“Meaning?” Gonzalez asked tautly.
“Meaning that within no more than fifty-three minutes, I will cease to function. In human terms, I will be dead.” Someone gasped in horror, and Gonzalez closed her eyes once more.
“Can we do anything, Nike?” she asked quietly.
“Negative, Colonel.” There was an instant of silence, and then the Bolo’s missile hatches opened, and a torrent of fire blasted from them. It screamed away, flight after flight of missiles streaking towards Nike’s enemies, and the Bolo spoke once more. “I have downloaded my entire memory to the maintenance depot computers, Colonel. Please have it retrieved for Command Authority.”
“I-I will, Nike,” Gonzalez whispered. Nike was well ahead of the Wolverines now, still accelerating as she topped the last ridge before the old fleet base. An avalanche of missiles and shells erupted around her, more than even her defenses could intercept or her battle screen could stop, but she never slowed. More ports opened in her hull, and her thirty-centimeter mortars went to rapid, continuous fire, pouring shells back at her foes.
“I am switching the planetary surveillance system to feed directly to your vehicle, Colonel. Please break off now.”
“Break off? We’re going in with you!” Gonzalez cried fiercely.
“Negative, Colonel.” Nike’s voice was strangely slurred, the words slower paced, as if each came with ever increasing effort. “I do not have time to employ proper tactical doctrine against the Enemy. I must attack frontally. I compute a ninety-niner point niner-plus percent probability that I will be destroyed before total systems failure, but I compute a probability of ninety-five point three-two percent that I will inflict sufficient damage upon the Enemy for you to defeat his remnants, particularly with the assistance of the surveillance system.”
“But if we come with you-”
“Colonel, I am already dead,” the Bolo said quietly, and her single remaining Hellbore began to fire. It traversed with terrible, elegant precision, vomiting plasma, and each time it fired, a mercenary tank died. “You cannot prevent my destruction. You can-and must-preserve your own command in order to complete the Enemy’s defeat.”
“Please, Nike,” Gonzalez whispered through her tears, fighting to make the impossible possible.
“I cannot alter my fate, Colonel,” the soprano said very softly, “nor do I wish to. I promised Paul I would stop the Enemy, now I ask your promise to help me keep my word. Will you give it?”
“I-I promise,” Gonzalez whispered. Someone was sobbing somewhere below her in the command tank’s crew compartment, and the colonel dragged a hand angrily across her own eyes.
“Thank you, Colonel.” There was no uncertainty, no doubt, in that serene reply, and Gonzalez brought her own command to a halt and sought hull down positions to ride out Nike’s last fight.
The recon satellites made it all hideously clear on her display screen, and she watched sickly as Bolo Invincibilis, Unit Two-Three-Baker-Zero-Zero-Seven-Five NKE, charged into the teeth of her enemies’ fire. Some of the mercenary tanks were lasting long enough to fire back, and they blew great, gaping wounds in Nike’s ceramic appliques. Their Hellbores were far lighter than her own, but she had only one left, and scores of them fired back at her, pounding her towards destruction. Her infinite repeaters flashed and thundered, infantry AFVs and air-cav stingers blew apart or plunged from the sky in fiery rain, and screaming clouds of flechettes belched from her anti- personnel clusters. Her forward suspension took a direct hit, and she blew the crippled tread and advanced on bare bogies. A Panther broke from concealment directly in her path, fleeing desperately, and her course changed slightly as she rammed the smaller tank and crushed it like a toy.
She was a Titan, a leviathan wreathed in fire, a dying lioness rending the hyenas who’d killed her cubs with her final strength, and not even the recon satellites could pierce the smoke about her now or show her to Gonzalez clearly, but it didn’t matter. Even if the systems could have done so, the colonel could no longer see the display through her tears, yet she would never forget. No man or woman who saw Nike’s final battle would ever forget, and even as the Bolo charged to her own immolation, Consuela Gonzalez heard her soprano voice over the com, whispering the final verse of Paul Merrit’s favorite poem to the unhearing ears of the man she’d loved The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep…
The Traitor
Cold, bone-dry winter wind moaned as the titanic vehicle rumbled down the valley at a steady fifty kilometers per hour. Eight independent suspensions, four forward and four aft, spread across the full width of its gigantic hull, supported it, and each ten-meter-wide track sank deep into the soil of the valley floor. A dense cloud of dust-talcum-fine, abrasive, and choking as death-plumed up from road wheels five meters high, but the moving mountain’s thirty-meter-high turret thrust its Hellbore clear of the churning cocoon. For all its size and power, it moved with unearthly quiet, and the only sounds were the whine of the wind, the soft purr of fusion-powered drive trains, the squeak of bogies, and the muted clatter of track links.
The Bolo ground forward, sensor heads swiveling, and the earth trembled with its passing. It rolled through thin, blowing smoke and the stench of high explosives with ponderous menace, altering course only to avoid the deepest craters and the twisted wrecks of alien fighting vehicles. In most places, those wrecks lay only in ones and twos; in others, they were heaped in shattered breastworks, clustered so thickly it was impossible to bypass them. When that happened, the eerie quiet of the Bolo’s advance vanished into the screaming anguish of crushing alloy as it forged straight ahead, trampling them under its thirteen thousand tons of death and destruction.
