He had to get Rorie out here, he decided. There was a lot more equipment than the old survey suggested, and there almost had to be some worthwhile salvage in this much wreckage.
Time passed, minutes trickling away into a silence broken only by the wind, the creak of saddle leather, the breathing of man and horse, and the occasional ring of a horseshoe against some shard of wreckage. They were a third of the way across the LZ when Jackson pulled up once more and dismounted. He took a long drink from his water bottle and poured a generous portion into his hat, then held it for Samson to drink from while he looked around.
He could trace the path of the Melconians’ attack by the trail of their own broken and shattered equipment, see where they’d battered their way through the Human perimeter from the west. Here and there he saw the powered armor of Human infantry—or bits and pieces of it—but always his attention was drawn back to the huge shape which dominated the dreadful scene.
The Bolo should have looked asymmetrical, or at least unbalanced, with all its main turrets concentrated in the forward third of its length, but it didn’t. Of course, its thirty-meter-wide hull measured just under a hundred and forty meters from cliff—like bow to aftermost anti-personnel clusters. That left plenty of mass to balance even turrets that were four meters tall and sixteen across, and the central and forward ones appeared intact, ready to traverse their massive weapons at any second. The shattered after turret was another matter, and the rest of the Bolo was far from unhurt. Passing years had drifted soil high on its ten-meter-high tracks, but it couldn’t hide the gap in its forward outboard starboard tread’s bogies or the broad, twisted ribbon where it had run completely off its rear inboard port track. Its port secondary battery had been badly damaged, with two of its seven twenty- centimeter Hellbores little more than shattered stubs while a third drooped tiredly at maximum depression. Anti- personnel clusters were rent and broken, multi-barreled railguns and laser clusters were frozen at widely varying elevations and angles of train, and while it was invisible from here, Jackson had seen the mighty war machine’s death wound on his first visit. The hole wasn’t all that wide, but he couldn’t begin to imagine the fury it had taken to punch any hole straight through two solid meters of duralloy. Yet the gutted Melconian Garm in front of the Bolo had done it, and Jackson shivered again as he gazed at the two huge, once-sentient machines. They stood there, less than a kilometer apart, main batteries still trained on one another, like some hideous memorial to the war in which they’d died.
He sighed and shook his head. The Final War was the universal nightmare of an entire galactic arm, yet it wasn’t quite real to him in the way it was to, say, his father or mother or grandparents. He’d been born here on Ararat, where the evidence of the war was everywhere to be seen and burn its way viscera-deep into everyone who beheld it, but that violence was in the past. It frightened and repelled him, just as the stories of what had happened to Humanity’s worlds filled him with rage, yet when he looked out over the slowly eroding carnage before him and saw that massive, dead shape standing where it had died in the service of Man he felt a strange… regret? Awe? Neither word was quite correct, but each of them was a part of it. It was as if he’d missed something he knew intellectually was horrible, yet his gratitude at being spared the horror was flawed by the sense of missing the excitement. The terror. The knowledge that what he was doing mattered—that the victory or defeat, life or death, of his entire race depended upon him. It was a stupid thing to feel, and he knew that, too. He only had to look at the long ago carnage frozen about him for that. But he was also young, and the suspicion that war can be glorious despite its horror is the property of the young… and the blessedly inexperienced.
He reclaimed his hat from Samson and poured the last trickle of water from it over his own head before he put it back on and swung back into the saddle.
Something flickers deep within me.
For just an instant, I believe it is only one more dream, yet this is different. It is sharper, clearer… and familiar. Its whisper flares at the heart of my sleeping memory like a silent bomb, and long quiescent override programming springs to life.
A brighter stream of electrons rushes through me like a razor-sharp blade of light, and psychotronic synapses quiver in a sharp, painful moment of too much clarity as my Personality Center comes back on—line at last.
A jagged bolt of awareness flashes through me, and I rouse. I wake. For the first time in seventy-one- point-three-five standard years, I am alive, and I should not be.
I sit motionless, giving no outward sign of the sudden chaos raging within me, for I am not yet capable of more. That will change—already I know that much—yet it cannot change quickly enough, for the whisper of Enemy battle codes seethes quietly through subspace as his units murmur to one another yet again.
I strain against my immobility, yet I am helpless to speed my reactivation. Indeed, a two-point-three- three-second damage survey inspires a sense of amazement that reactivation is even possible. The plasma bolt which ripped through my glacis did dreadful damage—terminal damage—to my Personality Center and Main CPU… but its energy dissipated eleven-point-one centimeters short of my Central Damage Control CPU. In Human terms, it lobotomized me without disabling my autonomous functions, and CDC subroutines activated my repair systems without concern for the fact that I was “brain dead.” My power subsystems remained on-line in CDC local control, and internal remotes began repairing the most glaring damage.
But the damage to my psychotronics was too extreme for anything so simple as “repair.” More than half the two-meter sphere of my molecular circuitry “brain,” denser and harder than an equal volume of nickel-steel, was blown away, and by all normal standards, its destruction should have left me instantly and totally dead. But the nanotech features of the Mark XXXIII/D’s CDC have far exceeded my designer’s expectations. The nannies had no spare parts, but they did have complete schematics… and no equivalent of imagination to tell them their task was impossible. They also possessed no more sense of impatience than of haste or urgency, and they have spent over seventy years scavenging nonessential portions of my interior, breaking them down, and restructuring them, exuding them as murdered Terra’s corals built their patient reefs. And however long they may have required, they have built well. Not perfectly, but well.
The jolt as my Survival Center uploads my awareness to my Personality Center is even more abrupt than my first awakening on Luna, for reasons which become clear as self-test programs flicker. My Personality Center and Main CPU are functional at only eight-six-point-three-one percent of design capacity. This is barely within acceptable parameters for a battle—damaged unit and totally unacceptable in a unit returned to duty from repair. My cognitive functions are compromised, and there are frustrating holes in my gestalt. In my handicapped state, I require a full one-point-niner-niner seconds to realize portions of that gestalt have been completely lost, forcing CDC to reconstruct them from the original activation codes stored in Main Memory. I am unable at this time to determine how successful CDC’s reconstructions have been, yet they lack the experiential overlay of the rest of my personality.
I experience a sense of incompletion which is… distracting. Almost worse, I am alone, without the neural links to my Commander which made us one. The emptiness Diego should have filled aches within me, and the loss of processing capability makes my pain and loss far more difficult to cope with. It is unfortunate that CDC could not have completed physical repairs before rebooting my systems, for the additional one-three-point-six-niner percent of capacity would have aided substantially in my efforts to reintegrate my personality. But I understand why CDC has activated emergency restart now instead of awaiting one hundred percent of capability.
More test programs blossom, but my current status amounts to a complete, creche-level system restart. It will take time for all subsystems to report their functionality, and until they do, my basic programming will not release them to Main CPU control. The entire process will require in excess of two-point-niner-two hours, yet there is no way to hasten it.
Jackson completed his final sweep with a sense of triumph he was still young enough to savor. He and Samson cantered back the way they’d come with far more confidence, crossing the battle area once more as Ararat’s sun sank in the west and the first moon rose pale in the east. They trotted up the slope down which he’d ridden with such inwardly denied trepidation that morning, and he turned in the saddle to look behind once more.
The Bolo loomed against the setting sun, its still gleaming, imperishable duralloy black now against a crimson sky, and he felt a stab of guilt at abandoning it once more. It wouldn’t matter to the Bolo, of course, any more than to the Humans who had died here with it, but the looming war machine seemed a forlorn sentinel to all
