Stavrakas. My Main Memory contains much background data on standard operating procedure; I realize how rare this is, and I am grateful for it. The depot power systems are fully charged. I do not even require internal power to maintain Full Alert Status, and I turn to my Library Files with pleasure.
7
Gerald Osterwelt didn’t like Ursula. Sector capital or no, the planet, as all planets in the frontier sectors, was terminally uncultured. He preferred the civilized amenities and pleasures of the Core Worlds, yet he comforted himself with the reflection that his task here was worth temporary inconveniences. He supposed it wasn’t really necessary for GalCorp to own the entire Santa Cruz System, but they certainly needed to own enough of it to control the rest, and the original planetary charter had made that difficult. Virgin as much of the planet might still be, most of it was already owned by some descendent of the original colonists or set aside in nature reserves held by the planetary government. Certainly all the choicest bits and pieces were, and GalCorp hadn’t become the third largest transstellar corporation of the Concordiat by settling for leftovers.
Unfortunately, his mother had been correct in at least one respect. His original bootlegged copy of Ursula Central’s records on the planet had been less complete than he’d thought. Central had updated itself considerably in the eighteen months since he’d first obtained access to its files, and it seemed Santa Cruz would be a tougher nut for a “messy solution” than he’d originally expected. The fact that the local yokel militia had no less than fourteen Wolverine heavy tanks was unfortunate, but formidable as the Wolverines had been in their day, they were also seventy or eighty years out of date. They could have been dealt with fairly easily if not for the real joker he’d never anticipated finding in the deck.
A Bolo. What in the name of sanity was a Bolo doing on a backwoods farming planet? More to the point, how did he go about neutralizing it? Despite his original airy confidence, he knew his mother’s maternal feelings would not suffice to preserve his present clear right of succession to the GalCorp throne if he blew this operation, but discovering a Bolo in the mix made things far more complicated.
He sat in the lounge of his palatial hyperyacht while options revolved in his brain. One did not normally-as humanity’s enemies had discovered over the last seven hundred years-employ a brute force solution against a Bolo with any great probability of success. Of course, this Bolo was as out of date as the militia’s Wolverines, but “obsolescent” was a purely relative concept where Bolos were concerned. No, no. If he was going to pull this off, he required a more subtle approach, and it was just possible he had one. Bolos might be incorruptible, but the same, alas, could not always be said for all the people who built or commanded them.
Yet even if he could somehow neutralize the Bolo, he would still require someone with the will, the experience, and the resources to deal with the militia’s over-aged armored element. There were plenty of mercenary outfits with the last two qualities, but finding one which was willing to undertake the operation in the first place might prove difficult. The Concordiat Navy would be extremely unhappy with them, and if any planetary survivor could identify them afterward, unhappiness on the Navy’s part could all too easily prove fatal. What he needed was an outfit with minimal scruples and maximum need, one whose greed for the sort of clandestine support GalCorp could provide would overcome both any lingering humanitarian principles and fear of the Navy’s potential response.
Finding it wouldn’t be easy, he admitted to himself, but he had time. Survey Command moved with glacial slowness when it came to certifying jump lines. By his most pessimistic estimate, it would be another T-year before the galaxy at large got the information GalCorp had already obtained. That gave him six or even seven months to get things organized, and it would probably take most of that time to find the Bolo’s Achilles heel, anyway.
He nodded to himself and brought his encrypted com on-line. The first step was to call home and get Mother’s research teams started finding the contacts he needed.
8
The subterranean rumble of an earthquake shook the jungle as the enormous doors covering the depot’s vehicle ramp swept ponderously wide for the first time in eighty years. The patient, insatiable incursions of creepers and small trees had mounded two meters of spongy earth over those doors, and “birds” screamed in alarm as the very ground parted with a huge tearing sound. Trees-some of them ten and twenty meters tall-toppled in slow motion as the gaping wound snapped roots like threads, and then, with the rumble of mighty engines, the squeak of sprockets, and a grating clash of treads, Nike moved majestically into the light.
The alloy leviathan paused for a moment, optic heads swiveling to scan its surroundings, and Paul Merrit felt a thrill he hadn’t felt in years as he rode Nike’s crash couch. No self-aware Bolo needed an on-board commander, but there was always an indescribable sense of communion-an adrenaline-charged exhilaration-the first time an officer of the Dinochrome Brigade rode his command’s unstoppable power, and that feeling had never been stronger than it was today, for Nike was like no Bolo he had ever commanded. Marina Stavrakas’ unauthorized modifications to the Descartes Team’s original brain box design had gone far deeper than he’d first realized. She hadn’t stopped with making Nike fully autonomous; she’d taken the step no other Bolo tech had dared take even yet and given her creation-her child-genuine emotions. Nike wasn’t “just” a machine, however magnificent; she was a person, and Merrit could feel her delight as direct sunlight bathed her hull at long last.
She stood a moment longer, the humming rumble of her idling engines vibrating through her mammoth hull like the purr of some enormous cat, then moved forward and pivoted regally to port. Her designers had given her the usual Bolo “wide track” suspension, and no less than eight separate tread systems, each with its own power train and tracks five meters wide, supported her massive bulk. Independent quadruple fore and aft suspensions took her weight, spreading it out to reduce ground pressure to an absolute minimum, and even so her tracks sank well over a meter into the damp, rich soil. She forged ahead, plowing through the jungle like the juggernaut she was, and forest titans toppled like straws before her while occasional outcrops of solid rock powdered under her treads.
Merrit said nothing. Nike knew where they were going-not that it would be any more than a brief jaunt around the depot’s immediate area-and he had no wish to intrude upon her pleasure. No doubt the psych types would be all hot and bothered over that, as well, but Paul Merrit had had it up to the eyebrows with Brigade Psych Ops, and their potential consternation mattered not at all to him. No, that wasn’t quite true. He would be delighted if it caused them all to drop dead of cardiac arrest on the spot.
Nike was moving at barely twenty kph, far too slow a speed to require his couch’s independent shock absorbers or crash frame, but he felt the gentle undulation of her suspension and grinned as he cocked the couch back in its gimbals. If anyone asked (not that they were likely to), he could justify his actions easily enough. Unit Zero-Zero-Seven-Five NKE had been on secondary power from the depot’s systems for eight decades. A test of its running gear and fusion plants was long overdue, and if he had other motives of his own, those were his business, not Psych Ops’!
Another huge tree toppled, and, as it fell, one of the large, scaled, lizard cats, the most feared predators of Santa Cruz, leapt suddenly into sight. It crouched before them, staring in disbelief at the enormous intruder into its domain… then screamed its challenge and charged the moving mountain of alloy.
Merrit couldn’t believe it. A lizard cat was four sinuous meters of vicious fighting power, the absolute ruler of Santa Cruz’s jungles, but surely not even one of them could think it could stop a Bolo! Yet the cat kept coming. He opened his mouth, but Nike halted abruptly on her own, before he could get the order out. The main fire control screen was slaved to her forward optical head, and Merrit frowned as it swept past the lizard cat now ripping futilely at one of her stopped treads with eight-centimeter claws. Ranging bars flickered, closing in on something in the center of the display, and he inhaled in surprise as he realized what that something was.
Four scaled shapes, far smaller than the monster trying to savage Nike, lay revealed where the roots of the falling tree had torn out the side of a subterranean den. They were almost as large as Merrit himself, perhaps, yet that was tiny compared to a mature lizard cat, and they turned blind, terrified eyes towards the snarling fury of their dam.
