Bolo Brigade (36 page)

He remembered Alexie's fear for the refugees and wondered where she was now. South, with the main body, he supposed. She was going to just plain go ballistic when she heard the Malach had grabbed some of her kids.

"Commander," Freddy's voice said. "I have an incoming communication, command circuit, channel three."

"Audio."

". . . tenant Ragnor!" Colonel Wood's voice said. "Come in, Lieutenant Ragnor! Please respond!"

"This is Ragnor," he said. "Go ahead."

"Colonel Wood, at CMAHQ. We have new orders for you."

Donal was already beginning to formulate a plan of his own, and he somehow doubted that Wood's new orders were going to fit in with his plans at all. Reaching over to the console, he killed his mike. "Freddy."

"Yes, Commander?"

"I want to develop some radio trouble. I don't think we're going to want to hear these orders."

There was an uncomfortable hesitation. "Commander, I cannot distort or conceal information. By extension, I cannot lie about the condition of my equipment."

"Sure you can. I order you to . . ."

Donal's voice trailed off. Something was happening . . . and it wasn't good. The small repeater screens along the top of his console that showed a steady stream of selected status messages from Freddy's operating system had just gone blank. The map had frozen in place on the circular screen, too, and a new window had just opened in the middle of it. He read the message on the screen with a dawning horror.

critical error

emergency conflict resolution logic error

level one conflict

error in instruction to delete roes

no rules of engagement to delete

One by one, Freddy's higher mind functions were going off-line, shutting down, and Donal knew that he was in very serious trouble indeed.

A glance at the message on the display screen told Donal immediately what the problem was, and he cursed himself for a thumb-fingered idiot. He'd caused the problem himself by not looking far enough ahead when he'd installed the cut-out for the ROEs. Turning his command chair to the right, he reached out and flipped down an access panel, opening up a small emergency keyboard. He began typing.

system level interrupt

restore primary system

load ecrl backup

Bolos, even the brightest of the self-aware marks, addressed problems in hierarchical arrays of relative urgency and importance. When faced with an internal contradiction in their software, they were usually able to figure out for themselves which way to go simply by following the contradictory chains of logic, judging the outcomes, and making a reasoned determination as to which outcome was more desirable in light of the Bolo's current orders. The process was known as conflict resolution modeling, or CRM.

Sometimes though, and inevitably when humans were part of the loop, the Bolo received two sets of directives, each weighted the same, and each so flatly contradictory that the Bolo's logic circuits were unable to resolve the conflict. That was why Bolos had the subroutine package known as the Emergency Conflict Resolution Logic, to address Level One conflicts created by sloppy programming or badly given human orders. With it, Freddy would have been able to handle even the idiot ROEs passed down from the Muir government and Phalbin, though they would have slowed him down a lot. Without it, Freddy did just fine, until he ran into a high-level conflict . . . not something simple like which side of a building to pass on, but a contradictory set of orders that were important enough that they couldn't be resolved by juggling random numbers.

Little things . . . like his stupid human counterpart giving him a direct order to lie when he had hard-wired directives requiring him to deliver information truthfully and in full. Had the ECRL been in place, Freddy might have resisted, advised, or even refused, but he wouldn't have started shutting down. As it was, more and more of Freddy's attention had been diverted by that particular imponderable; in another few moments, it could have frozen him up completely, or led to an unpredictable breakdown in his logic-chain orderings.

Donal kept typing, pausing from time to time to check the screen. The Bolo had come to a halt in the middle of the forest, and that made it a perfect X on the bull's eye. If the Malach decided to open up with their space bombardment again, Freddy and the human inside him were as good as dead. The one consolation was that Donal would never feel the stroke of artificial lightning that killed them.

Enemy forces still swarmed through the area. Freddy's tactics up to the moment when he'd started shutting down had been to locate each clump of Malach walkers before they could get more than six or eight together and scatter them, either by direct attack, or by loosing missiles from his vertical launch tubes. The idea had been working, too, until the machine had stopped paying attention. Donal could already see several Malach octets out there on the battlefield map, moving just out of Hellbore line-of-sight. They would be trying a rush very soon now, once they were convinced that the Bolo's silence was not some kind of ruse.

"Bolo 96876 of the Line! Respond!" Wood's voice was sounding frantic over the audio link. "Lieutenant Ragnor! Respond! Anybody!"

The Bolo shuddered as it took a direct hit. The Malach were beginning to test the waters, as it were, firing particle beams at long range, probing for a response.

"Colonel Wood, Ragnor," Donal said. "Look, I've got a problem here and I'm a little busy right now. Let me get back to you, okay?"

"Ragnor! I want you to break off your action and RTB at once! Do you hear me? Return to base! Immediately!"

Donal reached up with one hand and switched off the transmitter. Time enough to talk things over later. Right now, he had to do a quick job on his patch.

The fix wasn't too hard, once Donal knew what was going on. The closely circling logic loop had been broken by his system level interrupt. Now he was restoring the original Emergency Conflict Resolution Logic module, overwriting his ill-conceived patch and restoring the ROEs to full effect. He'd expected to do this anyway after the battle was over, in order to keep Phalbin and Chard from ever learning what he'd done.

Another explosion rocked the Bolo, heavier this time. Automated damage control diagnostics began flicking off statistics on power loss and weakened armor. He kept typing.

Part of the problem was that he was not primarily a programmer, certainly not the sort of programmer who routinely worked on advanced combat AI subsystems. He knew what any Bolo field commander was expected to know, and perhaps a little bit more, enough to handle routine field repairs, diagnostics and system tests, and possibly the odd bit of hacker's code for taking a necessary shortcut.

Unfortunately, his impatience had led him into a shortcut that could have been deadly—for him, for Freddy, for the entire world of Muir.

It was a mistake he did not intend to make twice.

"Freddy?" he said, looking up as he clattered in the final command line and hit Enter. "Freddy, are you there?"

Systems displays and discretes were already coming back on line. "I am here, Commander," Freddy's voice said. There was a short hesitation. "I have suffered damage, sections—"

"Enemy units are approaching, Freddy, bearing one-seven—"

"I see them." The Hellbore fired, momentarily blanking out part of the panorama on the viewscreen with its savage incandescence. An instant later, the infinite repeaters were giving voice with their buzzsaw shrieks of high-velocity, high-volume ion-bolt fire. A walker two kilometers away exploded in a fountain of flame and boiling smoke. A warning buzzer sounded.

"Damn! What's that?"

"The Enemy has acquired a weapons lock," Freddy replied with maddening calm. "They may be about to launch their penetrator weapons."

Donal's lips compressed, a hard, white line. Those two-stage Malach weapons, missiles that burned in through the outer armor, then deposited a micronuke deep inside the Bolo's hull, were the deadliest anti-armor weapons he'd ever seen in action, a serious threat to any Bolo.

Five glowing stars appeared on the panoramic screen, coming in from the right and behind. Another three appeared, arcing in across the shattered forest. Freddy's response was immediate and enthusiastic, a howling salvo of infinite repeater shots and antimissile lasers. He turned suddenly, the maneuver flinging Donal hard against his seat harness. Freddy was zigzagging wildly to confuse the enemy's tracking systems, combining the high-speed movements with a steady barrage of chaff canisters designed to sucker the enemy missiles' targeting radars.

Freddy managed to knock down seven of the missiles before they came too close, decoying four into chaff clouds and killing three more with head-on bursts. The eighth, nicked by an ion bolt, wobbled wildly in flight, began to break up, then detonated a few meters above the Bolo's upper deck. Donal felt the blow, a thunder-blasted detonation that set his ears ringing and momentarily blanked out the entire exterior view.

The Bolo kept moving, however, bouncing heavily as it hurtled off a low scarp and dropped three meters before slamming into the ground again. Bolos had good shock absorbers, but equipment providing for human comfort and a smooth ride was necessarily limited. More shocks followed, these generated by incoming missiles tipped with tactical nuclear weapons. In every direction Donal looked, he saw rising, twisting columns of gray smoke capped by ominous, flat, mushroom heads. The Malach, it seemed, were throwing everything they had into stopping and destroying the elusive human Bolo.

"I am receiving a radio message from Colonel Wood at HQ," Freddy said.

"Ignore the transmission," Donal said.

"That is not in line with standing orders or communications protocol, Commander." There was a pause. "I have just scanned my commo log records. I appear to have an entry referring to an earlier message from Colonel Wood, but I have no recorded transcript or memory of that conversation. That conversation would have occurred shortly after you suggested that I falsify data. What is the nature of these communications? Is this information of which I should be aware?"

"I took care of it," Donal said. "Ignore the transmission."

"But—"

"Freddy,
trust
me! Wood wants us to go back to Kinkaid, where we can be utilized in a static defense. I want to hit that new command center on Loch Haven. Use your combat logic. Which course of action will prove more successful against people like the Malach?"

There was a long silence, and Donal could almost imagine the machine juggling electrons in some obscure, random-number-generating way.

"I understand," Freddy replied at last. "However, I remind you that the Rules of Engagement are now back in force. I will not be able to attack the Delacroix castle without satisfying eight separate provisions entered in the ROE list."

"Don't worry, Freddy. I've got it covered."

"If it would not seem too inquisitive, I would like to know how."

In truth, Donal wasn't sure he had a direct answer. What he would have, soon, was some time to work on the problem. "Just head west," he told the Bolo. "Toward the sea. I'll take care of the rest."

Another pocket nuke detonated with a savage flash a few tens of meters away from the Bolo's left side, hurling debris against the machine's armor with sandblasting force and rocking the machine heavily to the right. The characteristic mushroom cloud billowed skyward, punching through the overcast. The rain, slightly radioactive now, continued falling.

Freddy raced toward the sea, skirting what once had been the refugee city of Simmstown, as the Malach gathered their forces to the east.

* * *

I turn my long-range sensors on circumplanetary space, searching for Enemy military satellites and spacecraft. The bulk of the fleet is maintaining a respectful distance now and is safely out of range . . . but that also puts them beyond the range from which they can safely direct the battle or serve as battlefield reconnaissance support. The planetary bombardment has ceased entirely, and I judge that it is now safe to halt my constant, randomized movement across the battlefield—at least for that reason. If nothing else, the Enemy will have ceased the bombardment in order to minimize friendly fire casualties among his own forces. Of course, this also means that his naval vessels are now safely beyond my maximum effective range.

Nearer at hand, however, three Enemy reconnaissance satellites are above my horizon, one rising in the east, the other two high overhead, at thirty-eight and one hundred twelve degrees, respectively. Swinging my primary turret, I bring my 90cm Hellbore to bear on the first target. Lock . . . fire! The first satellite flares briefly, dissolving in a cloud of hot plasma. I swing my turret, fire a second time, and finally slew to target and destroy the third satellite, now just rising above the mountains on the eastern horizon. All three targets have been engaged and destroyed within the space of .21 second, and I am now free to carry out my Commander's orders without fear of being observed by Enemy forces.

I report my status to Unit 96875, then shift into high-speed mode, traveling flat-out across the low, rolling terrain. Ahead is the Western Sea. In another 3.7 minutes, I traverse the dune terrain behind the beach, scattering great clouds of sand to the left and right as I burst through the highest dunes, descend the flat shelf, of the beach and plunge into the ocean.

"What happened?" General Phalbin asked, peering at the mapscreen as though his eyes had failed him. "Where did he go?"

"I'm not sure, sir," the technician at the screen's console said. "The Bolo went behind the radar shadow of the dune line, and we don't have any recon sats or drones up just now to show us what's happening on the other side."

"Maybe he went into the water," Colonel Wood suggested. "He was certainly heading that way as though he intended to do something in particular, and not just keep dodging the bad guys."

"Maybe the Bolo was destroyed," Colonel Ferraro, the Base Tactical Officer, suggested. "Things were getting awfully hot up there."