Bolo Brigade (38 page)

Donal wasn't sure how good Malach sensors might be, but he doubted that they would be able to track even something as large as a Bolo as it crawled along the seabed, at a depth of over forty meters.

By this time, he imagined, the Malach must be wondering what had become of the Bolo. At last report they were fully in control of the tent city, though—thank God—most of the kids and the Wide Sky adults who'd been taking care of them had managed to get away.

For that matter, Colonel Wood and General Phalbin and the rest of the brass back at Kinkaid must be about to have kittens by now. One of their Bolos had either just gone rogue or been scragged off the map, and if he was right, they were having trouble right now figuring out which possibility was worse.

Movement at a depth of forty meters was slow. Donal thought that he could probably urge Freddy to move more quickly, but at some point either the surface wake generated by the Bolo's movement or the intense heat released by fusion plants driven to higher and yet higher levels of output would give them away. Donal elected to leave the details of the approach, including both their exact course and speed, to Freddy.

Their position was plotted on a computer-generated map displayed on the otherwise blank toroidal screen. They were almost past the Singing River delta now and ready to turn up into the loch.

He didn't mind the time. He needed it to work on the Rules of Engagement problem. Donal was trying to do now what he knew he should have done before: find a way to get around the damned ROEs without affecting Freddy's ECRL or causing other, unanticipated problems with his psychotronic logic flow. There would be no time for integration testing before going into battle again.

There was also going to be no way to cover what he was doing. The first patch he'd tried had been designed to let him easily restore the ROEs, with no one the wiser. By going in and modifying the ROEs themselves, however, he was leaving a very large and blatant code trail, one that he would not be able to cover once Freddy linked in again with the base computer at the maintenance depot.

"It occurs to me," Freddy said as Donal continued pecking away at the small, special access keyboard, "that we are repeating a historical pattern."

"Yeah?" Donal said, without looking up. Bolo programming included massive amounts of historical data on military situations, tactics, and incidents going back to Narmer and the union of Upper and Lower Egypt. "How's that?"

"I refer to the second major part of the general world conflict during the first century a.e., what the people of the time called World War II. It was a time of great technological advances, with radical experimentation in new weapons, vehicles, and the like.

"Submarines had been introduced as weapons of war earlier in the century, but during this conflict, they became truly deadly. In the geographical theater of war known as 'the Pacific,' one of the combatants, the United States of America, employed submarines with great efficiency against the merchant shipping and surface naval war fleets of the Empire of Japan."

This was all new to Donal, and at another time he might have been interested. Not now, however. "What does this have to do with us?"

"Early in that conflict, American military weapons research developed a new type of torpedo, a kind of underwater missile designed to be fired from a submerged vessel at an enemy ship. It was supposed to explode
under
the target, when triggered by the magnetic fields induced in the water by the target's steel hull, although it would also detonate when striking the target directly. Unfortunately, the new torpedoes did not work as they were supposed to. Submarine commanders fired torpedo after torpedo, but they did not explode. The commanders changed tactics and fired the torpedoes directly into the sides of enemy ships. They knew they were hitting their targets. Sound travels very well under water, and they could hear the warheads striking home, but they still did not explode. The commanders recognized that the new torpedoes were the problem and requested that they be allowed to return to the older, and far more reliable, weapons.

"Unfortunately, the military and political bureaucracy responsible for producing the defective torpedoes refused to recognize that a problem existed. The bureaucracy insisted that the submarine captains were blaming their equipment to cover their own inefficiency and carelessness."

Donal looked up at that. "That sounds familiar." Some things, it seemed, never changed.

"I thought that you would notice the parallel. In any case, the submarine commanders were left to figure out how to carry out their assigned missions despite direct orders not to tamper with the new torpedoes."

"I think I know what I would have done in that situation."

"My assessment of your character suggests that you would have done the same as the submarine commanders. Once they'd left their home port on war patrol, they had the senior enlisted personnel and weapons specialists aboard disassemble each of twenty-four torpedoes on board their vessel, disable the magnetic exploders that were causing the trouble, and rig the torpedo to explode only on contact, as before. It was a dangerous process, carried out aboard a small and rolling vessel, and the officers involved were under specific orders not to tamper with the weapons. Immediately, the submarines began amassing respectable kill records in combat, sinking millions of tons of enemy shipping. When the submarine was returning from its patrol, before reaching port, the vessel's crew would again disassemble all remaining torpedoes and restore the magnetic exploders."

"And of course, the bureaucrats back home assumed their torpedoes were working just fine."

"That is correct. The debate, with American submarine commanders on one side and the U. S. Bureau of Ordnance on the other, became fierce and acrimonious. Rigorous testing ultimately proved the submariners to be correct. The detonators were faulty. Eventually the problem was recognized and corrected, but until then, the submarine commanders took upon themselves the responsibility of disobeying direct orders and of contravening established procedure in order to carry out their missions."

"And . . . why are you telling me all this?"

"I have been aware, Commander, of a certain tension in your speech patterns, activities, and moods, which I believe reflects the problems you have had with the Muir Military Command Authority. I know that what you are doing now is a direct violation of several standing orders regarding the field maintenance and operation of Bolos, even though your goal is to achieve an increase in my combat efficiency. I thought the story would ease your mind, somewhat. I believe that what you are attempting is the proper course of action."

Donal smiled at that. The Bolo was trying to reassure him. "Thanks, Freddy. I appreciate it."

In fact, he was a lot less concerned now with the effect this act would have on his career than he was with the simple question of whether or not it would work at all. The way he felt right now, if they found out about it later and court martialed him, well, so be it. He wasn't even sure he cared anymore, and he'd been thinking a lot about that hypothetical job he'd discussed a few nights ago with Alexie. The important thing was to make certain there was a later to be court martialed in, and he thought the best way to do that was to cripple the enemy's command and control center on the planet. After seeing Freddy's electronic evidence, he was willing to bet that he would find that center at Glenntor.

But that meant he had to come up with a way to get around the damned ROEs fast. They were on their way to attack Glenntor Castle. Fully a quarter of the ROEs, maybe more, were specifically concerned with protecting someone's property or with protecting humans living on Muir. Once they surfaced near Glenntor, they most emphatically would not have time, for instance, to get permission to cross private property lines as per ROE 20. And what about ROE 12, which prohibited a Bolo from scaring children? That had been one of Donal's absolute favorites . . . until now, knowing that there were probably children being held captive in that castle. Sure, they were scared already, but the key question was,
how would Freddy interpret that ROE?
Once the Bolo was forced to look at the fact that he was going to attack the castle, knowing that there were kids inside, he might easily balk. Donal didn't want to take that chance.

Unfortunately, it wasn't as simple as deleting or commenting out the offending code elements. Freddy's programming didn't use simplistic, straight-line logic. Bolo psychotronics mimicked the approach to problems used by the human brain, with many logic-strings running simultaneously and interconnectedly toward a given goal. As he'd already found out, simply deleting the ROEs outright affected other, widely separated parts of the program, probably in ways that Donal and even Freddy could not possibly predict.

The only way he could think of to cut the ROEs out of the loop was to go through each of them and assign it a specific weight, a number that placed a relative value on that ROE's importance. The numbers had to be logical; a Bolo could be badly affected by code that didn't "feel" right, that was inherently illogical or contained obvious inconsistencies. Hell, that was one of the main problems with the ROEs themselves.

With that in mind, he was assigning all forty-two Rules of Engagement numbers, ranging from 1 for the silliest, in his opinion, to 10 for the rules that had some logic, at least, behind them.

That done, he was now drafting a new ROE—Rule 0—giving it a weight of 15, and inserting it in front of the first of the regular ROEs.

0: weight: 15. all bolos, when so ordered by their human commanding officer, will disregard all rules of engagement of lesser weighted importance. the command order to disregard lesser roes will be the spoken word "eclipse."

It wasn't perfect, but it was the best he could do on short notice.

He wished he could do the same for Ferdy right now, but that was out of the question. He and Freddy were out of communications now until they surfaced . . . and then they were likely to be busy for a time.

He just hoped Ferdy was holding his own okay.

Freddy swung to the right, and Donal easily felt the motion. He looked up at the ceiling, trying very hard not to imagine the forty or so meters of dark, cold water above it, above him.

He'd never liked being shut in.

They brought Alexie into the Great Hall, leading her at gunpoint.

She hadn't exactly been mistreated during the past several hours, but it had not been pleasant, either. They'd brought her in a flying personnel carrier north over the mountains to Glenntor—she'd recognized the castle when they'd herded her out onto the landing pad and down the winding stone steps—and locked her in the stone-walled basement with seven kids snatched from Simmstown. Over the next hour or so, fourteen more children, ranging in age from six to fifteen, had been shoved through the big wooden door that was the only way out and down the steps to what could only be termed, in this place, a dungeon.

They'd not been bothered after that, though occasional snarls and inhuman barks and shrieks floated down from upstairs, and sometimes they could hear the far-off thunder of explosions, proving that the battle was continuing. Alexie was the only adult prisoner the Malach had. She had sat on the floor in a circle with the kids, and they'd talked, trying to comfort one another. Possibly, possibly, when the battle was over, they would be released, exchanged for Malach taken prisoner by the humans.

It was the slenderest of hopes, and a futile one, Alexie was sure. The Malach were so . . . alien. What value did they place on a human life? For that matter, what value did they place on an individual Malach? The idea of a prisoner exchange might be totally foreign to their way of thinking.

The Great Hall—she remembered that night, not so long ago, when this room had been filled with light and people and gaiety—was a place of cold terror, and she lost then all hope of ever being released. Twelve naked and bloody human bodies hung dripping from chains along one wall, with hooks driven through the bottoms of their jaws and out through soundlessly gaping mouths. Some of the corpses had been cut and torn in ways that suggested torture. Others showed burns and missing limbs that might mean they'd been shot and killed before being strung up like so many raw slabs of drox meat.

At least, she hoped they'd been dead by then.

Until that moment, she'd thinking of these creatures less as
lizards
and more as dragons. Up close, they were too powerful, too graceful, too obviously in control of themselves and of the situation to think of them as comical little reptilian skitterers that you might find under a desert rock. Confronted by those hideously mangled and callously displayed bodies, she stopped thinking of them as anything as comfortable and as comprehensible as dragons. They were monsters in every sense of the term, monstrously inhuman in form, in deed, and in thought.

There were eight Malach in the room, besides the guard who'd brought her here. One rested on a human-made sofa that had been stripped of its arms and back so that the creature could lie on it, belly down, tail hanging off the end. One of the others approached her, its head overtopping hers by nearly half a meter. She stood her ground, staring up into unwinking ruby eyes. The mouth, lined with double rows of razor-edged teeth, gaped; the odd-looking mustache of constantly writhing pink worms rippled with some unknown, untranslatable emotion. "You . . . sssubmit," the Malach croaked.

Alexie blinked. She'd not known any of these creatures spoke English.

"What do you want of me?" she asked. "What do you want me to do?"

"You . . . sssubmit . . . sssoldiers. Why."

The last word was lacked the usual rising tone of inquiry at the end, and she almost missed the fact that the Malach was asking a question. It was extremely difficult to understand the being. Its half-meter jaws were not well adapted to human-made sounds. Worse, it had a poor command of inflection and intonation, coupled with the fact that there was no way at all Alexie could read the thing's scaly green and red, grinning-lizard's expression.