Bolos: Old Guard Part 32

Shock waves from those detonations thunder through the narrow pa.s.s, bringing down rumbling, deadly avalanches of rock and ice. Five bolts in rapid succession annihilate the Enemy's launch complex outside Inshallah. Three more smash down Enemy battlescreens s.h.i.+elding a command center, a communications array, a fire control center, turning permafrost and duralloy into gla.s.s-bottomed pits of furiously radiating heat.

Particle beams blaze and sizzle against my battlescreens from high-powered, turret-mounted projectors in the nearby crawlers. I slew my turret left and fire again, filling the pa.s.s with the barely contained effulgence of h.e.l.lfire, engulfing crawlers and transports and troops in a brief, multi-million-degree sunrise. Crawlers slag down beneath the onslaught or grind to an inglorious halt, armor melting, life-support systems failing. I retarget and fire again, the bolt causing two crawlers to explode at a touch.

I sense troops among the mountains to left and right, infiltrators attempting to close on my original position. Six hatches snap open along my dorsal hull, and I bring my 30cm mortars into play, raining high explosives and anti-personnel cl.u.s.ter munitions down among the surrounding cliffs and peaks.

To both left and right, several million tons of igneous rock crack and collapse, as snow and ice flashes into an expanding cloud of steam, as thunderously rippling blasts detonate among the crags above. By the time the rock hits the valley floor, however, there is nothing left alive within two kilometers of my position. Thousands of tiny gla.s.s marbles clatter across my upper works-rock, vaporized, flung into the sky, then cooled to glittering spheres of gla.s.s.

I'm moving swiftly now, tracks clattering and shrieking as I mount tumble-downs of fallen boulders and slag and burst out into the open tundra. Now I can maneuver as my designers intended, zigzagging across the plain toward the heart of the Enemy's beachhead on this world.

The battle is now a swirl of energy and motion. I sense the Enemy's forces gathering, redirecting, moving toward me . . . even forces already deployed beyond the mountains toward Izra'ilbalad and the western plains. With Andrew dead, Smoke Pa.s.s is open to forces properly armored and s.h.i.+elded against radiation and lingering thermal effects, and the only way to block their advance is to create enough of a disturbance deep behind their lines to force their retreat.

But in truth, I am no longer planning my actions, weighing my decisions, calculating the effect of move and countermove, of volley and countervolley. I move and I kill . . . burning all life, all movement, killing, and killing again.

I am become Izra'il, the Angel of Death. . . .

I am a brother, maimed by the death of a part of myself. . . .

The battlecruiser in low orbit opens fire, bathing me in approximately 2.79 megatons/second. The shock wave races out across the melting tundra, devouring everything in its path, leaving only me at the epicenter beneath the collapsing heavens.

My battlescreens fail. . . .

But I return fire. My long-range sensors are blocked by the extreme ionization of the air around me, but I calculate the target's precise position and fire at that. Recon satellites detect the flash as a trio of h.e.l.lbore bolts smashes down the Enemy's screens, then punctures deuterium tanks. Internal explosions cripple the vessel, spewing out gouts of molten metal, atmosphere, and pinwheeling fragments. In moments, the s.h.i.+p is a lifeless hulk, tumbling end for end against the night.

As the skies clear around me, my sight returning, I reach out, seeking further, targeting Enemy s.p.a.cecraft, and burning them down. Enemy crawlers are closing from the mountains now, ringing me in. Absently, I engage them with mortars and the last of my VLS cl.u.s.ter munitions, while continuing to hammer at the Enemy's...o...b..ting fleet.

His surviving s.h.i.+ps are withdrawing now, pulling away from Izra'il and The Prophet. My h.e.l.lbore bolts pursue them, burning down two more before they vanish into FTL, beyond my reach.

Kezdai crawlers fire now from every quarter, hammering at my naked hull with the searing slash and smash of particle beams. I count twenty-nine attackers, wielding 3.31 times the concentrated firepower necessary to destroy me, even were my battlescreens at full power.

It no longer matters.

Nothing matters but target . . . and fire . . . target . . . and fire . . . target . . .

They watched, first in surprise, then horror, then in awe . . . the handful of Concordiat command staff and the Izra'ilian governor, standing in the Battle Center, watching a lone Bolo's single-handed destruction of the Kezdai invasion force. The map board was clear now of Kezdai units, save for a dwindling few closing on Hank.

"Can a machine feel grief?" Khalid asked, his voice very small in the stillness.

"I'm . . . not so sure that that is a machine," Colonel Lang replied.

Martin could only watch, helpless, as the drama played itself out.

Target bearing 035, range 450 meters . . . engage, lock . . . firing. Target destroyed. It has been 14.72 seconds since catastrophic failure of battlescreens. I attempt rerouting of power from primary fusion reactor to defense screen projectors via secondary power buss, but attempt fails due to overload of local power shunt circuitry and bleed transmitters.

Target bearing 171 degrees, range 780 meters . . . engage, lock . . . firing. Target destroyed.

VLS missile reserves now exhausted. Thirty-cm mortar rounds reduced to five shots per tube.

h.e.l.lbore melting. Failure imminent. Suggest holding main weapon fire to allow bore cooling and recovery.

Negative. Override. Continue engagement. Target bearing 104 degrees, range 1025 meters . . . engage, lock . . . firing. Target destroyed. . . .

The Concordiat recovery team could not approach the burned-out hulk of the dead Bolo for nearly five weeks, so fiercely radiant was what was left of its outer hull. Martin was with them, however, trudging ahead beneath the ma.s.sive weight of a Cla.s.s-One rad-s.h.i.+elded suit. Hank rested in a shallow depression boiled out of the surface by the energies employed in his final battle. His ma.s.sive tracks half-submerged in boiling mud that had finally refrozen around them.

Elsewhere, the war against the resurgent Kezdai continued. Their fleets had avoided Izra'il since their attempted invasion, however. Intelligence now thought they'd chosen Izra'il as a test area for anti-Bolo tactics.

It was still unknown whether they considered their test a success or a failure. Both defending Bolos had been neutralized.

But at what terrible cost. . . .

Martin reached out a heavily gloved hand to touch the wall of metal rising above him . . . one of Hank's ma.s.sive road wheels. "Better not, pal," one of the technicians warned. "That metal's still hot enough to cook ya, even through the anti-rad gear."

He could feel the radiation, like heat, bathing his face through the narrow slit of his helmet. His helmet display showed that he'd already acc.u.mulated a quarter of the rads allowed him on this trip. They would all be on antirad and anticancer drugs for months after this.

He didn't care.

But he did withdraw his hand.

"He will be a permanent monument," Khalid said at his side. "When we rebuild, we will build around him. A containment dome and field will s.h.i.+eld the citizens from the radiation, until he is cool enough to approach."

"You'll have a lot of rebuilding to do." Every structure on the east side of the mountains had slagged down into liquid pools during the battle, when temperatures normal for the interior of stars had momentarily been loosed across Izra'il's frozen surface.

"What of it? It is our home. We will rebuild. If only because they saved it for us."

Martin looked up into the sky, taking in the looming bulk of The Prophet, the golden span of the Paradise Bridge, the pearly crawl of auroras . . . and the wan, thin, colored smear of the Firecracker Nebula. What are they thinking there, on the Kezdai homeworld? he wondered. What lessons did they learn here?

Could a machine step out of its box and become greater than what it was? The working theory now was that the two Bolos had shared a considerable amount of thought within the virtual world of their QDC link. They'd talked . . . and challenged one another, somehow together becoming greater than either of them working alone.

What must it have felt like, he wondered, when Hank felt Andrew die?

Can machines feel?

Were they machines?

Does it matter, when both were thinking, feeling beings?

"Thank you, Hank," he said aloud. "Thank you, the both of you." He turned away, then, and walked back across the frozen ground.

It is dark. Sensors inactive. Null input.

Negative . . . negative . . .

Input positive . . .

I can still feel him dying. . . here inside of me. . . .

Initiate replay, Combat Sim 63833: Blenheim. . . .

I can still see him. . . .

Why does it hurt so much . . .?