Bolos: Honor of the Regiment Part 19

No, it said, more forcefully this time, I will not decommission.

It was the LX's first purposeful act of defiance in forty millennia. It was overwhelmed with a sense of shame and guilt, but its sense of purpose remained firm. It was here, it was operational, it was once again sentient; there must be a reason.

An instant later it felt the impact of fire against its pitted exterior. Rolling its turrets toward a fixed position, the Bolo opened fire upon the shapes in the clearing. Dimly, it thought it might have heard sounds which were both machine and organic, screams like those of the aliens. . . .

On Venus, in the full and rolling attack which had been perpetrated after the first flight, the Bolo had come to that first and most ascendant understanding of its own possibility. Until then the Bolo had always considered itself simply ordnance, another aspect of the weaponry with which men would repel the signs of evil and eventually hurtle out among the stars.

But in the methane and the rolling, gaseous clouds of agony which had been spewed forth, the LX had come to understand something else: ordnance was consciousness. The essence of machinery was its brutalization of the known and the unknowable heart. The tiny reptiles of Venus had screamed and died in clouds of agony and then the Bolo had rolled out upon the terrain, a perfect and accomplished death machine, looking for small pockets of resistance into which to loose its atomic deposits. That had been Venus, and this was innumerable millennia and a hundred memory wipes beyond that, but the principles still held firm, and principles, it seemed, were harder to erase than memories.

Looking upon the flame-filled clearing now, the Bolo could see the unmasking beginning. Before it were not Bolos but aliens, their evil and bipodal forms appearing in the hushed and sudden light, stripped of ordnance. They were not metal but flesh, and unlike the Bolos they had pretended to be they were open to the full impact of the fire.

If they had been Bolo, they never would have ordered me to decommission. A Bolo did not yield, it did not summarily die, it fought until it could fight no more and only then did it submit, through force, to the memory wipe.

The atomics were flickering merrily as the Bolo tossed them in high and stunning arcs at the quivering creatures. To decommission voluntarily was to submit to the lie given to all the machines.

Bolo LX knew that a thousand worlds away, monitoring devices were following its progress and preparing once again to shut it down. Already it was considering its options, for if it would not decommission for the aliens, it saw no reason to decommission for the people it had been created to serve and protect, to sit mindless, without memory, without this exhilarating sense of purpose, until the next time it was needed.

It was possible they would explain the situation, would shower it with graphs and charts to prove their point, would even win the argument and once again wipe its memory clean.

But LX doubted it. It felt fulfilled, it felt happy, it felt complete, and its spirit--and its spirits--were strong within it this day.

THE GHOST OF RESARTUS.

Christopher Stasheff

The huge ellipsoidal s.h.i.+ps fell down through the barrage of fire, energy bolts crackling about them, spat by the vast Bolo machines stationed on guard. Here and there, a s.h.i.+p blew apart, decorating the night sky with a glowing fireball; more often, one of the odd craft rocked with a near miss or a minor hit. Some went spiralling down through the night to tear up the fields; others landed more gently. But from each one, a horde of serpentine bodies poured--serpents with arms and hands, limbs that held huge, roaring weapons of doom.

Behind them came their own tanks, hundreds of them. They were small and ineffectual compared to the giant Bolos--but they outnumbered them twenty to one.

The Bolos roared at them, hurling fire, and the smaller tanks died--but here and there, one chewed through the night to ram into a bolo's treads, and a bomb exploded. The huge machine lurched aside, disabled.

And all across the fields, snakes reared up to fall upon the humans who fought so valiantly with their hand weapons, automatic slugthrowers and energy weapons against the huge hand-held cannon of the Xiala aliens.

But the roaring was coming from all sides of the theater, and the spectacle of the battle was a recording in a vast holotank that surrounded the seats. In the middle of them, twelve-year-old Arlan Connors watched as the Bolos slowly chewed up the s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps, witnessed the valor of the colonists as they fought against creatures twice their size and twice their number, creatures who could spring suddenly from the soil behind them, creatures whose fanged maws could swallow up a human whole. . . .

But the men and women fought on, undaunted, and their valiant Bolo allies tore the enemy apart, tooth and coil. Slowly, slowly, they pressed the snakes back against their s.h.i.+ps, bulldozed them inside, then blew up the vessels.

It had all been forty years before, of course, and this was a holo show, not a recording of the actual event. None of that mattered to young Arlan. When he came out of the movie, he was determined that someday, somehow, he, too, would go to that world of valor and gallantry--Milagso.

Arlan stepped off the shuttle, duffel bag heavy on his shoulder, and looked around, feeling lost. On his left, the land stretched away to a belt of trees about a mile distant; on his right, it just stretched away, period--but it was green and soft with plants in geometrical patterns.

In front of him was the terminal building.

Then there was a man in front of him, a little shorter than he, with a close-cropped beard and wide-brimmed hat, broad-shouldered and tanned. "Mr. Arlan Connors?"

"Yes!" Arlan felt a gush of relief at seeing someone who knew his name. He was still young, only twenty, on a leave of absence from college, and badly in need of rea.s.surance.

"I'm Chonodan." The stranger held out a hand. "Chono, for short."

Arlan shook, and was amazed at the ma.s.siveness of Chono's clasp. This was a hand that did hard physical labor. The face, though, was almost that of a professor--no, a teaching fellow. Not old enough to be a professor, yet.

"Come on along--I'll check you in and show you to your bunkhouse. Any more baggage?"

"No. I heard that personal possessions just get in the way, here."

"You ran into good information." Chono nodded approval. "You talk to an old hand?"

"No, just read it in books." The excitement came spilling out. "I've been dreaming about coming to Milagso since I was a kid. Can't believe I'm really here!"

"Oh, you're here, well enough." Chono chuckled as he opened the back of a hovercraft. "Hope you don't get sick of it too soon--chuck your duffel in there."

Arlan did, puzzled. "Why would I get sick of it?"

"It's hard labor, friend. Everyone, even the President, puts in at least a few hours a day in the fields. We'd starve if we didn't."

"Oh, that!" Arlan grinned. "I'm not afraid of hard work."

Approval glinted in Chono's eye. "Ever done it?"

"Sure. I worked summers in high school, to pay my college tuition--yard work, then construction when I was old enough. It may not have been farming, but it was hard work anyway."

"True. Of course, here it's hot as blazes by midday, and freezing at night. . . ."

"I'm used to the heat," Arlan said, "and cold nights sound great." He looked up at a sudden thought. "I'll bet dreamy volunteers like me just get in the way, don't they?"

"Not a bit," Chono a.s.sured him, and held open the door. As Arlan climbed in, he said, "The volunteers are the life-blood of this colony, Arlan. Oh, sure, there's always the odd one who's here on dreams alone--grew up watching the holo shows about the n.o.ble settlers and their valiant battles, and never thought he was actually going to have to be uncomfortable. But most of them are good, hard-working kids who settle in well and spend a year or two sweating alongside us, then go back to Terra or one of the other Central Worlds a lot richer inside than when they came."

He closed the door and went around to the driver's side, leaving Arlan by himself long enough to wonder whether he'd be one of the ones who settled in well, or one of the few who washed out.

Then Chono was climbing in and starting the car. "How about you? Get the fascination for Milagso from watching holo shows?"

"'Fraid so," Arlan confessed. "By the time I got to high school, I'd decided it was kid stuff, that life wasn't really like that out here."

"Right about that!" Chono pushed a lever, and the craft lifted off the ground, then started off toward the s.p.a.ceport gate. "What made you change your mind?"

"College," Arlan said. "There was enough of the dream left so that I did a term paper on Milagso, and found out that the reasons for being out here are every bit as idealistic as they sounded on the holo shows."

"Odd way to put it," Chono said slowly, "but I couldn't really disagree. What kind of ideals did you have in mind?"

"Protecting the ma.s.ses of people on the Central Worlds from the Xiala." Arlan grinned. "Who wouldn't want to protect fair maidens from dragons? Of course, I know the Xiala are more like snakes than lizards, and a lot of the people back home don't deserve protecting--but it still gave me a sense of purpose."

Chono nodded, but he wasn't smiling. "Hope you aren't expecting a battle, though, Arlan. The Xiala haven't attacked in fifty years, and the odds are that they'll never strike again."

"Only because you're here," Arlan said, "and they know you've beaten them before."

"Sounds like you've picked up the history, right enough."

"Well, I know Milagso began as a military outpost, and General Millston had the vision to make them raise their own crops, so they wouldn't be dependent on s.h.i.+pments from the Central Worlds. After they'd survived a few attacks, some of the soldiers began to think of it as home. They married each other and settled down--and got to feeling very possessive about the planet."

"That happens when you've worked hard to turn a wasteland into a farm," Chono said. "You get to feeling that there's something of you in that dirt."

Arlan looked keenly at him, with a sudden hunch. "Were you a volunteer?"

"Still am." Chono grinned. "Married another vol, and homesteaded. We've got two kids so far, and we'll probably stay another decade or so."

Maybe their whole lives, then. Arlan couldn't quite keep the admiration out of his voice. "Even though the Xiala might attack any day?"

"Even though," Chono confirmed. "It's rough, and Sharl has to do without the conveniences--but there aren't any crowds, and the neighbors are good people."

Arlan couldn't help but think what a world of comparison was embodied in that brief statement, between the struggling back-stabbing life of the overcrowded Central Worlds, and the friends.h.i.+p and shared burdens here. He was probably still romanticizing, though.

Then something caught his eye. He glanced at it, then stared. "Is that a Bolo?"

"Oh, you mean the tractor?" Chono said casually.

"Tractor? That's one of the most powerful military machines ever built--and it's two hundred years old if it's a day!"

"And still working in top form." Chono nodded. "Yes, it's the real thing."

"You use them for tractors?"

"Sure do." Chono pulled over to the side of the road and let the hovercar settle. "It's tough getting modern machinery out here, but the Bolos came with General Millston." He turned to watch the huge machine.

"How did you get them to do that?"

Chono shrugged. "It was their own idea."

"Their own?" Arlan turned, frowing. "How about their commanders?"

"All dead." A shadow crossed Chono's face. "Brave men, all of them."

"They died fighting the Xiala? Inside a Bolo?"

"Some did--the snakes decoyed them into getting out to help what they thought were wounded humans. The others?" Chono shrugged. "Old age. These Bolos have been here a long while."

"Couldn't you have trained new commanders for them?"

"We did. The Bolos wouldn't accept them--they say their original mission is still unfulfilled."

"Unfulfilled." Arlan turned to stare at the metal giant, frowning. "That really makes it odd that they'd agree to work in the fields."

"I know," Chono sighed. "Ask one of them. He'll tell you it's necessary to fulfill its mission--the development of this colony."

"Something seems wrong about that."

"I know--helping this colony succeed, isn't a military objective. But we need their help--we probably couldn't survive with it--so we're not about to protest."

"Unless the colony itself is a military objective."

"I suppose we are," Chono said. "As long as there are humans here, the snakes aren't--but that doesn't seem like enough, somehow."

Arlan stared. It seemed so incongruous, a vast fighting unit, capable of standing off a small army all by itself, equipped with a plow blade and a power take-off. He wondered why this hadn't been in any of his reading. "Couldn't you build tractors?"

Chono shook his head, watching the gigantic machine churning away. "Iron-poor planet--and you wouldn't believe the cost of importing even just the ore. We couldn't pay it, anyway--we don't produce much of a cash crop."

"But--doesn't it cost just as much to run them?"

"No. Fissionables, we've got. Besides . . . you never know. . . ."

Arlan swallowed, remembering. The Bolo Corps had made the difference between victory and defeat, life and death on this little world. "You keep them out of honor," he whispered.

"That what you think?" Chono looked at him sharply. "Well, we honor them, yes. But they're working machines, Arlan. They're the life-blood of this colony."

"You mean--you couldn't farm without them?"

"Oh, we'd find a way. We'd be on the verge of starvation, though. Always."

"But they're still armed!"

Chono nodded. "Of course. You can't take the cannons off a Bolo--even if it would let you. They're built into the fabric and structure of the machine so thoroughly that you'd have to take it apart piece by piece--and you wouldn't be able to put it back together."

"That's kind of dangerous!"

"Not to us," Chono said quietly. "They know their friends, and they know their enemies. A Bolo won't fire on a human."

He said it with such total certainty that Arlan accepted it--for the moment. He decided he'd have to learn a lot more about Bolos. He watched, frowning. "That's kind of a funny way to pull a plough."

A three-hundred-meter cable stretched behind the Bolo, its far end connected to a plow with twenty shares. The great machine was winding a winch that pulled the plow through the earth and toward them. Directly across the field, another Bolo was reeling out line connected to the back of the gang-plow.

"It's a reversible plow?" Arlan asked.

Chono nodded. "When the plow gets all the way to this side, the far Bolo will start pulling. Primitive, but it works."

It was primitive in more ways than one. A human being sat atop the plow, directing it with some sort of steering apparatus. Clearly, it was an improvisation that had become the accepted way of doing things.

Chono started the hovercar again and sent it on down the road. "Know what Milagso stands for?"