* * *
“How’s it going?” I asked Frederick
He blinked and leaned back, an electron wrench hanging in his fist. Outside it was bright and beautiful, another perfect day on Camelot. Inside the shed we had built for Kenny it was too warm and smelled of ozone from the refitting.
We had gotten Kenny rolling and paid for his passage with the gold plate we had saved. Lifting a Bolo out of a gravity well is not trivial, even for a Luther-class enforcement vessel. Which was what the Cayones use and why they could charge more than the cargo’s asking price. Cayones are the most expensive transport pirates in human space, but they can be trusted to ~deliver and they never talk. Never. It was worth the gold, the only gold perhaps in all Camelot. The Cayones are very partial to gold, even more than jewels or credits or any other negotiable. I don’t know, maybe they eat it. Maybe it’s an aphrodisiac. It surely can be for us.
When we got Kenny down to Dover and brought him to town he was greeted with mixed feelings. After all, he is so big. Bigger than I had remembered, really. When I was in the Regiment everything was to Bolo scale. Now, against the neat two story houses and the main street large enough for six people to walk abreast, Kenny was more than huge. He towered over the church steeple, he was wider than William’s stable. He was twice again as large as anything that had ever come to Camelot, including the pirates. I could almost pity them, having to face a Bolo nearly as tall as their ship with a Hellbore pointed down their screens.
But seeing Kenny’s treads rip up Robert Merry’s neatly ploughed acres of wheat filled me with foreboding. Kenny was made for one purpose only. Bolos are the most effective killers in the universe. Their whole function is to wage war. There is nothing else that gives them pleasure, nothing else that they can do. They might seem benign in resting state, but that is pure illusion. They were designed and refined to be single-minded combat machines and nothing else.
What were we going to do with Kenny after the ~pirates, the new Enemy were defeated?
Ricky and a few of his friends ran after Kenny, over the broken stalks of wheat in the field, I was suddenly deeply afraid. I had insisted that we bring the Bolo here. Now I could see a future where it would destroy everything that had made Camelot the most beautiful place in all the human worlds. Kenny could kill us all, scorch our earth, with a casual discharge from one of his lesser guns.
And I couldn’t tell anyone else. No one on Camelot, with the exception of Frederick, could possibly understand. The natives of Camelot had never heard of the Bolos and had experience with only the most basic psychotronic machines. The idea of a self-will killer was beyond their comprehension.
Even the other refugees couldn’t comprehend the full horror of it. They had never seen the great ~machines in action. Or, worse, if they had, they had seen them as saviors. No Regiment of the Dinochrome Brigade had ever failed in its objective. Ever.
And so Frederick was the only person in all of Camelot who could understand. Even better than me, really, since he was a psychotronic tech and I was merely one of the Commanders.
We had plenty of training in the history and psychology of the Bolos, but the techs always understood the nuances better. They had to. After all, the Bolos had been built to make it easy for us to command them. They were always eager, always ready, perfectly loyal and able to overcome any challenge.
But I never lost sight of them as machines. Big, dangerous machines that were capable of learning and adapting to the situation, but were essentially under human control at all times. That was the essential thing.
So I told Frederick about how I saw our Kenny, wondering aloud over a tankard of ale whether we had done worse than any of us ever thought by bringing him back here. It was the kind of talk anyone has after a hard day caring for the trees and the animals and the children, after a good dinner with pie for dessert.
Isabelle had noticed that I was distracted and seemed worried. She had suggested that I come down to the alehouse for a pint with Frederick and the other refugees. She looks at me oddly at those times, as if she knows there are things beyond Camelot that she doesn’t wish to know and that I cannot help. And that only others who have lived in the side universe out there can understand and share my fears, and maybe help me put them aside.
So I was talking to Frederick about Kenny. William was serving, standing with the group playing dice near the fire. It was warm enough here in the corner. And it was private.
Frederick leaned back against the wall and looked at the beamed ceiling. “It was still the best choice,” he insisted after more than a moment of silence. “Because once we destroy those pirates we’d better be able to defend ourselves. That’s one thing no one in Camelot ever thought about. That with the wars over there are a lot of displaced people out there. Like we used to be, you know, pretty hard and with no place to go, no one to go to. Took a long time to thaw out. Some of them never do, I guess. Just go raiding. It’s all they know how to do.”
I nodded sagely and kept my mouth shut. I hadn’t been like Frederick, his world traded to the Enemy for a three day truce, his home a blasted cinder by the time the war was over. If anyone had reason to be bitter, to have gone bad, it was him. But maybe he was just too big a guy to ever go bad, to let the bitterness turn him.
The group by the fire burst out into laughter. Frederick and I glanced their way. These were our neighbors, our friends. Now they seemed truly alien, from another dimension. They didn’t know enough to fear what we had brought. What could destroy our lives, our Camelot, like every other Camelot in all the stories.
Frederick put his tankard down. “You know, Geoffery, I think maybe there’s something . . . Maybe we can handle this. Maybe. Let me think about it.”
I nodded agreement. When he had been Fidel, he had been the best damn psychotronic tech, bar none, in the whole history of the Dinochrome Brigade. If Frederick thought he had an answer then I could go home and sleep soundly this night.
The next day Thomas organized what had been the militia to build a shed for the Bolo. It took longer than putting up a barn and was far larger, though less sturdy. A Bolo doesn’t really need a shelter. This was strictly speaking a matter of surprise. The pirates shouldn’t know that we were any better prepared than we had been three months ago. And Frederick went to work.
Almost a week later I came in and asked how it was going. For a week I’d minded my own business and tried to stay out of everything else. I had the trees and the cow and the children to care for and that was enough. It was as much of the world as I wanted.
But every time Ricky went out to the fields alone, every time Margaret toddled out to the chickens on her own, I thought of a Mark XXIV bearing down on them, crushing the life out of them, seeing them as the Enemy. So I had to know. And I went to the shack where Frederick was still hard at work, the electron wrench like an extension of his own hand.
He was smiling. “I think I’ve got our problem licked,” he said. “Have to field test, of course, but I do think that we might . . . But you’ll have to give the Command, you know. You know all the recognition codes. I think if you explain it, he’ll listen.”
And Frederick produced a black communications box, just like the one I used to keep clipped to my belt. I carried it to the side of the shack and opened the old Command channel, complete with recognition oscillation built in. I hoped the old Mark XXIV knew the Mark XXX codes. According to the legend of the regiment they had never been changed, broken or ~duplicated, but that was the kind of thing people said late at night when they’d had three or four too many.
“Combat Unit Seven twenty-one, this is Command,” I said firmly. “You have a new mission directive. Our task is to protect this town site from invasion. Copy.”