“Wait—yes. The ramp is down. We will be within visual range ourselves in a moment—there—”
More screens came alive; Siegfried read them rapidly—
Then read them again, incredulously.
“Mechs?” he said, astonished. “Remotely controlled mechs?”
“So it appears.” Rommel sounded just as mystified. “This does not match any known configuration. There is one limited AI in that ship. Data indicates it is hardened against any attack conventional forces at the port could mount. The ship seems to be digging in—look at the seismic reading on 4-B. The limited AI is in control of the mechs it is deploying. I believe that we can assume this will be the case for the other ~invading ships, at least the ones coming down at the moment, since they all appear to be of the same model.”
Siegfried studied the screens; as they had assumed, the mechs were about the size of pre-Atomic Panzers, and seemed to be built along similar lines. “Armored mechs. Good against anything a civilian has. Is that ship hardened against anything you can throw?” he asked finally.
There was a certain amount of glee in Rommel’s voice. “I think not. Shall we try?”
Siegfried’s mouth dried. There was no telling what weaponry that ship packed—or the mother-ship held. The mother-ship might be monitoring the drop-ships, watching for attack. God and my Duty, he thought.
“You may fire when ready, Herr Rommel.”
They had taken the drop-ship by complete surprise; destroying it before it had a chance to transmit distress or tactical data to the mother-ship. The mechs had stopped in their tracks the moment the AI’s direction ceased.
But rather than roll on to the next target, Siegfried had ordered Rommel to stealth again, while he examined the remains of the mechs and the controlling craft. He’d had an idea—the question was, would it work?
He knew weapons’ systems; knew computer-driven control. There were only a limited number of ways such controls could work. And if he recognized any of those here—
He told himself, as he scrambled into clothing and climbed the ladder out of the cabin, that he would give himself an hour. The situation would not change much in an hour; there was very little that he and Rommel could accomplish in that time in the way of mounting a campaign. As it happened, it took him fifteen minutes more than that to learn all he needed to know. At the end of that time, though, he scrambled back into Rommel’s guts with mingled feelings of elation and anger.
The ship and mechs were clearly of human origin, and some of the vanes and protrusions that made them look so unfamiliar had been tacked on purely to make both the drop-ships and armored mechs look alien in nature. Someone, somewhere, had discovered something about Bachman’s World that suddenly made it valuable. From the hardware interlocks and the programming modes he had found in what was left of the controlling ship, he suspected that the “someone” was not a government, but a corporation.
And a multiplanet corporation could afford to mount an invasion force fairly easily. The best force for the job would, of course, be something precisely like this—completely mechanized. There would be no troops to “hush up” afterwards; no leaks to the interstellar press. Only a nice clean invasion—and, in all probability, a nice, clean extermination at the end of it, with no humans to protest the slaughter of helpless civilians.
And afterwards, there would be no evidence anywhere to contradict the claim that the civilians had slaughtered each other in some kind of local conflict.
The mechs and the AI itself were from systems he had studied when he first started in this specialty—outmoded even by his standards, but reliable, and when set against farmers with hand-weapons, perfectly adequate.
There was one problem with this kind of setup . . . from the enemy’s standpoint. It was a problem they didn’t know they had.
Yet.
* * *
He filled Rommel in on what he had discovered as he raced up the ladder, then slid down the handrails into the command cabin. “Now, here’s the thing—I got the access code to command those mechs with a little fiddling in the AI’s memory. Nice of them to leave in so many manual overrides for me. I reset the command interface freq to one you have, and hardwired it so they shouldn’t be able to change it—”
He jumped into the command chair and strapped in; his hands danced across the keypad, keying in the frequency and the code. Then he saluted the console jauntily. “Congratulations, Herr Rommel,” he said, ~unable to keep the glee out of his voice. “You are now a Field Marshal.”
“Siegfried!” Yes, there was astonishment in Rommel’s synthesized voice. “You just gave me command of an armored mobile strike force!”
“I certainly did. And I freed your command circuits so that you can run them without waiting for my ~orders to do something.” Siegfried couldn’t help grinning. “After all, you’re not going against living troops, you’re going to be attacking AIs and mechs. The next AI might not be so easy to take over, but if you’re running in the middle of a swarm of ‘friendlies,’ you might not be suspected. And when we knock out that one, we’ll take over again. I’ll even put the next bunch on a different command freq so you can command them separately. Sooner or later they’ll figure out what we’re doing, but by then I hope we’ll have at least an equal force under our command.”
“This is good, Siegfried!”
“You bet it’s good, mein Freund,” he retorted. “What’s more, we’ve studied the best—they can’t possibly have that advantage. All right—let’s show these amateurs how one of the old masters handles armor!”
* * *
The second and third takeovers were as easy as the first. By the fourth, however, matters had changed. It might have dawned on either the AIs on the ground or whoever was in command of the overall operation in the mother-ship above that the triple loss of AIs and mechs was not due to simple malfunction, but to an unknown and unsuspected enemy.
In that, the hostiles were following in the mental footsteps of another pre-Atomic commander, who had once stated, “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but three times is enemy action.”
So the fourth time their forces advanced on a ship, they met with fierce resistance.
They lost about a dozen mechs, and Siegfried had suffered a bit of a shakeup and a fair amount of bruising, but they managed to destroy the fourth AI without much damage to Rommel’s exterior. Despite the danger from unexploded shells and some residual radiation, Siegfried doggedly went out into the wreckage to get that precious access code.
He returned to bad news. “They know we’re here, Siegfried,” Rommel announced. “That last barrage gave them a silhouette upstairs; they know I’m a Bolo, so now they know what they’re up against.”
Siegfried swore quietly, as he gave Rommel his fourth contingent of mechs. “Well, have they figured out exactly what we’re doing yet? Or can you tell?” Siegfried asked while typing in the fourth unit’s access codes.
“I can’t—I—can’t—Siegfried—” the Bolo replied, suddenly without any inflection at all. “Siegfried. There is a problem. Another. I am stretching my—resources—”
This time Siegfried swore with a lot less creativity. That was something he had not even considered! The AIs they were eliminating were much less sophisticated than Rommel—
“Drop the last batch!” he snapped. To his relief, Rommel sounded like himself again as he released control of the last contingent of mechs.
“That was not a pleasurable experience,” Rommel said mildly.
“What happened?” he demanded.
“As I needed to devote more resources to controlling the mechs, I began losing higher functions,” the Bolo replied simply. “We should have expected that; so far I am doing the work of three lesser AIs and all the functions you require, and maneuvering of the various groups we have captured. As I pick up more groups, I will inevitably lose processing functions.”
Siegfried thought, frantically. There were about twenty of these invading ships; their plan absolutely ~required that Rommel control at least eight of the groups successfully to hold the invasion off Port City. There was no way they’d be anything worse than an annoyance with only three; the other groups could outflank them. “What if you shut down things in here?” he asked. “Run basic life-support, but nothing fancy. And I could drive—run your weapons’ systems.”
“You could. That would help.” Rommel pondered for a moment. “My calculations are that we can take the required eight groups if you also issue battle ~orders and I simply carry them out. But there is a further problem.”
“Which is?” he asked—although he had the sinking feeling that he knew what the problem was going to be.
“Higher functions. One of the functions I will lose at about the seventh takeover is what you refer to as my personality. A great deal of my ability to maintain a personality is dependent on devoting a substantial percentage of my central processor to that personality. And if it disappears—”