The cold hollow in his belly expanded.
“Ought’a be interesting, huh?” the technician was saying as he put away tools. “Never seen a Bolo go starkers before. Not like this. They say the first Mark XX went and committed suicide on ’em; but, hell, at least it had a reason. Doing its duty, upholding the honor of the Brigade and all. That’s what they said, anyway. But this little baby, she’s just starkers, no explanation, nuthin’. . . .”
Ish had to restrain the impulse to crack the tech’s protective suit to hard radiation. He settled for a muttered, “Finish up, will you?”
The technician shrugged. “They’ll have to scrap ‘er. Always did wonder if these Mark XXI Special units would be stable under stress. Too much oddball programming. She just wasn’t designed right. Not her fault; but, hey, she’s nuts. You gonna fry her Action/Command center now?”
Red would be listening to every word they said, trying to understand what had happened to her. She’d be confused, hurt . . .
And irrational?
Ish was listening, too, to the Bolo’s ragged internal sounds. The noise was eerily like metallic keening. It came and went at random. “That’s not my decision,” he finally said. “I suppose it will depend on what we discover in the backup mission record.”
The technician shrugged inside his suit. “Well, whatever. You ought’a get back with this here box. I’ll leave her to you.”
The man departed noisily, banging his heavy tool kit against Red’s internal support frame. Ish experienced an irrational impulse of his own, to order Red to open fire on the unfeeling bastard; then remembered her sole gun was inoperative. He flexed the fingers of one gloved hand and forced himself to breathe steadily. He couldn’t afford to let personal feelings—regardless of their intensity—sway him. But that tech had no idea how close . . .
Ish stared emptily across the rugged, broken terrain that characterized this whole, miserable mining pit of a world. Then dropped his gaze to the dense module in his hands. It wasn’t black, exactly. More a purple-black, the color of iodine. Flintsteel, same as the Bolo’s hull. Given its weight, the module’s hull was thicker than Red’s.
Ish shut his eyes, trying not to think about what his next duty might well be. He never had blamed Red, not during all the long months since he’d given up command. Red had only been doing her duty, in the kindest way she could find to do it. Now she didn’t even remember him.
“Why’d you do it, Red?” he whispered.
The eerie, intermittent keening halted. The Bolo’s voice, mechanical yet definitely female, said, “Unit LRH-1313, awaiting orders. Please elaborate your question.”
Her apple-pie and warm-brownies personality was gone. What had replaced it was the cold, impersonal sound of a newly commissioned machine, devoid of associated memories, of everything that made her . . .
Red.
“Never mind.”
He wasn’t even certain which mystery he’d meant: the reason behind her decision a year previously or her far more serious behavior today. Was today his fault? He should have realized a year ago that her personality programming was unstable. If he’d taken steps to correct it . . .
His career might have ended, but Red might not have run mad. Ish tightened his hand around the dense module. All the answers had to be locked away in this thing. He cleared his throat and decided to make sure she still remembered he was her Commander before trying to dismount. No telling, with her internal circuitry so scrambled, what she might think or do. He didn’t want Red to kill him.
“Unit LRH-1313, respond to code Baked Bread.”
The disconcerting, intermittent keening halted once again. “Yes, Commander Matsuro? I have already responded to that code. Do you have further orders?”
Ish cleared his throat. “Retire for depot maintenance, vector 035, range 40.5 kilometers.”
“Understood, Commander. Will you accompany me?”
He had to glance away from her forward internal sensors. “No, I won’t be coming with you. I’ll . . . join you later, at the depot.”
“Understood, Commander.”
He swung down and stepped well to starboard, stumbling a little again on uneven ground. The Bolo turned and rumbled obediently in the assigned direction. Rumbled only because LRH’s treads were damaged and her hull was breached near her pivoting tread-control ratchets. The jagged hole allowed sound to leak out like water from a dying jellyfish. Mark XXI Special units normally operated so quietly, they could sneak up on a sleeping cat. Red had excelled at the game, which explained the battle honors welded to her low-slung, data-gathering turret.
The only reason she was able to move at all was that her wide-tired, independent-drive wheels were still functional. Conceptual descendants of the independent-drive wheels on the early twentieth-century Christie T-3 tank, which was in turn developed into the famous Soviet T-34 tank of that same century, they permitted a tracked vehicle to continue moving even if it lost its treads to battle damage. A tracked vehicle without treads or independent-drive wheels was little more than an armored pillbox. For an intelligence-gathering Bolo without significant armor, those wheels were doubly critical. Without them, an LRH unit wouldn’t have been an armored pillbox, it would’ve been a sitting duck.
Red’s wheels had been damaged, too, but they still functioned. She was certainly headed straight toward maintenance as ordered. Not an irrational peep out of her since his arrival, except for that odd keening—which might just as easily have been battle damage to instrumentation somewhere inside her. He wondered if she was even fully aware of what they’d removed.
He glanced at Red’s retreating hull, at the data module.
Destroying Red would feel entirely too much like murder.
3
I have been ordered to return to depot for much-needed maintenance. Despite severe damage to my sensors, I am able to perform a scan of extremely broken terrain which lies between my current position and the coordinates I have been given. At top cruising speed I could arrive in twenty-two minutes. I am not currently capable of top cruising speed. Even though external sensors and internal diagnostics tell me I am badly in need of maintenance, I do not choose even the top speed of which I am currently capable.
Instead, I delay. I have not been ordered to proceed with haste. I do not feel like haste. I am uncertain what I feel, a condition which triggers internal diagnostic alarms in my ego-gestalt circuitry. I am a Bolo Mark XXI Model I (Special) unit. I have been designed for steadfast emotional stability. Yet what has transpired fills my entire psychotronic awareness network with unease.
Something is seriously wrong with my memory. I retain basic orientation data. My primary personality and self-image files are intact. All else is vacant. My memory begins with reception of the transmitted code which my current Commander sent before coming aboard. This occurred 11.857 minutes ago. I can discover no cause for this condition, despite what appears to be serious battle damage to my hull.
This damage puzzles and alarms me. I am not a combat unit. I am not designed for it. I carry neither armor nor armaments appropriate to heavy combat. I am strongly motivated to seek an explanation from my Commander, for my basic orientation data urges me to confide my concerns to him. Yet when given the chance, I have held silent. Nor do I choose to call him now on my Command Link. He has discussed destroying me for a crime—an insanity—which I do not recall having committed.
I do not wish to die. Survival is a deeply imprinted part of my basic personality-gestalt circuitry. Nor do I wish to suffer madness. This, too, is something I fear, something which is an integral part of my personality gestalt. I am a stable, emotionally reliable Light Reconnaissance Headquarters unit, charged with the well-being and security of my Command and Dismount Teams. This is my function.
My Commander’s reluctance to accompany me to the maintenance depot weighs heavily upon me. I perform a deep probe of my personality-integration circuits and find no sign of damage which would explain my Commander’s or the technician’s accusations.
I am not mad.
Am I?
Do the mad know they are afflicted?
This is not a question I am currently capable of answering. I turn my attention to what I can answer. My basic orientation data reveals that I would not have been forwarded into a battlefield intelligence gathering mission without a crew. Mark XXI Model I (Special) units do not function independently. Mark XXI combat units maintain remote contact with a human commander and occasionally carry a passenger, but Mark XXI Model I (Special) units are subordinate to an on-board commander and are designed to house eight additional crewmembers at full battle readiness. I can discover no trace in my on-board files of having been assigned a full intelligence-gathering crew for this or any other mission.