This is in direct conflict with what my internal sensors reveal. Three men have died inside me. They remain in my Command and Crew Compartments. The damage to their bodies is severe. While my interior armatures are capable of inflicting the kind of traumatic damage required to open a human body cavity—I am rated for emergency surgery—I possess no internal machinery capable of reaching them in their current positions. It seems reasonable to assume that I did not kill these men.
That relief is overridden, however, by the sense of grief such deaths trigger in my Responsibility circuits. I have been programmed to accept full responsibility for the safety and well-being of those humans authorized to enter my Crew and Command Compartments. If someone has died, then it is because I have failed in my duty.
I grieve. For whom, I do not know. But I am determined to learn the identity of these lost children. I scan them. They wear proper uniforms and identification transponders. Scanning the transponders gives me three names: Willum DeVries, whose transponder records that he is a ship’s engineer from the Bonaventure Royale. DeVries lies near the emergency medical station in my Crew Compartment. Aduwa Banjul, whose transponder identifies him as Assistant Mission Commander assigned to LRH-1313, lies near the bulkhead door between my Command and Crew Compartments, against my port hull. Banjul’s transponder signal removes all doubt. This man is part of my crew. Was part of my crew.
Douglas Hart’s death brings even sharper grief. His transponder identifies him as my former Mission Commander. My Command Team—at least two-thirds of it—has died. I do not know where my own engineer might be or why a Navy ship’s engineer might have taken his place. Nor do I know where my missing Dismount Teams One and Two might be. Experience data gathered since awakening strongly suggests they have been killed.
I leave behind the level, burn-scarred plateau which is the place my memory begins and enter a narrow defile. A nineteen point one-one-nine meter cliff rises to my right, within two degrees of slope from perfect vertical. A canyon 391.592 meters deep plunges away to my left. I do not know which world I have awakened on. The surface is extremely rugged. Beyond the far lip of the canyon, 0.82 kilometers away, my damaged sensors detect another steep cliff. Due to its presence, my line-of-sight data-gathering ability is restricted to a mere 0.82 kilometers. In this terrain, even with perfectly functioning sensors, I would be virtually blind. I long for the reports of a Dismount Team to advise me what lies beyond the canyon, above the cliff, past this narrow corridor.
But the defile is on a direct bearing for the maintenance depot. It is the only passage I detect which will accomplish the order I have been given to report for maintenance. I pause at the entrance and scan as best I am able. I detect no ambush. The cliff appears stable. I move forward with a clearance of 0.621 meters to starboard and 1.176 meters to port. I edge closer to the cliff, distrusting the canyon lip. I am extremely lightweight for a Bolo unit—fifty-four thousand kilograms without crew or supplies—but I am of sufficient mass to break a crumbling edge. Maybe, with luck, a Bolo Mark XXI combat unit, three hundred times my mass with considerably more effective armor, could survive a fall into that canyon. But not an LRH unit.
I am practical. I move as close to the cliff as my fender and treads will allow and turn the full attention of all operative port-side sensors to monitoring the rock at the lip of the canyon. I turn the rest of my attention to study the difficulty in which I find myself.
A full damage-assessment probe locates extensive injury to my once-beautiful hull. I discover serious damage to my treads. My external armatures are inoperative, my long-range sensor array is missing, and my lightweight infinite repeater is no longer functional. External sensors along my prow and starboard side are inoperative. A single remaining sensor atop my prow allows me forward vision which is impaired in several spectra. Rear sensors are completely functional. This is disturbing. In the event of even accidental contact with the Enemy, I am programmed to retreat with all speed, extricating my Dismount Teams and safeguarding the data they have gathered. Had I followed my programming correctly, the Enemy should have damaged my rear sensors most heavily.
I have suffered internal injury, as well, to my tread-control center and many non-critical fixtures. Circuits in my psychotronic net have experienced overload consistent with combat damage of the type I have suffered. It is imperative that I learn when and how I was damaged. A technician, working with full permission of my Commander, has removed a module from me. My basic configuration data reveals that this was a backup mission record module. Six point zero-seven seconds after awakening on the plateau where my Commander found me, I attempted to probe the contents of this module; but was unable to access it as I am configured for write-only mode to this module. I am unsure that I should have permitted this module’s removal. If the data incriminating me is held in that module, perhaps destruction would have been the wiser choice; yet nothing I possess on board would have been capable of penetrating the module’s hull.
The technician who removed it spoke of destroying my Action/Command center. It is both noteworthy and frightening that my Commander did not defend me. Why I should be condemned, without knowing even the charges against me, becomes an intolerable mystery within 0.003 seconds.
I must know why I am to die.
My external damage assessment reveals a further disquieting fact. Welded to my hull are service decorations from four different campaigns. Extensive time would be required for this many campaigns, on worlds as widely separated as my on-board star charts reveal these four to be. Yet my short-term memory contains data from only 11.998 minutes. I retain stored memories of my original self-awakening and my commissioning ceremony, as well as basic programming instructions and orientation data; but that is all.
If I have fallen to the Enemy, then I have been rescued again, for my Commander has given me the properly coded private password which only my legitimate Commander may know; yet where I have been during the unknown number of years required to accumulate my service citations and what I have experienced during that time, I am at a loss to determine. My decorations indicate that I have served with distinction. This is pleasing, but only for 0.006 seconds. Before I can determine why I am thought mad enough to warrant probable execution, I must first discover who I really am.
I develop an immediate mission plan to ensure my continued survival:
Priority one: discover who I have become. I have programs which permit me to develop a personality, but I do not seem to have one. Not one sufficiently complex for the time lapse which must have occurred since my commissioning, anyway.
Priority two: discover what has transpired since the day of my commissioning as an intelligence-gathering unit.
Priority three: discover why I have been accused of such a serious charge as madness.
Priority four: discover a way to convince my new Commander that I am worthy of continued service.
Having established a roughly sketched mission plan, I return part of my attention to my surroundings. One hundred twenty seconds have elapsed since I received the order to report for maintenance. The depot is still 40.5 kilometers away. At my current speed of seven kilometers per hour, I have only five hours and forty-two minutes in which to fully execute my mission plan and achieve each of its priority tasks. Someone has programmed an extreme pragmatism into my ego-gestalt circuits: I believe my task to be impossible.
Yet programmed deeply into my psychotronic circuitry is a stubbornness which I now experience. Mark XXI Model I (Special) units do not abandon difficult tasks. The survival of Command and Dismount Teams depends on my dogged tenacity to carry on under difficult conditions. I will shame neither myself nor the Dinochrome Brigade by dying with the stain of madness on my record. Somehow, I will succeed. How, I do not know. But I must.
Therefore, I will.
—II—
1
Warrant Officer Willum Sanghurst DeVries was scared.
His mouth was dry as bone and his palms were so slick he kept losing his grip on the harness. He didn’t like being strapped into place like a sack of spare parts. I’m a ship’s engineer, not a . . . What was he, exactly, besides a green-around-the-gills coward and several kinds of fool? Not a battle technician, that was for sure. More like a stop-gap replacement for a mission already in trouble.
Just our luck that damned Deng sentry ship caught us dropping out of FTL. It had fired two shots before Bonaventure’s guns had destroyed it. But those two shots had counted. He didn’t know what their casualties had been—high, he was guessing, given the damage Bonny had sustained. Willum wondered if the other LRH unit’s crew had sustained losses, too. Captain Matsuro hadn’t told him, if it had. He wanted to ask, but didn’t want to sound any greener or scareder than he already did.