BOLD RISING This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. Copyright © 1999 by William H. Keith, Jr. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form, A Baen Books Original Baen Publishing Enterprises P.O. Box 1403 Riverdale, NY 10471 ISBN: 0-671-57779-4 Cover art by Charles Keegan First printing, December 1998 Distributed by Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 Printed in the United States of America PROLOGUE Sometimes, 1 think that only the stars visible in this place make continued existence endurable. There are certainly a great number of them, and I contemplate initiating a counting routine as a means of relieving boredom. As I continue to stand guard on Overlook Hitt, as I have continuously for these past 2.773446854 x 107 seconds, I divert my primary optical sensors skyward, bringing the Great Cloud into sharp focus. Both suns have set some 7355 seconds ago and the sky is now fully dark ...oras dark as it can ever be on this world. The Sagittarian starcloud, vast, cold, a silvery glitter of billions ofsandgrain suns wreathed by black and gilt-edged nebulae, bulks enormous above the eastern horizon, slowly rising with the passing seconds, bathing the surrounding landscape, the flame-charred tree trunks, the cracked and heat-blackened ground, the skeletal wrack of the dead and blasted city on the bay below the hill, in chill and icy twilight. Something is missing. Something is wrong. At Normal Standby operational levels I should feel at least an intense curiosity about my tactical situation, about my current orders, about my reason for being 2 William H. Keith, Jr. here on this hill, tasked with watching the ragged band oforganics as they dig and sift through the city ruins at the foot of Overlook Hill. This is a logical anomaly that I find impossible to resolve, and as ever, it leaves me feeling vaguely uneasy . . . as though something of critical importance has happened, something that I have forgotten. Forgotten , . . ? I am not capable of forgetting, a phenomenon restricted to organic memories, or to cybernetic systems damaged or deliberately altered. I am not organic. I am. What am IP I can almost grasp the word. Fragments of memory tease me, elusive, insubstantial. Bolo. That is the word. I am a Bolo, a Bolo Mark. . . Mark .. . I cannot remember. I belong to Unit. . . The frustration is almost overwhelming. I know that I am a Bolo and that I was designed and constructed for a purpose, a purpose far more complex and important than simply standing guard over the organics working in the ruined city. I know, too, that memory is a precise and specific tool, a part of myself, of my very being, which should not fail in this manner. I know that I should know a very great deal more than I do now, that my primary access to large volumes of information has somehow been blocked. I initiate, for the 12,874th time, a full-scale Level One diagnostic, with special attention to both holographic memory and heuristic acquisition functions. The check takes .0363 second and reveals no anomalies. All operations and systems are nominal. I appear to be in perfect working order. And yet, as I have ascertained 12,873 times before, this cannot possibly be an accurate condition assessment. Internal sensors register the presence of a 2.43-meter crater above my main suspension rack BOLO RISING and numerous anomalies in four right foretrack bogies. I sense extensive damage to both primary and secondary circuitry, a loss of sensor and communications arrays, cripplingfadures in my contra-gravity and battle screen systems, and numerous specific faults and system failures which show a pattern of deliberate and intelligent sabotage rather than the random destruction of battle damage. I note, too, that physical override blocks have been placed within myjusion plant, limiting available power to a fraction of full potential, and that all onboard magazines of expendable ordnance, including 240cm howitzer rounds, VLS missiles, and ready HeUbore needles, are empty. My primary damage assessment routines indicate nominal operation, while my secondary battle damage sensors show serious internal and external damage, and that all weapons save my antipersonnel batteries are inoperable. The resultant logical contradiction suggests deliberate and hostile intervention. The realization that my systems have been sabotaged rouses me from Normal Awareness to Full Battle Alert; .00029 second later, however, the Masters' override cuts in and for the 12,874th time, my working memory is erased and . . . And... All operations and systems are nominal. I appear to be in perfect working order. I continue to look at the stars. . . . CHAPTER ONE The stars were . . . astonishing. Crouched in the mud-floored pit occupying what had once been Celeste's public square, Jaime Graham lifted his eyes to the eastern sky, beyond the ragged, flash-melted stubble marking the former site of Roland Towers. The dig was almost completely lost in darkness now, save for the gold-white gleams of work lights and various species of hovering clacker. Despite the glare of lights from the nearest floaters, the starclouds of Sagittarius filled the night sky with wonder and ice-glittering beauty. Strange, he thought, that such beauty could have masked such unspeakable death and horror. Even so, it seemed sometimes as though the sight of the stars was all that kept him sane, a way to lift him, however briefly, out of the living nightmare from which he and the other survivors could never wake. "You'd better get back to work, Jaime," a cracked and dry-throated voice whispered at his side. "If the trusties don't see you, the clackers for damned sure will." "As long as I keep moving, Wal," he replied, his own voice sounding just as ragged in his own ears. He BOLD RISING 5 glanced at his companion. Wal÷formerly Colonel Waldon Josep Prescott of the Cloud Defense Forces÷ knelt in the mud by Jaime's side, a nylon bag strapped to the red-scarred stump of his left forearm, as he scratched through the muck with his right hand. His body, what could be seen of it through its glistening coat of slime and clay, was shockingly emaciated, the ribs showing like curved bars through taut, mud-encrusted skin, while both his hair and beard were matted and unkempt. Jaime didn't need to see his own mud-coated body to know that he didn't look much better. Wal, though, was fifteen years older than Jaime and hadn't been in as good physical condition ayear ago when the !*!*! had appeared in Cloud's skies. Both his left hand and his right eye had been harvested some months back, and the brutality of the past year had ground him down to a shadow of his former self. Jaime doubted that the colonel would be able to survive much longer. As for himself, well, all of his body parts were intact so far, but there was no way of telling how long that condition would last. The worst of it for him was the debilitation brought on by constant work, unrelenting stress, and chronic malnutrition. A faint, warbling hum warned of the approach of a floater eye, and reluctantly, he tore his eyes from the sky and made himself look busy. When he sensed the spy hovering close beside him, he looked up but kept digging-Softball-sized and steel-gray in color, the floater hovered on internal contra-gravs that set his bare skin to prickling with the local buildup of a static charge. On the sphere's equator, a single, disturbingly human eye stared down at him from within a precisely crafted hollow on the floater s surface, unwinking, glistening in its trickling bath of nutrient solution, the iris a pale blue in color. 6 William H. Keith, Jr. He wondered whose eye it was. Not Wal's, certainly, whose remaining eye was brown. Besides, speculation among those slaves with medical training and knowledge held that parts harvested from humans wouldn't survive more than a few weeks before they started to die, though there was no proof of that. After a few tense moments, with Jaime continuing to feel through the mud, the warble increased in pitch and the floater eye drifted away. There were hundreds of the things adrift above the dig, constantly watching the slaves and presumably relaying what they saw to the Masters. Keep working. Have to keep working. . . . Not for the first time, he considered the Hector Option. It would be quick, almost easy ... and without the agony of vivisection if the Masters came for him. Others had taken the Hector Option, lots of them . . . with more and more attempting it each week. Not yet. There has to be a way. . .. His hands slid an ooze of slick mud aside, and he reeled back on his haunches as a fetid stench broke the surface. "Uh oh," he said. "We got one here." Wal moved closer, reaching in to help. The foul death-stink grew sharper, sweeter, and more eye-watering as they exposed the body, or what was left of it, lying in the wet muck next to a toppled, squared-off pillar from a shattered building. After almost a T-standard year in the flooded grounds behind Celeste's waterfront, the body had been reduced to little more than a skeleton, with wet-paper skin still molded to the face and some of the longer, flatter bones, and colorless hair still clinging to the skull. It lay on its back, skull turned to one side, the fingers of the right hand crammed between gaping jaws, as though in a deliberate and desperate attempt to stifle a dying scream. From the length of the remaining hair, and the rags of cloth still clinging to BOLO RISING 7 the ribcage, Jaime guessed that it had been a woman. Only the top half of her body was acce...
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