"Ah. And you think your two friends out there are more intelligent than they should be."

"In a nutsh.e.l.l, yeah. Language, specifically the ability to carry on an extended conversation about a variety of topics, reflects general intelligence. That's exactly what I'm thinking. And I'm also wondering . . . why?"

"Why what?"

"The colonel is right. Those two Bolos out there are only machines. They're very, very smart machines, but they're smart because someone wrote some extraordinarily complex AI programs for them, which are processed through psychotronic circuitry designed to display a certain level of flexibility, speed, and even, to a limited degree, self-awareness. They can't step outside the parameters of their own programming, can't think outside of the box.

"So how can they possibly be thinking like Mark x.x.xs?"

"Perhaps they have found a way to reprogram themselves."

"They don't have that capability. Self-programming . . . that would mean they could step outside the box, somehow, and decide for themselves what they were going to do, exactly what people have been trying to prevent in Bolos ever since the things were invented."

"The one, 'Hank,' keeps refusing your order to fire his h.e.l.lbore."

"Yeah. I know. And that's part of what bothers me. He has a certain level of tactical discretion, sure. And when they slip over into full Combat Reflex Mode, they'll be entirely on their own. But I've never heard a Mark XXIV tell me that it couldn't obey an order to fire because it might cause civilian casualties."

"He sounds . . . human."

"Yeah . . ."

"You said earlier that a Bolo cannot step outside of its box, cannot reprogram itself. I am thinking, my friend, that most humans are no better. We are what Allah and our pasts decree we are, and few of us can rise beyond that."

Martin thought of Lang. "I'm beginning to think you're right."

The two Bolos were exchanging a barrage of information now over their QDCs, and Martin wondered what they were talking about.

In the Ad Dukhan Valley, twenty kilometers to the south, Andrew is engaging an Enemy air and ground a.s.sault. Sharing a real-time link via our Quantum Determinacy Communications suites, I watch, I feel as he maneuvers himself into a kilometer-wide pool of boiling water, the source of the hot-water Dukhan River and the "smoke" of "Smoke Valley."

Concealed both optically and thermally, he is in an ideal position to ambush the Enemy as his crawlers reach the top of the pa.s.s. Fortunately, the refugee traffic through the Dukhan Valley has tapered off to nothing, but he holds fire from his main turret weapon, depending instead on a high-velocity fusillade from all eighteen ion-bolt infinite repeaters and tactical barrages of anti-armor missiles. For forty flame-shot seconds, the rock-locked valley shudders and trembles to the thunder of his volleys. Four Enemy crawlers are destroyed as they attempt to slip over the ridge crest and rush him. The others mill in a confused huddle for a moment, then withdraw.

I can sense his excitement. "We can charge them and finish them now!"

"It would be suicide," I tell him. "Besides, our orders are to hold these pa.s.ses at all costs. If the Enemy manages to slip through behind us, the evacuation will be compromised."

"Then we will have to make sure none get past us."

"In combat, nothing is sure. Marlborough knew that."

"Marlborough also knew it was possible to win all of the battles and lose the war."

I take his point. The War of the Spanish Succession was little more than an extraordinary string of victories for Marlborough, until political disgrace ended his career seven years after his brilliant victory at Blenheim. In the end, France kept her prewar boundaries and got much of what she wanted, even though her military reputation had been blackened by her poor showing on the battlefield. History is filled with such reverses . . . Napoleon in Russia, America in Vietnam, Argentina in Brazil, the Berrengeri Legions on Trallenca IV . . . victories won on the battlefield with blood, then squandered or given away by the bureaucrats at the conference table.

I note that Concordiat transports are preparing for evacuation and wonder how many of the population will be able to escape. It seems a foregone conclusion that the Enemy will soon overwhelm our positions and surge through the pa.s.ses to attack the Command Center, the colonial capital at Izra'ilbalad, and the s.p.a.ceport.

I note transatmospheric strike craft lifting from the flame-ravaged cities to the east and report the sighting and target lock to the Command Center. Orders return seconds later, "Do not, repeat, do not target enemy s.p.a.cecraft."

I wonder why we are here, placed where we cannot fight, deprived of our best weapons, fit for nothing save destruction. . . .

"If we start killing their transports," Colonel Lang bellowed, "they start killing ours! And then we're dead!"

"We're also hobbling our one ace in the hole," Martin replied. "d.a.m.n it, Colonel! Unleash the Bolos!"

"You are relieved, Lieutenant. Get the h.e.l.l out of my command center."

"Colonel!" Governor Khalid said. "You are here under my jurisdiction. I think you should-"

"Your jurisdiction, Governor. My command. You are scarcely qualified to lead a battle, and my men would not obey your orders. Now . . . I must ask both of you to leave the center."

"Sir, with respect," Martin said, "you'll still need me to interface with Hank and Andrew. They might not accept your orders if they don't recognize your voice." It was a bluff, and a thin one, but he needed to stay, needed to at least try to stay in the loop with his two fourteen-thousand-ton charges.

"Colonel Lang!" a panicked voice said over one of the active speaker circuits. "Banner, at the s.p.a.ceport! We have a mob breaking through the north perimeter fence!"

"d.a.m.n it to h.e.l.l." Lang hesitated, visibly swaying, his face dark with anger. "Okay, Martin. Stay. Make them stay. But one more seditious remark out of you and you'll spend the next ten years in the stockade!"

"Yes, sir."

His hands were shaking as he turned back to the Bolo console once again.

"He intends to abandon the Bolos, doesn't he?" Khalid said softly.

"Of course. Those Bolo transports will carry a thousand people apiece."

"So he will simply use them to buy time, to organize an evacuation?

"I think that's the idea. But I don't think he's going to have the time."

"I am not leaving my homeworld," Khalid said.

"I'm not leaving either," Martin told him, voicing the decision he had only just that moment made. "Not if it means leaving them out there."

Andrew has beaten back the initial attack down the Ad Dukhan Valley. His use of infinite repeaters only slowed the advance of the enemy crawlers, but laser-guided cl.u.s.ter-munitions packages loaded with anti-armor missiles have proven to be effective.

I note that preparations are well under way for evacuation from Izra'ilbalad. Our sacrifice here, evidently, is designed to give Headquarters time to complete the evacuation. Andrew and I agree that we must do everything in our power to blunt the Enemy's thrusts across the mountains, to buy as much time for the Consortium facility as possible.

I continue to track the approach of five transatmospheric strike craft wheeling in low across the mountains. Headquarters' orders to hold my fire baffles me. The strike craft are fast, highly maneuverable, and grav-resist powered, similar to the Valkyrie XY-3000 Interceptor cla.s.s. Low-grade gamma leakage suggests that they either are powered by small fission power plants or are carrying nuclear munitions.

Suddenly, they break south. They are targeting Andrew.

"Andrew!" I call over the QDC channel.

"I see them!" he replies, before I can get my warning out. "Tracking! They've launched!"

They have also vanished off my sensor net, my line of sight blocked by the southern wall of the valley I occupy. But I can watch them through Andrew's eyes and through several orbiting military satellites, as each of five incoming TAS aircraft loose four missiles at nearly point-blank range.

"Engaging targets!" Andrew cries. He is climbing from the hot springs lake, hull steaming, seeking greater maneuverability as the attackers swoop in low across the northern wall of the Smoke Valley. Under Battle Reflex Mode, he can a.s.sign his own priorities to targets . . . and disregard the earlier no-fire order from Headquarters.

His infinite repeaters send up a flaring, dazzling cloud of ion bolts, as point-defense batteries loose invisible beams of UV lasers. Six of the missiles, and three aircraft, disintegrate within the first 0.16 second of his firing.

Through satellite recon views, I note a large flight of missiles launched from Enemy defense batteries near Inshallah, all of them targeting Andrew.

Four more missiles vaporize . . . and five more after that . . . but they have been fired at high velocity from a range of less than half a kilometer, and Andrew simply does not have point-defense weapons enough to track and destroy them all. He manages to burn down three more . . .

. . . and the remaining two strike his battlescreens, a pair of 25-kiloton fission nukes detonating almost simultaneously. Through the QDC link, I feel the sudden pulse as his battlescreens flutter, then fail, overloaded . . . feel the searing, deadly wash of superheated plasma scouring across his outer hull like the caress of a blowtorch across plastic . . . feel the black hurricane winds laden with vaporizing grit and rock exploding across his armor, as dense and as solid as the thunderous blast of a tsunami . . . feel the shift and slide of my tracks in ground now partly molten, as those winds attempt to push a ma.s.s of fourteen-thousand tons . . .

I am moving now, racing eastward through the valley, seeking a clear line of fire against the incoming wave of missiles still en route from Inshallah. The attacking aircraft have all been destroyed, by Andrew or in the fireball. But satellite sensors are tracking thirty-seven more targets inbound.

Andrew is still operational. Power at 27.4 percent . . . 12 infinite repeater batteries still full or partially operational . . . battlescreens down. His ablative layers are gone, carrying away the worst of the thermal radiation. His outer hull, the part facing the twin atomic suns when they lit off, is scorched black and in places sculpted smooth, with aerials and comm antennae melted away . . . and radiation sensors show that he is now hot enough to kill an unprotected human who comes within touching distance.

My seismic sensors register the trembling undertrack, followed by the shrill peal of thunder thirty seconds after the blast. "Andrew! Are you okay?"

"Still . . . operational." I can sense the struggle simply to formulate those words. His processing power must momentarily focus entirely on the matter of survival. "Tracking new wave . . . incoming . . ."

"I see them. I'm repositioning for a clear shot."

But the walls of the valley block me. I can see the launchers now, still thermal-bright after their launch seconds ago, but the missiles themselves are terrain-following ground huggers and have vanished into the rock-shrouded cleft of Smoke Valley.

Andrew's a.n.a.lyses of the missiles flickers through my combat center. They are five-meter rods of depleted uranium, incoming at hypervelocity. In the base of each projectile is a fission device of at least 25 kilotons. The rods are designed to penetrate even Bolo armor . . . with the pocket nukes slamming through the half-molten openings.

With his battlescreens down, Andrew is vulnerable . . . and I can do nothing.

I sense more missiles being swung into launch position at the Inshallah site. . . .

"G.o.d! What's happening?" Lang demanded.

"Those aircraft launched tacnuke penetrators at Andrew. His battlescreens are down, and it's going to take time to bring them up again. He's got more penetrators coming in from the east. Looks like they're trying to saturate his defenses."

"Can the other Bolo-?"

"Trapped in that high-walled valley. He's trying to maneuver to a.s.sist, but-"

"What . . . what can we do?"

"Not a G.o.d-d.a.m.ned thing, Colonel. We sit back and watch. . . ."

"The other one," Khalid put in, staring at the map display. "Hank. He moves so quickly! It's almost as though he feels what the first one feels."

"I think that's exactly right." Martin glanced at the colonel, expecting a rebuke, but there was none. "They're brothers. . . ."

In a sense, I feel what Andrew feels . . . relayed sensory data from those few external hull sensors that survived the nuclear storm. I see the incoming missiles now, feel myself maneuvering to bring the largest possible number of infinite-repeater turrets to bear.

"Fire your main weapon!" I call. A 90cm super-h.e.l.lbore discharge of approximately 2.25 megatons/second firepower might not engulf that entire cloud of incoming penetrators, but the sudden vacuum ripped out of atmosphere would destroy any survivors in the shock wave, fry even hardened electronics with EM induction, and melt delicate sensors through thermal effect. The missile cloud is beginning to disperse, however, each penetrator maneuvering separately in order to descend upon Andrew from a different direction. He must fire his h.e.l.lbore within the next 0.5 second or lose the opportunity.

"Fire! Fire!"

His reactions are sluggish, and I wonder if his operational centers have taken battle damage . . . but then he looses a h.e.l.lbore bolt, lighting up the murk-shrouded, nuke-torn landscape of the valley with a needle-thin sliver of starfire dragged from the heart of a sun and hurled at the incoming missiles.

Twenty-four missiles vaporize, and five more smash into the ground or Andrew's tough hide, broken, slowed, or half molten. Eight, reacting more swiftly than expected from available flight performance data, have swung clear of the fusion bolt and the thunderously collapsing tunnel of vacuum in its wake and arc around to approach Andrew from eight different angles.

His infinite repeaters kill five . . .

His point-defense lasers kill two . . .

The last surviving penetrator comes in high, plunging down into Andrew's main deck, twelve meters behind his primary weapon turret. Robbed of much of its kinetic energy by its high-G maneuver to avoid the h.e.l.lbore bolt, it strikes with only a fraction of the energy a five-meter rod of depleted uranium was designed to carry . . .

. . . but it strikes a tender spot where a meter of duralloy, ceramplast, and flintsteel alloys has been sc.r.a.ped from Andrew's hide and the remainder left soft, partly molten in places, above a mere two meters of inner t.i.tanium-duralloy amalgam and the blue shimmer of his inner defensive screens.

The breach, a white-hot needle driven like a spike into Andrew's back, is a tiny one . . . but the 25-kiloton nuclear explosion that follows spears a fraction of its unleashed fury into the gap, igniting plasma fires within . . . .

"Andrew . . . !"

My scream momentarily jams all military radio frequencies, and the audio output echoes from the rock cliffs around me. Our QDC link is snapped . . . yet in my virtual, inner world, the world I shared with him, I see him ablaze from within, consumed from the inside and the out by the starcore blaze of nuclear h.e.l.l that engulfs him.

"Andrew . . . !"

Ice dislodged from the cliff tops by sonic concussion tumbles into the valley on all sides, but I ignore it, continuing my eastern rush.

I feel the flame burning inside me, a blue-white, devouring heat.

I sense the touch of targeting radar and lidar locks. I swing my 90cm h.e.l.lbore around, target the launcher complex, some eighteen kilometers away, and fire. . . .

Lieutenant Martin looked up from his console, pinning Lang with a look of cold, hard hatred. "Bolo of the Line NDR 0831-57 has been destroyed," he said.

"G.o.d help us all," Lang replied.

"G.o.d forgive us," Martin said, correcting him. "I don't think we're in control of Hank any longer. . . ."

There are Enemy troops moving up the Buruj Pa.s.s, humanoids in heavy armor, laboring against the steep slope as they climb toward my position. I wonder if, perhaps, they are employing Marlborough's Blenheim tactics against me, pinning my attention on Andrew while moving a heavy armored force to break through at a different location-my position.

A better comparison might be Marlborough's victory at Ramillies, two years after Blenheim, another cla.s.sic battle frequently wargamed by Andrew and myself. There, Marlborough conducted probing attacks against Villeroi's left and right, feinted right, then swung the majority of his forces from right to left, shielding their movement from French eyes by moving them behind a fold in the ground behind the Anglo-Allied front. His final a.s.sault against the French right and center rolled back Villeroi's flank, then broke it.

The Kezdai Enemy has adopted a similar strategy, moving a sizable force up the Al Buruj Pa.s.s while I was distracted by events elsewhere. They are thermally shielded and well-camouflaged, invisible to the military recon satellites far overhead . . . or to my far flung net of sensor drones. As I race down the steepening slope, movement sensors and lidar pick up thirty Enemy crawlers and a large force of armored soldiers on foot or mounted in hovercraft troop carriers.

No matter. As I explode down the slope among them, I open fire for the first time with my main h.e.l.lbore, directing bolt upon searing starcore-plasma bolt against the Enemy's concentrations on the eastern plains below.