Dragon's Teeth Page 46

  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 to successfully 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 of the 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—”

  The Bolo paused. Siegfried’s hands clenched on the arms of his chair.

  “—it may not return. There is a possibility that the records and algorithms which make up my personality will be written over by comparison files during strategic control calculations.” Again Rommel paused. “Siegfried, this is our duty. I am willing to take that chance.”

  Siegfried swallowed, only to find a lump in his throat and his guts in knots. “Are you sure?” he asked gently. “Are you very sure? What you’re talking about is—is a kind of deactivation.”

  “I am sure,” Rommel replied firmly. “The Field Marshal would have made the same choice.”

  Rommel’s manuals were all on a handheld reader. He had studied them from front to back—wasn’t there something in there? “Hold on a minute—”

  He ran through the index, frantically keyword searching. This was a memory function, right? Or at least it was software. The designers didn’t encourage operators to go mucking around in the AI functions . . . what would a computer jock call what he was looking for?

  Finally he found it; a tiny section in programmerese, not even listed in the index. He scanned it, quickly, and found the warning that had been the thing that had caught his eye in the first place.

  This system has been simulation-proven in expected scenarios, but has never been fully field-tested.

  What the hell did that mean? He had a guess; this was essentially a full-copy backup of the AI’s processor. He suspected that they had never tested the backup function on an AI with a full personality. There was no way of knowing if the restoration function would actually “restore” a lost personality.

  But the backup memory-module in question had its own power-supply, and was protected in the most hardened areas of Rommel’s interior. Nothing was going to destroy it that didn’t slag him and Rommel together, and if “personality” was largely a matter of memory—

  It might work. It might not. It was worth trying, even if the backup procedure was fiendishly hard to initiate. They really didn’t want operators mucking around with the AIs.

  Twenty command-strings later, a single memory-mod began its simple task; Rommel was back in charge of the fourth group of mechs, and Siegfried had taken over the driving.

  He was not as good as Rommel was, but he was better than he had thought.

  They took groups five, and six, and it was horrible—listening to Rommel fade away, lose the vitality behind the synthesized voice. If Siegfried hadn’t had his hands full already, literally, it would have been worse.

  But with group seven—

  That was when he just about lost it, because in reply to one of his voice commands, instead of a, “Got it, Siegfried,” what came over the speakers was the metallic, “Affirmative,” of a simple voice-activated computer.

  All of Rommel’s resources were now devoted to self-defense and control of the armored mechs.

  God and my Duty. Siegfried took a deep breath, and began keying in the commands for mass armor deployment.

  The ancient commanders were right; from the ground, there was no way of knowing when the moment of truth came. Siegfried only realized that they had won when the mother-ship suddenly vanished from orbit, and the remaining AIs went dead. Cutting their losses; there was nothing in any of the equipment that would betray where it came from. Whoever was in charge of the invasion force must have decided that there was no way they would finish the mission before someone, a regularly scheduled freighter or a surprise patrol, discovered what was going on and reported it.

  By that time, he had been awake for fifty hours straight; he had put squeeze-bulbs of electrolytic drink near at hand, but he was starving and still thirsty. With the air conditioning cut out, he must have sweated out every ounce of fluid he drank. His hands were shaking and every muscle in his neck and shoulders was cramped from hunching over the boards.

  Rommel was battered and had lost several external sensors and one of his guns. But the moment that the mother-ship vanished, he had only one thought.

  He manually dropped control of every mech from Rommel’s systems, and waited, praying, for his old friend to “come back.”

  But nothing happened—other than the obvious things that any AI would do, restoring all the comfort-support and life-support functions, and beginning damage checks and some self-repair.

  Rommel was gone.

  His throat closed; his stomach knotted. But—

  It wasn’t tested. That doesn’t mean it won’t work.

  Once more, his hands moved over the keyboard, with another twenty command-strings, telling that little memory-module in the heart of his Bolo to initiate full restoration. He hadn’t thought he had water to spare for tears—yet there they were, burning their way down his cheeks. Two of them.

  He ignored them, fiercely, shaking his head to clear his eyes, and continuing the command-sequence.

  Damage checks and self-repair aborted. Life-support went on automatic.

  And Siegfried put his head down on the console to rest his burning eyes for a moment. Just for a moment—

  Just—

  “Ahem.”

  Sieg
fried jolted out of sleep, cracking his elbow on the console, staring around the cabin with his heart racing wildly.

  “I believe we have visitors, Siegfried,” said that wonderful, familiar voice. “They seem most impatient.”

  Screens lit up, showing a small army of civilians approaching, riding in everything from outmoded sandrails to tractors, all of them cheering, all of them heading straight for the Bolo.

  “We seem to have their approval at least,” Rommel continued.

  His heart had stopped racing, but he still trembled. And once again, he seemed to have come up with the moisture for tears. He nodded, knowing Rommel would see it, unable for the moment to get any words out.

  “Siegfried—before we become immersed in grateful civilians—how did you bring me back?” Rommel asked. “I’m rather curious—I actually seem to remember fading out. An unpleasant experience.”

  “How did I get you back?” he managed to choke out—and then began laughing.

  He held up the manual, laughing, and cried out the famous quote of George Patton—

  “ ‘Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!’”

  Sometimes we write for odd markets; I wrote this piece for a magazine called Pet Bird Report, which is bird behaviorist Sally Blanchard’s outlet for continuing information on parrot behavior and psychology. It’s a terrific magazine, and if you have a bird but haven’t subscribed, I suggest you would find it worth your while. With twelve birds, I need all the help I can get! At any rate, Sally asked me for some fiction, and I came up with this.

  Gray

  Mercedes Lackey

  For nine years, Sarah Jane Lyon-White lived happily with her parents in the heart of Africa. Her father was a physician, her mother, a nurse, and they worked at a Protestant mission in the Congo. She was happy there, not the least because her mother and father were far more enlightened than many another mission worker in the days when Victoria was Queen; taking the cause of healing as more sacred than that of conversion, they undertook to work with the natives, and made friends instead of enemies among the shamans and medicine-people. Because of this, Sarah was a cherished and protected child, although she was no stranger to the many dangers of life in the Congo.

  When she was six, and far older in responsibility than most of her peers, one of the shaman brought her a parrot-chick still in quills; he taught her how to feed and care for it, and told her that while it was a child, she was to protect it, but when it was grown, it would protect and guide her. She called the parrot “Gray,” and it became her best friend—and indeed, although she never told her parents, it became her protector as well.

  But when she was nine, her parents sent her to live in England for the sake of her health. And because her mother feared that the climate of England would not be good for Gray’s health, she had to leave her beloved friend behind.

  Now, this was quite the usual thing in the days when Victoria was Queen and the great British Empire was so vast that there was never an hour when some part of it was not in sunlight. It was thought that English children were more delicate than their parents, and that the inhospitable humors of hot climes would make them sicken and die. Not that their parents didn’t sicken and die quite as readily as the children, who were, in fact, far sturdier than they were given credit for—but it was thought, by anxious mothers, that the climate of England would be far kinder to them. So off they were shipped, some as young as two and three, torn away from their anxious mamas and native nurses and sent to live with relatives or even total strangers.

  Now, as Mr. Kipling and Mrs. Hope-Hodgson have shown us, many of these total strangers—and no few of the relatives—were bad, wicked people, interested only in the round gold sovereigns that the childrens’ parents sent to them for their care. There were many schools where the poor lonely things were neglected or even abused; where their health suffered far more than if they had stayed safely at the sides of their mamas.

  But there were good schools too, and kindly people, and Sarah Jane’s mama had been both wise and careful in her selection. In fact, Sarah Jane’s mama had made a choice that was far wiser than even she had guessed . . . .

  Nan—that was her only name, for no one had told her of any other—lurked anxiously about the back gate of the Big House. She was new to this neighborhood, for her slatternly mother had lost yet another job in a gin mill and they had been forced to move all the way across Whitechapel, and this part of London was as foreign to Nan as the wilds of Australia. She had been told by more than one of the children hereabouts that if she hung about the back gate after tea, a strange man with a towel wrapped about his head would come out with a basket of food and give it out to any child who happened to be there. Now, there were not as many children willing to accept this offering as might have been expected, even in this poor neighborhood. They were afraid of the man, afraid of his piercing, black eyes, his swarthy skin, and his way of walking like a great hunting-cat. Some suspected poison in the food, others murmured that he and the woman of the house were foreigners, and intended to kill English children with terrible curses on the food they offered. But Nan was faint with hunger; she hadn’t eaten in two days, and was willing to dare poison, curses, and anything else for a bit of bread.

  Furthermore, Nan had a secret defense; under duress, she could often sense the intent and even dimly hear the thoughts of others. That was how she avoided her mother when it was most dangerous to approach her, as well as avoiding other dangers in the streets themselves. Nan was certain that if this man had any ill intentions, she would know it.

  Still, as tea-time and twilight both approached, she hung back a little from the wrought-iron gate, beginning to wonder if it wouldn’t be better to see what, if anything, her mother brought home. If she’d found a job—or a “gen’lmun”—there might be a farthing or two to spare for food before Aggie spent the rest on gin. Behind the high, grimy wall, the Big House loomed dark and ominous against the smoky, lowering sky, and the strange, carved creatures sitting atop every pillar in the wall and every corner of the House fair gave Nan the shivers whenever she looked at them. There were no two alike, and most of them were beasts out of a rummy’s worst deliriums. The only one that Nan could see that looked at all normal was a big, gray bird with a fat body and a hooked beak that sat on top of the right-hand gatepost of the back gate.

  Nan had no way to tell time, but as she waited, growing colder and hungrier—and more nervous—with each passing moment, she began to think for certain that the other children had been having her on. Tea-time was surely long over; the tale they’d told her was nothing more than that, something to gull the newcomer with. It was getting dark, there were no other children waiting, and after dark it was dangerous even for a child like Nan, wise in the ways of the evil streets, to be abroad. Disappointed, and with her stomach a knot of pain, Nan began to turn away from the gate.

  “I think that there is no one here, Missy S’ab,” said a low, deep voice, heavily accented, sounding disappointed. Nan hastily turned back, and peering through the gloom, she barely made out a tall, dark form with a smaller one beside it.

  “No, Karamjit—look there!” replied the voice of a young girl, and the smaller form pointed at Nan. A little girl ran up to the gate, and waved through the bars. “Hello! I’m Sarah—what’s your name? Would you like some tea-bread? We’ve plenty!”

  The girl’s voice, also strangely accented, had none of the imperiousness that Nan would have expected coming from the child of a “toff.” She sounded only friendly and helpful, and that, more than anything, was what drew Nan back to the wrought-iron gate.

  “Indeed, Missy Sarah speaks the truth,” the man said; and as Nan drew nearer, she saw that the other children had not exaggerated when they described him. His head was wrapped around in a cloth; he wore a long, high-collared coat of some bright stuff, and white trousers that were tucked into glossy boots. He was as fiercely erect as the iron gate itself; lean and angular as a hunting tiger, with skin so dark sh
e could scarcely make out his features, and eyes that glittered at her like beads of black glass.

  But strangest, and perhaps most ominous of all, Nan could sense nothing from the dark man. He might not even have been there; there was a blank wall where his thoughts should have been.

  The little girl beside him was perfectly ordinary by comparison; a bright little wren of a thing, not pretty, but sweet, with a trusting smile that went straight to Nan’s heart. Nan had a motherly side to her; the younger children of whatever neighborhood she lived in tended to flock to her, look up to her, and follow her lead. She in her turn tried to keep them out of trouble, and whenever there was extra to go around, she fed them out of her own scant stocks.

  But the tall fellow frightened her, and made her nervous, especially when further moments revealed no more of his intentions than Nan had sensed before; the girl’s bright eyes noted that, and she whispered something to the dark man as Nan withdrew a little. He nodded, and handed her a basket that looked promisingly heavy.

  Then he withdrew out of sight, leaving the little girl alone at the gate. The child pushed the gate open enough to hand the basket through. “Please, won’t you come and take this? It’s awfully heavy.”

  In spite of the clear and open brightness of the little girl’s thoughts, ten years of hard living had made Nan suspicious. The child might know nothing of what the dark man wanted. “Woi’re yer givin’ food away?” she asked, edging forward a little, but not yet quite willing to take the basket.

  The little girl put the basket down on the ground and clasped her hands behind her back. “Well, Mem’sab says that she won’t tell Maya and Selim to make less food for tea, because she won’t have us going hungry while we’re growing. And she says that old, stale toast is fit only for starlings, so people ought to have the good of it before it goes stale. And she says that there’s no reason why children outside our gate have to go to bed hungry when we have enough to share, and my Mum and Da say that sharing is charity and Charity is one of the cardinal virtues, so Mem’sab is being virtuous, which is a good thing, because she’ll go to heaven and she would make a good angel.”