A Plague of Demons

Chapter Twelve

Somewhere, I dream in a sunless emptiness where the years arch like ancient elms over the long avenue of time—a path across eternity, without a beginning and without end.

Into the static universe, change comes: a sense of subtle pressures, of energy-fields in transition. An imbalance grows—and with the imbalance a need—and from the need, volition. I sense movement, the slide and turn of intricate components, and the tentative questing of sensors, like raw nerves hesitantly exposed. Light, form, color impinge on delicate instruments. Space takes on dimension, texture.

All around me, a broad plain of shattered rock and black shadows stretches away to a line of fire at the edge of the world, under the glare of a sun that rages purple-white against bottomless silver-black.

A shape moves, small with distance—beyond it, others. I am moving too, driving forward effortlessly over the rough ground, throwing up dust in heavy clouds that drop back with a curious quickness. Rock-chips fly, twinkling as they fall. I sense vibrations; the thunder of my passage, the whine and growl of meshing metal, the oscillation of electrons.

Abruptly, from beyond the jagged horizon, an object comes, a glittering torpedo-shape tipped with blue fire, flashing with a swiftness that swells it in a movement to giant size. I feel the closing of relays within me; circuits come alive. My back arches; I lift my arms and thrust—

Fire lances from my fingertips, a silent stuttering of brilliance across the sky. I pivot, trailing the shattered projectile as it gouts incandescence, breaks apart, falls in fragments beyond a distant stony ridge. A growl of thunder rolls, dies. I rake my eyes across the desolate spread of fragmented shale around me, mark a flicker of movement among up-tilted rock-slabs, point and fire in one smooth, coordinated motion…

And still I plunge on, charging to a blind attack against an unknown enemy.

I grind down a long slope, dozing aside rock-chunks, jolting across crevasses. A vast shape swings from an inky shadow to my left, pivots heavily, trailing a shattered tread—dreadnaught of the enemy, damaged, left behind in the retreat, but with its offensive power intact. I see the immense disrupter grid swing to bear on me, glow to red heat—

I lock full emergency power to my prime batteries, open my mouth, and bellow—and bellow again…

Then I am racing off-side, driving for the crest of a ridge, over, down the far slope as molten rock bubbles behind me. The shock wave strikes and I am lifted, flung down-slope. I catch myself, claw for purchase; the limping monster appears on the ridge and I hurl my thunder at it and see its exposed grid shatter, explode…

I turn back to rejoin my column, aware of the drive of mighty gears and shafts, of curving plates of flintsteel and chromalloy, of the maze of neurotronic linkages that run to command-ganglia, and from these secondary centers to the thousand sensors, controls, mechanisms, reflex circuits that are my nervous system. Far away, I feel a momentary stir of remote phantom memories—faint echoes of a forgotten dream of life… but the recollection fades, is forgotten.

I swing up across a slanting rock-shelf, take up my position on the flank of a fire-spouting behemoth bearing the symbol of a Centurion. The battle continues…

I fight, responding automatically to each emergency with the instant reaction of drilled reflexes—but in among the incisive commands of my response circuits, meaningless wisps of thought flash like darting fishes:

Wheel left into line, advance in file… dry-looking country; a long way between bars… Main battery, arm; primary quadrant, saturation fire… What is this place? A hell of a strange sky… Defensive armor, category nine; blank visual sensors for flash at minute twelve microseconds, mark… Air-bursts all around, looks like a battle going on; what am I doing here? Advance at assault speed; arm secondary batteries, omega shields in position… The dust—it’s thick as Georgia clay—but I seem to see through it, beyond it—

“UNIT EIGHTY-FOUR! DAMAGE REPORT!”

The words flash into my mind like the silent blow of a bright ax, not spoken in English, but spat in an abbreviated Command code of harsh inflected syllables. I hear myself acknowledge the order in kind, as in instant compulsive response my damage sensors race through a fifty-thousand-item checklist like rats scurrying among filled shelves. “Negative,” I hear myself report. “All systems functional.”

But deep inside me a dam strains, cracks, bursts. A tendril of released thought, startled awake by the command, seems to grope, struggling outward. Word-images, sharp-chiseled as diamonds, thrust among the bodiless conceptualizations of rote conditioning. I reach back, back—to the blinding light of a strange awakening, past confusion and dawning awareness… back… into a bland, ever-dwindling record of stimulus, pain, stimulus, pleasure; a wordless voice that speaks, instructs, impresses, punishes, rewards—printing on my receptive mind the skein of conditioned reflex, the teachings that convert the blanked protoplasm of the shocked brain into the trained battle-computer of a dreadnaught of the line…

And in the forefront of my mind, I am remembering: somewhere long ago, a body—of flesh and blood, soft, complex, infinitely responsive—

A target flashes, and I aim and fire—

That impulse had once lifted an arm, pointed a finger. A human finger; a human body! I savor the concept, at once strange and as familiar as life itself. The fragile concept of identity crystallized from vagueness, grows, sharpens—

There is a moment of disorientation, a swirling together and a rending apart.

I am a man. A man named Bravais.

“UNIT EIGHTY-FOUR! RECHECK NAVIGATIONAL GRID FOR GROSS POSITIONAL ERROR!” The habit of obedience carried me forward over rough ground, maneuvering in response to long-learned rules as rigid as laws of nature. My sensors lanced out, locked to my fellow machines; my control mechanisms acted, swinging me to the point of zero-stress, then driving me forward—and in my mind, thoughts jostled each other:

Secondary target, track!… If you meet another Julius, break him in two and keep going… advance, assault speed… This is your Station Monitor; permission requested to mutilate the body… Arm all batteries; ten-microsecond alert… I guess you was the only friend I ever had—

Suddenly, vividly, I remembered the fight with the demons, the weight of the stinking bodies that bore me down, teeth tearing at my throat…

I had seen the enemy at work—the deft saws, the clever scalpels.

I remembered the brain of the Algerian major, lifted from the skull, preserved—

As mine was now preserved.

The demons had killed my body, left it to rot in the forest. But now I lived again—in the body of a great machine.

“UNIT EIGHTY-FOUR: REPORT!”

The command struck at me—a mental impulse of immense power. I watched, an observer aloof from the action, as my conditioned-response complex reacted, sensing the fantastic complexity of the workings of the mobile fort that was now my body.

“RETIRE TO POSITION IN SECONDARY TIER!” The harsh order galvanized my automatic responses in instant obedience—

On impulse, I intercepted the command; then I reached out along my circuits, sent out new commands. I turned myself, faced the violent sun, moved ponderously forward; I halted, pivoted, tracked my guns across the dark sky. Somehow, I had gained control of my machine-body. I remembered the command—the external voice that would have asserted its control—

But instead, it had cued my hypnotically-produced reserve personality-fraction into active control.

I withdrew, felt the automatics resume control, moving me off to my new station. The aliens were clever, and as thorough as death; I had been tracked down, killed, chained in slavery on a ruined no-man’s world; but I had broken the bonds. I was alive, master of my fortress-body—free, inside the enemy defenses!

Later—hours or days, I had no way of knowing—I rumbled down an echoing tunnel into a vast cavern, took my place in a long line of scarred battle units.

“UNIT EIGHTY-FOUR: FALL OUT!” the command voice bellowed soundlessly. I moved forward. Other units moved up, stationed themselves on either side of me. A long silence grew. I was aware that other orders were being given—orders not addressed to me, automatically tuned out by my trained reflexes. Something was going on…

I made an effort, extended sensitivity, picked up the transmission:

“—malfunction! Escort Unit Eighty-four to interrogation chamber and stand by during reflex-check! Acknowledge and execute!”

I heard the snick of relays closing; I was hearing the internal command circuits of my fellow battle units.

“UNIT EIGHTY-FOUR: PROCEED TO INTERROGATION CHAMBER!”

I let my automaton-circuits stir me into motion. I moved off, listening as the command voice gave a final instruction to my armed guard:

“Units Eighty-three and Eighty-five: at first indication of deviant response, trigger destruct circuits!”

I saw the turrets of the battle wagons beside me swing to cover me; their ports slid back, the black snouts of infinite repeaters emerged, aimed and ready. The command-mind had already sensed something out of the ordinary in Unit Eighty-four.

I rolled on toward the interrogation chamber, monitoring the flow of reflex-thought in the minds of the units beside me—a dull sequence of course-correction, alert-reinforcements, routine functional adjustments. Carefully, using minimal power, I reached out…

“Unit Eighty-three; damage report!” I commanded.

Nothing happened. The battle units were programmed to accept commands from only one source—the Command voice.

“Units Eighty-three and Eighty-five: arm weapons; complete prefire drill!” The command came. From beside me, I heard arming locks slide open. Together, my guards and I entered the armored test cell.

“UNIT EIGHTY-FOUR! DISARM AND LOCK ALL WEAPONS! RESPONSE-SEQUENCE ALPHA, EXECUTE!” The voice of the Interrogator rang out.

I watched as my well-drilled reflexes went through their paces. I would have to move with great care now; every action was under scrutiny by the enemy. Another command came, and as I responded, I studied the quality of the Interrogator’s voice. It was different, simpler, lacking the overtones of emotion of the Command-mind. I reached out my awareness toward it, sensed walls of armor, the complex filaments of circuitry. I followed a communications lead that trailed off underground, arose in a distant bunker. The intricacy of a vast computer lay exposed before me. I probed gently, testing the shape and density of the mechanical mind-field; it was a poor thing, a huge but feeble monomaniac—but it was linked to memory banks…

I felt a warning twitch of alarm in the moron-circuits, caught the shape of an intention—Instantly I shunted aside its command, struck back to seize control of the computer’s limited discretionary function. Holding it firmly, I traced the location of the destruct-assembly that it would have activated, found it mounted below my brain, disarmed it. Then I instructed the Interrogator to continue with the routine checkout, and to report all normal. While it busied itself in idiot obedience, I linked myself to its memory banks, scanned the stored data.

The results were disappointing: the Interrogator’s programming was starkly limited, a series of test patterns for fighting and service machines. I withdrew, knowing no more than I had of the aliens.

The Interrogator reported me as battle-ready. On command, I rejoined my waiting comrades. An order came: “ALL UNITS, SWITCH TO MINIMUM AWARENESS LEVEL!”

As the energy quotient in my servo-circuits dropped, the sensitivity range of my receptors drew in, scanning from the gamma scale down through ultra-violet, past infra-red, into the dullness of short-wave. Silence and darkness settled over the depot.

I sent out a pulse, scanned the space around me. The clatter of the Command-voice was gone. I was alone now—I and my comatose comrades-in-arms. There were ninety-one units, similar to myself in most respects, but armed with a variety of weapons. Small, busy machines scurried among us, carrying out needed repairs. I touched one, caught vague images of a simplified world-image, out-lined in scents and animal drives. I recognized it as the brain of an Earthly dog, programmed to operate the elementary maintenance apparatus.

Reaching farther, I encountered the confused mutter of a far-flung communications system, a muted surf-roar of commands, acknowledgments, an incoherent clutter of operational messages, meaningless to me.

I touched the mind of the fighting machine beside me, groped along the dark passages of its dulled nerve-complex, found the personality center. A sharp probing impulse elicited nothing; the ego was paralyzed. I withdrew to its peripheral awareness level; a dim glow of consciousness lingered there.

“Who are you?” I called.

“Unit Eighty-three, of the line.” The reply was a flat monotone.

“You were a man—once,” I told it. “What was your name?”

“Unit Eighty-three of the line,” the monotone repeated. “Combat-ready, standing by at low alert. Awaiting orders.”

I tried another; the result was the same. There was no hint of personality in the captive brains; they were complex neurotronic circuits, nothing more—compact, efficient, with trained reflex-patterns, cheaper and easier to gather from the warring tribes of Earth than to duplicate mechanically.

I stirred another quiescent brain, probed at the numbed ego, pried without success at the opaque shield of stunned tissue that surrounded it. It was hopeless; I would find no allies here—only slaves of the aliens.

Free inside the alien fortress—in a flawless camouflage—I was helpless without information. I needed to know what and where the Command-voice was, the disposition of other brigades, the long-range plan of action, who the enemy was that we fought on the fire-shattered plain—and on what world the plain lay. I would learn nothing here, packed in a subterranean depot. It was time to take risks.

An impulse to my drive mechanism sent me forward out of the lineup; I swung around, moved off toward the tunnel through which I had entered the cave. In the utter silence, the clash of my treads transmitted through my frame was deafening. I filtered out the noise, tuned my receptivity for sounds of other activity nearby. There was none.

Past the ranked combat units, high and grim in the lightless place, the tunnel mouth gaped dark. I entered it, ascended the sloping passage, reached a massive barrier of flint-steel. I felt for the presence of a control-field, sensed the imbecile mechanism of the lock. A touch and it responded, sent out the pulse that rolled the immense doors back. I moved out into the open, under a blazing black sky.

I studied the landscape, realizing for the first time that my field of vision included the entire circumference of the horizon. Nothing stirred, all across the barren waste. Here and there the ruins of a combat unit showed dark against gray dust. The flaring purple sun was low over the far ridges now; a profusion of glittering stars seemed to hang close overhead. I didn’t know in what direction the alien headquarters might lie. I picked a route that led across level ground toward a lone promontory and started toward it.