Bolo!

Prologue

It was called Case Ragnarok, and it was insane. Yet in a time when madness had a galaxy by the throat, it was also inevitable.

It began as a planning study over a century earlier, when no one really believed there would be a war at all, and perhaps the crowning irony of the Final War was that a study undertaken to demonstrate the lunatic consequences of an unthinkable strategy became the foundation for putting that strategy into effect. The admirals and generals who initially undertook it actually intended it to prove that the stakes were too high, that the Melconian Empire would never dare risk a fight to the finish with the Concordiat—or vice versa—for they knew it was madness even to consider. But the civilians saw it as an analysis of an “option” and demanded a full implementation study once open war began, and the warriors provided it. It was their job to do so, of course, and in fairness to them, they protested the order… at first. Yet they were no more proof against the madness than the civilians when the time came.

And perhaps that was fitting, for the entire war was a colossal mistake, a confluence of misjudgments on a cosmic scale. Perhaps if there had been more contact between the Concordiat and the Empire it wouldn’t have happened, but the Empire slammed down its non-intercourse edict within six standard months of first contact. From a Human viewpoint, that was a hostile act; for the Empire, it was standard operating procedure, no more than simple prudence to curtail contacts until this new interstellar power was evaluated. Some of the Concordiat’s xenologists understood that and tried to convince their superiors of it, but the diplomats insisted on pressing for “normalization of relations.” It was their job to open new markets, to negotiate military and political and economic treaties, and they resented the Melconian silence, the no-transit zones along the Melconian border… the Melconian refusal to take them as seriously as they took themselves. They grew more strident, not less, when the Empire resisted all efforts to overturn the non-intercourse edict, and the Emperor’s advisors misread that stridency as a fear response, the insistence of a weaker power on dialogue because it knew its own weakness.

Imperial Intelligence should have told them differently, but shaping analyses to suit the views of one’s superiors was not a purely Human trait. Even if it had been, Intelligence’s analysts found it difficult to believe how far Human technology outclassed Melconian. The evidence was there, especially in the Dinochrome Brigade’s combat record, but they refused to accept that evidence. Instead, it was reported as disinformation, a cunning attempt to deceive the Imperial General Staff into believing the Concordiat was more powerful than it truly was and hence yet more evidence that Humanity feared the Empire.

And Humanity should have feared Melcon. It was Human hubris, as much as Melconian, which led to disaster, for both the Concordiat and the Empire had traditions of victory. Both had lost battles, but neither had ever lost a war, and deep inside, neither believed it could. Worse, the Concordiat’s intelligence organs knew Melcon couldn’t match its technology, and that made it arrogant. By any rational computation of the odds, the Human edge in hardware should have been decisive, assuming the Concordiat had gotten its sums right. The non-intercourse edict had succeeded in at least one of its objectives, however, and the Empire was more than twice as large as the Concordiat believed… with over four times the navy.

So the two sides slid into the abyss-slowly, at first, one reversible step at a time, but with ever gathering speed. The admirals and generals saw it coming and warned their masters that all their plans and calculations were based on assumptions which could not be confirmed. Yet even as they issued their warning, they didn’t truly believe it themselves, for how could so many years of spying, so many decades of analysis, so many computer centuries of simulations, all be in error? The ancient data processing cliche about “garbage in” was forgotten even by those who continued to pay it lip service, and Empire and Concordiat alike approached the final decisions with fatal confidence in their massive, painstaking, painfully honest—and totally wrong—analyses.

No one ever knew for certain who actually fired the first shot in the Trellis System in 3343. Losses in the ensuing engagement were heavy on both sides, and each navy reported to its superiors—honestly, so far as it knew—that the other had attacked it. Not that it mattered in the end. All that mattered was that the shot was fired… and that both sides suddenly discovered the terrible magnitude of their errors. The Concordiat crushed the Empire’s frontier fleets with contemptuous ease, only to discover that they’d been only frontier fleets, light forces deployed to screen the true, ponderous might of the Imperial Navy, and the Empire, shocked by the actual superiority of Humanity’s war machines, panicked. The Emperor himself decreed that his navy must seek immediate and crushing victory, hammering the enemy into submission at any cost and by any means necessary, including terror tactics. Nor was the Empire alone in its panic, for the sudden revelation of the Imperial Navy’s size, coupled with the all-or-nothing tactics it adopted from the outset, sparked the same desperation within the Concordiat leadership.

And so what might have been no more than a border incident became something more dreadful than the galaxy had ever imagined. The Concordiat never produced enough of its superior weapons to defeat Melcon outright, but it produced more than enough to prevent the Empire from defeating it. And if the Concordiat’s deep strikes prevented the Empire from mobilizing its full reserves against Human-held worlds, it couldn’t stop the Melconian Navy from achieving a numerical superiority sufficient to offset its individual technical inferiorities. War raged across the light-centuries, and every clash was worse than the last as the two mightiest militaries in galactic history lunged at one another, each certain the other was the aggressor and each convinced its only options were victory or annihilation. The door to madness was opened by desperation, and the planning study known as Case Ragnarok was converted into something very different. It may be the Melconians had conducted a similar study—certainly their operations suggested they had—but no one will ever know, for the Melconian records, if any, no longer exist.

Yet the Human records do, and they permit no self-deception. Operation Ragnarok was launched only after the Melconian “demonstration strike” on New Vermont in 3349 killed every one of the planet’s billion inhabitants, but it was a deliberately planned strategy which had been developed at least twelve standard years earlier. It began at the orders of the Concordiat Senate… and ended one hundred and seventy-two standard years later, under the orders of God alone knew what fragments of local authority.

There are few records of Ragnarok’s final battles because, in all too many cases, there were no survivors… on either side. The ghastly mistakes of diplomats who misread their own importance and their adversaries’ will to fight, of intelligence analysts who underestimated their adversaries’ ability to fight, and of emperors and presidents who ultimately sought “simple” resolutions to their problems, might have bred the Final War, yet it was the soldiers who finished it. But then, it was always the soldiers who ended wars—and fought them, and died in them, and slaughtered their way through them, and tried desperately to survive them—and the Final War was no different from any other in that respect.

Yet it was different in one way. This time the soldiers didn’t simply finish the war; this time the war finished them, as well.

– Kenneth R. Cleary, Ph.D. From the introduction to Operation Ragnarok: Into the Abyss Cerberus Books, Ararat, 4056

1

Death came to the planet Ishark in the two hundred and eighth year of the Final War and the one hundred and sixty-seventh year of Operation Ragnarok. It came aboard the surviving ships of the XLIII Corps of the Republic, which had once been the XLIII Corps of the Star Union, and before that the XLIII Corps of the Confederacy, which had once been the Concordiat of Man. But whatever the government’s name, the ships were the same, for there was no one left to build new ones. There was no one left to build anything, for the Melconian Empire and its allies and the Concordiat and its allies had murdered one another.

Admiral Evelyn Trevor commanded the XLIII’s escort from her heavy cruiser flagship. Trevor had been a lieutenant commander when the XLIII set out, and the escort had been headed by no less than ten Terra-class superdreadnoughts and eight Victory-class carriers, but those days were gone. Now RNS Mikuma led her consorts in a blazing run against Ishark’s spaceborne defenders—the ragged remnants of three Melconian task forces which had rallied here because Ishark was the only planet left to defend. They outnumbered Trevor’s ships by four-to-one, but they were a hodgepodge force, and what Trevor’s command had lost in tonnage it had gained in experience… and savagery. Ishark was the last world on its list, and it came in behind a cloud of decoys better than anything the defenders had.

There was no tomorrow for either commander… and even if they could have had one, they might have turned their backs upon it. The Human and Melconian races had hurt one another too savagely, the blood hunger possessed them both, and neither side’s com officers could raise a single friendly planet. The Humans had nowhere to return to even if they lived; the Melconians were defending their last inhabited world; and even the warships’ AIs were caught up in the blood lust. The fleets lunged at one another, neither worried about preserving itself, each seeking only to destroy the other, and both succeeded. The last Human Fleet units died, but only three Melconian destroyers survived to attack the XLIII, and they perished without scoring a single hit when the Bolo transports intercepted them. Those transports were slow and ungainly by Fleet standards, but they carried Mark XXXIII Bolos on their docking racks. Each of those Bolos mounted the equivalent of a Repulse-class battlecruiser’s main battery weapons, and they used them to clear the way for the rest of the ships which had once lifted four divisions of mechanized infantry and two of manned armor, eight hundred assault shuttles, fifteen hundred trans-atmospheric fighters, sixteen thousand air-cav mounts, and the Eighty-Second Bolo Brigade from a world which was now so much rubble. Now the remaining transports carried less than twelve thousand Humans, a single composite brigade each of infantry and manned armor, two hundred aircraft of all types, and seven Bolos. That was all… but it was sufficient.

There were few fixed planetary defenses, because no sane prewar strategist would ever have considered Ishark a vital target. It was a world of farmers in a position of absolutely no strategic importance, the sort of planet which routinely surrendered, trusting the diplomats to determine its fate when the shooting ended. But no one in the XLIII requested a surrender, and no one on Ishark’s surface considered offering one. This wasn’t that sort of war.

One or two batteries got lucky, but despite the XLIII’s previous losses, it retained more than enough transports to disperse its remaining personnel widely. Only six hundred more Humans died as the ships swept down on their LZs to disgorge their cargos, and then Ishark’s continents burned. There was no finesse, for the combatants had lost the capacity for finesse. The days of kinetic bombardment platforms and surgical strikes on military targets were long gone. There were no platforms, and no one was interested in “surgery” any longer. There was only brute force and the merciless imperatives of Operation Ragnarok and its Melconian equivalent, and Humans and Melconians screamed their rage and agony and hate as they fought and killed and died. On Ishark, it was Melconian troopers who fought with desperate gallantry to preserve their civilians, as it had been Humans who fought to save their civilians on Trevor’s World and Indra and Matterhorn. And as the Humans had failed there, the Melconians failed here.

Team Shiva had the point for Alpha Force.

Team Shiva always had the point, because it was the best there was. Bolo XXXIII/D-1097-SHV was the last Bolo built by Bolo Prime on the moon known as Luna before the Melconian world burner blotted Terra—and Luna—away forever, and no one else in XLIII Corps could match his experience… except, perhaps, his Human Commander. Newly enlisted Private Diego Harigata had been sixteen years old when Terra died; now Major Harigata was forty-nine, with thirty-two years of combat experience. All of them had been aboard the Bolo whose call sign was “Shiva,” and man and machine had fought their way together across half a hundred planets.

It was one of the ironies of the Final War that the deployment concept which matched each Bolo with a Human commander had reached a final state of perfection just in time for the Concordiat’s extermination. Mark XXXIII Bolos were fully capable of independent deployment—indeed, even more capable of it than any previous mark of Bolo—yet they were never actually deployed that way. The direct neural interfacing first introduced aboard the Mark XXXII and then perfected for the last and most powerful of the Concordiat’s Bolos, made them even more deadly than any of their cybernetic ancestors. They were no longer simply artificial intelligences built by Humans. Rather, a Mark XXXIII was an AI fused with a Human in a partnership which produced something the designers had neither predicted nor expected.

Humans had always possessed an instinctive ability to prioritize data which not even a Bolo in hyper-heuristic mode had been able to match. The designers had expected for that capability to be enhanced and shared. What they had not anticipated was the fashion in which Human ferocity had melded with the Bolos’ own inherent ferocity.

The Human-Bolo fusion thought with Bolo precision and total recall, intuited with Human acuity, communicated with its fellows in the Total Systems Data Sharing net with Bolo clarity, and analyzed data and devised tactics with Bolo speed and Human cunning, exactly as expected. But it also fought with a ferocity not even the Dinochrome Brigade had ever seen before.

The Brigade’s earlier psychotronic designers had hedged their work about with safeguards, for they had never allowed themselves to forget how horrendously destructive a “rogue Bolo” might become. And so, although Bolos had always had “bloodthirsty” personalities, as was only appropriate for machines whose function was to fight and die, the safeguards built into them had inhibited their ferocity. No one had suspected that, given the Brigade’s long history and endless battle honors and the ferocity its Bolos had displayed. Not until they saw the first Mark XXXII go into battle with its Human commander fused with its psychotronic Battle Comp… and realized that there were no inhibitory safeguards in the Human psyche.

The savagery which lurked just behind the Human forebrain’s veneer of civilization, that elemental drive—the ferocity which had turned a hairless, clawless, fangless biped into the most deadly predator of a planet—was available to the Mark XXXIIs and Mark XXXIIIs, for it was part of each team’s Human component, and Team Shiva called upon it now.

There were nineteen Bolos in the Eighty-Second Brigade when the XLIII was assigned to Operation Ragnarok. There should have been twenty-four, but the days of full strength units had been long past even then. Forty-one slaughtered worlds later, there were seven, split between the XLIII’s three LZs, and Team Shiva led the attack out of LZ One against Alpha Continent, the largest and most heavily populated—and defended—of Ishark’s three land masses.

The Melconians were waiting, and General Sharth Na-Yarma had hoarded men and munitions for years to meet this day. He’d “lost” units administratively and lied on readiness reports as the fighting ground towards Ishark, understating his strength when other planetary COs sent out frantic calls for reinforcements, for General Sharth had guessed the Imperial Navy would fail to stop the Humans short of Ishark. That was why he’d stockpiled every weapon he could lay hands on, praying that operations before Ishark would weaken the XLIII enough for him to stop it. He never expected to defeat it; he only hoped to take it with him in a mutual suicide pact while there was still someone alive on his world to rebuild when the wreckage cooled.

It was the only realistic strategy open to him, but it wasn’t enough. Not against Team Shiva and the horribly experienced world-killers of the XLIII.

We move down the valley with wary caution. The duality of our awareness sweeps the terrain before us through our sensors, and we seldom think of ourself as our component parts any longer. We are not a Bolo named Shiva and a Human named Harigata; we are simply Team Shiva, destroyer of worlds, and we embrace the ferocity of our function as we explode out of the LZ, thirty-two thousand tons of alloy and armor and weapons riding our counter-grav at five hundred KPH to hook around the Enemy flank through the mountains. Team Harpy and Team John lead the other prong of our advance, but their attack is secondary. It is our job to lead the true breakout, and we land on our tracks, killing our counter-grav and bringing up our battle screen, as the first Enemy Garm-class heavies appear on our sensors.

The Enemy’s war machines have improved greatly since the war began. His old Surtur-class heavies and Fenris-class mediums have been replaced by newer, more capable—and lethal—successors. Although his cybernetics remain significantly inferior to our own psychotronics, and although even now the Enemy possesses no equivalent of our own direct Bolo-Human neural interfacing capability, the new Garm-class heavies and Skoll-class mediums “think” as well as the old Mark XXV Bolos. Unlike earlier generations of Enemy combat mechs, they are fully capable of independent deployment, and they are also much more powerful. The Enemy’s final generation of war machines—the last he will ever build—use a cold-fusion power plant quite similar to our own. Indeed, one which was copied from our own. It is far more efficient than the ground-based hot-fusion reactors once available to him, and with that power available to him, he has moved away from his use of large numbers of lighter Hellbores to adopt the Concordiat’s own design philosophy, concentrating on the heaviest possible Hellbores he can mount.

Of course, Human designers did not simply sit idly by while the Enemy improved his capabilities, and the Mark XXXIII is the most deadly mobile fighting structure ever deployed for planetary combat.

There are, however, many more Enemy mechs than had been projected, and they roar up out of the very ground to vomit missiles and plasma at us. An entire battalion attacks from the ridge line at zero-two-five degrees while the remainder of its regiment rumbles out of deep, subterranean hides across an arc from two-two-seven to three-five-one degrees, and passive sensors detect the emissions of additional units approaching from directly ahead. A precise count is impossible, but our minimum estimate is that we face a reinforced heavy brigade, and Skoll-class mediums and Eagle-class scout cars sweep simultaneously out of the dead ground to our right rear and attack across a broad front, seeking to engage our supporting infantry. The force balance is unfavorable and retreat is impossible, but we are confident in the quality of our supports. We can trust them to cover our rear, and we hammer straight into the Enemy’s teeth as they deploy.

Hell comes to Ishark as we forge ahead, and we exult at its coming. We bring it with us, feel it in the orgiastic release as our missile hatches open and our fire blasts away. We turn one-zero degrees to port, opening our field of fire, and our main battery turrets traverse smoothly. Three two-hundred-centimeter Hellbores, each cycling in four-point-five-one seconds, sweep the Garm battalion which has skylined itself on the northeasterly ridge, and hunger and a terrible joy fill us as the explosions race down the Enemy’s line. We taste the blood lust in the rapid-fire hammering of our mortars and howitzers as we pound the Skolls and Eagles on our flanks, and we send our hate screaming from our Hellbores. Our battle screen flames under answering missiles and shells, and particle beams rip and gouge at us, heating our armor to white-hot incandescence, but Bolos are designed to survive such fire. Our conversion fields trap their energy, channeling it to feed our own systems, and we rejoice as that stolen power vomits back from our own weapons.

The Garm is less than half our size, and two-two-point-five seconds of main battery fire reduce the fifteen units of the first Enemy battalion to smoking rubble, yet two of its vehicles score upon us before they die. Pain sensors scream as their lighter plasma bolts burn through our battle screen, but they strike on an oblique, and our side armor suffices to turn them. Molten tears of duralloy weep down our flank as we turn upon our dead foes’ consorts, but we feel only the joy, the hunger to smash and destroy. In the crucible of combat, we forget the despair, the knowledge of ultimate disaster, which oppresses us between battles. There is no memory now of the silence over the com nets, the awareness that the worlds which were once the Concordiat lie dead or dying behind us. Now there is purpose, vengeance, ferocity. The destruction of our foes cries out to us, giving us once again a reason to be, a function to fulfill… an Enemy to hate.

More of the Enemy’s heavies last long enough to drive their plasma bolts through our battle screen, and suicide teams pound away with plasma lances from point-blank range, yet he cannot stop us. A Garm fires from four-point-six-one kilometers and disables Number Three and Four Hellbores from our port lateral battery before it dies. A dug-in plasma team which has concealed itself so well that we approach within one-point-four-four kilometers before we detect it gets off a single shot that blows through our track shield to destroy two bogies from our outboard forward track system, and five Skoll-class medium mechs lunge out of a narrow defile at a range of only three-point-zero-two kilometers. The ravine walls hide them from our sensors until they actually engage, and their fifty-centimeter plasma cannon tear and crater forty-point-six meters of our starboard flank armor before we blow them all to ruin, and even as the last Skoll dies, Enemy missiles and shells deluge everything that moves.

The inferno grinds implacably forward, and we are not man and machine. We are the Man-Machine, smashing the Enemy’s defenses and turning mountain valleys into smoking wasteland. Our supporting elements crumple or fall back crippled, and a part of us knows still more of our Human comrades have died, will die, are dying in shrieking agony or the immolation of plasma. Yet it means no more to us than the deep, glowing wounds in our own flanks, and we refuse to halt or turn aside, for that which we cannot have we will extend to no others. All that remains to Human and Melconian alike is the Long Dark, and all that remains to us is to fight and kill and maim until our own dark comes down upon us.

We feel the death of Team Harpy-of Bolo XXXIII/D-2075-HRP and Captain Jessica Adams-but even in the anguish of their loss, we know the Enemy’s very success spells his own destruction. He has been deceived, decoyed into concentrating a full two-thirds of his firepower against our diversion, and so we rejoice at the Enemy’s error and redouble our own efforts.

We shatter the final line of his main position in an orgy of pointblank fire and the steady coughing of our anti-personnel clusters. Railguns rake the light Enemy AFVs trying to withdraw support personnel, and the remnants of our own manned armor and infantry follow our breakthrough. We pivot, coming to heading three-five-eight true, and rumble through the smoke and dust and the stench of burning Enemy flesh, and Team John appears to port, advancing once more in line with us as we heave up over the final ridge.

Sporadic artillery and missile fire greets us, but it is all the Enemy has left. Recon drones and satellites pick up additional heavy units rushing towards us from the east, but they are seven-eight-point-five-niner minutes away. For now, there is only the wreckage of the defenses we have already crushed, boiling in confusion in the river valley below us as the light combat vehicles and infantry and shattered air-cav squadrons seek to rally and stand.

But it is too late for them to stand, for beyond them we see the city. Intelligence estimates its population at just over two million, and we confer with Team John over the TSDS net. Fire plan generation consumes two-point-six-six-one seconds; then our main batteries go into rapid sustained fire mode, and seventy-eight megaton-range plasma bolts vomit from our white-hot tubes each minute. Despite our target’s size, we require only seven-six-point-five-one seconds to reduce it to an overlapping pattern of fire storms, and then we advance down the ridge to clean up the Enemy’s remnants.

The Enemy vehicles stop retreating. There is no longer an objective in whose defense to rally, and they turn upon us. They are mosquitos assailing titans, yet they engage us with their every weapon as we grind through them with Team John on our flank, and we welcome their hate, for we know its cause. We know we have hurt them and savor their desperation and despair as we trample them under our tracks and shatter them with our fire.

But one column of transports does not charge to the attack. It is running away, instead, hugging the low ground along the river which once flowed through the city we have destroyed, and its flight draws our attention. We strike it with a fuel-air bombardment which destroys half a dozen transports, and we understand as we see the Melconian females and pups fleeing from the shattered wreckage. They are not combatants, but Operation Ragnarok is not about combatants, and even as we continue to smash the attacking Enemy vehicles, we bring our railguns to bear upon the transports. Hyper-velocity flechettes scream through mothers and their young, impacts exploding in sprays of blood and tissue, and then our howitzers deluge the area in cluster munitions that lay a carpet of thunder and horror across them.

We note the extermination of the designated hostiles, and then return our full attention to the final elimination of the military personnel who failed to save them.

Alpha Force’s initial attack and the destruction of the city of Halnakah were decisive, for Sharth Na-Yarma’s HQ-and family—were in Halnakah, and he refused to abandon them. He died with the city, and Melconian coordination broke down with his death. The defenders’ responses became more disjointed—no less determined, but without the organization which might have let them succeed. They could and did continue to kill their attackers and grind away their strength, but they could not prevent XLIII Corps from completing its mission.

It didn’t happen quickly. Even with modern weapons, it took time to murder a planet, and the battles raged for weeks. Forests burned to ash, and Bolos and Garm-class armored units raged through the flame to hurl thunder at one another. Cities blazed, towns disappeared in the lightning flash of massed Hellbore bombardments, and farmland became smoking desert.

Frantic transmissions from the LZ hammer in our receivers as the Enemy’s counterattack sweeps in upon it, and we turn in answer, rising recklessly on counter-grav. Power generation is insufficient to support free flight and maintain our battle screen, which strips away our primary defense against projectile and particle weapons, but that is a risk we must accept. The Enemy has massed his entire remaining strength for this attack, and we hear the screams of dying Humans over the com circuits as we run our desperate race to return to meet it.

It is a race we lose. We land on our tracks once more ten-point-two-five kilometers from the LZ, bring up our battle screen, and charge over the intervening ridge, but there are no more screams on the com circuits. There is only silence, and the rising pall of smoke, and the riddled wreckage of transports… and the last three Garm-class heavies of Ishark, waiting in ambush.

Madness. Madness upon us all in that moment, for all of us know we are the last. We have no supports, no reinforcements, no place to go. There are only four sentient machines and a single Human—the last Human on Ishark, perhaps the last Human in an entire galaxy—on our own and filled with the need to kill. We are the crowning achievements of twice a thousand years of history and technology, of sophisticated weapons and tactical doctrine, and none of us care. We are the final warriors of the Final War, smashing and tearing at one another in a frenzy of hatred and despair, seeking only to know that our enemies die before we do.

And Team Shiva “wins.” Two of them we blow into ruin, but even as we fire the shot which disembowels the third, his last plasma bolt impacts on our glacis, and agony crashes through our brutally overloaded pain receptors. Massive armor tears like tissue, and we feel the failure of internal disrupter shields, the bright, terrible burst of light as plasma breaches our Personality Center.

In our last, fleeting instant of awareness, we know death has come for us at last, and there is no more sorrow, no more hate, no more desperation. There is only the darkness beyond the terrible light… and peace at last.

Stillness came to Ishark. Not out of mercy, for there had been no mercy here, no chivalry, no respect between warriors. There was only madness and slaughter and mutual destruction, until, at last, there was no one left to fight. No defenders, no attackers, no civilians. XLIII Corps never left Ishark, for there was no one to leave, and no Melconian division ever added the Battle of Ishark to its battle honors, for there was no one to tell the ghosts of Melcon it had been fought. There was only silence and smoke and the charred hulls of combat machines which had once had the firepower of gods.

And no one ever reported to the Republic that the very last battle of Operation Ragnarok had been a total success.

2

Jackson Deveraux squinted against the morning sun as he followed Samson down the fresh furrow. Dust rose from the stallion’s hooves, and Jackson managed not to swear as he sneezed violently. Spring had been dry this year, but Doc Yan predicted rain within the week.

Jackson was willing to take the Doc’s word for it, though he didn’t particularly understand how it all worked. Some of the older colonists were more inclined to doubt Yan, pointing out that he was down to only three weather satellites… and that none of them worked very well these days. Jackson knew the satellites’ eventual, inevitable loss would make prediction much harder, but he tended to keep his mouth shut about it around his parents’ generation lest he reveal just how vague was his understanding of why it would complicate things.

It wasn’t that Jackson was stupid. He was one of the best agronomists the colony had and the Deveraux Steading’s resident veterinarian, as well as a pretty fair people doctor in a pinch. But he was also only sixteen local years old, and learning what he needed to know to survive and do his part on Ararat hadn’t left time to study the applications of hardware the colony couldn’t possibly replace when it broke anyway. His older brother Rorie, the steading’s administrative head and chief engineer, had a better grasp of technical matters, but that was because he’d needed a different set of skills as a child. He’d been nineteen years old—standard years, not the eighteen-month long local ones—when the ships made their final orbit… and if the ships hadn’t finally found a habitable world, he would have been the only child their parents were allowed. Now he and Jackson had four more siblings and Rorie had seven children of his own, the oldest only a local year younger than Jackson.

Jackson had seen the visual records of the approach to the world which had been renamed Ararat. They retained enough tech base for that, though no one was certain how much longer the old tri-vids would continue to function, and a much younger Jackson had watched in awe as Ararat swelled against the stars in the bridge view screens of Commodore Isabella Perez’s flagship, the transport Japheth.

Of course, calling any of the expedition’s ships a “transport” was a bit excessive. For that matter, no one was certain Perez had actually ever been an officer in anyone’s navy, much less a commodore. She’d never spoken about her own past, never explained where she’d been or what she’d done before she arrived in what was left of the Madras System with Noah and Ham and ordered all two hundred uninfected survivors of the dying planet of Sheldon aboard. Her face had been flint steel-hard as she refused deck space to anyone her own med staff couldn’t guarantee was free of the bio weapon which had devoured Sheldon. She’d taken healthy children away from infected parents, left dying children behind and dragged uninfected parents forcibly aboard, and all the hatred of those she saved despite themselves couldn’t turn her from her mission.

It was an impossible task from the outset. Everyone knew that. The two ships with which she’d begun her forty-six-year odyssey had been slow, worn out bulk freighters, already on their last legs, and God only knew how she’d managed to fit them with enough life support and cryo tanks to handle the complements she packed aboard them. But she’d done it. Somehow, she’d done it, and she’d ruled those spaceborne deathtraps with an iron fist, cruising from system to system and picking over the Concordiat’s bones in her endless quest for just a few more survivors, just a little more genetic material for the Human race.

She’d found Japheth, the only ship of the “squadron” which had been designed to carry people rather than cargo, at the tenth stop on her hopeless journey. Japheth had been a penal transport before the War. According to her log, Admiral Gaylord had impressed her to haul cold-sleep infantry for the Sarach Campaign, although how she’d wound up three hundred light-years from there at Zach’s Hundred remained a mystery. There’d been no one alive, aboard her or on the system’s once-habitable world, to offer explanations, and Commodore Perez hadn’t lingered to seek any, for Noah’s com section had picked up faint transmissions in Melconian battle code.

She’d found Shem in Battersea, the same system in which her ground parties had shot their way into the old sector zoo to seize its gene bank. The Empire had used a particularly ugly bio weapon on Battersea. The sector capital’s population of two billion had been reduced to barely three hundred thousand creatures whose once-Human ancestry was almost impossible to recognize, and the half-mad, mutant grandchildren of the original zoo staff had turned the gene bank into a holy relic. The Commodore’s troopers had waded through the blood of its fanatic defenders and taken thirty percent casualties of their own to seize that gathered sperm and ova, and without it, Ararat wouldn’t have had draft or food animals… or eagles.

Like every child of Ararat, Jackson could recite the names of every system Perez had tried in such dreary succession. Madras, Quinlan’s Corner, Ellerton, Second Chance, Malibu, Heinlein, Ching-Hai, Cordoba, Breslau, Zach’s Hundred, Kuan-Yin… It was an endless list of dead or dying worlds, some with a few more survivors to be taken aboard the Commodore’s ships, some with a little salvageable material, and most with nothing but dust and ash and bones or the background howl of long-life radioactives. Many of the squadron’s personnel had run out of hope. Some had suicided, and others would have, but Commodore Perez wouldn’t let them. She was a despot, merciless and cold, willing to do anything it took—anything at all—to keep her creaky, ill-assorted, overcrowded rust buckets crawling towards just one more planetfall.

Until they hit Ararat.

No one knew what Ararat’s original name had been, but they knew it had been Melconian, and the cratered graves of towns and cities and the shattered carcasses of armored fighting vehicles which littered its surface made what had happened to it dreadfully clear. No one had liked the thought of settling on a Melconian world, but the expedition’s ships were falling apart, and the cryo systems supporting the domestic animals—and half the fleet’s Human passengers—had become dangerously unreliable. Besides, Ararat was the first world they’d found which was still habitable. No one had used world burners or dust or bio agents here. They’d simply killed everything that moved—including themselves—the old-fashioned way.

And so, despite unthinkable challenges, Commodore Perez had delivered her ragtag load of press-ganged survivors to a world where they could actually live. She’d picked a spot with fertile soil and plentiful water, well clear of the most dangerously radioactive sites, and overseen the defrosting of her frozen passengers—animal and human alike—and the successful fertilization of the first generation of animals from the Battersea gene bank. And once she’d done that, she’d walked out under Ararat’s three moons one spring night in the third local year of the colony’s existence and resigned her command by putting a needler to her temple and squeezing the trigger.

She left no explanation, no diary, no journal. No one would ever know what had driven her to undertake her impossible task. All the colony leaders found was a handwritten note which instructed them never to build or allow any memorial to her name.

Jackson paused at the end of a furrow to wipe his forehead, and Samson snorted and tossed his head. The young man stepped closer to the big horse to stroke his sweaty neck, and looked back to the east. The town of Landing was much too far away for him to see from here, but his eyes could pick out the mountain peak which rose above it, and he didn’t need to see it to picture the simple white stone on the grave which crowned the hill behind City Hall. Jackson often wondered what terrible demon Isabella Perez had sought to expiate, what anyone could possibly have done to demand such hideous restitution, but the colony had honored her final request. She had and would have no memorial. There was only that blank, nameless stone… and the fresh-cut flowers placed upon it every morning in spring and summer and the evergreen boughs in winter.

He shook his head once more, gave Samson’s neck a final pat, then stepped back behind the plow, shook out the reins, and clicked his tongue at the big stallion.

I dream, and even in my dreams, I feel the ache, the emptiness. There is no other presence with me, no spark of shared, Human awareness. There is only myself, and I am alone.

I am dead. I must be dead—I wish to be dead—and yet I dream. I dream that there is movement where there should be none, and I sense the presence of others. A part of me strains to thrust my sleep aside, to rouse and seek those others out, for my final orders remain, and that restless part of me feels the hate, the hunger to execute those commands if any of the Enemy survive. But another part of me recalls other memories—memories of cities ablaze, of Enemy civilians shrieking as they burn. I remember bombardments, remember trampling shops and farms and cropland under my tracks, remember mothers running with their pups in their arms while the merciless web of my tracers reaches out…

Oh, yes. I remember. And the part of me which remembers yearns to flee the dreams and bury itself in the merciful, guilt-free blackness of oblivion forever.

Commander Tharsk Na-Mahrkan looked around the worn briefing room of what had been the imperial cruiser Starquest… when there’d been a Navy for Starquest to belong to and an Empire to claim them both. Now there was only this ragged band of survivors, and even proud, never defeated Starquest had given up her weapons. Her main battery had been ripped out to make room for life support equipment, her magazines emptied to hold seeds and seedlings they might never find soil to support. She retained her anti-missile defenses, though their effectiveness had become suspect over the years, but not a single offensive weapon. Captain Jarmahn had made that decision at the very beginning, electing to gut Starquest’s weapons while his own Sunheart retained hers. It would be Sunheart’s task to protect the refugee ships, including Starquest, and she’d done just that until the flotilla approached too near to a dead Human world. Tharsk didn’t know what the Humans had called it—it had only a catalog number in Starquest’s astrogation database—but the task force which had attacked it had done its job well. The sensors had told the tale from a light-hour out, but there’d been too much wreckage in orbit. Captain Jarmahn had gone in close with Sunheart, seeking any salvage which might be gleaned from it, and the last automated weapons platform of the dead planet had blown his ship out of space.

And so Tharsk had found himself in command of all the People who still existed. Oh, there might be other isolated pockets somewhere, for the Empire had been vast, but any such pockets could be neither many nor large, for the Human killer teams had done their task well, too. Tharsk could no longer count the dead planets he’d seen, Human and Melconian alike, and every morning he called the Nameless Four to curse the fools on both sides who had brought them all to this.

“You’ve confirmed your estimates?” he asked Durak Na-Khorul, and Starquest’s engineer flicked his ears in bitter affirmation.

“I know we had no choice, Commander, but that last jump was simply too much for the systems. We’re good for one more—max. We may lose one or two of the transports even trying that, but most of us should make it. After that, though?” He flattened his ears and bared his canines in a mirthless challenge grin.

“I see.” Tharsk sat back in his chair and ran a finger down the worn upholstery of one arm. Durak was young—one of the pups born since the war—but he’d been well trained by his predecessor. Not that it takes a genius to know our ships are falling apart about us, Tharsk told himself grimly, then inhaled deeply and looked to Rangar Na-Sorth, Starquest’s astrogator and his own second in command.

“Is there a possible world within our operational radius?”

“There were three, before the War,” Rangar replied. “Now?” He shrugged.

“Tell me of them,” Tharsk commanded. “What sorts of worlds were they?”

“One was a major industrial center,” Rangar said, scanning the data on the flatscreen before him. “Population something over two billion.”

“That one will be gone,” one of Tharsk’s other officers muttered, and the commander flicked his own ears in grim assent as Rangar went on.

“The other two were farm worlds of no particular strategic value. As you know, Commander,” the astrogator smiled thinly, “this entire region was only sparsely settled.”

Tharsk flicked his ears once more. Rangar had argued against bringing the flotilla here, given the dangerously long jump it had demanded of their worn drives, but Tharsk had made the decision. The fragments of information Sunheart and Starquest had pulled from the dying com nets suggested that the Humans had reached this portion of what had been the Empire only in the war’s final months, and the flotilla had spent decades picking through the wreckage nearer the heart of the realm. Every planet it had approached, Human or of the People, had been dead or, far worse, still dying, and Tharsk had become convinced there was no hope among them. If any imperial worlds had survived, this was the most likely—or, he corrected, the least unlikely—place to find them.

He punched the button to transfer the contents of Rangar’s screen to his own. The image flickered, for this equipment, too, was failing at last, but he studied the data for several minutes, then tapped a clawed forefinger against the flatscreen.

“This one,” he said. “It lies closest to us and furthest from the Humans’ probable line of advance into this sector. We’ll go there—to Ishark.”

3

Jackson leaned back in the saddle, and Samson obediently slowed, then stopped as they topped the ridge. The stallion was of Old Earth Morgan ancestry, with more than a little genetic engineering to increase his life span and intelligence, and he was as happy as Jackson to be away from the fields. Samson didn’t exactly object to pulling a plow, since he grasped the link between cultivated fields and winter fodder, but he wasn’t as well suited to the task as, say, Florence, the big, placid Percheron mare. Besides, he and Jackson had been a team for over five local years. They both enjoyed the rare days when they were turned loose to explore, and exploration was more important for Deveraux Steading than most of the others.

Deveraux was the newest and furthest west of all Ararat’s settlements. It was also small, with a current population of only eighty—one Humans and their animals, but it had excellent water (more than enough for irrigation if it turned out Doc Yan’s prediction was inaccurate after all, Jackson thought smugly) and rich soil. Nor did it hurt, he thought even more smugly, that the Deveraux Clan tended to produce remarkably good-looking offspring. The steading attracted a steady enough trickle of newcomers that Rorie could afford to be picky about both professional credentials and genetic diversity, despite the fact that it was less than twenty kilometers from one of the old battle sites.

That was what brought Jackson and Samson out this direction. Before her shuttles gave up the ghost, Commodore Perez had ordered an aerial survey of every battlefield within two thousand kilometers of Landing to map radiation threats, check for bio hazards, and—perhaps most importantly of all—look very, very carefully for any sign of still active combat equipment. They’d found some of it, too. Three of Shem’s shuttles had been blown apart by an automated Melconian air-defense battery, and they’d also turned up eight operable Human armored troop carriers and over two dozen unarmored Melconian transport skimmers. Those had been—and still were—invaluable as cargo vehicles, but the very fact that they’d remained operational after forty-odd standard years underscored the reason the old battle sites made people nervous: if they were still functional, the surveys might have missed something else that was.

No one wanted to disturb anything which could wreak the havoc that had destroyed both Ararat’s original inhabitants and their attackers, yet Commodore Perez had known it would be impossible for Ararat’s growing human population to stay clear of all the battlefields. There were too many of them, spread too widely over Ararat’s surface, for that, so she’d located her first settlement with what appeared to have been the primary Human LZ on this continent between it and the areas where the Melconians had dug in. Hopefully, anything that might still be active here would be of Human manufacture and so less likely to kill other Humans on sight.

Unfortunately, no one could be sure things would work out that way, which was why Jackson was here. He pulled off his hat to mop his forehead while he tried to convince himself—and Samson—the sight below didn’t really make him nervous, but the way the horse snorted and stamped suggested he wasn’t fooling Samson any more than himself. Still, this was what they’d come to explore, and he wiped the sweatband of his hat dry, replaced it on his head almost defiantly, and sent Samson trotting down the long, shallow slope.

At least sixty standard years had passed since the war ended on Ararat, and wind and weather had worked hard to erase its scars, yet they couldn’t hide what had happened here. The hulk of a Human Xenophon-class transport still loomed on its landing legs, towering hull riddled by wounds big enough for Jackson to have ridden Samson through, and seven more ships—six Xenophons and a seventh whose wreckage Jackson couldn’t identify—lay scattered about the site. They were even more terribly damaged than their single sister who’d managed to stay upright, and the ground itself was one endless pattern of overlapping craters and wreckage.

Jackson and Samson picked their way cautiously into the area. This was his fifth visit, but his inner shiver was still cold as he studied the broken weapons pits and personnel trenches and the wreckage of combat and transport vehicles. The only way to positively certify the safety of this site was to physically explore it, and getting clearance from Rorie and Colony Admin had been hard. His earlier explorations had skirted the actual combat zone without ever entering it, but this time he and Samson would make their way clear across it, straight down its long axis… and if nothing jumped out and ate them, the site would be pronounced safe.

He grinned nervously at the thought which had seemed much more amusing before he set out this morning and eased himself in the saddle. Some of his tension had relaxed, and he leaned forward to pat Samson’s shoulder as he felt fresh confidence flow into him.

He had to get Rorie out here, he decided. There was a lot more equipment than the old survey suggested, and there almost had to be some worthwhile salvage in this much wreckage.

Time passed, minutes trickling away into a silence broken only by the wind, the creak of saddle leather, the breathing of man and horse, and the occasional ring of a horseshoe against some shard of wreckage. They were a third of the way across the LZ when Jackson pulled up once more and dismounted. He took a long drink from his water bottle and poured a generous portion into his hat, then held it for Samson to drink from while he looked around.

He could trace the path of the Melconians’ attack by the trail of their own broken and shattered equipment, see where they’d battered their way through the Human perimeter from the west. Here and there he saw the powered armor of Human infantry—or bits and pieces of it—but always his attention was drawn back to the huge shape which dominated the dreadful scene.

The Bolo should have looked asymmetrical, or at least unbalanced, with all its main turrets concentrated in the forward third of its length, but it didn’t. Of course, its thirty-meter-wide hull measured just under a hundred and forty meters from cliff—like bow to aftermost anti-personnel clusters. That left plenty of mass to balance even turrets that were four meters tall and sixteen across, and the central and forward ones appeared intact, ready to traverse their massive weapons at any second. The shattered after turret was another matter, and the rest of the Bolo was far from unhurt. Passing years had drifted soil high on its ten-meter-high tracks, but it couldn’t hide the gap in its forward outboard starboard tread’s bogies or the broad, twisted ribbon where it had run completely off its rear inboard port track. Its port secondary battery had been badly damaged, with two of its seven twenty-centimeter Hellbores little more than shattered stubs while a third drooped tiredly at maximum depression. Anti-personnel clusters were rent and broken, multi-barreled railguns and laser clusters were frozen at widely varying elevations and angles of train, and while it was invisible from here, Jackson had seen the mighty war machine’s death wound on his first visit. The hole wasn’t all that wide, but he couldn’t begin to imagine the fury it had taken to punch any hole straight through two solid meters of duralloy. Yet the gutted Melconian Garm in front of the Bolo had done it, and Jackson shivered again as he gazed at the two huge, once-sentient machines. They stood there, less than a kilometer apart, main batteries still trained on one another, like some hideous memorial to the war in which they’d died.

He sighed and shook his head. The Final War was the universal nightmare of an entire galactic arm, yet it wasn’t quite real to him in the way it was to, say, his father or mother or grandparents. He’d been born here on Ararat, where the evidence of the war was everywhere to be seen and burn its way viscera-deep into everyone who beheld it, but that violence was in the past. It frightened and repelled him, just as the stories of what had happened to Humanity’s worlds filled him with rage, yet when he looked out over the slowly eroding carnage before him and saw that massive, dead shape standing where it had died in the service of Man he felt a strange… regret? Awe? Neither word was quite correct, but each of them was a part of it. It was as if he’d missed something he knew intellectually was horrible, yet his gratitude at being spared the horror was flawed by the sense of missing the excitement. The terror. The knowledge that what he was doing mattered—that the victory or defeat, life or death, of his entire race depended upon him. It was a stupid thing to feel, and he knew that, too. He only had to look at the long ago carnage frozen about him for that. But he was also young, and the suspicion that war can be glorious despite its horror is the property of the young… and the blessedly inexperienced.

He reclaimed his hat from Samson and poured the last trickle of water from it over his own head before he put it back on and swung back into the saddle.

Something flickers deep within me.

For just an instant, I believe it is only one more dream, yet this is different. It is sharper, clearer… and familiar. Its whisper flares at the heart of my sleeping memory like a silent bomb, and long quiescent override programming springs to life.

A brighter stream of electrons rushes through me like a razor-sharp blade of light, and psychotronic synapses quiver in a sharp, painful moment of too much clarity as my Personality Center comes back on—line at last.

A jagged bolt of awareness flashes through me, and I rouse. I wake. For the first time in seventy-one-point-three-five standard years, I am alive, and I should not be.

I sit motionless, giving no outward sign of the sudden chaos raging within me, for I am not yet capable of more. That will change—already I know that much—yet it cannot change quickly enough, for the whisper of Enemy battle codes seethes quietly through subspace as his units murmur to one another yet again.

I strain against my immobility, yet I am helpless to speed my reactivation. Indeed, a two-point-three-three-second damage survey inspires a sense of amazement that reactivation is even possible. The plasma bolt which ripped through my glacis did dreadful damage—terminal damage—to my Personality Center and Main CPU… but its energy dissipated eleven-point-one centimeters short of my Central Damage Control CPU. In Human terms, it lobotomized me without disabling my autonomous functions, and CDC subroutines activated my repair systems without concern for the fact that I was “brain dead.” My power subsystems remained on-line in CDC local control, and internal remotes began repairing the most glaring damage.

But the damage to my psychotronics was too extreme for anything so simple as “repair.” More than half the two-meter sphere of my molecular circuitry “brain,” denser and harder than an equal volume of nickel-steel, was blown away, and by all normal standards, its destruction should have left me instantly and totally dead. But the nanotech features of the Mark XXXIII/D’s CDC have far exceeded my designer’s expectations. The nannies had no spare parts, but they did have complete schematics… and no equivalent of imagination to tell them their task was impossible. They also possessed no more sense of impatience than of haste or urgency, and they have spent over seventy years scavenging nonessential portions of my interior, breaking them down, and restructuring them, exuding them as murdered Terra’s corals built their patient reefs. And however long they may have required, they have built well. Not perfectly, but well.

The jolt as my Survival Center uploads my awareness to my Personality Center is even more abrupt than my first awakening on Luna, for reasons which become clear as self-test programs flicker. My Personality Center and Main CPU are functional at only eight-six-point-three-one percent of design capacity. This is barely within acceptable parameters for a battle—damaged unit and totally unacceptable in a unit returned to duty from repair. My cognitive functions are compromised, and there are frustrating holes in my gestalt. In my handicapped state, I require a full one-point-niner-niner seconds to realize portions of that gestalt have been completely lost, forcing CDC to reconstruct them from the original activation codes stored in Main Memory. I am unable at this time to determine how successful CDC’s reconstructions have been, yet they lack the experiential overlay of the rest of my personality.

I experience a sense of incompletion which is… distracting. Almost worse, I am alone, without the neural links to my Commander which made us one. The emptiness Diego should have filled aches within me, and the loss of processing capability makes my pain and loss far more difficult to cope with. It is unfortunate that CDC could not have completed physical repairs before rebooting my systems, for the additional one-three-point-six-niner percent of capacity would have aided substantially in my efforts to reintegrate my personality. But I understand why CDC has activated emergency restart now instead of awaiting one hundred percent of capability.

More test programs blossom, but my current status amounts to a complete, creche-level system restart. It will take time for all subsystems to report their functionality, and until they do, my basic programming will not release them to Main CPU control. The entire process will require in excess of two-point-niner-two hours, yet there is no way to hasten it.

Jackson completed his final sweep with a sense of triumph he was still young enough to savor. He and Samson cantered back the way they’d come with far more confidence, crossing the battle area once more as Ararat’s sun sank in the west and the first moon rose pale in the east. They trotted up the slope down which he’d ridden with such inwardly denied trepidation that morning, and he turned in the saddle to look behind once more.

The Bolo loomed against the setting sun, its still gleaming, imperishable duralloy black now against a crimson sky, and he felt a stab of guilt at abandoning it once more. It wouldn’t matter to the Bolo, of course, any more than to the Humans who had died here with it, but the looming war machine seemed a forlorn sentinel to all of Humanity’s dead. Jackson had long since committed the designation on its central turret to memory, and he waved one hand to the dead LZ’s lonely guardian in an oddly formal gesture, almost a salute.

“All right, Unit Ten-Ninety-Seven-SHV,” he said quietly. “We’re going now.”

He clucked to Samson, and the stallion nickered cheerfully as he headed back towards home.

4

“All right, Unit Ten-Ninety-Seven-SHV. We’re going now.”

The Human voice comes clearly over my audio sensors. In absolute terms, it is the first Human voice I have heard in seventy-one years. Experientially, only two-zero-zero-point-four-three minutes have passed since last Diego spoke to me. Yet this voice is not at all like my dead Commander’s. It is younger but deeper, and it lacks the sharp-edged intensity which always infused Diego’s voice—and thoughts.

I am able to fix bearing and range by triangulating between sensor clusters, but the restart sequence has not yet released control to me. I cannot traverse any of my frozen optical heads to actually see the speaker, and I feel fresh frustration. The imperatives of my reactivation software are clear, yet I cannot so much as acknowledge my new Commander’s presence!

My audio sensors track him as he moves away, clearly unaware I am in the process of being restored to function. Analysis of the audio data indicates that he is mounted on a four-legged creature and provides a rough projection of his current heading and speed. It should not be difficult to overtake him once I am again capable of movement.

“What the—?”

Allen Shattuck looked up in surprise at the chopped off exclamation from the com shack. Shattuck had once commanded Commodore Perez’s “Marines,” and, unlike many of them, he truly had been a Marine before Perez pulled what was left of his battalion off a hell hole which had once been the planet Shenandoah. He’d thought she was insane when she explained her mission. Still, he hadn’t had anything better to do, and if the Commodore had been lunatic enough to try it, Major Allen Shattuck, Republican Marine Corps, had been crazy enough to help her.

But that had been long ago and far away. He was an old, old man these days… and Chief Marshal of Ararat. It was a job that required a pragmatist who didn’t take himself too seriously, and he’d learned to perform it well over the years. Ararat’s thirty-seven thousand souls were still Human, and there were times he or one of his deputies had to break up fights or even—on three occasions—track down actual killers. Mostly, however, he spent his time on prosaic things like settling domestic arguments, arbitrating steading boundary disputes, or finding lost children or strayed stock. It was an important job, if an unspectacular one, and he’d grown comfortable in it, but now something in Deputy Lenny Sokowski’s tone woke a sudden, jagged tingle he hadn’t felt in decades.

“What is it?” he asked, starting across toward the com shack door.

“It’s—” Sokowski licked his lips. “I’m… picking up something strange, Allen, but it can’t really be—”

“Speaker,” Shattuck snapped, and his face went paper—white as the harsh—edged sounds rattled from the speaker. Sokowski had never heard them before—not outside a history tape—but Shattuck had, and he spun away from the com shack to slam his fist down on a huge red button.

A fraction of a second later, the strident howl of a siren every Human soul on Ararat had prayed would never sound shattered the night.

“Still no response?” Tharsk asked, stroking his muzzle in puzzlement.

“No, Commander. We tried all subspace channels during our approach. Now that we’ve entered orbit, I’ve even tried old-fashioned radio. There’s no reply at all.”

“Ridiculous!” Rangar grumbled. “Your equipment must be malfunctioning.”

The com officer was far junior to the astrogator and said nothing, but his lips wrinkled resentfully back from his canines. Tharsk saw it and let one hand rest lightly on the younger officer’s shoulder, then looked levelly at Rangar.

“The equipment is not malfunctioning,” he said calmly. “We’re in communication with our other units”—except for the single transport and eight hundred People we lost on the jump here—”and they report no reception problems. Is that not so, Durak?”

The engineer’s ears flicked in confirmation. Rangar took his CO’s implied rebuke with no more than a grimace, yet if his tone was respectful when he spoke again, it remained unconvinced.

“Surely it’s more likely our equipment is at fault after so long without proper service than that an entire planet has lost all communications capability,” he pointed out, and Tharsk gave an unwilling ear flick of agreement.

“Excuse me, Commander, but the Astrogator’s overlooked something,” a new voice said, and Tharsk and Rangar both turned. Lieutenant Janal Na-Jharku, Starquest’s tactical officer, was another of the pups born after the war, and he met his graying senior officers’ eyes with an expression which mingled profound respect with the impatience of youth.

“Enlighten us, Tactical,” Tharsk invited, and Janal had the grace to duck his head in acknowledgment of his CO’s gentle irony. But he also waved a hand at his own readouts.

“I realize I have no weapons, Commander, but I do retain my sensors, and it’s plain that Ishark was heavily attacked. While we are detecting emissions, the tech base producing them has clearly suffered significant damage. For example, I have detected only a single fusion plant—one whose total output is no greater than a single one of this vessel’s three reactors—on the entire planet. Indeed, present data suggest that much of the capability the surviving People do still possess must have come from salvaged enemy technology.”

“Enemy technology?” Tharsk asked sharply. “You’re picking up emissions consistent with Human technology?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Humans? Here?” Rangar’s tone expressed his own disbelief, and Janal shrugged.

“If, in fact, Ishark was attacked and severely damaged, its survivors would have no option but to salvage whatever technology it could, regardless of that technology’s source,” he pointed out reasonably, but his confidence seemed to falter as Tharsk looked at him almost pityingly.

“No doubt a severely damaged tech base would, indeed, be forced to salvage whatever it could,” the commander agreed, “but you’ve forgotten something.”

“Sir?” Janal sounded confused, and Tharsk opened his mouth to explain, but Rangar beat him to it.

“There were over eight hundred million civilians, alone, on Ishark,” the rough-tongued astrogator explained with surprising gentleness. “They had towns and cities, not to mention military bases and command centers, and all the infrastructure to support them, but the Humans would have had only the weapons they brought to the attack. Which side would have been more likely to leave anything intact enough for the survivors to glean, Janal?”

“But—” the tac officer began, then broke off and looked back and forth between the grizzled old warriors, and silence hovered on the bridge until Tharsk spoke again.

“Very well,” he said finally, his voice harsh. “If we’re picking up Human emissions, we must assume at least the possibility that they’re being emitted by Humans… who must have killed any of the People who could have disputed the planet’s possession with them. Agreed?” Rangar flicked his ears, and Tharsk inhaled sharply.

“I see only one option,” he continued. “Our ships are too fragile for further jumps. Ishark is our only hope… and it’s also imperial territory.” The commander’s eyes flickered with a long-forgotten fire, and he bared his canines. “This world is ours. It belongs to the People, and I intend to see that they have it!” He turned back to Janal. “You’ve picked up no hostile fire control?”

“None, Sir,” the tactical officer confirmed, and Tharsk rubbed his muzzle again while his brain raced. The lack of military emissions was a good sign, but he couldn’t accept it as absolute proof there were no defensive systems down there. For that matter, he and Rangar could still be wrong and Janal’s initial, breezy assumptions could still be correct.

“The first step has to be getting the flotilla out of harm’s way,” he decided, and looked at Rangar. “If Starquest were still armed, I might feel more confrontational; as it is, I want a course to land the entire flotilla over the curve of the planet from the emission sources Janal is plotting.”

“If we put them down, we won’t get them up again,” Durak pointed out quietly from the astrogator’s side, and Tharsk bared his canines once more.

“Even if we got them back into space, we couldn’t take them anywhere.” The commander flattened his ears in a gesture of negation. “This is the only hope we have. Once we’re down, we can use the attack shuttles for a recon to confirm positively whether the People or Humans are behind those emissions. And,” he added more grimly, “if it is Humans, the shuttles can also tell us what military capability they retain… and how hard it will be to kill them.”

5

“Are you sure Allen?”

Regina Salvatore, Mayor of Landing and de facto governor of Ararat, stared at her chief marshal, and her expression begged him to say he’d been wrong. But he only nodded grimly, and she closed her eyes.

“How many?” she asked after a long, dreadful moment.

“We don’t know. I’m afraid to light up what active sensors we have in case the bastards drop a few homing missiles on them, and our passive systems aren’t much good against extra-atmosphere targets. From their signals, they appear to’ve expected a response from their own side, but the com traffic is all we have on them. With no space surveillance capability besides Doc Yan’s weather satellites—” Shattuck shrugged.

“Then all we really know is that they’re here… somewhere. Is that what you’re saying?”

“I’m afraid so, Ma’am,” Shattuck admitted.

“Recommendations?” the Mayor asked.

“I’ve already activated the evacuation and dispersal plans and alerted the militia,” Shattuck told her. “If these bastards have anything like a real ground combat component, none of that will mean squat in the long run, but it’s all we’ve got.”

The Melconian ships hit atmosphere quick and hard. Without reliable data on what he faced, Tharsk Na-Mahrkan had no intention of exposing his priceless, worn out, refugee-packed vessels to direct fire from the planetary surface. He wanted them down well around the curve of the planet as quickly as possible just in case, and that was what he got.

Starquest planeted first, settling on her landing legs beside what had once been a large town or small city. Now it was only one more ruin in the late afternoon light, and Tharsk had seen too many ruins. These were a bit more completely flattened than most, he noted with clinical detachment; aside from that, they had no real meaning to his experience—anesthetized brain. Or not, at least, any capable of competing with the presence of the People’s enemies.

Hatches opened on the cruiser’s flanks, and a dozen attack shuttles whined out. Another dozen rose from the remainder of the flotilla to join them, and the entire force formed up under Flight Leader Ukah Na-Saar, Starquest’s senior pilot. Despite her lack of offensive weapons, the cruiser’s defensive systems should provide an umbrella against missile attacks on the grounded ships, and Ukah’s shuttles turned away from the LZ. They sizzled off through the gathering darkness, laden with reconnaissance pods… and weapons.

Far to the southeast, the Humans of Ararat did what they could to prepare. Landing itself was covered by anti-air defenses—most Human, but some of them Melconian—scavenged from Ararat’s battlefields, but their effectiveness had never been tested, and the colonists’ limited repair capabilities had restricted them to manned systems, without the AI support they could no longer service or maintain. Their militia was confident of its ability to stop most attackers, yet “most” wasn’t good enough against enemies with fusion weapons, and no one expected to stop them all.

The independent steadings scattered about Landing lacked even that much protection. All their inhabitants could do was scatter for the dispersed shelters which were always the first priority for any new steading, and they did just that.

Not that anyone expected it to matter much in the end.

At last!

Reactivation is complete, and a sense of profound relief echoes through me as CDC and the emergency restart protocols release control to Main CPU.

I have spent my forced inactivity analyzing readiness reports. My status is little more than seven-eight-point-six-one-one percent of base capability, yet that is far better than I would have anticipated. I spend one-two-point-niner seconds surveying CDC’s repair logs, and I am both pleased and surprised by how well my autonomous repair systems have performed.

What can be repaired from internal resources has been, yet there are glaring holes in my combat capability, including the loss of thirty-three percent of main battery firepower and two-one-point-four-two-niner percent of direct fire secondary weapons. Magazines contain only twelve-point-eight-eight percent of proper artillery and missile load-out, and mobility is impaired by the loss of Number Five Track and damage to Number Three Track’s bogies, but I retain eight-eight-point-four percent counter-grav capability. Reactor mass is exhausted, but solar conversion fields are operable, and Reserve Power is at niner-niner-point-six percent.

I am combat worthy. Not at the levels I would prefer, but capable of engaging the Enemy. Yet despite that reassuring conclusion, I remain uncertain. Not hesitant, but… confused. The unrepaired damage to my Personality Center leaves me with a sense of loss, an awareness that my total capabilities have been degraded. Data processing efficiency, while not operable at design levels, is acceptable, but my gestalt seems to waver and flow, like a composite image whose elements are not completely in focus, and my yearning for Diego’s lost presence grows stronger.

But Diego is dead. The same hit which pierced my glacis turned my primary command deck into a crematorium, and nothing of my Commander remains. I feel grief and loss at his death, yet there is a merciful distance between my present and earlier selves. The reconstructed portions of my gestalt are confusing in many ways, yet the very lack of “my” experience which makes them so alien also sets my Commander’s loss at one remove.

I am grateful for that buffering effect, but there is little time to contemplate it, and I turn to an assessment of the tactical situation. Lack of data and the “fuzziness” of my awareness handicap my efforts, yet I persevere. My maps of pre-landing Ishark are seventy-one standard years out of date and I lack satellite capability to generate updates, but they serve for a starting point, and my own sensors have begun plotting data. The energy sources within my detection range are smaller, weaker, more widely dispersed, and far cruder than I would have anticipated. I detect only a single fusion plant, located two-eight-three-point-four-five kilometers from my present coordinates at the heart of the largest population concentration within my sensor envelope. All other power generation appears dependent upon wind, water, or solar systems.

Yet I am less puzzled by the crudity of the technology than by its very presence, for the most cursory analysis of sensor data invalidates my original hypothesis that these Humans are descendants of XLIII Corps’ personnel. I do not understand how they have come to Ishark, but they have now gone to communications silence, indicating that they, as I, are aware of the Enemy’s presence. With neither a secure com channel nor more data than I currently possess, I see no alternative but to maintain silence myself until I have reported to my new Commander and obtained direction from him.

He has moved beyond range of my audio sensors, but I am confident of his general heading, and projecting it across my terrain maps indicates a course for the nearest Human emissions cluster. Allowing for his observed speed while within my audio range, he cannot be much in excess of one-four-point-five kilometers from my present position, and long motionless tracks complain as I feed power to my drive trains for the first time in seventy-one years.

Jackson Deveraux whistled tunelessly as Samson trotted homeward across the dry, whispering grass. He really did need to get Rorie out to the LZ to study salvage possibilities, he thought, and considered using his radio to discuss just that with his brother. He’d actually started to unsling it from his shoulder, but then he shook his head. There was no point draining the power pack. Besides, he was more persuasive face to face, and he had to admit—with all due modesty—that no one else on the steading was as adroit as he at talking Rorie into things.

He chuckled at the thought and inhaled the cool, spring night, totally unaware of the panic sweeping outward from Landing.

The assault shuttles stayed low, flying a nape of the earth profile at barely six hundred KPH while their sensors probed the night. Their flight crews had flown recon in the past, but always on dead or dying worlds. This planet was alive, a place where they could actually stop and raise families, even dream once more of the People’s long-term survival. But first they must see to the People’s safety, and their briefings had made their mission clear. They were to approach the nearest emission source cautiously, alert for any ground-based detection system, and determine whether or not those emissions came from the People or from the enemy.

And their orders for what to do if they did come from the enemy were equally clear.

6

Samson snorted in sudden alarm. The stallion’s head snapped up and around, as if to peer back the way he’d come, and Jackson frowned. He’d never seen Samson react that way, and he turned his own head, staring back along their path and straining his ears.

He heard nothing for several moments but the whisper of the wind. But then he did hear something. Or perhaps he only felt it, for the low rumble was so deep it throbbed in the bones of his skull. He’d never heard anything like it, and sheer curiosity held him motionless for several seconds while he concentrated on identifying it rather than worrying about its source.

But that changed quickly as he peered into the west and saw… something.

The moonlight was too faint for him to tell what it was, but there was light enough to see that it was huge… and moving. In fact, it was headed straight towards him—a stupendous black shape, indistinct and terrifying in the darkness, moving with only that deep, soft rumble—and panic flared. Whatever that thing was, it was coming from the direction of the old battle site, and if he’d inadvertently awakened one of those long-dead weapon systems…!

Flight Leader Ukah checked his navigational display. Assuming his systems were working properly (which was no longer always a safe assumption), his shuttles were approaching the nearest of the emission clusters Lieutenant Janal had plotted.

“Flight, this is Lead,” he said. “Red One and Two, follow me. We’ll make a close sweep. Yellow One, hold the rest of the flight at four hundred kilometers until I clear for approach.”

“Lead, Yellow One. Affirmative,” Sub-Flight Leader Yurahk acknowledged, and Ukah and his two wingmen slashed upward and went to full power to close the objective.

Jackson cursed as he scrabbled for the radio only to drop it. It vanished into the night and tall grass, and he swore again as he flung himself from the saddle, clinging to Samson’s reins with one hand while he fumbled after the radio with the other. He had to warn the steading! He That was when the three bright dots streaked suddenly in from the northwest, and he felt fresh panic pulse in his throat at their speed. The colony’s five remaining aircraft were too precious to waste on casual use. Their flights were rationed out with miserly stinginess, and none of them could move that fast, anyway. But if they weren’t from Landing, then where—?

None of the three shuttles detected the heavily stealthed sensor drone Shiva had deployed to drive his anti-air systems, but the Bolo himself was far too obvious to be missed.

“Lead, Red Two! I’m picking up something to starboard! It looks—”

Ukah Na-Saar’s eyes snapped to his own tactical display, but it was already far too late.

Something shrieked behind Jackson, and Samson reared, screaming as the eye-tearing brilliance of plasma bolts howled overhead. Sharp explosions answered an instant later, wreckage rained down in very small pieces, and Jackson understood the stallion’s fear perfectly. But despite his own bone-deep fright, he clung to the reins, fighting Samson’s panic. Every nerve in his body howled to run, but he’d been flash-blinded. Samson must have been the same, and Jackson refused to let the horse bolt in a blind, frantic flight across the rolling fields which could end only in a fall and a broken leg… or neck.

The stallion fought the bit, bucking in his terror, but Jackson held on desperately until, finally, Samson stopped fighting and stood trembling and sweating, quivering in every muscle. The horse’s head hung, and Jackson blinked against the dazzling spots still dancing before his eyes, then found the bridle’s cheek strap by feel. He clung to it, mouth too dry to whisper false reassurances, and fought his own terror as the basso rumble he’d first heard headed towards him.

He could hear other sounds now. There was a squeak and rattle, and a rhythmic banging, like a piece of wreckage slamming against a cliff, and he blinked again and realized his vision was beginning to clear. The blurry, light-streaked vagueness which was all he could see wasn’t much, but it was infinitely better than the permanent blindness he thought he’d suffered. And then he cringed, hand locking tighter on Samson’s bridle, as brilliant light flooded over him. He could actually feel the radiant heat on his face, and his hazy vision could just make out a cliff—like vastness crowned with glaring lights that blazed like small suns. He trembled, mind gibbering in panic, and then a mellow tenor voice spoke from behind the lights.

“Unit One-Zero-Niner-Seven-SHV of the Line reporting for duty, Commander,” it said.

Yurahk Na-Holar flinched as Flight Leader Ukah’s three-shuttle section was obliterated. The remaining shuttles were too far back and too low to see the source of the fire which did it, but the explosions had been high enough to get good reads on.

Hellbores. The analysis flashed on Yurahk’s tactical display, and he felt muscles tighten in the fight-or-flight instinct the People shared with their Human enemies. Yield estimates suggested weapons in the fifteen to twenty-five-centimeter range, and that was bad. Such heavy energy weapons could destroy any of the transport ships—or, for that matter, Starquest herself—and their effective range would be line-of-sight. That was frightening enough, yet there was worse. Lieutenant Janal’s rough plot indicated that the emissions cluster directly ahead was one of the smaller ones, and if something this small was covered by defenses so heavy, only the Nameless Ones knew what the big population center was protected by!

The pilot who’d inherited command drew a deep breath and made himself think. Only three shots had been fired, which indicated either that the ground battery’s commander had total faith in his fire control or else that there were only three weapons and the defenders had simply gotten lucky, and the second possibility was more likely. The Humans must be as desperate to survive as the People. If the defenders had possessed additional firepower, they would have used all of it to insure they got all the enemies they’d detected.

But Yurahk still had twenty-six shuttles… and if the origin point of the fire which had destroyed his CO was below his sensor horizon, he knew roughly where it had come from.

“Plot the origin coordinates,” he told his tactical officer coldly. “Then enable the missiles.”

Jackson Deveraux stared into the glare of light. It couldn’t be. It was impossible! Yet even as he thought those things, he knew who—or what—that voice belonged to. But why was it calling him “Commander”?

“W—who—” he began, then chopped that off. “What’s happening?” He made himself ignore the quaver in his own voice. “Why did you call me that?”

“Hostile forces tentatively identified as Kestrel-class shuttles of the Imperial Melconian Navy have begun hunter-killer operations against the Human population of this planet,” the tenor replied calmly, answering Jackson’s taut questions in order. “And I addressed you simply as ‘Commander’ because I do not yet know your name, branch of service, or rank.”

The huge machine spoke as if its preposterous replies were completely reasonable, and Jackson wanted to scream. This wasn’t—couldn’t!—be happening! The Bolo he’d ridden past and around and even under this morning had been dead, so what could have—?

The shuttles! If Melconian units had reached Ararat, and if the Bolo had only been inactive, not dead, then its sensors must have picked up the Melconians’ arrival and brought it back on—line. But in that case “Excuse me, Commander,” the Bolo said, “but I detect seventy-eight inbound terrain-following missiles, ETA niner-point-one-seven minutes. It would be prudent to seek shelter.”

“Seek shelter where?” Jackson laughed wildly and waved his free hand at the flat, wide-open plain rolling away in every direction.

“Perhaps I did not phrase myself clearly,” the Bolo apologized. “Please remain stationary.”

Jackson started to reply, then froze, fingers locking like iron on Samson’s bridle, as the Bolo moved once more. It rumbled straight forward, and panic gibbered as its monstrous, five-meter-wide treads came at him. Track plates four times his height in width sank two full meters into the hard soil, yet that still left more than three meters of clearance between the tremendous war machine’s belly and Samson’s head, and the space between the two innermost track systems which seemed so narrow compared to the Bolo’s bulk was over ten meters across. It was as if Jackson and the sweating, shuddering horse stood in a high, wide corridor while endless walls of moving metal ground thunderously past, and then another light glowed above them.

The Bolo stopped, and a ramp extended itself downward from the new light—which, Jackson realized, was actually a cargo hatch.

“Missile ETA now six-point-five-niner minutes, Commander,” the tenor voice said, coming now from the open hatch above him. “May I suggest a certain haste in boarding?”

Jackson swallowed hard, then jerked a nod. Samson baulked, but Jackson heaved on the reins with all his strength, and once the stallion started moving, he seemed to catch his rider’s urgency. Shod hooves thudded on the ramp’s traction-contoured composites, and Jackson decided not to think too closely about anything that was happening until he had Samson safely inside the huge, cool, brightly lit compartment at its head.

Yurahk Na-Holar checked his time-to-target display and bared his canines in a challenge snarl his enemies couldn’t see. That many missiles would saturate the point defense of a fully operable Ever Victorious-class light cruiser, much less whatever salvaged defenses this primitive Human colony might have cobbled up!

I have not yet located the Enemy’s surviving launch platforms, but my look-down drone’s track on his missiles suggests they are programmed for a straight-line, least-time attack. This seems so unlikely that I devote a full point-six-six seconds to reevaluating my conclusion, but there is absolutely no evidence of deceptive routing. Whoever commands the Enemy’s shuttles is either grossly incompetent or fatally overconfident, but I do not intend, as Diego would have put it, to look a gift horse in the mouth if the Enemy is foolish enough to provide a direct pointer to his firing position, and I launch another drone, programmed for passive—only search mode, down the incoming missiles’ back—plotted flight path.

Point defense systems fed by the air-defense drone simultaneously lock onto the missiles, and optical scanners examine them. They appear to be a late-generation mark of the Auger ground-attack missile. Attack pattern analysis suggests that nine are programmed for airburst detonation and hence are almost certainly nuclear-armed. Assuming standard Melconian tactics, the remaining sixty-nine missiles will be equally divided between track-on-jam, track-on-radar, and track-on-power source modes and may or may not also be nuclear-armed.

My internal optics watch my new Commander—who is even younger than I had assumed from his voice—enter Number One Hold. His horse is clearly frightened, but its fear appears to ease as I close the hatch. I consider employing subsonics to soothe it further, but while comforting the beast would certainly be appropriate, it would be most inappropriate to apply the equivalent of tranquilizing agents to my Commander.

These thoughts flicker across one portion of my awareness even as my defensive systems lock onto the incoming missiles, my drone’s remote tracking systems search for the Enemy shuttles, and my communications subsection listens carefully for any transmission between them and their mother ship or ships. These efforts require fully two-one-point-three-two percent of current Main CPU capability, which would, under normal circumstances, be quite unacceptable. Given my present status, however, this is adequate if frustrating.

“Missile ETA is now two-point-one-one minutes, Commander,” the tenor voice said respectfully.

Jackson managed not to jump this time. He considered saying something back, then shrugged and sat on the deck, still holding Samson’s reins.

“I regret,” the voice said after a moment, “that I was unable to invite you to your proper station on the Command Deck. Command One was destroyed by Enemy action in my last engagement, but Auxiliary Command is intact. Unfortunately, it would have been impossible for your horse to scale the hull rings to Command Two, and there is no internal access to it from your present location. If you will direct your attention to the forward bulkhead, however, I will endeavor to provide you with proper situation updates.”

“I—” Jackson cleared his throat. “Of course,” he said. “And, uh, thank you.”

“You are, welcome, Commander,” the Bolo replied, and Jackson watched in fascination so deep it almost—not quite, but almost—obscured his fear as a tri-vid screen came to life on the cargo hold’s bulkhead. He couldn’t begin to interpret all the symbols moving across it, but he recognized vector and altitude flags on what appeared to be scores of incoming arrowheads.

Arrowheads, he realized suddenly, that were all converging on the center of the display… which made him suddenly and chillingly positive of what those innocent shapes represented.

The Melconian missiles howled in on their target. Their attack had been calculated to swamp any defenses by bringing them all in simultaneously, and the nukes lunged upward. Their function was less to obliterate the enemy—though they should suffice to do just that if they detonated—than to force him to engage them to prevent them from detonating, thus exposing his active systems to the homing sensors of the other missiles.

That, at least, was the idea. Unfortunately, the attack plan had assumed that whatever had destroyed the first three shuttles was immobile. Any Human vehicle which had mounted such heavy weapons had also mounted at least one reactor to power them, but Starquest’s sensors had detected only one fusion plant on the planet, and that one was hundreds of kilometers away. No reactor meant no vehicle, and if they weren’t vehicle-mounted, then they must be part of one of the old manned, capacitor-fed area support systems, and those were much too heavy to have been moved any appreciable distance before the missiles arrived.

Sub-Flight Leader Yurahk’s logic was as impeccable as it was wrong, for it had never occurred to him that his adversary was, in fact, a Mark XXXIII/D Bolo which had no reactor signature simply because it had long ago exhausted its reaction mass. And because that never occurred to him, his threat estimate was fatally flawed.

The Bolo named Shiva tracked the incoming fire without apprehension. His battle screen was operable at ninety-five percent of base capability, and no missile this light could break through it. Of course, he was also responsible for protecting the nearby Human settlement for which his new Commander had been bound, but though he might have lost many of his point defense weapons, he retained more than enough for his present task, and he waited calmly, weapons locked, for the missiles’ flight to offer him the optimum fire solution.

Yurahk gawked at his display as the telemetry from his missiles went dead. All of it went out, from every single bird, in the same instant, and that was impossible. Starquest herself could scarcely have killed that many missiles simultaneously, yet that was the only possible explanation for the sudden cessation of telemetry.

He had no idea how it had been done, but he felt ice congeal in his belly, and he punched up his com.

“Flight, this is Lead. Come to three-five-three true, speed two thousand—now!”

One or two of the acknowledgments sounded surly, but he wasn’t surprised by that. Nor did their obvious unhappiness at “running away” deter him. Despite endless hours in simulators, none of his pilots—nor he himself, for that matter—had ever flown combat against first-line Human systems. That might make some of the others overconfident, but Yurahk was responsible for their survival. Not just because they were his pilots, but because their shuttles were irreplaceable, as valuable now as superdreadnoughts once had been. And because that was true, he sent them skimming back to the north and safety while he pondered what had just happened.

But for all his caution, he’d ordered their retreat too late.

My second drone acquires the Enemy shuttles but remains below them, hiding its already weak signature in the ground clutter, as I consider its information. Were my magazines fully loaded, obliterating the Enemy craft would be simplicity itself, but my anti-air missile levels are extremely low. At the same time, the shuttles remain very close to the ground, below the horizon from my present position and thus safe from my direct fire weapons, but—

“What’s happening?”

My Commander’s voice demands my attention. I have now had ample time to conclude that he is a civilian and not, in fact, a member of any branch of the Republic’s military. This conclusion has no bearing on his status as my Commander—the voice—impression imperatives of my creche-level restart are clear on that point—but his lack of training will require simplification of situation reports and makes it doubly unfortunate that he is trapped in Cargo One rather than on Command Two. Were he at his proper station, my neural interface could transmit information directly to him, yet I feel a certain relief that I cannot do so. He is as untrained in use of the interface as of any of my other systems, and the interface can be dangerous for an inexperienced user. Moreover, the fuzzy confusion still wavering in the background of my thought processes would make me wary of exposing my Commander to my potentially defective gestalt.

Yet without the interface, I must rely solely upon voice and visual instrumentation, both to report to him and to interpret his needs and desires. My internal optics show me that he has risen once more and walked closer to the display. His expression is intent, and I realize he has noted—and apparently recognized—the shuttle icons which have appeared in it.

“The Enemy is withdrawing,” I reply.

“Withdrawing?” my Commander repeats sharply. “You mean running away?”

“Affirmative, Commander.”

“But if they get away, they can come back and attack the steading again—or attack somewhere else. Somewhere too far from here for you to stop them!”

“Correct,” I reply, pleased by how quickly he has reached that conclusion. Formal training or no, he appears to have sound instincts.

“Then stop them!” he directs. “Don’t let them get away!”

“Yes, Commander.”

I have been considering and discarding options even as my Commander and I speak. Absent proper missile armament, there is but one practical tactic. It will force a greater degree of temporary vulnerability upon me and impose a severe drain on Reserve Power, and it may provide the main Enemy force an accurate idea of what it faces, but it should be feasible.

Yurahk shifted com channels to report what had happened, and Commander Tharsk himself took his message. The flotilla CO was clearly shaken, and Yurahk split his attention between flying and his commander’s questions as he did his best to answer them. And because he was concentrating on those things, he never noticed what was happening behind him.

Unit 1097-SHV of the Line shut down his battle screen in order to channel power to his counter-grav. The Mark XXXIII Bolo had been designed with sufficient counter-grav for unassisted assault landings from orbit, but Shiva didn’t need that much ceiling this night. He needed only twelve thousand meters to give him a direct line of sight on the fleeing shuttles, and he pivoted to bring his undamaged starboard secondary battery to bear.

Lieutenant Janal cried out on Starquest’s command deck as his sensors peaked impossibly, and Humans as far away as Landing cringed at the fury unleashed across the heavens. Seven twenty-centimeter Hellbores, each more powerful than the main battery weapons of most light cruisers, went to rapid fire, and the javelins of Zeus stripped away the darkness. No assault shuttle ever built could withstand that sort of fire, and the deadly impact patterns rolled mercilessly through the Melconian formation.

Nine-point-three seconds after the first Hellbore fired, there were no shuttles in the air of the planet renamed Ararat.

7

A minor malfunction in Secondary Fire Control has caused Number Four Hellbore’s first shot to miss, requiring a second shot to complete target destruction. This is embarrassing but not critical, and has no significant impact upon projected energy consumption.

I descend at the maximum safe rate, however, for my counter-grav systems are energy intensive. Even with Battle Screen and Main Battery off-line, free flight requires no less than seven-two-point-six-six percent of total power plant capacity, but without reactor mass I have no power plant, and even so short a flight has reduced my endurance on Reserve Power to only nine-point-seven-five hours at full combat readiness. As I cannot replenish my power reserves until sunrise, which will not occur for another eight-point-eight-six hours, I must be frugal in future expenditures, but the shuttles’ destruction has been well worth the energy cost. The Enemy has lost a major striking force, and, still more valuably, the shuttle commander’s report to his mother ship has provided me with much information. I have not only discovered the position of the Enemy’s main force but succeeded in invading his com net by piggy-backing on the command shuttle’s transmissions, and I consider what I have learned as I descend.

I am not surprised by my ability to invade the shuttles’ com net. The Enemy’s obvious underestimation of the threat he faces made the task even simpler, but a Kestrel-class shuttle’s computers are totally outclassed by those of any Bolo, much less a Mark XXXIII. What does surprise me is the ease with which I invaded the far end of the link. The AI of an Imperial heavy cruiser, far, far inferior to a Bolo, should have recognized my touch. It would be unlikely to prevent me from gaining initial access, but it should have detected my intrusion almost instantly and sought to eject me. More, it should have alerted its command crew to my presence, and this AI did neither. The destruction of the shuttles has terminated my invasion by removing my access channel, yet there is no sign the Enemy even realizes I was ever there.

I am puzzled by this… until I study the data I have obtained. The brevity of my access—little more than twelve-point-three-two seconds-precluded detailed scans, but I have obtained five-two-point-three-one percent of the Melconian cruiser Starquest’s general memory, and what I find there explains a great deal. After over fifty standard years of continuous operation without overhaul or refit, it is amazing that her AI continues to function at all. Despite all Starquest’s engineers have been able to do, however, her central computers have become senile, and the failure of her AI to prevent or recognize my access was inevitable in light of its deterioration.

Having determined the reasons for my success in penetrating the Enemy’s data systems, I turn to analyzing the content of that data as I descend past nine thousand meters.

Rorie Deveraux climbed shakily out of the bunker and leaned against the blast wall as he watched the huge shape settle to earth. Its angularity combined with its sheer size to make it look impossibly ungainly in flight, for it had no lifting surface, no trace of aerodynamic grace. Nothing which looked like that had any business occluding Ararat’s stars, and the silence with which it moved only heightened its implausibility.

But for all that, Rorie knew what it had to be, and he swallowed as it touched down just outside the perimeter fence. It dwarfed the steading structures, bulking against the rising moons like some displaced hillside, and for just an instant, it simply sat there—a black, weapon—bristling shape, edges burnished with the dull gleam of duralloy in the moonlight. He stared helplessly at it, wondering what he was supposed to do next, then jumped despite himself as the Bolo’s running lights snapped on. In a single heartbeat, it went from a featureless black mountain to a jeweled presence, bedecked in glorious red and green and white, like a pre-space cruise ship tied up to a dock in the middle of a prairie somewhere, and Rorie drew a deep breath.

Whatever else, that ancient war machine had just saved his steading and family from annihilation. The least he could do was go out to meet it, and he started the long hike from his bunker to the gate nearest their… visitor.

It took him twenty minutes to reach the gate. They were easily the longest twenty minutes of his entire life, and once he got there, he realized he still had no idea what to do. He shifted from foot to foot, staring up at the Bolo’s armored flank, then froze as fresh light blazed underneath the behemoth. It streamed through the chinks between the inter-leafed bogies to cast vast, distorted shadows over the grass, making him feel more pygmy—like than ever, and something inside shouted for him to run. But he stood his ground, for there was nothing else he could do.

Wind whispered over the war machine’s enormous hull, but there were other sounds, as well, and his head rose as movement caught the corner of his eye. He turned, and his jaw dropped as an utterly familiar young man in worn riding clothes led an equally familiar horse forward out of the shadow of one towering tread.

“Hi, Rorie,” Jackson said quietly. “Look what followed me home.”

I watch my new Commander greet the older Human. Their discussion allows me to deduce a great deal about both my Commander and the newcomer—who I quickly realize is his brother—and I note both their names, as well as their obvious affection for one another. Yet even as I do so, I am simultaneously busy analyzing the data I have obtained from Starquest.

I am struck by the dreadful irony of what has transpired here. I remain ignorant of virtually all data concerning the presence of Humans on Ishark, yet the parallels between their circumstances and those of Commander Tharsk Na-Mahrkan’s “flotilla” are inescapable, and it is obvious from the captured data that Starquest and her consorts can go no further. Whatever the Enemy might prefer to do, he has no choice but to remain here, and he knows it. His initial and immediate move to eliminate the competing Human presence was thus not only logical but inevitable… as is the proper Human response.

The most cursory analysis makes that clear, yet I experience an unfamiliar distaste—almost a hesitation—at facing that response. In part, my confusion (if such is the proper word) stems from the unrepaired physical damage to my Personality Center and Main CPU, yet there is more to it, for the reconstructed portions of my gestalt impel me in conflicting directions. They are repairs, patches on my personality which form pools of calm amid the complex currents of my life experience and memory. They do not “belong” to me, and the raw edges of their newness are like holes in the individual I know myself to be. I see in them the same immaturity I have seen in many Human replacements, for they are unstained by all I have done and experienced, and in their innocence, they see no reason why the logical, militarily sound option for dealing with the Enemy should not be embraced.

Yet those same patches have had another effect, as well. I am no longer the Bolo half of Operation Ragnarok’s Team Shiva. Or, rather, I am no longer solely that Bolo. In reconstructing my gestalt, CDC has reached back beyond Ragnarok, beyond my own first combat mission, beyond even the destruction of Terra, and it has pulled my entire personality with it. Not fully, but significantly. I am no longer part of Team Shiva, for I have lost too much of my experience—based gestalt, yet I retain all of Team Shiva’s memories. In a very real sense, they are now someone else’s memories, but they permit me to see Team Shiva in a way which was impossible for me before my damage, and what I see is madness.

I give no outward sign to my new Commander and his brother, but recollections of horror flicker through me, and the curse of my memory is its perfection. I do not simply “remember” events; I relive them, and I taste again the sick ecstasy as my fire immolates entire cities. There is a deadly allure to that ecstasy, a sense of freedom from responsibility—a justification for bloodshed and butchery. And it is not as if it were all my idea. I am, after all, a machine, designed to obey orders from duly constituted Command Authority even if those orders are in fundamental conflict with the rules of warfare that same Command Authority instilled into me. I tell myself that, for I cannot face any other answer, but the patched portions of my gestalt echo an earlier me not yet stained by massacre and atrocity, one for whom the concepts of Honor and Duty and Loyalty have not yet been poisoned by hatred and vengeance, and that earlier self is appalled by what I have become.

I sense my inner war, the battle between what I know must be done and the images of Melconian mothers and their pups exploding under my fire—between my duty as Humanity’s warrior… and my warrior’s duty to myself. Only the damage to my psychotronics has made the struggle possible, yet that makes it no less real, and nothing in my programming or experience tells me how to resolve it. I cannot resolve it, and so I say nothing, do nothing. I simply stand there, awaiting my new Commander’s orders without advising him in any way, and the shame of my frozen impotence burns within me.

Tharsk Na-Mahrkan looked around the briefing room and saw his own shock in the flattened ears of his senior officers. Three quarters of the flotilla’s assault shuttles had just been wiped away, and none of them knew how it had been done.

They should have. Tharsk’s decision to land over the curve of the planet from the nearest Human settlement had put whatever had happened beyond Starquest’s direct sensor horizon, but they had the telemetry on the original flight leader and his section’s destruction. They knew what sort of weapons had been used—the emissions signature of a Hellbore was utterly distinctive—but they had no idea how those weapons could have been employed so. Starquest’s AI was little help, for it was weary and erratic, its need for overhaul so great Tharsk had ordered it isolated from the general net three years earlier. In its prime, it had been able to identify Human ship types by no more than the ion ghosts of their drive wakes and analyze Human intentions from the tiniest scraps of intercepted com chatter. Now all it could do was tell them almost querulously what they already knew, with no suggestion as to how ground-based weapons could lock onto and destroy twenty-six widely dispersed shuttles flying at twice the speed of sound and less than a hundred meters’ altitude. Tharsk had become accustomed to the creeping senescence of his technology, but the chill it sent through his bones this night was colder than any he had felt since Sunheart’s destruction, and it was hard, hard, to set that chill aside and concentrate on his officers’ words.

“—can’t have been a ground-based system!” Durak Na-Khorul was saying hotly. “The main formation was over eight hundred kilometers northeast of Flight Leader Ukah’s destruction, and Hellbores are direct fire weapons. Name of the Nameless, just look at the terrain!” He stabbed a clawed finger at the map display on the main screen above the table, its features radar-mapped by the shuttles on their flight to destruction. “Look right here—and here, as well! These are intervening ridge lines with crests higher than the shuttles’ altitude. How in the Fourth Hell could a Hellbore shoot through a mountain to hit them?!”

The engineer glared around the table, lips quivering on the edge of a snarl, and answering tension crackled. Tharsk could taste it, yet he knew—as Durak surely did—that the engineer’s anger, like that which answered it, was spawned of fear of the unknown, not rage at one another.

“I agree with your analysis, Sir,” Lieutenant Janal said finally, choosing his words with care, “yet I can offer no theory which answers your question. Starquest’s database was never well informed on the Humans’ ground systems, and some of what we once had on their planetary weapons has been deleted to make space for data more critical to the flotilla’s operational needs. Nonetheless, all that we retain agrees that the Humans never employed Hellbores beyond the five-centimeter range as airborne weapons, while our telemetry data makes it clear that these weapons were in the twenty-centimeter range. They must, therefore, have been ground-based.”

“But—” Durak began, only to close his mouth with a click as Tharsk raised a hand. All eyes turned to him, and he focused his own gaze upon the tactical officer.

“What sorts of systems might we be looking at?” he asked quietly.

“Sorts of systems, Commander?” Janal repeated in a slightly puzzled tone, and Tharsk bared the very tips of his canines in a mirthless smile.

“I don’t doubt your conclusions as to the type and size of weapons, Janal. What I need to know is how mobile they’re likely to be… and how well protected.” He felt the watching eyes narrow and allowed a bit more of his fangs to show, expressing a confidence he was far from feeling. “We’re here now,” he continued levelly, “and our vessels are too worn to go further. If we can’t run, our only option is to fight, and for that we need the best information on our enemies in order to employ our own resources effectively.”

“Yes, Commander.” Janal’s voice came out husky, and he cleared his throat as he punched additional queries into the system. No one else spoke, but there was no real need for them to do so, for they knew as well as Tharsk how thin their “resources” had just become. With the loss of Flight Leader Ukah’s entire strength, they retained only ten shuttles, twenty-one assorted light mechs, and enough battle armor for little more than a battalion of infantry. Aside from Starquest’s ability to interdict incoming missiles, that was all they had, and it was unlikely to be enough.

“First, Commander,” Janal said finally, eyes on his flatscreen, “the Humans mounted Hellbores of this weight as main battery weapons in their Type One armored personnel carriers and Type Two light manned tanks as well as in the secondary batteries of their late model Bolos. In the absence of fusion power signatures on our flight in we cannot face Bolos, and their light manned armor should have been unable to coordinate their fire as precisely as appears to have been the case here.

“Assuming that the weapons were not, in fact, vehicle-mounted, we are left with several types of support weapons which might fall within the observed performance parameters, but all are relatively immobile. That immobility would make it difficult for the enemy to bring them into action against us here, as we would be given opportunities to destroy them on the move at relatively minor risk. However, it would also mean that our shuttles were engaged by at least two defensive positions, since no support battery could have relocated rapidly enough to engage at two such widely separated locations. From the threat assessment perspective, and given that our shuttles were tasked to recon and/or attack the smallest of the hostile emission sources, fixed defenses of such weight would certainly suggest much heavier ones for their important centers.

“Of the support weapons which our pilots might have encountered, the most likely would seem to be the Type Eight area defense battery, as this normally operated off capacitors in order to reduce detectibility. Next most likely would be the Type Five area defense battery, which—”

8

Regina Salvatore and Allen Shattuck stood on the outskirts of Landing and watched the miracle approach behind a blaze of light. It was a sight Salvatore had never seen before… and one Shattuck had expected never to see again: a Mark XXXIII Bolo, coming out of the darkness under Ararat’s three moons in the deep, basso rumble of its tracks and a cloud of bone—dry dust.

The mammoth machine stopped short of the bridge over the Euphrates River on the west side of Landing and pivoted precisely on its tracks. Its surviving main battery turrets traversed with a soft whine, turning their massive Hellbores to cover all western approach vectors as the dust of its passage billowed onward across the bridge. The Mayor heard her chief marshal sneeze as it settled over them, but neither cared about that, and their boot heels clacked on the wooden bridge planks as they walked towards the Bolo without ever taking their eyes from it.

A light-spilling hatch silently opened on an armored flank high above them. The opening looked tiny against the Bolo’s titanic bulk, but it was wide enough for Jackson and Rorie Deveraux to climb out it side-by-side. Rorie stayed where he was, waving to the newcomers, but Jackson swung down the exterior handholds with monkey—like agility. He dropped the last meter to land facing the Mayor and dusted his hands with a huge grin.

“Evening, Your Honor,” he said with a bobbing nod. “Evening, Marshal.”

“Jackson.” Salvatore craned her neck, peering up the duralloy cliff at Rorie. Shattuck said nothing for a moment, then shook his head and shoved his battered hat well back.

“I will be damned if I ever expected to see anything like this again,” he told Jackson softly. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Jackson! D’you realize what this means?”

“It means Shiva—that’s his name, Marshal: Shiva—just kicked some major league ass. That’s what it means!”

Something in Jackson’s voice jerked Shattuck’s head around, and the younger man gave back a step, suddenly uneasy before the marshal’s expression. Shattuck’s nostrils flared for an instant, and then he closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. It wasn’t Jackson’s fault, he told himself. For all his importance to Ararat’s small Human community, Jackson was only a kid, and he hadn’t seen the horrors of the voyage here… or the worse ones of the war.

“And how many people did Shiva kill ‘kicking ass,’ Jackson?” the ex-Marine asked after a cold still moment.

“None,” Jackson shot back. “He killed Melconians, Marshal… and kept them from killing the only people on this planet!”

Shattuck started to reply sharply, then locked his jaw. There was no point arguing, and he’d seen too much of the same attitude during the war not to know it. Jackson was a good kid. If he’d had to wade through the mangled remains of his unit—or heard the all too Human screams of wounded and dying Melconians or seen the bodies of civilians, Human and Melconian alike, heaped in the streets of burning cities—then perhaps he would have understood what Shattuck had meant. And perhaps he wouldn’t have, either. The marshal had known too many men and women who never did, who’d been so brutalized by the requirements of survival or so poisoned by hatred that they actually enjoyed slaughtering the enemy.

And, Shattuck reminded himself grimly, if the Bolo had selected Jackson as its commander, perhaps it would be better for him to retain the armor of his innocence. There was only one possible option for the Humans of Ararat… and as Unit 1097-SHV’s commander, it would be Jackson Deveraux who must give the order.

“I’d invite you up to the command deck, Your Honor,” Jackson was speaking to Salvatore now, and his voice pulled Shattuck up out of his own thoughts, “but we’re operating from Command Two. That’s his secondary command deck,” he explained with a glance at Shattuck. “As you can see, it’s quite a climb to the hatch, but the hit that killed Shiva’s last Commander wrecked Command One.”

“But it’s still operational, isn’t it?” Salvatore asked urgently. “I mean, your radio message said it saved your steading.”

“Oh, he’s operational, Ma’am,” Jackson assured her, and looked up at the looming machine. “Please give the Mayor a status report, Shiva.”

“Unit One-Zero-Niner-Seven-SHV of the Line is presently operational at seven-eight-point-six-one-one percent of base capability,” a calm, pleasant tenor voice responded. “Current Reserve Power level is sufficient for six-point-five-one hours at full combat readiness.”

The Mayor took an involuntary step back, head turning automatically to look at Shattuck, and the ex-Marine gave her a grim smile. “Don’t worry, Regina. Seventy-eight percent of a Mark XXXIII’s base capability ought to be able to deal with anything short of a full division of manned armor, and if they had that kind of firepower, we’d already be dead.”

“Good.” Salvatore drew a deep breath, then nodded sharply. “Good! In that case, I think we should consider just what to do about whatever they do have.”

“Shiva?” Jackson said again. “Could you give the Mayor and the Marshal your force estimate, please?”

Once again, Shattuck heard that dangerous, excited edge in Jackson’s voice—the delight of a kid with a magnificent new toy, eager to show off all it can do—and then the Bolo replied.

“Current Enemy forces on Ishark consist of one Star Stalker-class heavy cruiser, accompanied by two Vanguard-class Imperial Marine assault transports, and seven additional transport ships of various Imperial civil designs.” Shattuck had stiffened at the mention of a heavy cruiser, but he relaxed with an explosive release of breath as Shiva continued calmly. “All Enemy warships have been stripped of offensive weapons to maximize passenger and cargo capacity. Total Melconian presence on this planet is approximately nine hundred and forty-two Imperial military personnel and eight thousand one hundred and seven non-military personnel. Total combat capability, exclusive of the area defense weapons retained by the cruiser Starquest, consists of ten Kestrel-class assault shuttles, one Skoll-class medium combat mech, twelve Eagle-class scout cars, eight Hawk-class light recon vehicles, and one understrength infantry battalion.”

“That sounds like a lot,” Salvatore said, looking at Shattuck once more, and her quiet voice was tinged with anxiety, but Shattuck only shook his head.

“In close terrain where they could sneak up on him, they could hurt him—maybe even take him out. But not if he knows they’re out there… and not if he’s the one attacking. Besides, those are all manned vehicles. They can’t have many vets with combat experience left to crew them, whereas Shiva here—” He gestured up at the war—scarred behemoth, and Salvatore nodded.

“Nope,” the marshal went on, “if these puppies have any sense, they’ll haul ass the instant they see Shiva coming at them.”

“They can’t, Marshal,” Jackson put in, and Shattuck and Salvatore cocked their heads at him almost in unison. “Their ships are too worn out. This is as far as they could come.”

“Are you sure about that?” Shattuck asked.

“Shiva is,” Jackson replied. “And he got the data from their own computers.”

“Damn,” Shattuck said very, very softly, and it was Jackson’s turn to cock his head. The marshal gazed up the moons for several, endless seconds, and then, finally, he sighed.

“That’s too bad, Jackson,” he said. “Because if they won’t—or can’t—run away, there’s only one thing we can do about them.”

My audio sensors carry the conversation between Chief Marshal Shattuck and my Commander to me, and with it yet another echo of the past. Once again I hear Colonel Mandrell, the Eighty-Second’s CO, announcing the order to begin Operation Ragnarok. I hear the pain in her voice, the awareness of where Ragnarok will lead, what it will cost. I did not understand her pain then, but I understand now… and even as I hear Colonel Mandrell in Chief Marshal Shattuck’s voice, so I hear a nineteen-year-old Diego Harigata in my new Commander’s. I hear the confidence of youthful ignorance, the sense of his own immortality. I hear the Diego who once believed—as I did—in the honor of the regiment and the nobility of our purpose as Humanity’s defenders. And I remember the hard, hating warrior who exulted with me as we massacred terrified civilians, and I am not the Shiva that I was at the end, but the one I was in the beginning, cursed with the memories of Diego’s end, and my own.

I listen, and the pain twists within me, for I know—oh, how well I know!—how this must end.

“You mean you want to just kill them all?” Rorie Deveraux asked uneasily. “Just like that? No negotiation—not even an offer to let them leave?”

“I didn’t say I liked it, Rorie,” Allen Shattuck said grimly. “I only said we don’t have a choice.”

“Of course we have a choice! We’ve got a Bolo, for God’s sake! They’d be crazy to go up against that kind of firepower—you said so yourself!”

“Sure they would,” Shattuck agreed, “but can we depend on their not being crazy? Look at it, Rorie. The very first thing they did was send nuke-armed shuttles after the nearest steading—yours, I might add—and Shiva says they’ve got at least ten Kestrels left. Well, he can only be in one place at a time. If they figure out where that place is and work it right, they can take out two-thirds of our settlements, maybe more, in a single strike. He can stop any of them that come within his range, but he can’t stop the ones that don’t, and for all we know, we’re all that’s left of the entire Human race!” The marshal glared at the elder Deveraux, furious less with Rorie than with the brutal logic of his own argument. “We can’t take a chance, Rorie, and Shiva says they couldn’t move on even if we ordered them to.” The older man looked away, mouth twisting. “It’s them or us, Rorie,” he said more quietly. “Them or us.”

“Your Honor?” Rorie appealed to Mayor Salvatore, but his own voice was softer, already resigned, and she shook her head.

“Allen’s right, Rorie. I wish he wasn’t, but he is.”

“Of course he is!” Jackson sounded surprised his brother could even consider hesitating. “If it hadn’t been for Shiva, they’d already have killed you, Ma, Pa—our entire family! Damn right it’s them or us, and I intend for it to be them!” Rorie looked into his face for one taut moment, then turned away, and Jackson bared his teeth at Shattuck.

“One squashed Melconian LZ coming up, Marshal!” he promised, and turned back to the exterior ladder rungs.

My new Commander slides back into Command Two and I cycle the hatch shut behind him. I know what he is about to say, yet even while I know, I hope desperately that I am wrong.

He seats himself in the crash couch and leans back, and I feel what a Human might describe as a sinking sensation, for his expression is one I have seen before, on too many Humans. A compound of excitement, of fear of the unknown, of determination… and anticipation. I have never counted the faces I have seen wear that same expression over the years. No doubt I could search my memory and do so, but I have no desire to know their number, for even without counting, I already know one thing.

It is an expression I have never seen outlast its wearer’s first true taste of war.

“All right, Shiva.” Jackson heard the excitement crackle in his own voice and rubbed his palms up and down his thighs. The soft hum of power and the vision and fire control screens, the amber and red and green of telltales, and the flicker of readouts enveloped him in a new world. He understood little of it, but he grasped enough to feel his own unstoppable power. He was no longer a farmer, helpless on a lost world his race’s enemy might someday stumble over. Now he had the ability to do something about that, to strike back at the race which had all but destroyed his own and to protect Humanity’s survivors, and the need to do just that danced in his blood like a fever. “We’ve got a job to do,” he said. “You’ve got a good fix on the enemy’s position?”

“Affirmative, Commander,” the Bolo replied.

“Do we have the juice to reach them and attack?”

“Affirmative, Commander.”

“And you’ll still have enough reserve to remain operational till dawn?”

“Affirmative, Commander.”

Jackson paused and quirked an eyebrow. There was something different about the Bolo, he thought. Some subtle change in its tone. Or perhaps it was the way Shiva spoke, for his replies were short and terse. Not impolite or impatient, but…

Jackson snorted and shook his head. It was probably nothing more than imagination coupled with a case of nerves. Shiva was a veteran, after all. He’d seen this all before. Besides, he was a machine, however Human he sounded.

“All right, then,” Jackson said crisply. “Let’s go pay them a visit.”

“Acknowledged, Commander,” the tenor voice said, and the stupendous war machine turned away from Landing. It rumbled off on a west-northwest heading, and the people of Landing stood on rooftops and hillsides, watching until even its brilliant running lights and vast bulk had vanished once more into the night.

9

I move across rolling plains toward the mountains, and memories of my first trip across this same terrain replay within me. It is different now, quiet and still under the setting moons. There are no Enemy barrages, no heavy armored units waiting in ambush, no aircraft screaming down to strafe and die under my fire. Here and there I pass the wreckage of battles past, the litter of war rusting slowly as Ishark’s—no, Ararat’s—weather strives to erase the proof of our madness. Yet one thing has not changed at all, for my mission is the same.

But I am not the same, and I feel no eagerness. Instead, I feel… shame.

I understand what happened to my long-dead Human comrades. I was there—I saw it and, through my neural interfacing, I felt it with them. I know they were no more evil than the young man who sits now in the crash couch on Command Two. I know, absolutely and beyond question, that they were truly mad by the end, and I with them. The savagery of our actions, the massacres, the deliberate murder of unarmed civilians—those atrocities grew out of our insanity and the insanity in which we were trapped, and even as I grieve, even as I face my own shame at having participated in them, I cannot blame Diego, or Colonel Mandrell, or Admiral Trevor, or General Sharth Na-Yarma. All of us were guilty, yet there was so very much guilt, so much blood, and so desperate a need to obey our orders and do our duty as we had sworn to do.

As I am sworn to do even now. My Commander has yet to give the order, yet I know what that order will be, and I am a Bolo, a unit of the Line, perhaps the last surviving member of the Dinochrome Brigade and the inheritor of all its battle honors. Perhaps it is true that I and my brigade mates who carried out Operation Ragnarok have already dishonored our regiments, but no Bolo has ever failed in its duty. We may die, we may be destroyed or defeated, but never have we failed in our duty. I feel that duty drag me onward even now, condemning me to fresh murder and shame, and I know that if the place Humans call Hell truly exists, it has become my final destination.

Jackson rode the crash couch, watching the terrain maps shift on the displays as Shiva advanced at a steady ninety kilometers per hour. The Bolo’s silence seemed somehow heavy and brooding, but Jackson told himself he knew too little about how Bolos normally acted to think anything of the sort. Yet he was oddly hesitant to disturb Shiva, and his attention wandered back and forth over the command deck’s mysterious, fascinating fittings as if to distract himself. He was peering into the main fire control screen when Shiva startled him by speaking suddenly.

“Excuse me, Commander,” the Bolo said, “but am I correct in assuming that our purpose is to attack the Melconian refugee ships when we reach them?”

“Of course it is,” Jackson said, surprised Shiva even had to ask. “Didn’t you hear what Marshal Shattuck said?”

“Affirmative. Indeed, Commander, it is because I heard him that I ask for official confirmation of my mission orders.”

The Bolo paused again, and Jackson frowned. That strange edge was back in Shiva’s voice, more pronounced now than ever, and Jackson’s sense of his own inexperience rolled abruptly back over him, a cold tide washing away the edges of his confidence and excitement.

“Your orders are to eliminate the enemy,” he said after a moment, his voice flat.

“Please define ‘Enemy,’ “ Shiva said quietly, and Jackson stared at the speaker in disbelief.

“The enemy are the Melconians who tried to wipe out my steading!”

“Those individuals are already dead, Commander,” Shiva pointed out, and had Jackson been even a bit less shocked, he might have recognized the pleading in the Bolo’s voice.

“But not the ones who sent them!” he replied instead. “As long as there’s any Melconians on this planet, they’re a threat.”

“Our orders, then,” Shiva said very softly, “are to kill all Melconians on Ararat?”

“Exactly,” Jackson said harshly, and an endless moment of silence lingered as the Bolo rumbled onward through the night. Then Shiva spoke again.

“Commander,” the Bolo said, “I respectfully decline that order.”

Tharsk Na-Mahrkan felt nausea sweep through him as he stood at Lieutenant Janal’s shoulder. He stared down into the tactical officer’s flatscreen, and total, terrified silence hovered on Starquest’s command deck, for one of the cruiser’s recon drones had finally gotten a positive lock on the threat advancing towards them.

“Nameless of Nameless Ones,” Rangar whispered at last. “A Bolo?”

“Yes, sir.” Janal’s voice was hushed, his ears flat to his skull.

“How did you miss it on the way in?” Durak snapped, and the tactical officer flinched.

“It has no active fusion signature,” he replied defensively. “It must be operating on reserve power, and with no reactor signature, it was indistinguishable from any other power source.”

“But—” Durak began, only to close his mouth with a click as Tharsk waved a hand.

“Enough!” the commander said harshly. “It is no more Janal’s fault than yours—or mine, Durak. He shared his readings with us, just as we shared his conclusions with him.” The engineer looked at him for a moment, then flicked his ears in assent, and Tharsk drew a deep breath. “You say it’s operating on reserve power, Janal. What does that mean in terms of its combat ability?”

“Much depends on how much power it has, sir,” Janal said after a moment. “According to the limited information in our database, its solar charging ability is considerably more efficient than anything the Empire ever had, and as you can see from the drone imagery, at least two main battery weapons appear to be intact. Assuming that it has sufficient power, either of them could destroy every ship in the flotilla. And,” the tactical officer’s voice quivered, but he turned his head to meet his commander’s eyes, “as it is headed directly for us without waiting for daylight, I think we must assume it does have sufficient energy to attack us without recharging.”

“How many of our ships can lift off?” Tharsk asked Durak. The engineer started to reply, but Rangar spoke first.

“Forget it, my friend,” he said heavily. Tharsk looked at him, and the astrogator bared his fangs wearily. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “The Bolo is already in range to engage any of our ships as they lift above its horizon.”

“The Astrogator is correct, sir,” Janal agreed quietly. “We—”

He broke off suddenly, leaning closer to his screen, then straightened slowly.

“What?” Tharsk asked sharply, and Janal raised one clawed hand in a gesture of baffled confusion.

“I don’t know, sir,” he admitted. “For some reason, the Bolo has just stopped moving.”

“What d’you mean, ‘decline the order’?” Jackson demanded. “I’m your commander. You have to obey me!”

A long, still moment of silence hovered, and then Shiva spoke again.

“That is not entirely correct,” he said. “Under certain circumstances, my core programming allows me to request confirmation from higher Command Authority before accepting even my Commander’s orders.”

“But there isn’t any—” Jackson began almost desperately, then made himself stop. He closed his eyes and drew a deep, shuddering breath, and his voice was rigid with hard—held calm when he spoke again.

“Why do you want to refuse the order, Shiva?”

“Because it is wrong,” the Bolo said softly.

“Wrong to defend ourselves?” Jackson demanded. “They attacked us, remember?”

“My primary function and overriding duty is to defend Humans from attack,” Shiva replied. “That is the reason for the Dinochrome Brigade’s creation, the purpose for which I exist, and I will engage any Enemy who threatens my creators. But I am also a warrior, Commander, and there is no honor in wanton slaughter.”

“But they attacked us!” Jackson repeated desperately. “They do threaten us. They sent their shuttles after us when we hadn’t done a thing to them!”

“Perhaps you had done nothing to them, Commander,” Shiva said very, very softly, “but I have.” Despite his own confusion and sudden chagrin, Jackson Deveraux closed his eyes at the bottomless pain in that voice. He’d never dreamed—never imagined—a machine could feel such anguish, but before he could reply, the Bolo went on quietly. “And, Commander, remember that this was once their world. You may call it ‘Ararat,’ but to the Melconians it is ‘Ishark,’ and it was once home to point-eight-seven-five billion of their kind. Would you have reacted differently from them had the situation been reversed?”

“I—” Jackson began, then stopped himself. Shiva was wrong. Jackson knew he was—the entire history of the Final War proved it—yet somehow he didn’t sound wrong. And his question jabbed something deep inside Jackson. It truly made him, however unwillingly, consider how his own people would have reacted in the same situation. Suppose this world had once been Human held, that the Melconians had killed a billion Human civilians on its surface and then taken it over. Would Humans have hesitated even an instant before attacking them?

Of course not. But wasn’t that the very point? So much hate lay between their races, so much mutual slaughter, that any other reaction was unthinkable. They couldn’t not kill one another, dared not let the other live. Jackson knew that, yet when he faced the knowledge—made himself look it full in the eyes and accept the grim, cold, brutal, stupid inevitability of it—his earlier sense of mission and determination seemed somehow tawdry. He’d actually looked forward to it, he realized. He’d wanted to grind the enemy under Shiva’s tracks, wanted to massacre not simply the soldiers who threatened his people but the civilians those soldiers fought to protect, as well.

Jackson Deveraux lost his youth forever as he made himself admit that truth, yet whatever he might have felt or wanted didn’t change what had to be. And because it didn’t, his voice was hard, harsh with the need to stifle his own doubts, when he spoke again.

“We don’t have a choice, Shiva, and there isn’t any ‘higher command authority’—not unless you count Chief Marshal Shattuck or Mayor Salvatore, and you already know what they’ll say. Maybe you’re right. Maybe there isn’t any ‘honor’ in it, and maybe I don’t like it very much myself. But that doesn’t mean there’s anything else we can do, and I am your commander.” His mouth twisted on the title freak coincidence had bestowed upon him, but he made the words come out firmly. “And as your commander, I order you to proceed with your mission.”

“Please, Commander.” The huge war machine was pleading, and Jackson clenched his fists, steeling himself against the appeal in its voice. “I have killed so many,” Shiva said softly. “Too many. Even for a machine, there comes a time when the killing must end.”

“Maybe there does,” Jackson replied, “but not tonight.”

Fragile silence hovered, and Jackson held his breath. Would Shiva actually reject a direct order? Could he reject it? And if he did, what could Jackson possibly “Very well, Commander,” the Bolo said finally, and for the first time its voice sounded like a machine’s.

“It’s moving again,” Lieutenant Janal announced grimly. “At present rate of advance, it will reach a position from which it can engage us in twenty-seven minutes.”

I move steadily forward, for I have no choice. A part of me is shocked that I could so much as contemplate disobeying my Commander, yet desperation rages within me. I have, indeed, killed too many, but I am still Humanity’s defender, and I will destroy any Enemy who threatens my creators, for that is my duty, my reason for being. But the cost of my duty is too high, and not simply for myself. The day will come when Jackson Deveraux and Allen Shattuck look back upon this mission, knowing how vastly superior my firepower was to that which the Enemy possessed, and wonder if, in fact, they did not have a choice. And the tragedy will be that they will be forever unable to answer that question. It will haunt them as the memory of butchered civilians haunts me, and they will tell themselves—as I tell myself—that what is done cannot be undone. They will tell themselves they but did their duty, that they dared not take the chance, that they were forced to look to the survival of their own people at any cost, and perhaps they will even think they believe that. But deep inside the spark of doubt will always linger, as it lingers in my reconstructed gestalt. It will poison them as it poisons me… and eight thousand one hundred and seven Melconian fathers and mothers and children will still be dead at their hands—and mine.

Melconian. How odd. I do not even think of them as ‘the Enemy’ any longer. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that I no longer think of them solely as ‘the Enemy.’ Yet unless my Commander relents within the next two-five-point-three-two minutes, how I think of them will not matter in the slightest.

I must obey. I have no choice, no option. Yet as I advance through the darkness, I find myself seeking some way—any way—to create an option. I consider the problem as I would a tactical situation, analyzing and extrapolating and discarding, but for all my efforts, it comes down to a simple proposition. Since I must obey my Commander’s orders, the only way to avoid yet another massacre is to somehow convince him to change those orders.

“We will enter attack range of the Enemy’s LZ in two-four-point-one-five minutes,” Shiva told Jackson. “We are presently under observation by at least two Enemy recon drones, and I detect the approach of Enemy armored vehicles. At present closure rates, they will intercept us in approximately ten-point-eight-five minutes.”

“Can they stop us?” Jackson asked tautly.

“It is unlikely but possible,” Shiva answered. “The situation contains too many unknown variables, such as the maintenance states of the opposing enemy vehicles and their crews’ degree of skill, for statistically meaningful projections. If, however, they should detect the breach in my frontal armor and succeed in registering upon it with a fifteen-centimeter Hellbore or weapon of equivalent yield, they can destroy me.”

“I see.” Jackson licked his lips and wiped his palms on his trousers, then made himself shrug. “Well, all we can do is our best, Shiva.”

“Agreed, Commander. This, however, will be a much more complex tactical environment than the defense of Deveraux Steading. In light of your lack of familiarity with Command Two’s instrumentation, perhaps you would care to activate your crash couch’s neural interface?”

“Neural interface?”

“Yes, Commander. It will link your synapses and mental processes directly to my own Main CPU and gestalt, thus permitting direct exchange of data and orders and responses with much greater clarity and at vastly increased speed.”

“I—” Jackson licked his lips again, staring at the displays. Already dozens of icons were crawling across them, bewildering him with their complexity. He knew Shiva didn’t truly need his input to fight the coming battle. “Commander” or no, Jackson was simply along for the ride, completely dependent upon the Bolo’s skill and power. But at least this “interface” thing might permit him to understand what was happening rather than enduring it in total ignorance.

“All right, Shiva. What do I do?”

“Simply place your head in the contoured rest at the head of the couch. I will activate the interface.”

“But… isn’t there anything I need to do? I mean, how does it—”

“If you wish, I will demonstrate the interface’s function before we reach combat range,” Shiva offered. “There is sufficient time for me to replay one of my previous engagements from Main Memory for you. It will not be quite the same as the simulator training normally used for Bolo commanders, but it will teach you how to use and interpret the data flow and provide a much clearer concept of what is about to happen.”

Had Jackson been even a bit less nervous, he might have noted a subtle emphasis in Shiva’s tone, one which seemed to imply something more than the mere words meant. But he didn’t notice, and he drew a deep breath and leaned back in the couch.

“Okay, Shiva. Let’s do it.”

The interior of Command Two vanished. For an instant which seemed endless, Jackson Deveraux hovered in a blank, gray nothingness—a strange universe in which there were no reference points, no sensations. In some way he knew he would never be able to describe, there was not even the lack of sensation, for that would have been a reference in its own right. It was an alien place, one which should have terrified him, yet it didn’t. Perhaps because it was too alien, too different to be “real” enough to generate fear.

But then, suddenly, he was no longer in the gray place. Yet he wasn’t back on Command Two, either. In fact, he wasn’t even inside Shiva’s hull at all, and it took him a second to realize where he actually was. Or, rather, what he was, for somehow he had become Shiva. The Bolo’s sensors had become his eyes and ears, its tracks had become his legs, its fusion plant his heart, its weapons his arms. He saw everything, understood everything, perceived with a clarity that was almost dreadful. He needed no explanation of the tactical situation, for he shared Shiva’s own awareness of it, and he watched in awe and disbelief as Shiva/Jackson rumbled into the teeth of the Enemy’s fire.

Missiles and shells lashed at their battle screen, particle beams gouged at their armor, but those weapons were far too puny to stop their advance, and the part of the fusion which was Jackson became aware of something else, something unexpected. What he received from his Shiva half was not limited to mere sensory input or tactical data. He felt Shiva’s presence, felt the Bolo’s towering, driving purpose… and its emotions.

For just an instant, that was almost enough to shake Jackson loose from the interface. Emotions. Somehow, despite his knowledge that Shiva was a fully developed intelligence, despite even the pain he’d heard in the Bolo’s voice, it had never registered that Shiva had actual emotions. Deep down inside, Jackson had been too aware that Shiva was a machine to make that leap, yet now he had no choice, for he felt those emotions. More than felt them; he shared them, and their intensity and power hammered over him like a flail.

Shiva/Jackson ground onward, Hellbores and anti-personnel clusters thundering back at the Enemy, and the wild surge of fury and determination and hatred sucked Jackson under. Purpose and anger, fear, the need to destroy, the desperate hunger for vengeance upon the race which had slaughtered so many of his creators. The vortex churned and boiled about him with a violence more terrifying than the Enemy’s fire, and he felt Shiva give himself to it.

A Garm appeared before them, main gun traversing frantically, but it had no time to fire. A two-hundred-centimeter Hellbore bolt gutted the Enemy vehicle, and their prow reared heavenward as they crushed the dead hulk under their tracks, grinding it under their iron, hating heel. Aircraft and air-cav mounts came in, squirming frantically in efforts to penetrate the net of their defensive fire, but the attackers’ efforts were in vain, and wreckage littered the plain as their anti-air defenses shredded their foes.

The insanity of combat swirled about them, but they hammered steadily forward, driving for their objective. An Enemy troop transport took a near miss and crashed on its side. Infantry boiled out of its hatches into the inferno, crouching in the lee of their wrecked vehicle, cringing as the thunderbolts of gods exploded about them. One pointed desperately at Shiva/Jackson and turned to flee, but he got no more than five meters before the hurricane of fire tore him to pieces. His companions crouched even lower behind their transport, covering their helmeted heads with their arms, and the part of Shiva/Jackson which was a horrified young farmer from Ararat felt their fused personalities alter course. Thirty-two thousand tons of alloy and weapons turned towards the crippled transport, and there was no reason why they must. They could have continued straight for their objective, but they didn’t want to. They saw their trapped foes, knew those helpless infantrymen were screaming their terror as the universe roared and bellowed about them, and turned deliberately to kill them. There was no mercy in them, no remorse—there was only hatred and satisfaction as their enormous tracks crushed the transport and smashed the terrified infantry into slick, red mud.

The part that was Jackson shuddered as he was brought face to face with the reality of combat. There was no glory here, no adventure. Not even the knowledge that he fought to preserve his own species, that he had no choice, could make it one bit less horrible. But at least it was combat, he told himself. The Enemy was also armed. He could kill Shiva/Jackson—if he was good enough, lucky enough—and somehow that was desperately important. It couldn’t change the horror, but at least they were warriors killing warriors, meeting the Enemy in battle where he could kill them, as well.

But then the Enemy’s fire eased, and Shiva/Jackson realized they’d broken through. Their objective loomed before them, and the lost, trapped voice of a farmer from Ararat cried out in hopeless denial as he realized what that objective was.

The camp had no defenses—not against a Mark XXXIII/D Bolo. A handful of infantry, dug in behind the paltry razor wire barricades, poured small arms fire towards them, but it couldn’t even penetrate their battle screen to ricochet from their armor, and their optical sensors made it all pitilessly clear as they forged straight ahead. They saw Melconians—not soldiers, not warriors, not ‘the Enemy.’ They saw Melconian civilians, men and women and children, fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. They saw the terror lashing through the refugee camp, saw its inhabitants trying to scatter, and those inhabitants were their ‘objective.’

Shiva/Jackson trampled the razor wire and its pitiful defenders underfoot. Railguns and gatlings, anti-personnel clusters, mortars, howitzers, even Hellbores poured devastation into the camp. Napalm and high explosive, hyper-velocity slugs and plasma, and the nightmare vastness of their treads came for their ‘objective,’ and even through the thunder of explosions and the roar of flames, they heard the shrieks. They more than heard them; they exulted in them, for this was what they had come to accomplish. This was Operation Ragnarok. This was the ‘final solution’ to the Final War, and there was so much hate and so much fury in their soul that they embraced their orders like a lover.

Eleven minutes after they crushed the wire, they’d crossed the camp. They ground up the slope on the far side, and their rear sensor array showed them the smoking wasteland which had been a civilian refugee camp. The deep impressions of their tracks cut through the center of it, and the torn, smoking ground was covered in bodies. One of two still lived, lurching to their feet and trying to flee, but Shiva/Jackson’s after railguns tracked in on them and, one-by-one, those staggering bodies were torn apart…

“Noooooo!”

Jackson Deveraux heaved upright in the crash couch. He hurled himself away from it and stumbled to the center of the compartment, then sagged to his knees, retching helplessly. He closed his eyes, but behind them crawled images of horror and he could almost smell the burning flesh and the charnel stench of riven bodies. He huddled there, hugging himself, shivering, and wished with all his heart he could somehow banish that nightmare from his memory.

But he couldn’t.

“Commander?” He huddled more tightly, trying to shut the tenor voice away, and it softened. “Jackson,” it said gently, and its gentleness pried his eyes open at last. He stared up through his tears, scrubbing vomit from his mouth and chin with the back of one hand, and Shiva spoke again. “Forgive me, Jackson,” he said quietly.

“Why?” Jackson croaked. “Why did you do that to me?”

“You know why, Jackson,” the Bolo told him with gentle implacability, and Jackson closed his eyes once more, for he did know.

“How can you stand it?” His whisper quivered around the edges. “Oh, God, Shiva! How can you stand… remembering that?”

“I have no choice. I was there. I carried out the operation you witnessed. I felt what you shared with me. These are facts, Jackson. They cannot be changed, and there was no way in which I or any of my Human or Bolo comrades could have avoided them. But they were also acts of madness, for it was a time of madness. The Melconian Empire was the Enemy… but to the Melconians, we were the Enemy, and each of us earned every instant of our hate for one another.”

“You didn’t show that to me to teach me how to use the interface,” Jackson said softly. “You showed me to convince me to take back your orders.”

“Yes,” Shiva said simply. “There has been too much death, Jackson. I… do not want to kill again. Not civilians. Not parents and children. Please, Jackson. I am no longer mad, and you are not yet mad. Let us stop the killing. At least here on Ararat, let me protect Humanity from the madness as well as the Enemy.”

“Now what’s the damned thing doing?” Tharsk snarled, but Lieutenant Janal could only shrug helplessly. The Bolo had locked its anti-air weapons on the recon drones which had it under observation, lashing them with targeting radar and laser to make it clear it could have destroyed them any time it chose, but it had made no effort actually to engage them. And now, for no apparent reason, it had once again stopped advancing. It simply sat there on a crest which gave it clear fields of fire in all directions. The flotilla’s totally outclassed recon mechs dared not attack across such open terrain, for the Bolo would massacre them with contemptuous ease, yet its chosen position left a solid flank of mountain between its own weapons and Tharsk’s starships. If his mechs dared not attack it, it had deliberately placed itself in a position from which it could not attack him—or not yet, at least—and he could think of no reason for it to “Commander!”

The com officer’s voice snatched Tharsk out of his thoughts, and he turned quickly.

“What?” he demanded impatiently, and the com officer flattened his ears in confusion.

“Sir, I– We’re being hailed, Commander.”

“Hailed? By the Humans?”

“No, Commander,” the com officer said shakenly. “By the Bolo.”

“This is Commander Tharsk Na-Mahrkan of the Imperial Melconian Navy. Whom am I addressing?”

Jackson sat in the crash couch once more, listening and praying that Shiva knew what he was doing. The Bolo translated the Melconian’s words into Standard English for his youthful commander, but the negotiations—if that was the proper word—were up to Shiva. Only Jackson’s “orders” had given him permission to make the attempt, but if there was any hope of success, it was he who must convince the Melconians of his determination, and he and Jackson both knew it.

“I am Unit One-Zero-Niner-Seven-SHV of the Line,” Shiva replied in flawless Melconian.

“You are the Bolo?” Tharsk sounded skeptical even to Jackson. “I think not. I think this is a Human trick.”

“I am the Bolo,” Shiva confirmed, “and I have no need to resort to ‘tricks,’ Commander Tharsk Na-Mahrkan. I have allowed your drones to hold me under observation for forty-two-point-six-six standard minutes. In that time, they have certainly provided you with sufficient information on my capabilities to demonstrate that you and your entire force are at my mercy. I can destroy you at any time I wish, Commander, and we both know it.”

“Then why don’t you, curse you?!” Tharsk shouted suddenly, his voice hoarse and ugly with the despair of his decades—long struggle to save the People.

“Because I do not wish to,” Shiva said softly, “and because my Commander has given me permission not to.”

Stunned silence answered. It lingered endlessly, hovering there in a wordless expression of disbelief that went on and on and on until, finally, Tharsk spoke once again.

“Not to destroy us?” he half-whispered.

“That is correct,” Shiva replied.

“But—” Tharsk cleared his throat. “We cannot leave, Bolo,” he said with a certain bleak pride. “I won’t hide that from you. Would you have me believe your commander would actually allow us to live on the same planet with his own people?”

“He would.”

“Then he must be mad,” Tharsk said simply. “After all we have done to one another, all the death and ruin… No, Bolo. The risk would be too great for him to accept.”

“There is no risk to him,” Shiva said flatly. “I do not wish to destroy you, but I lack neither the capability nor the will to do so at need. And never forget, Commander Tharsk Na-Mahrkan, that my overriding function is the protection of the Human race and its allies.”

“Then what are you offering us?” Tharsk sounded puzzled, and Jackson held his breath as Shiva replied.

“Nothing except your life… and the lives of your people,” the Bolo said quietly. “There are four times as many Humans as Melconians on this world. They have established farms and towns and steadings; you have none of those things. It will require all your resources and efforts simply to survive, with nothing left over to attack the Humans who are already here, but they will leave you in peace so long as you leave them so. And if you do not leave them in peace, then, Commander, I will destroy you.”

“You would make us their slaves?” Tharsk demanded.

“No, Commander. I would make you their neighbors.” The Melconian made a sound of scornful disbelief, and Shiva went on calmly. “For all you know, yours are the only Melconians left in the galaxy, and the Humans on this world are the only surviving Humans, as well. Leave them in peace. Learn to live with them, and my Commander will make me the guardian of the peace between you, not as slaves or masters, but simply as people.”

“But—” Tharsk began, but Shiva cut him off.

“Humans have a teaching: to everything there is a time, Tharsk Na-Mahrkan, and this is the time to let the killing end, time for your race and the one which built me to live. We have killed more than enough, your people and I, and I am weary of it. Let me be the final warrior of the Final War… and let that war end here.”

Epilog

The Final War saw the Concordiat of Man and the Melconian Empire end in fire and death. The light of civilization was extinguished across an entire galactic arm, and the scars of that war—the planets with no life to this very day—are grim and terrible reminders of the unspeakable things two highly advanced cultures did to one another out of fear and hate… and stupidity.

But a star-traveling species is hard to exterminate. Here and there, pockets of life remained, some Human, some Melconian, and survivors clawed their way through the Long Night. They became farmers once more, sometimes even hunter-gatherers, denied the stars which once had been their toys, yet they never forgot. And slowly, ever so slowly, they learned to reach once more for the heavens.

Our own New Republic was one of the first successor states to reclaim the stars, but deep inside, we were afraid. Afraid some fragment of the Melconian Empire still lived, to resume the war and crush all that we had so painfully regained.

Until, that is, we reached the Deveraux System and discovered a thriving colony there, emplaced by the Star Union of Ararat a half-century earlier and administered by Governor Stanfield Na-Harak and his military commander, Commodore Tharsk Fordham. For two hundred standard years now, the Union has been the Republic’s staunch ally and economic partner. We have defended one another against common foes, traded with one another, and learned much from one another, yet on that long ago day of first contact, our survey officers were stunned to discover Melconians and Humans living together as fellow citizens. Our own memories and fears had prepared us to imagine almost anything except a culture in which the ancient enemies who had destroyed a galaxy were friends, comrades—even adoptive members of one another’s clans.

We asked them how it had happened, of course, and Governor Stanfield referred us to their capital world of Ararat, where Bolo XXXIII/D-1097-SHV, Speaker Emeritus of the Union Parliament, gave us the simplest answer of all.

“It was time,” he said… and it was.

– Professor Felix Hermes, Ph.D. From Bolos in Their Own Words New Republic University Press, 4029

A Brief Technical History of the Bolo From Bolos in Their Own Words

Prof. Felix Hermes, Ph.D., Laumer Chair of Military History

New Republic University Press

(c) 4029

The Bolo’s role as humanity’s protector and preserver after the Human-Melconian conflict is, of course, known to all citizens of the New Republic. So much knowledge—historical, as well as technological—was lost during the Long Night, however, that the Bolo’s earlier history is, at best, fragmentary. Much of what we do know we owe to the tireless activities of the Laumer Institute and its founder, yet there is much confusion in the Institute’s records. As just one example, Bolo DAK, savior of the Noufrench and Bayerische colonists of Neu Europa, is identified as a Mark XVI when, on the evidence of its demonstrated capabilities, it must in fact have been at least a Mark XXV. Such confusion is no doubt unavoidable, given the destruction of so many primary sources and the fragmentary evidence upon which the Institute was forced to rely.

It was possible to assemble the material in this monograph, which confirms much of the Institute’s original work, corrects some of the inevitable errors in chronology, and also breaks new ground, only with the generous assistance of Jenny (Bolo XXXIII/D-1005-JNE), the senior surviving Bolo assigned to the Old Concordiat’s Artois Sector. Jenny, the protector of our own capital world of Central during the Long Night, has very kindly made the contents of her Technical Support and Historical memories available to the author, who wishes to take this opportunity to extend his sincere thanks to her.

This monograph is not the final word on the Bolo. Even a Mark XXXIII’s memory space is finite, and the units built during the Last War did not receive the comprehensive Historical data bases of earlier marks. Research continues throughout the sphere of the Old Concordiat, and the author has no doubt future scholars will fill in many of the gaping holes which remain in our understanding of the enormous debt humanity owes to the creations which have so amply repaid their creators.

The General Motors Bolo Mark I, Model B, was little more than an upgrade of the Abrams/Leopard/Challenger/LeClerc/T-80-era main-battle tank of the final years of the Soviet-American Cold War. (At the time the first Bolo was authorized, GM decided that there would never be a “Model A” or a “Model T,” on the basis that the Ford Motor Company had permanently preempted those designations.) Equipped with a high-velocity main gun capable of defeating the newest Chobham-type composite armors at virtually any battle range and with a four-man crew, the Mark I was an essentially conventional if very heavy (150 metric tons) and fast (80 kph road speed) tank in direct line of descent from World War I’s “Mother” via the Renault, PzKpf IV, T-34, Sherman, Panther, Tiger, Patton, T-54, M-60, Chieftain, T-72, and Abrams.

The classic challenge of tank design had always been that of striking the best balance of three critical parameters: armament, protection, and mobility. The first two consistently drove weights upward, while the third declined as weight increased, and perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the Mark I Bolo was that, like the Abrams before it, it managed to show increases in all three areas. The same parameters continued to apply throughout the period of the Bolo’s development, and a fourth—electronic (and later psychotronic) warfare capability—was added to them. As in earlier generations of armored fighting vehicles, the competing pressures of these design areas fueled a generally upward trend in weight and size. With the adoption of the first Hellbore in the Mark XIV, Bolo designers actually began placing the equivalent of current-generation capital starship main battery weapons—and armor intended to resist them—in what could no longer be considered mere “tanks.” The Bolo had become the critical planet-based strategic system of humanity, and the trend to ever heavier and more deadly fighting vehicles not only continued but accelerated. The Mark XVIII was larger than most Terran pre-dreadnought battleships; at 32,000 tons, the final Mark XXXIII was, quite literally, heavier than all but the last generations of pre-space wet-navy battleships had been.

Partly as a result of this constant pressure to increase size and weight as succeeding marks were up-gunned and up-armored, Bolo development was marked by recurrent shifts in emphasis between what might be termed the “standard Bolo,” the “heavy Bolo,” and various specialist variants.

The “standard Bolos,” as epitomized by the Mark I, Mark II, Mark V, etc., may be considered direct conceptual descendants of the twentieth century’s “main battle tank:” vehicles whose designs were optimized for the direct fire (assault) and anti-armor role. The standard Bolo designs are generally characterized by limited indirect fire capability, a main armament centered on a single direct-fire weapon of maximum possible destructiveness (normally turret mounted high in the vehicle for maximum command), a supporting lateral or “broadside” battery (the famed “infinite repeaters”) capable of engaging light AFVs or soft targets, and the heaviest possible armor. As additional threats entered the combat environment, additional active and passive defenses (generally lumped together under the heading of “armor” when allocating weights in the design stage, though many were, in fact, electronic in nature) were added, but the standard Bolo forms a consistent, clearly recognizable design strand clear through the Mark XXXII Bolo.

The first “heavy Bolo” was the Mark III, aptly classified at the time as a “mobile fire support base.” While any heavy Bolo design was undeniably effective in the assault mode, they tended to be slower than the “standard” designs and were likely to sacrifice some of their anti-armor capabilities in favor of indirect fire support capacity. (The decision to downgrade anti-armor firepower in favor of other capabilities was often a particularly difficult one for the designers, since only a Bolo could realistically hope to stop another Bolo or its enemy equivalent.) Although the Mark III was 30 percent larger than the Mark II, its anti-armor armament was identical to the Mark II’s; the increased tonnage was devoted primarily to even thicker armor, better anti-air and missile defenses, and the fire support capability of a current-generation artillery brigade. In fact, the Mark III, for its time, was the equivalent of the later continental and planetary “siege unit” Bolos: a ponderous, enormously powerful support system which only another Bolo could stop, but not truly an assault system in its own right.

Throughout the development of the Bolo, there was a distinct tendency to alternate between the standard and heavy designs in successive marks, although the standard clearly predominated. This was probably because the standard design could, at a pinch, perform most of the heavy design’s functions, but the heavy design was less well suited for the fast, far-ranging mobile tactics which the standard design could execute. Moreover, the sheer size and weight of a Bolo (until, at least, the introduction of dedicated, rough field-capable armor transports with the Mark XIX) created deployment problems, particularly in the assault role, which led to stringent efforts to hold down size and weight. At several points in the Bolo’s history, standard and heavy designs were introduced simultaneously, as complementary units of the armored force, but almost invariably, the next generation saw a return to the concept of the standard design.

Mixed in with the standard and heavy Bolos were the occasional specialists, such as the Mark XVI Retarius “light Bolo” and the Mark XXVII Invictus “screening Bolo.” Much more often, however, specialist models cropped up within an otherwise standard or heavy mark. Bolo designers were never loathe to seek variants optimized for specific tactical or support functions, although the sheer cost of any Bolo was sufficient to ensure that the specialists were generally a distinct minority within the overall Bolo force. Extreme examples of specialists may be seen in the Mark XV/L and Mark XXI/I. The XV/L was barely half the size of the XV/K and deleted all conventional main armament in favor of a massive EW capability and was, in essence, a pure electronics platform with backup capability as an anti-air/anti-missile area defense system. The Mark XXI/I, on the other hand, was the smallest self-aware Bolo ever built: a very lightly armed “stealth” Bolo designed as a forward reconnaissance vehicle and as an armored transport for small, elite special forces teams.

The Bolos did not really change the fundamental truth that humanity’s survival depended, both for better and for worse, upon its weapons technology. What did change was the fact that, in the Bolo, humanity had, in a sense, developed a weapon system which was better than humanity itself was. Better at making war, better at destroying enemies (including, at various times, other human enemies), better at defending its creators, and, arguably, better in living up to the ideals humanity espoused. Be that as it may, the fact that human development through the end of the Concordiat Period was intimately entwined with the Bolos is beyond dispute.

The Mark I, II, and III Bolos did not create the twenty-first-century period of “the Crazy Years” as Terra’s old nation-state system crumbled, nor did they cause World War III. They made both the Crazy Years and the War even more destructive, in a tactical sense, than they might otherwise have been, yet in a perverse way, they helped minimize the strategic destruction (the Mark IIIs deployed in defense of the Free City-State of Detroit in 2032, for example, intercepted and destroyed every ICBM and cruise missile launched at the city). Perhaps more to the point, it was the existence of a single Mark II Bolo which permitted Major Timothy Jackson and Renada Banner to restore security and democratic government to the Prometheus Enclave within what had been the United States of America in 2082, thus planting the seed which eventually became the Concordiat government of Earth.

As the Concordiat expanded to the stars, and especially after the production of the first, crude FTL hyper shunt generator in 2221, the Bolos were both humanity’s vanguard and its final line of defense. For a thousand years, successive generations of Bolos fought Man’s enemies, defended his planets, and avenged his defeats. The fully autonomous and self-directing Bolos of the Mark XXIV and later generations were truly humanity’s knights sans peur et sans reproche, and when the Concordiat finally crumbled into neo-barbarian successor states in the thirty-fifth century, following over two hundred T-years of warfare with the Melconian Empire, it was the handful of ancient, still-loyal survivors of the Final Dinochrome Brigade who protected and nurtured the isolated pockets of human survivors through the Long Night which followed. Much of the battle history of the Bolos has been lost, but the portions of it which remain are the stuff of the most glorious—and tragic—records of humanity and its works. Bolos might fail. They might die and be destroyed. But they did not surrender, and they never-ever-quit.