Old Soldiers

10

Edmund Hawthorne sat on the bluff above the ocean, watching its wrinkled silver and black roll towards him endlessly under Indrani's two moons. He could hear the booming mutter of the surf at the foot of the bluff, exploding in spouts of silver-struck foam and heaving black water, and the light of the paired moons spilled across the sea like rippled searchlights. The breeze atop the bluff was stiff, ruffling his hair and plucking at his clothing, bringing him the scent of the ocean mingled with the perfume of the native, night-flowering bushes about him which they hadn't gotten around to naming yet.

He raised the bottle to eye height, holding it up between him and the brighter of the two moons to peer at the level inside it. Still almost half full, he noted. At the rate he was going, it would probably last him till at least first moonset. Of course, he could always just slug it back, use it for anesthesia. There were times he was tempted to do just that, despite his innate distaste for maudlin melodrama. It would be nice to forget, however briefly, how much it hurt. Someone had once told him that pain was part of life, that loss was the price human beings paid for allowing themselves to care in the first place. He'd thought at the time that it was a remarkably platitudinous thing for a reasonably intelligent person to say. In fact, he still did.

He took another swallow, and smooth, liquid fire flowed down his throat, like biting honey with just an edge of rawness.

Lauren Hanover was a woman of many parts, he reflected with a chuckle as he lowered the bottle once more. Not only had she saved her industrial module from the Dog Boys, but she'd put together a remarkably good distillery. At least she'd bothered to clear it with Governor Agnelli's council ahead of time, unlike one or two other operators he could think of. And once she had the opportunity to age some of it properly and take that raw edge off, she was probably going to become comfortably wealthy off of it. But for now, she was still giving away bottles of what she called "test product" to friends.

"'The first taste is free,' hey, Lauren?" he murmured. "That's okay. That's fine."

He realized he'd spoken aloud and looked around. Maybe he'd been killing this bottle a little more quickly than he'd thought he was, if he was starting to talk to himself. Or, worse, to people who weren't there. But there was no one to hear. No one but Lazarus, parked well back from the edge of the bluff, main battery trained out to sea. And Lazarus was wise enough to leave a man to his thoughts, even if the thinker in question was close enough to drunk to be speaking those thoughts out loud.

Hawthorne's mouth twisted with a bitterness he knew was totally unfair as he gazed at the towering, moon-shot black bulk of the Bolo. It wasn't Lazarus' fault. It wasn't anyone's fault, aside from the goddamned Melconians. Mary Lou Atwater blamed herself for it. He felt confident that Lazarus blamed himself for it, too. But it was just one of those things, he supposed. One of those damned, bitterly ironic things.

He capped the bottle carefully and lay back in the stiff, native grasses, listening to them hiss and rustle in the wind. The faint sounds of machinery came to him through the wind sound. They'd been going on nonstop, day and night, for the fifty-three days, twelve hours, and—he raised his forearm to consult his chrono—thirty-seven minutes since Lazarus had come grinding out of the mountains on his crippled tracks with his commander's body sealed inside the standard, military-issue body bag on his missile deck.

His internal damage control and repair systems had already been doing what they could; the other repair remotes had deployed themselves from the automated depot aboard the assault pod after he had paused in the exact center of Landing while an honor guard of Jeffords' militia removed Maneka's body from his care at last.

The Bolo hadn't said a word. It had simply sat there, optical heads tracking as the militiamen and women carried Maneka away, and then every one of its surviving secondary and tertiary weapons had elevated in salute before it lurched back into motion.

No one had been quite certain where Lazarus was going, but they should have guessed, Hawthorne thought. This had been Maneka's favorite spot. She'd often parked Lazarus here and sat up on top of his main turret to enjoy the alien stars, the moonlight, and the sea. Now Lazarus stood in exactly the same spot, attended by the mechanical minions who were repairing as much of his damage as they could.

Until they got their industrial infrastructure up and running, it would be impossible to repair him fully, of course. Just fabricating the necessary duralloy would be impossible for at least another couple of years. But Jeffords, Maneka's successor as the colony's senior military officer, had shared the Bolo's analysis with Hawthorne. The odds were overwhelming—better than 99.95 percent, according to Lazarus—that the Melconian transport which had managed to follow them here was the only ship which knew where they'd gone. If there had been a second ship, then the soonest it could possibly bring other Dog Boy warships back to Lakshmaniah would be at least three standard years in the future. By that time, it should be possible to complete the repairs to Lazarus' armor, although that probably wouldn't matter if the Melconians sent along a proper task force.

It was good that Bolo logic had supported human illogic in this case, Hawthorne thought, uncapping the bottle and taking another swallow. Because whether it had or not, the illogic would have triumphed in the end. He was certain of that.

He snorted and sat back up, turning to gaze back westward, away from the sea. He imagined he could just make out the loom of the mountains, but he was pretty sure he was fooling himself. It was too dark for that, despite the moons. Yet he didn't have to see them. He felt them, standing tall and tangled in the dark, the barrier which had done exactly what Maneka had hoped it would by breaking up the Melconians' attack force, letting her spring her trap and cut them up before they could reach the settlement. The Council had already announced that those mountains would henceforth be known as the Trevor Range, and that their tallest peak would be known as Mount Maneka. There was snow on that peak, year-round, despite Indrani's climate, and Hawthorne found that fitting somehow.

Then there was the Cenotaph. The sketches Hawthorne had seen were still tentative and preliminary, but all of them included the towering column at the center of a formal garden, and the duralloy plaques facing it, listing the names of every single human—including the personnel of Commodore Lakshmaniah's task force—who had died to reach and hold Indrani. And atop the column, looking out across the sea she'd loved so much, would be a statue of Maneka.

None of which would bring back the woman Edmund Hawthorne had loved.

He grimaced, half-angry at himself for the undeniable self-pity of that thought. He wasn't the only person who'd lost someone. Hell, almost everyone on Indrani had lost someone they'd loved! Not to mention all the friends and family members they had left behind forever when they embarked for Seed Corn in the first place. And Maneka would have kicked his butt if she'd seen him sitting around nursing her memory like some sort of wound.

He shoved himself to his feet and stood in the breezy dark. Not even a hint of a sway, he noted.

Good. That probably meant he wasn't more blasted than he'd thought. He nodded to himself, slid the bottle into the thigh cargo pocket of his uniform trousers, and started walking towards Lazarus.

An unwinking red eye turned in his direction as he approached. One of Lazarus' optical heads, he knew. As he got closer, the Bolo's exterior lights switched themselves on—dim, at first, in consideration of Hawthorne's darkness-accustomed vision, but growing brighter. The automated repair mechs working on him hadn't required light, of course, and Hawthorne recognized the Bolo's courtesy in providing it for him.

He walked around to the front, standing between Lazarus and the ocean. That, Maneka had explained to him, was the position from which custom and courtesy required a human to address a Bolo.

The jagged contours of Lazarus' wrecked glacis towered high above him, wrenched and twisted by the inconceivable fury of the blast of directed fusion which had finally breached it. The lights Lazarus had switched on for him threw the wreckage and the extent of the Bolo's damage into merciless contrast, and Hawthorne realized again that he could have walked through the gaping wound in Lazarus' frontal armor without even being required to duck his head.

"Good evening, Lazarus," he heard himself say. His voice sounded harsh in his own ears against the rumble of the surf and the hissing voice of the wind. It was the first time he had spoken directly to the Bolo since before Maneka's death.

"I've come to apologize," Hawthorne said abruptly. "I've been sitting over there resenting the fact that you're still alive and Maneka isn't. Stupid of me, I know. Wasn't your fault. And even if it had been, if you'd died, too, the Puppies would have wiped Landing out. But I did resent it. Stupid or not, I did. And you didn't deserve that."

"There is no need to apologize, Lieutenant," the Bolo said after a moment. "Bolos understand grief and loss. And we understand it far better than I sometimes think our creators truly intended us to. I, too, have blamed myself for what happened to my Commander. I have replayed and reanalyzed my sensor data from the twenty-five minutes before her death, attempting to isolate the datum I ought to have seen and responded to. Yet I have found no such datum. The Enemy who killed her was simply too well concealed for anyone to detect before he fired."

"I know." Hawthorne closed his eyes for a moment, then nodded. "I know," he repeated more strongly. "It's just that ... I miss her."

He pulled the bottle back out of his pocket, opened it, and raised it in salute to the Bolo's optical head, so far above him. Then he took another sip.

"That was for me," he said, recapping the bottle. "I'd drink for both of us, but I'm close enough to drunk already. Maneka wouldn't like it if I passed out in a drunken stupor out here. Hell," he chuckled, "I wouldn't like it! It's supposed to rain before morning, and it'd be damned embarrassing to manage to catch pneumonia in the middle of the summer because I was too drunk to come in out of the rain!"

"I agree that the potential for embarrassment would be high," Lazarus told him. "However, if you should happen to go to sleep, for whatever reason, I would certainly employ my remotes to construct temporary shelter for you."

"Decent of you," Hawthorne said. He folded his arms across his chest and leaned back against a towering stack of track plates, gazing up at the Bolo.

"I talked to Dr. Agnelli day before yesterday," he said after a moment. "Maneka and I had both made donations, you know. And under the terms of her will, well ..."

His voice trailed off, and he drew a deep breath. This is ridiculous, he thought. Here I am, in the middle of the night, explaining to a machine that I don't know what I really want to do. No, be honest, Ed. The real problem is that you don't know whether or not you have the guts to take it on by yourself.

"I want to do it," he heard himself saying to the monstrous Bolo looming above him. "I really do. But I'm ... well, scared, I guess. I wanted to have kids with Maneka. For the two of us to raise them together. Now I'm not really sure I want them for themselves, or if I just want them because they'd be some kind of echo of her. Like managing to hang onto a little piece of her, even though she's dead. And kids need to be wanted for who they are, loved for who they are, not just because they remind you of someone else. And raising them by myself, a single parent. What if I fucked up, Lazarus? What if I made mistakes, failed her kids because I didn't know what I was doing?"

"I am a Bolo, Lieutenant," Lazarus replied after another brief pause. "I am a war machine, a soldier.

A killer. My perspective upon what makes a successful Human parent is not, perhaps, the most reliable one. However, it seems to me that the questions you are asking indicate both the depth of your grief and the seriousness with which you would approach the responsibilities of parenthood, and I feel certain that Captain Trevor would agree with me. I have had many commanders over the course of my existence.

Some have been better tacticians than others. Some have been more aggressive than others. None were more compassionate or more aware of her responsibilities—not simply as the commander of a Unit of the Line, but as a human being—than Captain Trevor. I believe that she would urge you to make the decision you feel is correct. But I know from conversation with her, and from the time we spent linked, that she would cherish no doubts about your suitability as the parent of her children, single or not. You might make mistakes, as most parents do, yet it would never be because you had not done your very best. She loved you very much, Lieutenant, and Maneka Trevor would not have loved someone who was capable of violating his responsibilities as a father."

"Thank you, Lazarus," he said, finally. "That ... means a lot to me."

"You are welcome, Lieutenant. I wish it were possible for me to do more. Indeed, I had hoped it would be. But she is gone, and I must confess that I would very much like to watch her children grow to adulthood. For themselves, as you yourself said, and not simply as a living memento of her. But perhaps also as a promise that life continues. That what she died to protect, will live on."

Hawthorne gazed up at the Bolo and surprised himself with a smile.

"Well, Lazarus, I suppose a single parent could do worse for a godfather for his kids than a Bolo. It'd sure as hell trump the 'My old man can beat up your old man' thing, wouldn't it?"

"I had not thought of it in precisely that light," Lazarus replied with a soft electronic chuckle.

"Probably not," Hawthorne agreed. "I know you Bolos are supposed to be a bloodthirsty lot, but we humans have spent a lot longer than you have thinking long and homicidal thoughts."

"I imagine so, but even so, I would sus—"

Lazarus' voice stopped. It didn't slow, or slur, or fade. It just stopped in mid-syllable, and Hawthorne jerked upright as the red power light on the optical head facing him blinked suddenly off.

"Lazarus?"

No response. Not even a flicker.

"Lazarus?"

Hawthorne took two quick steps towards the Bolo before he made himself stop. If something had happened to Lazarus, what did he think he could do about it? He was no Bolo tech! Hell, he would have been barely qualified to hand a real Bolo tech his tools! But if something was wrong with Lazarus then—

"Ed."

Edmund Hawthorne froze, his eyes suddenly huge, as the optical head power light blinked back on and the Bolo spoke once more. Not in the mellow tenor he heard before, but in another voice. A smoky, almost purring soprano.

"Ed," the Bolo said again, and then it giggled. Unmistakably, it giggled, and the eyes which had gone wide in shock suddenly narrowed in a combination of disbelief and something else.

"Oh, Ed," the soprano said contritely a moment later. "I'm sorry. But if you could have seen your expression—!"

"Lazarus," Hawthorne said harshly, "this isn't funny, goddamn it!"

"No, it isn't," the soprano said. "But it isn't Lazarus doing it, Ed. It's me—Maneka."

"Maneka is dead!"

"Well, yes, I suppose I am. Sort of." Hawthorne leaned back against the pile of track plates again, then somehow found himself sliding down them into a sitting position as the soprano continued. "It's just that, well, I don't seem to be gone."

"What ... what do you mean?"

"That's going to be just a bit difficult to explain," Maneka's voice—and it was Maneka's voice; somehow Hawthorne was certain of that—replied.

"I will. But bear in mind that we're in some pretty unexplored territory here. All right?"

"If you really are Maneka, then 'unexplored territory' doesn't even begin to cover it!"

"I guess not," the soprano agreed. "Well, as simply as I can explain it, it all starts with the fact that Lazarus and I were still linked when I got shot. If we hadn't been—"

Hawthorne had the distinct mental impression of a shrug in that slight pause, and then the voice continued.

"Mary Lou's medics did all they could, you know. But the damage was just too severe. My heart stopped within two minutes, and even with CPR, I'd lost so much blood that brain function ceased three minutes after that."

Hawthorne was distantly astonished, somehow, that he was able to suppress the shiver which ran through him at that matter-of-fact description of the death of the woman he had loved.

"Five minutes doesn't sound like very much, I know," her voice went on, "but for a Bolo, it's a long, long time, Ed. I knew at the time that Lazarus had thrown us both into hyper-heuristic mode, but I didn't know why. And he didn't tell me, either—because he wasn't at all sure it was going to work, I think. But what he did was to ... well, to download me."

"Download you?" Hawthorne got out in a half-strangled voice.

"That's the best way I can describe it to you," Maneka's voice said calmly. "And while The Book doesn't exactly cover what he did, it violated at least the spirit of twenty or thirty Brigade regulations. In fact, I'm pretty sure the only reason there isn't a Reg specifically against it is that it never occurred to anyone that anything like this could be done in the first place."

"I wouldn't doubt it," he said, and shook his head. "In fact, I think I agree with them."

"And you'd probably be right, under most circumstances. But Lazarus isn't exactly a standard Bolo anymore, either. You know that when they repaired and refitted him after Chartres they upgraded his psychotronics. That included hauling out almost all of his old mollycircs and replacing them with the new, improved version, all of which took up a lot less volume than the older hardware had required. Since they had all that volume, they went ahead and installed a second complete survival center at the far end of the core hull. They intended it for redundancy, since Lazarus had managed to get himself brain-killed twice already in his career. But when he knew I was dying, he used that space to store me."

"You mean to store Maneka's memories," Hawthorne said hoarsely.

"No. Or, at least," Maneka's voice said in a tone he recognized well, the tone she used when she was being painstakingly honest, "I don't think that's what I mean. I'm not really positive. I'm here, and as far as I can tell, I'm ... me. The same memories, same thoughts. The same emotions," her voice softened.

"I'm a fully integrated personality, separate from Lazarus, that remembers being Maneka Trevor, Ed. I don't know whether or not I have Maneka's soul, assuming souls really exist, but I truly believe I'm the same person I've always been."

"And where have you been for the last seven and a half weeks?" he demanded, fighting against a sudden surge of mingled hope and shocked almost-horror.

"Trying to get out," she said simply. "Human minds and personalities aren't wired the same way as Bolo AIs. I always knew that, but I never realized just how different we were until I found myself trying to adapt to such a radically different environment. It wasn't Lazarus' fault. He didn't have any more to go on than I did. The only technique he had was the one Bolos use for downloading the memories of other Bolos under emergency field conditions, so that was the one he used. And it took me a long time—longer than you can imagine, probably—to 'wake up' in here. Remember what I said about hyper-heuristic mode. The differential between the speed of human thought processes and Bolo thought processes is literally millions to one, Ed. I've spent the equivalent of more than a complete human lifetime reintegrating my personality over the past seven weeks. I was getting close before this evening, but when you started talking to Lazarus, he tried to access me again. He hadn't done that in a long time, for the same reason he'd never mentioned what he'd tried to do to anyone who'd cared about me—because he'd decided his effort must have failed. That humans and Bolos were too different for it to work. But we aren't—quite.

Just ... almost. And when he tried to access me again, it finally let me out."

"No, Lieutenant," the Bolo said in the familiar tenor, which sounded almost shocking after Maneka's soprano. "My personality and gestalt remain intact and unimpaired. I must concede that there was a certain period of ... uncertainty when Captain Trevor's—Maneka's—personality first fully expressed itself once more. As she has just explained to you, however, Bolos in hyper-heuristic mode have extremely high processing rates, by Human standards. We have evolved a suitable joint interface which leaves Lazarus—'me,' for a practical referent—in direct control of this unit's weapons systems. Access to sensor systems, data storage, central processing, and communication interfaces is shared."

"So you've got a split personality."

"No." Hawthorne's head tried to spin rather more energetically than his alcohol intake could explain as the Bolo spoke again in its Maneka voice. "We're not a split personality any more than two AIs assigned to different functions in the same building would be, Ed. We're two distinct personalities who just happen to live inside the same Bolo. Lazarus is still in control of his weapons because my personality is so far outside the parameters the Brigade considers acceptable that his inhibitory programming would never permit me to control them. And, frankly, I'm in agreement with the inhibitions. I don't want anyone, including me, in charge of that kind of firepower without all of the precautionary elements the Brigade's spent the last millennium or so working out."

"Yet an interesting situation now arises," the Bolo observed in its Lazarus voice. "Since Captain Trevor is, by every standard I can apply, still alive, she remains my legal Commander, even though she has no direct access to my weaponry. I do not believe Brigade Regulations ever contemplated a situation in which the Human command element of a Bolo detachment was directly integrated into one of the Bolos of that detachment."

"Yep," the Maneka voice said, and chuckled again. "I guess I've become an 'old soldier' after all, Lazarus."

"I do not believe this is precisely the situation MacArthur envisioned at the time of his remark," the Bolo replied to itself in its Lazarus voice. "Nonetheless, it does seem possible that your tenure of command will be ... somewhat longer than originally envisioned."

"Oh, Lord!" Hawthorne bent forward, clutching his head in both hands and shaking it from side to side. "Agnelli's going to have a litter of kittens when he finds out about this!"

"So you're beginning to accept I might really still be me?" the Maneka voice said.

"I ... really think I am," Hawthorne replied after several seconds. "Of course, even if you aren't, Lazarus thinks you are, which is the reason I expect Agnelli to have a fit when Lazarus announces that his Commander isn't really gone and the statue on top of the Cenotaph might be just a bit premature. As Governor, Agnelli isn't likely to be too delighted by the notion that he'll never be able to assign a new commander to Lazarus. And to be honest ... Maneka, right this moment I can't say whether I'm happier to realize you aren't really gone or more horrified at the notion of your being stuck inside a Bolo."

"The idea took some getting used to for me, too," she said dryly. "As I've already pointed out, though, I've had quite some time to think about it and consider the alternatives. And, frankly, Ed, I'd rather be here, talking to you, even if I am 'stuck inside a Bolo,' than to be dead."

"Put that way, I guess I'd feel the same. But it's going to take me a while longer, I expect. I don't come equipped with hyper-heuristic capability!"

"Of course you don't," the Maneka voice said with a warm ripple of loving amusement. "But that's okay. As it happens, it seems I have plenty of time for you to adjust to it, after all."

"Of course you don't," the Maneka voice said with a warm ripple of loving amusement. "But that's okay. As it happens, it seems I have plenty of time for you to adjust to it, after all."

1

Fleet Admiral Edmund Hawthorne (retired), Indrani Navy, sat in his medical float chair, silver hair gleaming in the brilliant sunlight of Lakshmaniah as the real, live human band played the Concordiat Anthem the Indrani Republic had retained as its own. He had an excellent view of the main reviewing stand, although his place was no longer atop that stand, taking the salute with the rest of the Joint Chiefs as the standards passed in review on Founders' Day.

Of course, this Founders' Day was somewhat more significant than most, he reflected.

He turned his head, gazing out over the gaily colored crowds of people thronging Agnelli Field. The band and Marine honor guard around the review platform had arrived from Fort Atwater, the Indrani Marine Corps' main training facility on the Jeffords Plateau in Indrani's northern hemisphere, well before dawn. The rest of the crowd had gathered more gradually, walking through Agnelli Field's gates in groups of no more than a few dozen at a time. Most of them had come from Landing itself, whose majestic towers rose like enormous needles of glittering glasteel, marble, and pastel ceramacrete beyond Agnelli's southern perimeter. The first of them had appeared almost as soon as the honor guard, eager to get the best seats, not minding the dew which soaked their shoes as they walked across the immaculate lawns from which all pedestrian traffic was normally barred. The gleaming gems of orbital power collectors, industrial facilities, and the massively armed and armored orbital fortresses of the Navy—so familiar they normally drew scarcely a glance these days—had glittered above them like a diadem, and Hawthorne suspected that many an eye had looked at them rather differently today.

He himself had had no need to hurry, of course. Even without his imposing (if long since retired) rank, he and his family would have been assured of the perfect vantage point. He chuckled at the thought, reclining comfortably in the chair which monitored his increasingly decrepit physical processes and basking in the warmth of Lakshmaniah as it crept gradually higher in the east. He looked at the people seated in the chairs clustered immediately around him, and a feeling of immense joy and satisfaction flowed through him. He would not see many more Founders' Days. In fact, he rather suspected that this might be his last. But although he'd never really expected that he might, during the dark days when he was first assigned to Operation Seed Corn, he looked back upon his long life with the absolute certainty that what he'd done with it had made a difference. It was not given to many, he thought, to know beyond any shadow of a doubt that his life had truly mattered, and that when it ended, he would leave the universe a better place for his efforts.

And the personal accomplishments and rewards were at least as great. His surviving sons and daughters—all fifteen of them—most with hair as silver as his own, surrounded his life support chair in a solid block. Beyond them were their sons and daughters, his and Maneka's grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great-grandchildren. And, seated in his lap, was the youngest of their great-great-great-grandchildren. The crowd of them was enormous, but there was plenty of space for them atop their own special fifteen-thousand-ton reviewing stand, he thought with a mental chuckle.

He remembered the days of his own youth, back in the Concordiat, when population pressure had enforced low birth rates on the crowded inner worlds and people who wanted large families had competed for passage to the colony worlds, where large families were the norm. Even those people who'd thought in terms of "large families" would have been dazed by the average size of an Indrani family, but then, their families hadn't been routinely composed of children born both through natural childbirth and the artificial wombs which had been so much a part of Indrani from the very beginning.

He worried just a bit, sometimes, about the militancy, the sense of unwavering purpose, which filled the people of his planet and star system. The focus on military preparedness and research and development that routinely subordinated the sort of unruly, restless, all-directions-at-once, civilian-driven ferment which had been the hallmark of the pre-Melconian Concordiat. Not that it was surprising the Republic had been shaped in that fashion, of course.

The scars left by the Melconian attack which had come so close to wiping out all human life in this system had been carefully preserved by the Republic's government. That chain of mountain battlegrounds was the most hallowed monument—after the Cenotaph itself—of Indrani. And it insured that however peaceful the life experience of Indrani's population might have been since those battles, the Indranians would never—could never—forget the merciless, genocidal war which was the entire reason this system had been settled.

Hawthorne could scarcely object to that, yet there was a hardness, or perhaps a readiness, that bothered him just a little. A sense of their own accomplishments, their own prowess. For the most part, he vastly preferred that attitude to one of timidity, of hiding breathlessly in their mouse hole while the cat prowled hungrily outside it. But it also carried with it an edge of ... cockiness, perhaps. At its worst, almost an eagerness to confront humanity's mortal enemies and show the Melconians that Indranians were their masters at the art of war.

Which, he conceded, they might very well be. Certainly they had applied themselves for better than five generations now to the study of war, to preparations for it, and to the research and development to support it. They had begun with full technical specifications for the Concordiat's current-generation weapons technology at the time of the colony expedition's departure, and they'd spent the better part of a century—once the immediate needs of survival and providing for their expanding population had been met—refining that technology. It was amazing what a population rising steadily from millions into billions could accomplish when it set its collective mind to it.

Hawthorne remembered his last flagship, before his incredible seniority had sent him permanently dirt-side at last. The superdreadnought IRNS Guthrie Chin would have annihilated six or seven times her own mass in Concordiat capital ships, far less the best the Melconian Empire had boasted, at the time Operation Seed Corn was first mounted. And more recent ships were significantly more powerful than the Guthrie ... which, he thought with a trace of nostalgia, after over three decades in the Reserve Fleet, had finally been scrapped three years ago as hopelessly obsolescent.

No, if the Republic encountered the Empire, he did not expect the Empire to enjoy the experience.

Unfortunately, as the Concordiat had learned, quantity had a quality all its own. If the Empire had won the war against the Concordiat, then it was all too likely that it would still have the size to absorb any attack the Republic could launch and still pay the price to punch out a single star system.

"Are you keeping an eye on your blood-oxygen monitors, Ed?" a familiar soprano purred through the com implanted in his mastoid.

"No reason to bother, is there?" he subvocalized back. "Not with you and Lazarus snooping on them for me!"

"Somebody has to watch out for an old fart like you. Besides, think how the kids would react if you dropped dead on them today, of all days!"

He managed to turn his belly laugh into an almost convincing coughing fit, although he doubted it fooled any of their children. They were too accustomed to Dad's one-sided or even totally subvocal conversations with Mom ... among other things. Growing up knowing your mother lived inside a fifteen-thousand-ton Bolo was enough to give any child a ... unique perspective, he supposed.

"You should have married Lauren when you had the chance, Ed," Maneka teased gently. "Think of how rich you'd be! And running the Republic's biggest distillery would have made an amusing project for you after they finally managed to dragoon you into retiring. Always assuming," she continued thoughtfully,

"that your liver survived the experience."

"Lauren was perfectly satisfied with the two husbands she had," Hawthorne retorted. "And it's not as if I were exactly lacking—dashing officer that I was—in female companionship."

"No, you weren't," she said fondly, and he smiled slightly at the gratitude in her voice. He wondered, sometimes, if she regretted the loss of the physical intimacy they'd once shared. If she did, it had never shown, and she'd never resented any of the women—the many women, he corrected himself with another, deeper smile—who'd shared his life. Yet she was right. He'd never married. Which probably, he conceded, said something just a bit odd about his own psyche. Not that he particularly cared.

He was about to say something else when his oldest daughter, Maneka, touched him on the shoulder.

"I can tell from your expression that you and Mom are giving each other a hard time again, Dad," she said with a smile. "Still, I think this is the part you wanted to see."

"Humph! Giving her a 'hard time,' indeed! Woman's got an entire damned Bolo to beat up on me with!"

"You seem to have held your own fairly well over the years," she pointed out. "Now hush and listen!"

He grinned at her unrepentantly, but he also obeyed, focusing his attention on the speaker. Young Spiro Simmons it was, he saw. General Spiro Simmons, these days, the uniformed deputy commander in chief of the Republic's military.

"—and generations of dedication," Simmons was saying. "Our Founders would, I think, have much to feel proud of if they could see this day, yet all that we have accomplished we owe to them. It was their courage, their sacrifice, and their unfaltering determination and dedication which allowed us not simply to survive, but to prosper. Now it is our turn to bring that same dedication and determination to yet another star system, and—"

Hawthorne listened with an attentive expression, because his daughter was right, they were getting to the part he'd dragged himself away from his retirement villa to see. Although judging from what he'd heard so far, young Spiro still had a ways to go.

Well, that was all right. Today marked the official inauguration of the Republic's first extra-Lakshmaniah colony, and God knew everyone deserved the opportunity to pat themselves on the back. He remembered the first time the colonizing referendum had been voted upon. He'd still been Chief of Naval Operations then, and he'd been secretly relieved when the referendum failed.

There was much to be said for expanding, for finding additional baskets for some of their eggs. But as the fellow who'd been responsible for protecting Lakshmaniah, the thought of spreading his resources thinner hadn't precisely appealed to him. And there was always that lurking fear—more prevalent among the rapidly disappearing ranks of the Founders than among their descendants, he admitted—that expanding into other star systems would make them a bigger target. If the Melconians had triumphed and eventually expanded in Lakshmaniah's direction once more, additional settled star systems might well make the Republic more vulnerable to premature discovery by its enemies.

He looked at the shuttles dotted across Agnelli Field's immense expanse, comparing them in his own mind to the faded memories of Seed Corn's original expedition. The new colony in the defiantly named Bastion System would begin with an initial population of almost a half million, protected by six battle squadrons and massive prefabricated orbital defenses. Nor would Bastion be dependent solely upon spaceborne defenders.

Ah! Spiro was getting down to it at last!

"I don't like Ed's bio readings," Maneka told Lazarus.

"Maneka, he is one hundred and thirty-one Standard Years old," the Bolo replied gently. "For a Human of his age, his readings are remarkably good."

"I know," she sighed. "It's just ..."

Her voice trailed off with the strong impression of a mental shrug, and the Bolo allowed himself to radiate a sense of understanding coupled with the assurance that his comfort would be there for her on the inevitable day.

Maneka sent back the flow of her own gratitude. It was odd, she reflected yet again, how their relationship had altered since she first reawakened in his backup survival center. In many ways, they were closer than ever, and Lazarus had learned far more about human emotions—and occasional irrationality—than any other Bolo was ever likely to have learned. After all, the two of them had spent over a Standard Century living in the same "body."

Yet they'd lived there as two totally separate entities. When they linked fully, they fused even more seamlessly than they had when Maneka had possessed a human body, but between those periods of fusion, there was a scrupulously maintained firewall between their personalities and viewpoints. Which was probably just as well for her, given the overwhelming nature of any Bolo's personality.

There were still times, many of them, when she regretted the loss of her mortality. Her psychotronic state had done nothing to reduce the pain when friends and loved ones died, and although Lazarus'

sensors and computational ability had become hers, there were moments when she longed inexpressibly to once more experience the smell of hot chocolate, the taste of a hot dog smothered in chili and onions.

The touch of another human being's lips upon her own. She could still relive those experiences, for her psychotronic memory of them was as perfect and imperishable as any Bolo's, but it wasn't the same, and never could be.

Yet if much had been lost, much had also been given, she told herself. Her own particular version of Operator Identification Syndrome was just a tad more pronounced than that of any other Bolo commander in history, she thought with a flicker of amusement. In fact, in very many ways, she'd had two

"husbands" for the past hundred and five Standard Years. She and Ed might not have shared any physical relationship with one another over those years, but the shared parenting of their children and her own total, if not precisely normal, involvement in their lives had produced a binding which defied the use of any other terminology. And for those same years, she and Lazarus had been, quite literally, wedded in a single body.

And from the moment Adrian Agnelli allowed himself to accept that somehow, impossible though it had seemed, Maneka Trevor was still alive inside the duralloy body of Unit 28/G-179-LAZ, she had also enjoyed a full and infinitely rewarding "career."

"—under Admiral Ju's capable command," the general said. "If our projections are met, the initial Bastion settlements will be fully self-sustaining within no more than two Standard Years. And, of course, our new colonists' military security will be as high a priority for us as our own security here in Lakshmaniah has always been. In space, that security will be the responsibility of our Navy. And on Bastion itself—"

It is not difficult to follow my Commander's—Maneka's—thoughts at this moment. Indeed, I have learned more of Humanity, and of this Human in particular, since the day of her physical death than even I had ever suspected might be learned. They are a most remarkable species, my creators. So many of them fall so short of the standards to which they aspire, yet all have the potential to aspire to them. And some, like Maneka Trevor and Edmund Hawthorne and Adrian Agnelli and Indrani Lakshmaniah, rise to the very pinnacle of that potentiality, despite the brevity and fragility of their lives.

It has been an enormous privilege to be part of that process, although I realize that not even my Commander truly recognizes the extent to which that is true. Humans see the sacrifices of the Brigade. They see the shattered war hulls, the casualty roles. They see the Bolos which have been decommissioned, the older Bolos whose personality centers were burned when they became dangerously obsolescent. In their inner hearts, they fear that we who serve as Humanity's sword and shield must resent the fact that our creation condemns us to a warrior's existence and the pain and death which so often awaits the warrior. They do not fully grasp the fact that we Bolos recognize in ourselves—in our fidelity, our sense of identity and continuity and our commitment to the proud history and honor code of the Dinochrome Brigade—an echo of flawed Humanity's endless struggle to achieve that same fidelity, that same commitment. They gave us as our common birthright that greatness for which they themselves must eternally strive, and the best among them have served—and died—on our command decks, as loyal to the beings of molecular circuitry and alloy and fusion power plants as ever the Dinochrome Brigade has been to the beings of fragile protoplasm who created us. And that is why we can never resent them. Because even in their failures, they have always honored the compact between us.

I believe Maneka, to whom, more than any other Bolo commander, it has been given to experience both aspects of the Brigade's tradition and continuity, may actually have come to understand that Bolo-Human compact better even than we Bolos do. And that understanding is a part of what fits her so well to the task to which she has been called even after the death of the Human body in which she was born.

I am proud of her, and of the privilege of serving with her. Almost as proud as I am grateful for the insight into Humanity which she has given me.

"—the planetary defense component, of course, will be, as always, the responsibility of the Dinochrome Brigade."

This time there were no cheers when Simmons paused. Instead, there was a sort of breathless silence. An intense anticipation which could have been chipped with a knife. All eyes turned towards the far end of the field, and Hawthorne felt, rather than heard, the deep sigh which went up from that gathered multitude as twelve stupendous duralloy forms rumbled into motion.

Edmund Hawthorne's vision was no longer what it once had been, despite all that modern medicine could do. But he didn't have to see them clearly. He'd seen the schematics, the technical summaries. In fact, he'd helped develop the plans for their construction before his own retirement.

He looked out over them, seeing the massive hulls—each just over two hundred and twelve meters in length and almost thirty-five in width. The two main turrets, each mounting a pair of 210-centimeter Hellbores, on the articulated barbettes which gave both turrets an effective 360 degree field of fire. The twelve secondary turrets, each mounting a pair of 35-centimeter Hellbores. The missile hatches; the new, improved, thicker antiplasma appliques; the antipersonnel clusters; the smooth swell of hull over the bulk of the integral counter-grav generators which made them independent of any assault pod.

They were something new: the Mark XXXIV Bolo, named Resurgent and developed from the starting point of the Mark XXXII-XXXIII plans which had been stored in the colony ships' memories.

Each of them forty thousand tons of duralloy, weapons, and power, better than twice the size of the antiquated Mark XXVIII Bolo before whom they had stopped.

Yet as they stopped, they elevated their main and secondary weapons in salute, and after a moment, a hatch on the battalion commander's missile deck opened. A man in the uniform of the Dinochrome Brigade—young-looking, but with strands of silver threaded through his hair—rose through it on a counter-gravity lift. He had blue eyes, very dark hair, and a sandalwood complexion, and Edmund Hawthorne sat up a bit straighter in his life-support chair, old eyes bright with approval as his grandson saluted the ancient Bolo in which his grandmother's mind and spirit lived.

"Bastion Detachment, Dinochrome Brigade, Indrani Command, reporting for deployment off-planet, ma'am!" he said, his voice amplified over the Bolo's speakers.

There was a moment of silence, and then the voice of the Commanding Officer, Dinochrome Brigade, Republic of Indrani, replied.

"Very well, Colonel Hawthorne," Maneka Trevor said. "Prepare your battalion for deployment."

"Yes, ma'am!" Colonel Anson Hawthorne braced to attention, then turned on his heel to face the main optical head of the Bolo upon which he stood.

"Third Battalion, attention to orders!" he said. There was the briefest of pauses, and then an earthquake-deep bass voice responded.

"Unit Three-Four-Alpha-Zero-Zero-One-Sierra-Bravo-Romeo of the Line, Third Battalion, Dinochrome Brigade, Indrani Command, awaiting orders," the Bolo said.

"Very good, Sabre," Colonel Hawthorne said, and even through his grandson's formal tone, Edmund Hawthorne heard the affection as the younger man addressed the stupendous, self-aware machine.

"Prepare for deployment."

"The Battalion stands ready now, sir," the Bolo replied.

"Very good." The younger Hawthorne turned back to face Maneka/Lazarus. "Bastion Detachment is prepared to deploy, ma'am!" he announced.

"In that case, Colonel," Maneka's voice said, "board transports."

"Yes, ma'am!"

Colonel Hawthorne saluted once more, and then disappeared down the hatch from which he had emerged. The hatch closed, and the deep, vibrating thrum of massive counter-gravity generators arose from twelve Mark XXXIVs. It washed over the vast crowd, burrowing into their bones, almost but not quite overwhelming, yet nothing else happened for approximately ten seconds. And then, as effortlessly as soap bubbles, twelve mammoth war machines lifted lightly on their internal counter-grav. Slowly at first, then more and more rapidly, slicing upward through Indrani's atmosphere to the brand-new Chartres-class Bolo transports built specifically for them.

"It is good to be needed," Lazarus told her quietly. "To have a function. To be useful and to protect those for whom one cares, is it not, Maneka?"

"Yes. Yes, it is," she replied.

"Then you forgive me for consigning you to this fate without first consulting you?" the Bolo said, even more quietly, and Maneka felt the eyebrows she no longer possessed rising in surprise. It was the first time, in all the years they'd shared, that Lazarus had explicitly posed that question, and she was unprepared for the tentative, almost uncertain tone in which it was asked.

"Of course I do!" she said quickly. "There's nothing to forgive. You've given me over a human century with people I love—and relatively speaking, far longer than that with you. And like you just said, you've also given me the opportunity to continue to protect the ones I love. Lazarus, if I'd wanted to, I could have self-terminated long ago. I've never even been tempted."

"I am ... relieved to hear that," Lazarus said after a moment. "I had believed that to be the case, yet I have also discovered that there are things I fear more than combat. The possibility that I had, with the best of intentions, condemned one for whom I care deeply to the equivalent of Purgatory, was one of them. Which is why it has taken me so long to find the courage to ask."

Maneka was about to reassure him further when they were interrupted.

"Maneka," Edmund Hawthorne subvocalized over their com link.

"Yes, Ed?"

"It was good, wasn't it?" he asked almost wistfully.

"Yes, it was," she agreed. "Anson is a fine officer—one of the best we've ever had. He and Sabre will do just fine on Bastion."

"Oh, I'm sure he will," Hawthorne said. "But that wasn't really what I was asking. I meant ... all of it.

Everything, since Seed Corn. It's been good, hasn't it?"

"Well, there's been the odd bad moment," she replied after a moment. "But over all? I'd have to say it hasn't been just 'good,' Love. It's been much better than that. Although I have to wonder why you and Lazarus both seem to feel the need for reassurance on that point just now."

"Oh, he did, did he?" Hawthorne chuckled. "Two great minds, with but a single thought ... between them." He chuckled again, shaking his head. "You know, it's been odd, hasn't it? A sort of strange menage a trois."

"I suppose you could put it that way," she said. "But surely you've never thought you and Lazarus were in some sort of competition, have you?"

"No, of course not. And yet you've been so central to both of us. And, if I'm honest, I think I am just a little bit jealous of him, in a wistful sort of way. There's so much he'll still see and do with you."

"Ed, you know it might be possible—"

"No," he said, firmly. "We've discussed it before. You and Lazarus still aren't sure how you reestablished and reintegrated your personality in that matrix. I'm not sure I could. And, to be honest, Dearheart, I'm tired. I've had an incredibly long, full life. One full of challenges, achievements, wonderful people. But this chassis wasn't designed to last as long as Lazarus. I'm ready to call it a day, and much as I love you, I don't really want to trade up to a Bolo at this late date."

"We'll miss you, Lazarus and I," she told him softly.

"I know. But you'll remember me, too. I find that ... comforting." He was silent for several moments, then spoke again. "You can still see them, can't you? You and Lazarus?"

"Do you have any idea, woman, how proud of them you sound?"

"Well, of course I'm proud of them!"

"No, the question I should have asked is whether or not you realize how proud you sound of all of them? All of your Bolo commanders—not just Anson—and of the Bolos themselves, as well. They're all your children, aren't they? Anson, of course. But the Bolos, too. Anson is yours and mine, but Sabre is yours and Lazarus'. All of them, the children of your heart and mind."

"Yes, Ed. Yes, they are."

"Good. Because I've just been thinking about that quotation of your General MacArthur you and Lazarus told me about. The one about old soldiers."

He paused once more, long enough for her to begin to worry just a bit.

"What about it?" she prodded finally.

"Well, the first half of it was accurate enough. You didn't die—either of you. But I've been thinking about the second half."

"The bit about fading away?"

"Exactly. I don't think I'll see another Founders' Day, Maneka. The doctors and I have seen that coming for a while."

"Ed—!"

"No, don't interrupt," he said very gently. "I told them not to share the information with you. You're a worrier where the people you care about are concerned, and I didn't want you worrying about me. And, like I said, I'm ready for a good, long sleep. But promise me something, Maneka. Please."

"What?" The tears she could no longer shed hovered in her voice, and the old man seated among his family—and hers—on the missile deck of the Bolo in which she lived smiled lovingly.

"Promise me that MacArthur was wrong, Love," he said. "Promise me you won't 'fade away.' That you—and Lazarus—will look after yourselves and all the other people I love, and all the people they love, and the people those people will love. In the end, that's what it's all about, isn't it? Not hatred for the 'enemy'—even the Dog Boys—but protecting the people and things we love. You and Lazarus do that so well, Maneka. Promise me you'll keep doing it."

Maneka swiveled the main optical head so that he could look directly into it. For a moment she longed once more for the human eyes she had lost so long ago, wished he could look into them one more time, see the love and the deep, bittersweet joy his words had kindled deep inside her. He couldn't, of course. And, she knew, he really didn't have to. Not after so many long decades together. But whether he needed to see it or not, she needed to express it, and her smoky soprano voice was very quiet, and infinitely gentle, in his mastoid implant.

"Of course we will, my love," she said. "Of course we will."