BNJ’s glacis glittered with the welded-on battle honors of well over a century of active service. Maneka recognized perhaps half of the campaign ribbons, including awards for several of the Xalontese and Deng War campaigns. She felt embarrassed at not recognizing the others and made a mental note to look them up as soon as possible. But if she failed to recognize some of those, the awards for valor were another matter. She ran her eyes down the long, glittering row of platinum and rhodium stars and tried not to show her reaction to the discovery that BNJ had received no less than three Galactic Clusters. There were probably at least some equally or even more highly decorated Bolos still in service, but there could not have been many.
And yet, for all the Mark XXVIII’s undoubted firepower and all BNJ’s proven lethality and courage, Colonel Tchaikovsky and Sergeant Tobias were right. BNJ and his brothers and sisters were no longer fit for combat against first-line enemy opposition.
At the Academy, Maneka had studied everything she could get her hands on about the Melconian Empire’s ground combat systems, and she knew the human advantage in psychotronics and artificial intelligence generally gave even older Bolos like BNJ an enormous edge in any one-on-one confrontation with the Puppies’ manned armored units. The Melconian heavy combat mechs-the Surturs, as the Concordiat had code-named them-had heavy AI support, but the AIs in question were far less capable and required command inputs at almost every stage. They were roughly equivalent to an old Mark XX, or possibly only to a Mark XIX, albeit with far more powerful weapons than those ancient Bolos had mounted: fast, lethal, and capable as long as they operated within preplanned “canned” battle plans, but much slower than any current-inventory Bolo when faced with tactical situations outside their preprogrammed plans.
But if their cybernetics were vastly inferior to the Concordiat’s psychotronic-based systems, they were also less massive, and the Melconians had accepted the use of antimatter-reactors rather than the bulkier cold-fusion plants humanity employed. The result was an 18,000-ton fighting machine with two echeloned main turrets, each mounting the Melconian equivalent of three 81-centimeter Hellbores. The turret arrangement meant that each turret masked the other’s fire over an arc of about twenty-five degrees, but that still meant all six Hellbores could be brought to bear on a single target over a three hundred and ten-degree field of fire. That much main battery armament meant that the Surtur’s secondary armament was inevitably much lighter than current-generation Bolos mounted, although it was heavier than that of an older model, like BNJ, and the Surtur came in two distinct variants. One “standard” model, and a “support” model which suppressed the secondary armament almost entirely in favor of an indirect fire capability at least twenty-five percent heavier than BNJ’s.
The Surtur’s stablemate, the medium mech the Concordiat had code-named Garm, weighed in at barely nine thousand tons and was hopelessly outclassed against any Bolo. But the Melconians operated their armored forces in tactical units, called “fists,” each of which combined one Surtur with two of the Garms. With the lighter Garms to probe ahead and provide flanking units under the command Surtur’s tight tactical control, a Melconian “fist” was probably the most dangerous foe a unit of the Dinochrome Brigade had faced in centuries.
And there were a lot of fists out there. Which was one reason the Academy was now graduating two classes a year, instead of one.
As those thoughts flashed through her, BNJ’s forward main optical head unhoused itself and swivelled around to face her. She felt particularly buglike as the mammoth Bolo regarded her with every appearance of watching thoughtfulness, and her mouth wanted to twitch into a smile at the thought of how ridiculous she must look standing in front of him, with the top of her head reaching barely a quarter of the way up one of his bogey wheels.
“Benjy,” Sergeant Schumer said after a moment, “this is Lieutenant Trevor.”
The introduction, Maneka knew, was purely a formality. BNJ-it was considered the height of bad manners to refer to any Bolo by its cognomen until after one had been formally introduced to it-had undoubtedly scanned her implant IFF the instant she crossed his defensive zone perimeter. But over the centuries the Brigade had evolved an ironbound tradition of proper protocol and courtesy.
“I am pleased to meet you, Lieutenant,” a resonant baritone said pleasantly over the Bolo’s external speakers.
“Thank you,” she replied.
“The Lieutenant’s being assigned as your new Commander, Benjy,” Schumer said. “Command authentication: ‘When the bluebirds sing in the spring.’”
“Authentication accepted.” A red light blinked on the optical head, and then the baritone voice spoke again, this time directly to Maneka. “Unit Two-Eight-Golf-Eight-Six-Two-Baker-November-Juliette of the Line awaiting orders, Commander,” it said.
“Thank you, Benjy.” Maneka fought, almost successfully, to keep the tremors out of her voice as for the first time one of the stupendous, awe-inspiring war machines she had trained for almost eight Standard Years to command acknowledged her authority. She had never expected this moment to come so early in her career, even with the war’s intensity growing steadily to fresh heights of violence, and she inhaled deeply as she savored it.
“You’ll have to give Benjy his head a bit more, Lieutenant,” Major Angela Fredericks said over Maneka’s mastoid transceiver from her command couch aboard Unit 28/D-302-PGY. Her voice wasn’t precisely unpleasant, but it most definitely was pointed. “Don’t second-guess him. You don’t have the experience for that yet.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Maneka kept her tone steady, but her cheeks burned with embarrassment. Damn it, she knew Benjy’s BattleComp had a better grasp of any tactical situation than her own merely mortal perceptions and brain could match. And God knew that everyone knew no human being could possibly match the speed with which a Bolo “thought” and responded. Yet even knowing all that, she’d found herself issuing orders when her own situational awareness was obviously at least several seconds behind the decision-making curve, and Fredericks and Peggy had handed them-her-their heads.
“It’s a common beginner’s mistake, Lieutenant,” Fredericks said in a slightly gentler tone. “Once our own adrenaline gets engaged, we all forget how much faster the Bolos think. Trust me, even commanders with years of experience do it sometimes, but it’s something the newbies have to watch even more closely.”
“Yes, ma’am. I understand, and I’ll try not to let it happen again.”
“Do that,” Fredericks responded, and this time there was an actual suspicion of a chuckle in her voice. “Of course, if you manage to never let it happen again, you’ll have accomplished something absolutely unique in the Brigade’s history. Fredericks, clear.”
Maneka’s face felt hotter than ever, and she was devoutly grateful to the major for having officially terminated the conversation before she had to figure out how to respond to that last remark.
She lay back in the incredibly comfortable command couch in the center of Benjy’s command deck while Fredericks’ comments sank in. She was perched directly atop the Bolo’s personality center, her fragile flesh and his psychotronic brain both protected at the core of his warhull along with his powerplant. It would require a direct hit with a very heavy-caliber Hellbore to penetrate this deep, and protected by Benjy’s battle screen, antiradiation fields, and duralloy armor-over two meters thick across his glacis-Maneka could ride safely through the fringes of a nuclear blast.