“Tag, you’re it!” Maneka called out in delight as Benjy’s Hellbore’s integral range-finding lidar simulated a direct hit on Lazy.
“Why, you sneaky little twit!” Captain Joseph Takahashi replied over the com with a laugh. “Lazy and I were sure that was you, over to the east.”
“Nope,” Maneka said smugly. “That, Captain sir, is a Mark 26 ECM drone.”
“And just how the hell did you sneak a ground-based decoy into position without us spotting you?” Takahashi demanded.
“We cheated,” Maneka confessed cheerfully. “You two didn’t know that Major Fredericks told us about the simulation yesterday.”
“She did what?”
“She told us yesterday,” Maneka repeated, smiling at the surprise in Takahashi’s tone. “She said Major Hendrixson said you and Lazy have been getting just a little bit too smug about your simulation scores. And, I’m pretty sure that if you go back and check your mission briefing, you’ll discover that no one ever told you the opposition force hadn’t had time to prepare.”
“They did so-” Takahashi began, then broke off abruptly. Maneka reached up and clasped her hands behind her head as she reclined luxuriantly in Benjy’s command couch and waited. It took several seconds, but then Takahashi’s chagrined voice came back over the com.
“All right,” he said resignedly. “Lazy’s gone back and analyzed the briefing, and you’re right. Although, in my own humble opinion, Major Hendrixson deliberately implied that it would be a meeting engagement, with both sides arriving simultaneously.”
“That’s because your part of the simulation included dealing with faulty intelligence,” Maneka told him. She chuckled, then grew slightly more serious.
“Actually, sir,” she said more formally, “I think she picked Benjy and me for this partly because I’m still so much of the new kid on the block that she figured we’d probably need the edge. Or that we could certainly use it, anyway.”
“Don’t sell yourself too short, Lieutenant,” Takahashi replied. “You and Benjy are coming along a lot faster than Lazy managed to bring me up to speed. And the major didn’t tell you how to set up your little trap, did she?”
“No,” Maneka admitted, “Benjy and I came up with that on our own.”
“And executed perfectly,” Takahashi pointed out. “Don’t forget that. It’s not easy for even another Bolo to surprise a Bolo. Even when one of the Bolos in question comes in fat, dumb, and happy.”
“Thank you, sir.” Maneka raised her right hand to Benjy’s visual pickup with the thumb extended in the ancient gesture of triumph, and the red light above the lens winked in reply.
Joseph Takahashi was only about three Standard Years older than she herself was, but he’d been assigned to the Thirty-Ninth for almost two of those three years. Unlike her, he’d reported for duty with the Battalion early enough in the war to get in after the war had entered its new, uglier phase but before Brigade HQ had begun raiding the second-line battalions so ruthlessly for experienced commanders. He’d served the traditional six-month apprenticeship being mentored by one of those same experienced commanders, and he was very, very good.
He and his Bolo-28/G-179-LAZ—were assigned to Major Carlos Hendrixson’s First Company, where they had established an enviable reputation for consistently outscoring everyone else in the regular simulations and field exercises. Of course, Takahashi did have a certain advantage over his fellow commanders, over and above the fact that he was one of the sneakiest tacticians Maneka had yet encountered. Lazy, whose cognomen clearly had been selected because of how poorly it described him, was the Battalion’s senior Bolo. Although his personality center was currently mounted in a Model G war hull like Benjy’s, he had begun his existence as a Model B the better part of one hundred and seventy years ago. His current hull bore the battle honors he’d won in his original configuration, as well as those he’d received after his personality center was transferred to his present hull, and they were headed by one Maneka had never before seen outside the Brigade’s standard reference works: the Platinum Galactic Cluster… with star.
The Battle of Chesterfield, in which Lazy had won that award, was the stuff of the Brigade’s legends. It was also a classic tactical study at the Academy, where not a single student had ever managed to win the engagement in a simulation.
A single company of Mark XXVIIIs had gone up against an entire battalion of Kai-Sabres during the Fringe Rebellion which had followed the Xalontese War. The Kai-Sabres had been clones of the Mark XXVIII itself, built using stolen technology after decades of espionage, and they had been based upon the Model G, not the Model B. Although their weaponry fits had been very similar, the Kai-Sabres’ armor, battle screen, disrupter shields, and targeting systems had all been superior to those of Lazy and his three consorts, but Chesterfield had been a planet whose critical strategic importance meant it could not be yielded without a fight.
So Second Company, Twelfth Battalion, Ninth Regiment, of the Dinochrome Brigade had fought at three-to-one odds. And when the relief force arrived, Lazy had been the only surviving Bolo—or Kai-Sabre—on the planet. They’d found his immobilized wreck where he’d made his final stand in a rugged mountain pass just short of Chesterfield’s capital city, his commander dead on his breached command deck… and the last four Kai-Sabres stacked up dead in front of them.
His damage had been far too severe to merely “repair.” Fixing it would have cost more and taken longer than building an entire, newer Bolo from scratch. But by that time, the Brigade had adopted the practice of upgrading Bolo AIs, and a reserve Model G hull had been activated to receive his undamaged personality center. After which, he’d soldiered on for another full Standard Century.
Although she wasn’t about to admit it to anyone, Maneka was more than a little uncomfortable around Lazy. Benjy was almost six times as old as she was, with a distinguished record any Bolo might have envied, but Lazy was older still. And it was difficult, she’d discovered, to know precisely how to react when one found oneself in the presence of what was literally a living legend. Indeed, she often wondered how Takahashi had reacted when they told him who he was getting as his first Bolo command.
Probably tempted to cut his own throat, she thought with a grin, although she really didn’t know the captain or Lazy very well.
On the other hand, she reflected as Benjy rolled back towards the Company depot area, I don’t really know anyone outside the Third “very well” yet, now do I?
The past two and half months had flown past at breakneck speed for Lieutenant Maneka Trevor. In that time, she’d become even closer to Benjy—close enough, indeed, that she was guiltily aware that, as everyone had warned her she would, she had completely succumbed to Operator Identification Syndrome. When she considered it, any other outcome had probably been impossible. Benjy was, quite simply, the most wonderful person—organic or psychotronic—she’d ever known. In less than ninety local days, he’d become her closest friend, her most trusted confidant, and the mentor the Battalion had been unable to provide her in human form. She’d learned more from him in that short period than she had in all eight previous years of her training, and she knew it.
That intense concentration on her Bolo had pretty much eliminated any possibility of a social life, and although Major Fredericks had seen to it that she’d been smoothly slotted into Third Company, she didn’t even know some of the other companies’ Bolo commanders by sight. That was something she was going to have to start doing something about, and she knew it. In fact, the major had begun dropping gentle hints that now that she’d settled in with her Bolo, it was probably time she began getting to know some of the Battalion’s flesh-and-blood members, as well.