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.