“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.”