"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.