Hawthorne remembered his last flagship, before his incredible seniority had sent him permanently dirt-side at last. The superdreadnought IRNS Guthrie Chin would have annihilated six or seven times her own mass in Concordiat capital ships, far less the best the Melconian Empire had boasted, at the time Operation Seed Corn was first mounted. And more recent ships were significantly more powerful than the Guthrie ... which, he thought with a trace of nostalgia, after over three decades in the Reserve Fleet, had finally been scrapped three years ago as hopelessly obsolescent.
No, if the Republic encountered the Empire, he did not expect the Empire to enjoy the experience.
Unfortunately, as the Concordiat had learned, quantity had a quality all its own. If the Empire had won the war against the Concordiat, then it was all too likely that it would still have the size to absorb any attack the Republic could launch and still pay the price to punch out a single star system.
"Are you keeping an eye on your blood-oxygen monitors, Ed?" a familiar soprano purred through the com implanted in his mastoid.
"No reason to bother, is there?" he subvocalized back. "Not with you and Lazarus snooping on them for me!"
"Somebody has to watch out for an old fart like you. Besides, think how the kids would react if you dropped dead on them today, of all days!"
He managed to turn his belly laugh into an almost convincing coughing fit, although he doubted it fooled any of their children. They were too accustomed to Dad's one-sided or even totally subvocal conversations with Mom ... among other things. Growing up knowing your mother lived inside a fifteen-thousand-ton Bolo was enough to give any child a ... unique perspective, he supposed.
"You should have married Lauren when you had the chance, Ed," Maneka teased gently. "Think of how rich you'd be! And running the Republic's biggest distillery would have made an amusing project for you after they finally managed to dragoon you into retiring. Always assuming," she continued thoughtfully,
"that your liver survived the experience."
"Lauren was perfectly satisfied with the two husbands she had," Hawthorne retorted. "And it's not as if I were exactly lacking—dashing officer that I was—in female companionship."
"No, you weren't," she said fondly, and he smiled slightly at the gratitude in her voice. He wondered, sometimes, if she regretted the loss of the physical intimacy they'd once shared. If she did, it had never shown, and she'd never resented any of the women—the many women, he corrected himself with another, deeper smile—who'd shared his life. Yet she was right. He'd never married. Which probably, he conceded, said something just a bit odd about his own psyche. Not that he particularly cared.
He was about to say something else when his oldest daughter, Maneka, touched him on the shoulder.
"I can tell from your expression that you and Mom are giving each other a hard time again, Dad," she said with a smile. "Still, I think this is the part you wanted to see."
"Humph! Giving her a 'hard time,' indeed! Woman's got an entire damned Bolo to beat up on me with!"
"You seem to have held your own fairly well over the years," she pointed out. "Now hush and listen!"
He grinned at her unrepentantly, but he also obeyed, focusing his attention on the speaker. Young Spiro Simmons it was, he saw. General Spiro Simmons, these days, the uniformed deputy commander in chief of the Republic's military.
"—and generations of dedication," Simmons was saying. "Our Founders would, I think, have much to feel proud of if they could see this day, yet all that we have accomplished we owe to them. It was their courage, their sacrifice, and their unfaltering determination and dedication which allowed us not simply to survive, but to prosper. Now it is our turn to bring that same dedication and determination to yet another star system, and—"
Hawthorne listened with an attentive expression, because his daughter was right, they were getting to the part he'd dragged himself away from his retirement villa to see. Although judging from what he'd heard so far, young Spiro still had a ways to go.
Well, that was all right. Today marked the official inauguration of the Republic's first extra-Lakshmaniah colony, and God knew everyone deserved the opportunity to pat themselves on the back. He remembered the first time the colonizing referendum had been voted upon. He'd still been Chief of Naval Operations then, and he'd been secretly relieved when the referendum failed.
There was much to be said for expanding, for finding additional baskets for some of their eggs. But as the fellow who'd been responsible for protecting Lakshmaniah, the thought of spreading his resources thinner hadn't precisely appealed to him. And there was always that lurking fear—more prevalent among the rapidly disappearing ranks of the Founders than among their descendants, he admitted—that expanding into other star systems would make them a bigger target. If the Melconians had triumphed and eventually expanded in Lakshmaniah's direction once more, additional settled star systems might well make the Republic more vulnerable to premature discovery by its enemies.
He looked at the shuttles dotted across Agnelli Field's immense expanse, comparing them in his own mind to the faded memories of Seed Corn's original expedition. The new colony in the defiantly named Bastion System would begin with an initial population of almost a half million, protected by six battle squadrons and massive prefabricated orbital defenses. Nor would Bastion be dependent solely upon spaceborne defenders.
Ah! Spiro was getting down to it at last!
"I don't like Ed's bio readings," Maneka told Lazarus.
"Maneka, he is one hundred and thirty-one Standard Years old," the Bolo replied gently. "For a Human of his age, his readings are remarkably good."
"I know," she sighed. "It's just ..."
Her voice trailed off with the strong impression of a mental shrug, and the Bolo allowed himself to radiate a sense of understanding coupled with the assurance that his comfort would be there for her on the inevitable day.
Maneka sent back the flow of her own gratitude. It was odd, she reflected yet again, how their relationship had altered since she first reawakened in his backup survival center. In many ways, they were closer than ever, and Lazarus had learned far more about human emotions—and occasional irrationality—than any other Bolo was ever likely to have learned. After all, the two of them had spent over a Standard Century living in the same "body."
Yet they'd lived there as two totally separate entities. When they linked fully, they fused even more seamlessly than they had when Maneka had possessed a human body, but between those periods of fusion, there was a scrupulously maintained firewall between their personalities and viewpoints. Which was probably just as well for her, given the overwhelming nature of any Bolo's personality.
There were still times, many of them, when she regretted the loss of her mortality. Her psychotronic state had done nothing to reduce the pain when friends and loved ones died, and although Lazarus'
sensors and computational ability had become hers, there were moments when she longed inexpressibly to once more experience the smell of hot chocolate, the taste of a hot dog smothered in chili and onions.
The touch of another human being's lips upon her own. She could still relive those experiences, for her psychotronic memory of them was as perfect and imperishable as any Bolo's, but it wasn't the same, and never could be.
Yet if much had been lost, much had also been given, she told herself. Her own particular version of Operator Identification Syndrome was just a tad more pronounced than that of any other Bolo commander in history, she thought with a flicker of amusement. In fact, in very many ways, she'd had two
"husbands" for the past hundred and five Standard Years. She and Ed might not have shared any physical relationship with one another over those years, but the shared parenting of their children and her own total, if not precisely normal, involvement in their lives had produced a binding which defied the use of any other terminology. And for those same years, she and Lazarus had been, quite literally, wedded in a single body.