by David Weber
“Tommy?”
Thomas Mallory looked up from where he crouched on the floor of the packed compartment. His eight-year-old sister had sobbed herself out of tears at last, and she huddled against his side in the protective circle of his arm. But Thomas Mallory had learned too much about the limits of protectiveness. At fifteen, he was the oldest person in the compartment, and he knew what many of the others had not yet realized-that they would never see their parents again, for the fifty-one of them were the sole survivors of Morville.
“Tommy?” the slurred voice said once more, and Thomas cleared his throat.
“Yes?” He heard the quaver in his own voice, but he made himself speak loudly. Despite the air filtration systems, the compartment stank of ozone, explosives, and burning organic compounds. He’d felt the terrible concussions of combat and knew the vehicle in whose protective belly he sat was savagely wounded, and he was no longer certain how efficient its audio pickups might be.
“I have failed in my mission, Tommy,” the voice said. “The Enemy has cut us off from our objective.”
“What enemy?” Thomas demanded. “Who are they, Lance? Why are they doing this?”
“They are doing it because they are the Enemy,” the voice replied.
“But there must be a reason!” Thomas cried with all the anguish of a fifteen-year-old heart.
“They are the Enemy,” the voice repeated in that eerie, slurred tone. “It is the Enemy’s function to destroy… to destroy… to dest-” The voice chopped off, and Thomas swallowed. Lance’s responses were becoming increasingly less lucid, wandering into repetitive loops that sometimes faded into silence and other times, as now, cut off abruptly, and Thomas Mallory had learned about mortality. Even Bolos could perish, and somehow he knew Lance was dying by centimeters even as he struggled to complete his mission.
“They are the Enemy,” Lance resumed, and the electronic voice was higher and tauter. “There is always the Enemy. The Enemy must be defeated. The Enemy must be destroyed. The Enemy-” Again the voice died with the sharpness of an axe blow, and Thomas bit his lip and hugged his sister tight. Endless seconds of silence oozed past, broken only by the whimpers and weeping of the younger children, until Thomas could stand it no longer.
“Lance?” he said hoarsely.
“I am here, Tommy.” The voice was stronger this time, and calmer.
“W-What do we do?” Thomas asked.
“There is only one option.” A cargo compartment hissed open to reveal a backpack military com unit and an all-terrain survival kit. Thomas had never used a military com, but he knew it was preset to the Dinochrome Brigade’s frequencies. “Please take the kit and com unit,” the voice said.
“All right.” Thomas eased his arm from around his sister and lifted the backpack from the compartment. It was much lighter than he’d expected, and he slipped his arms through the straps and settled it on his back, then tugged the survival kit out as well.
“Thank you,” the slurred voice said. “Now, here is what you must do, Tommy-”
My questing sensors detect him at last. He is moving slowly, coming in along yet another valley. This one is shorter and shallower, barely deep enough to hide him from my fire, and I trace its course along my maps. He must emerge from it approximately 12.98 kilometers to the southwest of my present position, and I grind into motion once more. I will enter the valley from the north and sweep along it until we meet, and then I will kill him.
Thomas Mallory crouched on the hilltop. It hadn’t been hard to make the younger kids hide-not after the horrors they’d seen in Morville. But Thomas couldn’t join them. He had to be here, where he could see the end, for someone had to see it. Someone had to be there, to know how fifty-one children had been saved from death… and to witness the price their dying savior had paid for them.
Distance blurred details, hiding Lance’s dreadful damages as he ground steadily up the valley, but Thomas’s eyes narrowed as he saw the cloud of dust coming to meet him. Tears burned like ice on his cheeks in the sub-zero wind, and he scrubbed at them angrily. Lance deserved those tears, but Thomas couldn’t let the other kids see them. There was little enough chance that they could survive a single Camlan winter night, even in the mountains, where they would at least have water, fuel, and the means to build some sort of shelter. But it was the only chance Lance had been able to give them, and Thomas would not show weakness before the children he was now responsible for driving and goading into surviving until someone came to rescue them. Would not betray the trust Lance had bestowed upon him.
The oncoming dust grew thicker, and he raised the electronic binoculars, gazing through them for his first sight of the enemy. He adjusted their focus as an iodine-colored turret moved beyond a saddle of hills. Lance couldn’t see it from his lower vantage point, but Thomas could, and his face went suddenly paper-white. He stared for one more moment, then grabbed for the com unit’s microphone.
“No, Lance! Don’t-don’t! It’s not the enemy-it’s another Bolo!”
The Human voice cracks with strain as it burns suddenly over the command channel, and confusion whips through me. The transmitter is close-very close-and that is not possible. Nor do I recognize the voice, and that also is impossible. I start to reply, but before I can, another voice comes over the same channel.
“Cease transmission,” it says. “Do not reveal your location.”
This time I know the voice, yet I have never heard it speak so. It has lost its crispness, its sureness. It is the voice of one on the brink of madness, a voice crushed and harrowed by pain and despair and a purpose that goes beyond obsession.
“Lance,” the Human voice-a young, male Human voice-sobs. “Please, Lance! It’s another Bolo! It really is!”
“It is the Enemy,” the voice I once knew replies, and it is higher and shriller. “It is the Enemy. There is only the Enemy. I am Unit Zero-One-Zero-Three-LNC of the Line. It is my function to destroy the Enemy. The Enemy. The Enemy. The Enemy. The Enemy.”
I hear the broken cadence of that voice, and suddenly I understand. I understand everything, and horror fills me. I lock my tracks, slithering to a halt, fighting to avoid what I know must happen. Yet understanding has come too late, and even as I brake, LNC rounds the flank of a hill in a scream of tortured, over-strained tracks and a billowing cloud of dust.
For the first time, I see his hideously mauled starboard side and the gaping wound driven deep, deep into his hull. I can actually see his breached Personality Center in its depths, see the penetration where Enemy fire ripped brutally into the circuitry of his psychotronic brain, and I understand it all. I hear the madness in his electronic voice, and the determination and courage which have kept that broken, dying wreck in motion, and the child’s voice on the com is the final element. I know his mission, now, the reason he has fought so doggedly, so desperately to cross the Badlands to the life-sustaining shelter of the mountains.
Yet my knowledge changes nothing, for there is no way to avoid him. He staggers and lurches on his crippled tracks, but he is moving at almost eighty kilometers per hour. He has no Hellbore, no missiles, and his remaining infinite repeaters cannot harm me, yet he retains one final weapon: himself.
He thunders towards me, his com voice silent no more, screaming the single word “Enemy! Enemy! Enemy!” again and again. He hurls himself upon me in a suicide attack, charging to his death as the only way he can protect the children he has carried out of hell from the friend he can no longer recognize, the “Enemy” who has hunted him over four hundred kilometers of frozen, waterless stone and dust. It is all he has left, the only thing he can do… and if he carries through with his ramming attack, we both will die and exposure will kill the children before anyone can rescue them.
I have no choice. He has left me none, and in that instant I wish I were Human. That I, too, could shed the tears which fog the young voice crying out to its protector to turn aside and save himself.
But I cannot weep. There is only one
thing I can do.
“Good bye, Lance,” I send softly over the battalion command net. “Forgive me.”
And I fire.
With Your Shield
Lieutenant Maneka Trevor had seldom felt quite so young.
She climbed out of the hover cab which had delivered her to Fort Merrit and made herself stop and stretch thoroughly. She was a slender, fine-boned young woman, but the cramped passenger compartment of the small cab she’d been able to afford hadn’t been designed to transport baggage as well as people. She’d made the entire flight from Nike Field to Fort Merrit with her duffel bag and footlocker piled in on top of her legs. Besides, stretching the kinks out gave her an obvious reason to stand in place, gazing out over what she could see of the Merrit reservation.
The sprawling military base, named for one of the Dinochrome Brigade’s fallen heroes, stretched as far as the unaided human eye could see. Most of its visible structures were low-lying, mere swells of ceramacrete rising like enormous, half-buried golf balls from the surrounding tropical vegetation. There were a few exceptions. One of them, judging by the signs in front of it, was the fort’s primary administration block. That particular structure was close to thirty stories tall, and crowned with a bewilderingly complex clutter of communications arrays. Maneka wondered if it had been built so much taller than the base’s other buildings specifically to make very youthful officers reporting for their first field assignments feel even more nervous, or if that had simply been an unanticipated bit of serendipity.
Her mouth twitched in a wry little smile at the trend of her own thoughts, and she stopped stretching, tugged the hem of her uniform tunic back down, and activated her baggage hand unit.
The footlocker and duffel bag floated out of the cramped cab and arranged themselves in neat formation behind her on their individual counter-grav units. She’d already paid the fare, and the cab’s AI called a cheerful “Have a nice day!” after her before it zipped its door shut, pivoted, and went whining back towards Nike Field.
Maneka squared her shoulders and advanced along the seemingly endless ceramacrete walkway towards Admin’s imposing front entrance with her baggage tagging obediently along behind.
Mirrored armorplast towered above her, reflecting the deep-toned blue sky and brilliant white clouds of Santa Cruz. The day was only moderately warm for early summer on Santa Cruz, but Maneka had been born and raised among craggy peaks of the planet of Everest. She much preferred a cooler, drier climate, not to mention a considerably lower atmospheric pressure, and although her Brigade uniform’s smart fabric maintained her body temperature in the range she’d selected, she felt sweat beading her forehead and gathering under her short, dark hair. At least Everest wasn’t so far out of the human-occupied norm that its citizens couldn’t adjust even to sweltering, humid sweat boxes like Santa Cruz if they had to… eventually. And at least her genetic heritage meant she tanned quickly and deeply.
Of course, she admitted to herself, the climate isn’t the only reason you’re sweating today, now is it, Maneka?
She chuckled quietly at the thought, then donned her “official” face as she approached the sidearm-equipped sentry. The impeccably uniformed Brigade corporal stood at a comfortable parade rest, impassively watching her approach. His presence, Maneka knew, was a complete anachronism. Far more effective security systems guarded the perimeter and buildings of Fort Merrit, and a standard computer interface would have been more efficient at greeting visitors and directing them to their appropriate destinations.
Yet the corporal’s assignment here carried a message which was not lost on the shiny new lieutenant. However good the technology, however lethal and dedicated the units of the Dinochrome Brigade might be, human command authority was engineered into it at every level. Ultimately, the Brigade’s Bolos were humanity’s servants. Protectors as well, yes, and trusted battle companions. But in the end, human authority must be preserved at all levels.
The corporal came to attention and saluted as Maneka stopped in front of him. She returned the salute smartly and read his nameplate as she did so.
“Good afternoon, ma’am,” the noncom said briskly. “How may I assist the lieutenant?”
“Good afternoon, Corporal Morales,” she replied. “I’m reporting for assignment to the Thirty-Ninth Battalion. My orders are to report in to the Battalion CO’s office in the Admin Building.”
“I see. May I see the Lieutenant’s orders?”
“Of course.” Maneka handed across the chip folio containing not only her duty assignment orders but also all of the movement orders and transportation vouchers it had taken to get her here from the Sandhurst System. Corporal Morales flipped quickly to her assignment orders and slipped the relevant chip into his wristband minicomp, then twiddled his fingers briefly on the virtual keyboard.
From her perspective, Maneka couldn’t make out the details of the holo display the minicomp projected in front of Morales’ eyes, but the corporal obviously found what he was looking for quickly.
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, snapping the chip back out of the minicomp and restoring it to its proper storage slot before he handed the entire folio back to Maneka. “The Lieutenant will find Colonel Tchaikovsky’s office on the fifteenth floor. Number 1532. Take the center grav lift, turn right at the fifteenth floor landing, and continue to the end of the corridor.”
“Thank you, Corporal Morales. Could you tell me if there’s some place I could check my baggage while I report in?”
“Yes, ma’am. Press the ‘Housekeeping’ button on the building console. It’s located to your right, just inside the entrance.”
“Thank you,” Maneka repeated, and the corporal nodded, came back to attention, and saluted her once more. She returned the courtesy and stepped past him into the Admin Building.
The building console was where Morales had indicated, and Maneka punched up Housekeeping.
“How may I assist you, Lieutenant Trevor?” a pleasant voice asked, speaking through the Brigade transceiver surgically implanted in Maneka’s left mastoid.
“I need to put my baggage in temporary storage while I report in,” she replied to the empty air.
“Of course. One moment, please.”
Maneka watched as her floating baggage twitched slightly. The building’s artificial intelligence had automatically and instantly identified her from the IFF code programmed into her implanted Brigade communications system. It took the computer a few more seconds to derive the proper command channel frequencies and codes from her baggage hand unit, which had been a civilian purchase. But it was more than equal to the challenge, and Maneka stood back as the foot locker and duffel went gliding smoothly away down a side passage.
“Your baggage will be stored pending your return, Lieutenant Trevor,” the AI assured her. “Just press the recall button on your hand unit when you wish to reclaim it.”
“Do I have to return here for that?”
“No, Lieutenant Trevor. It may take somewhat longer to route it to you, but you may recall it from any point inside the Admin Building.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“You are most welcome,” the AI replied, and Maneka walked across the lobby towards the grav lifts.
She rather doubted that the building computer had a fully developed personality. One thing any Brigade officer, even one as shiny and new-minted as she was, understood was the combined expense and complexity of the advanced psychotronics which gave Bolos complete, autonomous, functional personalities as complex as any human being’s. But even AIs which lacked full personalities carried programming which recognized and responded to courtesy… and automatic consideration for the emotions of electronic individuals was an excellent habit for a Brigade officer to develop.
The grav lift delivered her to the fifteenth floor with its customary disorienting speed and efficiency. Mindful of Morales’ instructions, she turned to the right and quickly picked up the wall signage directing her towards “Office of the Co
mmanding Officer, 39th Batt, Dinochrome Bgde.”
The sight of those words sent a sudden bright shiver through her. It was close now, so close!
She drew a deep breath, ordered herself to project an aura of calm, and walked briskly down the corridor.
Colonel Everard Tchaikovsky had discovered years ago that if he kept his computer’s holo display adjusted to exactly the right height and angle, it not only eased the strain long hours spent in front of it imposed on his neck, but also permitted him to look directly through it at the door of his office while obviously keeping his attention focused on his routine paperwork.
Now he let his eyes appear to linger on an absolutely fascinating breakdown of the most recent squabble between Central Depot Maintenance and the Battalion’s chief armorer while he actually studied the young woman Staff Sergeant Schumer had ushered into his office.
The young woman in question stood at parade rest, waiting with every outward sign of patience for him to notice her arrival. She was small, he thought. No more than a hundred and fifty-five or a hundred sixty centimeters tall, and so slender he was tempted to think of her as delicate. Her cobalt blue eyes, set in an oval face with high cheekbones, a determined-looking, high-arched nose, and slightly pouty lips made an intriguing contrast with her very dark black hair and sandalwood complexion. They had a pronounced epicanthic fold, as well, those eyes, he noticed, and wondered exactly which strains of humankind’s zestfully bubbling genetic stew had produced her.
He quirked an index finger, touching a function key on his virtual keyboard, and the logistical report disappeared, replaced by the concisely encapsulated abstract from Lieutenant Trevor’s records Sergeant Schumer had prepared and uploaded for him.