by David Weber
He smiled again, and this time his smile was harsh and ugly.
“It didn’t come cheap,” he went on after a moment. “Not for any of us. I’m the senior ranking officer the Ninth has left, and the entire ‘Division’ isn’t really more than one understrength brigade, but there isn’t a breathing Dog Boy on Chartres. On your way in, the Thirty-Ninth also took out what appears to have been their entire surviving fleet strength in the system after Commodore Selkirk got done with them, and Admiral Kwang’s relief task force got through to us two days ago. We lost almost seven hundred million people on Chartres, Lieutenant, but almost two billion others are alive because of you. Because of all of us, I suppose, but we couldn’t have done any of it without the Thirty-Ninth.”
Maneka looked at him, and a cold, icy fist squeezed her heart. He hadn’t said a word about the Battalion’s casualties, and he would have… unless he knew how much it was going to hurt when he did.
She closed her eye for just a moment, wishing with all her heart that she was still unconscious, but she wasn’t. And because she wasn’t, she had no choice.
“And the Battalion, sir?” she heard her voice ask levelly, almost as if it belonged to someone else entirely.
“And the Battalion… paid the price, Lieutenant,” Shallek said, meeting her single cobalt-blue eye unflinchingly. It wasn’t easy for him, she could see that, but he owed her honesty, and he paid in the coin of candor. Then he drew a deep breath.
“You’re the only surviving Bolo commander,” he said with terrible gentleness, and she stared at him in disbelief.
No, a small, stern voice deep within her said with ruthless clarity. Not disbelief. Denial.
But even as she thought that, she felt a wild, sudden surge of hope. Shallek had called her the only surviving Bolo commander, and that meant “Benjy?” she said. “Sir, Benjy—my Bolo. How badly is he damaged?”
Shallek looked at her, still meeting her gaze, and then, after a moment, shook his head.
“He didn’t make it, Lieutenant,” he said softly, and his gentle compassion was a dagger of fiery ice buried in her still-beating heart.
He was wrong. He had to be wrong. She was alive. That meant Benjy had to have survived, too, or she would have died in his destruction. She should have died in his destruction.
“The Bolo techs tell me one of your Bolos may survive,” Shallek went on and that same gentle voice. “Unit One-Seven-Niner-Lima-Alpha-Zebra. I understand his survival center is still intact, and the hit that took out his command deck and main personality center did surprisingly little additional damage. But every other unit of the Thirty-Ninth Battalion was destroyed in action.”
“But… but how—?” Her left hand moved weakly, gesturing around her at the hospital room and the medical equipment surrounding her bed, and Shallek shook his head.
“He got your survival capsule closed and pumped his entire command deck full of fire suppressant,” Shallek said. “The capsule’s emergency auto-medic kept you alive, and the suppressant had time to set its matrix before—”
He broke off, and Maneka’s eye squeezed shut in understanding. The fire suppressing foam used in the Bolos’ damage control systems was less effective at actually suppressing fires than other technologies might have been, but it was retained because within twenty seconds of deployment it set up into an artificial “alloy” almost as tough as the flintsteel Bolo warhulls had once been made of. Yet for all its toughness, it dissolved almost instantly under the touch of the proper nanotech “solvent.”
Benjy had used it to save her life. As he waded into that horrendous sea of fire, he had encased her duralloy capsule inside what was effectively a block of solid armor over three meters across.
Oh, Benjy, she thought miserably, her broken heart twisting within her. Oh, Benjy. How could you have done this to me?
“How did—” She broke off and clenched the fingers of her remaining hand into an ivory—knuckled fist.
“How did it happen?” she got out on the second attempt.
“I—” the Marine started, then paused and looked at the doctor.
“I advise against it,” the doctor said. “She’s in bad enough shape as it is. But—”
It was his turn to break off and look down at Maneka, and his mouth tightened.
“But I’ve seen this before,” he went on, his voice harsh, almost angry. Not at her, Maneka realized even through the crushing iron fist of her grief, but at something else.
“They pick them so young,” the white-clad man went on. “They train them. They give them war gods for friends. And when those gods die, something—”
He closed his mouth, jaw muscles clenching, then shook himself.
“Go ahead, Brigadier,” he said curtly. “Not knowing will only make her tear herself up inside even worse.”
Shallek gazed at the doctor for several seconds, then nodded and looked back down at Maneka.
“We got some of our own recon drones—the Ninth’s, I mean—in with you when your Battalion broke the line, Lieutenant,” he said. He reached into the left cargo pocket of his uniform and withdrew a small portable holo unit and laid it on a bedside table. “This is a recording of the imagery from one of those drones, Lieutenant Trevor. Are you certain you want to see it?”
Maneka stared up, wanting to scream at him for the stupidity of his compassionate question. There was nothing in the universe she wanted less than to view that imagery… and nothing that could possibly have stopped her. She tried to find some way to express that, but words were a clumsy, meaningless interface, and so she simply nodded.
Shallek’s nostrils flared. Then he pressed the play button.
The holo came up instantly, crystal clear, its shapes a light sculpture solid enough to touch, and Maneka felt herself falling into its depths. She saw six brutally damaged Bolos hammering forward, led by one whose hull bore the remnants of the unit code “862-BNJ” in half-obliterated letters down one scorched and seared flank.
From the drone’s perspective, she could see the glowing wound the Surtur Hellbore had blasted through Benjy’s armor. The one which had come so close to killing both of them. She could actually see a gray-white scab spilling out of the hole and some fragment of her brain recognized it as overflow from the fire suppressant with which he must have packed the entire web of his internal access spaces.
Explosions and energy weapons ripped and tore at them. Missiles screamed in and disintegrated under the pounding of point defense clusters and auto cannon or exploded in savage fury against battle screens that glowed incandescent with the fury of the energies they fought to somehow turn aside. Light and medium Melconian combat mechs charged to meet them, like packs of jackals charging wounded grizzlies. Infinite repeaters tore the jackals apart, grinding tracks smashed over their blazing corpses, grinding them into the mud, but still they came, and there were scores of them.
A handful of Surturs reared among them, towering over them like titans, and thunderbolts slammed back and forth as main battery fire added itself to the seething holocaust. Two of the Bolos lurched to a halt, belching smoke and incandescent fury as multiple Hellbores blasted through their armor. Surturs exploded as the four survivors smashed back, but two more of the Melconian war machines loomed suddenly on the Bolos’ flank. The exchange of fire lasted less than ten seconds; when it was done, every Surtur was dead… and only Benjy remained, still charging forward—all alone now—into the teeth of the desperate Melconian fire.
Maneka blinked her remaining eye hard. The film of tears defied her efforts, and she scrubbed at them furiously with her left hand. Uselessly. Her vision still blurred and ran, and yet she saw every hideous detail as Benjy advanced single-handedly into the very maw of Hell.
I should have been with him, she thought, and knew it was insane even as the thought hammered in her brain. She had been with him. Her own body was inside that staggering, smoking wreck of a Bolo as it clawed its way onward. But it wasn’t the same thing. She hadn’t been with
him—hadn’t been there for him in his march to Golgatha. He’d been alone, abandoned, left without the presence of even a single friend, and yet he never flinched. Never hesitated.
His entire starboard suspension system had been destroyed, but he blew the tracks and advanced on the bare bogeys. A Loki-class tank destroyer popped out of its hide behind him and lasted long enough to fire before a trio of ion bolts tore it apart. Its screaming plasma bolt smashed through the thinner armor at the rear of Benjy’s main turret, and the turret shattered, vomiting heat and shattered duralloy as it was consumed from within.
Maneka’s hand no longer scrubbed at her eye. It was pressed to her mouth, covering her trembling lips as she watched Benjy still advancing. She knew about Bolos’ psychotronic pain sensors, knew about the agony which had to be shrieking through him, but his surviving weapons remained in action. His infinite repeaters went to continuous maximum-rate fire, a ruinous rate which must burn them out within a handful of minutes, unless they exploded first, and the lash of their ion bolts blasted a molten path through the enemies still swarming down upon him.
They were like locusts, sensing the weakening of his defenses, flinging themselves against him, frantic to stop him before he reached the critical command node which was the heart and brain of their own defense. The massively defended command post she had ordered him to attack. Air cavalry mounts raced in, firing rockets and cannon that ripped through his wavering battle screen. Light, manned Hellbores lacerated his flanks, gouged half-molten chasms through his armor. Missiles and artillery fire exploded around him, and still he advanced.
And then, somehow—impossibly—the staggering wreck which had been her friend reached his final objective. His Hellbore was gone and his infinite repeaters were too light to penetrate the ceramacrete facing the hastily constructed command post. But he still had one weapon, and he ground slowly, agonizingly forward, until his 15,000-ton hull crunched over the bunker, smashing and crushing.
He lurched to a halt then, unable—or unwilling—to move further, and his surviving infinite repeaters continued to blaze as the Melconians closed in on him from all sides with a fury that would not be denied. He had accomplished his mission. Sanity should have told the Melconians there was no point in continuing to waste combat power against him when they might soon need it desperately against other foes.
But he’d cost them too much, hurt them too badly, for them to realize that. And so they swarmed towards him, wasting their strength, and Maneka realized—knew, as if she heard his baritone voice once again—that that was the reason he’d stopped where he was. Why he wasn’t even attempting to maneuver. Like the Invictuses of the 351st, he was deliberately drawing their remaining combat strength down upon himself… and away from the Marines advancing in the Battalion’s wake.
It could not last long. That was the only mercy Maneka could think of, yet even as she did, she knew how eternal those brief screaming minutes of agony and destruction must have been to a person who thought at psychotronic speed.
They came from all directions. Lokis, a handful of Fenrises, Heimdall reconnaissance mechs, air cavalry mounts, even Melconian infantrymen, and every one of them poured fire into Benjy’s dying hull. One by one his remaining weapons were silenced, blown into ruin, while breaches hammered deeper and deeper into him. Maneka knew she was sobbing aloud, and she couldn’t stop—didn’t want to stop—as his hull glowed brighter and brighter, hotter and hotter, with the transfer energy bleeding into it.
And still he fought, with all the incredible toughness of Bolo—kind and all the courage of his century—old psychotronic heart.
Yet any toughness, any courage, must eventually fail under that onslaught, and the Melconian pack swept over him at last. A Loki—one of the last half—dozen or less the Melconians still had—maneuvered into the kill position.
Benjy’s last surviving secondary turret was still firing, still killing targets with flashing precision, when the plasma lance ripped into his survival center at last.
Maneka could never remember the exact words Shallek said after that. They were only sounds, only noise. She knew he was telling her the Ninth Marines had only been able to break through because of Benjy. That his final stand had drawn in the Melconian reserves, concentrated the majority of the Melconian mobile strength in one spot, where the Marines’ light armored units had taken it from behind. That Benjy’s death had saved almost two billion human lives.
She knew all of that. Understood all of it. And yet, the words remained only sounds, only echoes of something which had no significance against the loss and anguish twisting deep in her soul.
They left her then, after a time, and Shallek took the holo player with him. Perhaps, she thought, he wanted to prevent her from replaying the record, witnessing Benjy’s death again and again. But if he did, it was wasted effort. She needed no holo player. Would never need one. The images were part of her now, burned into her, and she closed her eye as they washed over her once more.
“With your shield, or on it,” carrying it in triumph or carried upon it in death. That was the ancient admonition Benjy had once quoted to her on the day he explained the unspoken and unwritten compact between Bolos and their human commanders. To face death together. To share it when it came for them both.
But Maneka had come back neither with her shield nor on it. She hadn’t met her part of the compact. She knew it was irrational, insane, to blame herself for that. And she knew, as if Benjy were parked beside her bed telling her, that just as she would have given anything for his survival, he had wanted her to survive. And because he had, she would. However much it hurt, she would.
She rolled her head on the pillow, blotting her tears, and touched the grief she knew would never leave her again.
Oh, Benjy, she whispered in the silence of her mind.
Oh, Benjy.
A Time to Kill
Prologue
It was called Case Ragnarok, and it was insane. Yet in a time when madness had a galaxy by the throat, it was also inevitable.
It began as a planning study over a century earlier, when no one really believed there would be a war at all, and perhaps the crowning irony of the Final War was that a study undertaken to demonstrate the lunatic consequences of an unthinkable strategy became the foundation for putting that strategy into effect. The admirals and generals who initially undertook it actually intended it to prove that the stakes were too high, that the Melconian Empire would never dare risk a fight to the finish with the Concordiat—or vice versa—for they knew it was madness even to consider. But the civilians saw it as an analysis of an “option” and demanded a full implementation study once open war began, and the warriors provided it. It was their job to do so, of course, and in fairness to them, they protested the order… at first. Yet they were no more proof against the madness than the civilians when the time came.
And perhaps that was fitting, for the entire war was a colossal mistake, a confluence of misjudgments on a cosmic scale. Perhaps if there had been more contact between the Concordiat and the Empire it wouldn’t have happened, but the Empire slammed down its non-intercourse edict within six standard months of first contact. From a Human viewpoint, that was a hostile act; for the Empire, it was standard operating procedure, no more than simple prudence to curtail contacts until this new interstellar power was evaluated. Some of the Concordiat’s xenologists understood that and tried to convince their superiors of it, but the diplomats insisted on pressing for “normalization of relations.” It was their job to open new markets, to negotiate military and political and economic treaties, and they resented the Melconian silence, the no-transit zones along the Melconian border… the Melconian refusal to take them as seriously as they took themselves. They grew more strident, not less, when the Empire resisted all efforts to overturn the non-intercourse edict, and the Emperor’s advisors misread that stridency as a fear response, the insistence of a weaker power on dialogue because it knew its own weakness.
Imperial
Intelligence should have told them differently, but shaping analyses to suit the views of one’s superiors was not a purely Human trait. Even if it had been, Intelligence’s analysts found it difficult to believe how far Human technology outclassed Melconian. The evidence was there, especially in the Dinochrome Brigade’s combat record, but they refused to accept that evidence. Instead, it was reported as disinformation, a cunning attempt to deceive the Imperial General Staff into believing the Concordiat was more powerful than it truly was and hence yet more evidence that Humanity feared the Empire.
And Humanity should have feared Melcon. It was Human hubris, as much as Melconian, which led to disaster, for both the Concordiat and the Empire had traditions of victory. Both had lost battles, but neither had ever lost a war, and deep inside, neither believed it could. Worse, the Concordiat’s intelligence organs knew Melcon couldn’t match its technology, and that made it arrogant. By any rational computation of the odds, the Human edge in hardware should have been decisive, assuming the Concordiat had gotten its sums right. The non-intercourse edict had succeeded in at least one of its objectives, however, and the Empire was more than twice as large as the Concordiat believed… with over four times the navy.
So the two sides slid into the abyss-slowly, at first, one reversible step at a time, but with ever gathering speed. The admirals and generals saw it coming and warned their masters that all their plans and calculations were based on assumptions which could not be confirmed. Yet even as they issued their warning, they didn’t truly believe it themselves, for how could so many years of spying, so many decades of analysis, so many computer centuries of simulations, all be in error? The ancient data processing cliche about “garbage in” was forgotten even by those who continued to pay it lip service, and Empire and Concordiat alike approached the final decisions with fatal confidence in their massive, painstaking, painfully honest—and totally wrong—analyses.