by David Weber
“But it’s still operational, isn’t it?” Salvatore asked urgently. “I mean, your radio message said it saved your steading.”
“Oh, he’s operational, Ma’am,” Jackson assured her, and looked up at the looming machine. “Please give the Mayor a status report, Shiva.”
“Unit One-Zero-Niner-Seven-SHV of the Line is presently operational at seven-eight-point-six-one-one percent of base capability,” a calm, pleasant tenor voice responded. “Current Reserve Power level is sufficient for six-point-five-one hours at full combat readiness.”
The Mayor took an involuntary step back, head turning automatically to look at Shattuck, and the ex-Marine gave her a grim smile. “Don’t worry, Regina. Seventy-eight percent of a Mark XXXIII’s base capability ought to be able to deal with anything short of a full division of manned armor, and if they had that kind of firepower, we’d already be dead.”
“Good.” Salvatore drew a deep breath, then nodded sharply. “Good! In that case, I think we should consider just what to do about whatever they do have.”
“Shiva?” Jackson said again. “Could you give the Mayor and the Marshal your force estimate, please?”
Once again, Shattuck heard that dangerous, excited edge in Jackson’s voice—the delight of a kid with a magnificent new toy, eager to show off all it can do—and then the Bolo replied.
“Current Enemy forces on Ishark consist of one Star Stalker-class heavy cruiser, accompanied by two Vanguard-class Imperial Marine assault transports, and seven additional transport ships of various Imperial civil designs.” Shattuck had stiffened at the mention of a heavy cruiser, but he relaxed with an explosive release of breath as Shiva continued calmly. “All Enemy warships have been stripped of offensive weapons to maximize passenger and cargo capacity. Total Melconian presence on this planet is approximately nine hundred and forty-two Imperial military personnel and eight thousand one hundred and seven non-military personnel. Total combat capability, exclusive of the area defense weapons retained by the cruiser Starquest, consists of ten Kestrel-class assault shuttles, one Skoll-class medium combat mech, twelve Eagle-class scout cars, eight Hawk-class light recon vehicles, and one understrength infantry battalion.”
“That sounds like a lot,” Salvatore said, looking at Shattuck once more, and her quiet voice was tinged with anxiety, but Shattuck only shook his head.
“In close terrain where they could sneak up on him, they could hurt him—maybe even take him out. But not if he knows they’re out there… and not if he’s the one attacking. Besides, those are all manned vehicles. They can’t have many vets with combat experience left to crew them, whereas Shiva here—” He gestured up at the war—scarred behemoth, and Salvatore nodded.
“Nope,” the marshal went on, “if these puppies have any sense, they’ll haul ass the instant they see Shiva coming at them.”
“They can’t, Marshal,” Jackson put in, and Shattuck and Salvatore cocked their heads at him almost in unison. “Their ships are too worn out. This is as far as they could come.”
“Are you sure about that?” Shattuck asked.
“Shiva is,” Jackson replied. “And he got the data from their own computers.”
“Damn,” Shattuck said very, very softly, and it was Jackson’s turn to cock his head. The marshal gazed up the moons for several, endless seconds, and then, finally, he sighed.
“That’s too bad, Jackson,” he said. “Because if they won’t—or can’t—run away, there’s only one thing we can do about them.”
My audio sensors carry the conversation between Chief Marshal Shattuck and my Commander to me, and with it yet another echo of the past. Once again I hear Colonel Mandrell, the Eighty-Second’s CO, announcing the order to begin Operation Ragnarok. I hear the pain in her voice, the awareness of where Ragnarok will lead, what it will cost. I did not understand her pain then, but I understand now… and even as I hear Colonel Mandrell in Chief Marshal Shattuck’s voice, so I hear a nineteen-year-old Diego Harigata in my new Commander’s. I hear the confidence of youthful ignorance, the sense of his own immortality. I hear the Diego who once believed—as I did—in the honor of the regiment and the nobility of our purpose as Humanity’s defenders. And I remember the hard, hating warrior who exulted with me as we massacred terrified civilians, and I am not the Shiva that I was at the end, but the one I was in the beginning, cursed with the memories of Diego’s end, and my own.
I listen, and the pain twists within me, for I know—oh, how well I know!—how this must end.
“You mean you want to just kill them all?” Rorie Deveraux asked uneasily. “Just like that? No negotiation—not even an offer to let them leave?”
“I didn’t say I liked it, Rorie,” Allen Shattuck said grimly. “I only said we don’t have a choice.”
“Of course we have a choice! We’ve got a Bolo, for God’s sake! They’d be crazy to go up against that kind of firepower—you said so yourself!”
“Sure they would,” Shattuck agreed, “but can we depend on their not being crazy? Look at it, Rorie. The very first thing they did was send nuke-armed shuttles after the nearest steading—yours, I might add—and Shiva says they’ve got at least ten Kestrels left. Well, he can only be in one place at a time. If they figure out where that place is and work it right, they can take out two-thirds of our settlements, maybe more, in a single strike. He can stop any of them that come within his range, but he can’t stop the ones that don’t, and for all we know, we’re all that’s left of the entire Human race!” The marshal glared at the elder Deveraux, furious less with Rorie than with the brutal logic of his own argument. “We can’t take a chance, Rorie, and Shiva says they couldn’t move on even if we ordered them to.” The older man looked away, mouth twisting. “It’s them or us, Rorie,” he said more quietly. “Them or us.”
“Your Honor?” Rorie appealed to Mayor Salvatore, but his own voice was softer, already resigned, and she shook her head.
“Allen’s right, Rorie. I wish he wasn’t, but he is.”
“Of course he is!” Jackson sounded surprised his brother could even consider hesitating. “If it hadn’t been for Shiva, they’d already have killed you, Ma, Pa—our entire family! Damn right it’s them or us, and I intend for it to be them!” Rorie looked into his face for one taut moment, then turned away, and Jackson bared his teeth at Shattuck.
“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.”
“But—” Durak began, only to close his mouth with a click as Tharsk waved a hand.
“Enough!” the commander said harshly. “It is no more Janal’s fault than yours—or mine, Durak. He shared his readings with us, just as we shared his conclusions with him.” The engineer looked at him for a moment, then flicked his ears in assent, and Tharsk drew a deep breath. “You say it’s operating on reserve power, Janal. What does that mean in terms of its combat ability?”
“Much depends on how much power it has, sir,” Janal said after a moment. “According to the limited information in our database, its solar charging ability is considerably more efficient than anything the Empire ever had, and as you can see from the drone imagery, at least two main battery weapons appear to be intact. Assuming that it has sufficient power, either of them could destroy every ship in the flotilla. And,” the tactical officer’s voice quivered, but he turned his head to meet his commander’s eyes, “as it is headed directly for us without waiting for daylight, I think we must assume it does have sufficient energy to attack us without recharging.”
“How many of our ships can lift off?” Tharsk asked Durak. The engineer started to reply, but Rangar spoke first.
“Forget it, my friend,” he said heavily. Tharsk looked at him, and the astrogator bared his fangs wearily. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “The Bolo is already in range to engage any of our ships as they lift above its horizon.”
“The Astrogator is correct, sir,” Janal agreed quietly. “We—”
He broke off suddenly, leaning closer to his screen, then straightened slowly.
“What?” Tharsk asked sharply, and Janal raised one clawed hand in a gesture of baffled confusion.
“I don’t know, sir,” he admitted. “For some reason, the Bolo has just stopped moving.”
* * *
“What d’you mean, ‘decline the order’?” Jackson demanded. “I’m your commander. You have to obey me!”
A long, still moment of silence hovered, and then Shiva spoke again.
“That is not entirely correct,” he said. “Under cer
tain circumstances, my core programming allows me to request confirmation from higher Command Authority before accepting even my Commander’s orders.”
“But there isn’t any—” Jackson began almost desperately, then made himself stop. He closed his eyes and drew a deep, shuddering breath, and his voice was rigid with hard—held calm when he spoke again.
“Why do you want to refuse the order, Shiva?”
“Because it is wrong,” the Bolo said softly.
“Wrong to defend ourselves?” Jackson demanded. “They attacked us, remember?”
“My primary function and overriding duty is to defend Humans from attack,” Shiva replied. “That is the reason for the Dinochrome Brigade’s creation, the purpose for which I exist, and I will engage any Enemy who threatens my creators. But I am also a warrior, Commander, and there is no honor in wanton slaughter.”
“But they attacked us!” Jackson repeated desperately. “They do threaten us. They sent their shuttles after us when we hadn’t done a thing to them!”
“Perhaps you had done nothing to them, Commander,” Shiva said very, very softly, “but I have.” Despite his own confusion and sudden chagrin, Jackson Deveraux closed his eyes at the bottomless pain in that voice. He’d never dreamed—never imagined—a machine could feel such anguish, but before he could reply, the Bolo went on quietly. “And, Commander, remember that this was once their world. You may call it ‘Ararat,’ but to the Melconians it is ‘Ishark,’ and it was once home to point-eight-seven-five billion of their kind. Would you have reacted differently from them had the situation been reversed?”