Old Soldiers

by David Weber

  "I should have detected his presence before he fired." Self-condemnation was like some huge, stony weight in Lazarus' voice.

  "Not your fault." She realized, vaguely, that Lazarus had pulled them both into hyper-heuristic mode. Which was odd. She hadn't realized they could do that when their personalities weren't fully merged. Then she realized her mind wasn't really working very well.

  "How bad is it?" she asked.

  "Very bad," Lazarus told her quietly, his voice unflinching. "Major Atwater's senior medic is working to save your life, Maneka. He will not succeed."

  "Oh." She supposed she ought to have reacted more strongly to that, but somehow she couldn't.

  She felt Lazarus, as if he were ... coming physically closer to her. As if he had arms, and they were lifting her up as her own presence seemed to be fading.

  "It's cold, Lazarus," she thought.

  "I had so many things I meant to do," she told him, aware even as she did that she was losing focus, beginning to drift.

  "I know," he repeated.

  "You'll tell Edmund? Tell him I'm sorry?"

  "I will," he promised.

  "I wonder if Bolos have souls?" she wondered through the chill, drifting blackness. "I hope so. I hope Benjy is waiting for me out there. If he is, we'll both wait for you, too, Lazarus. I promise."

  "I know," he said yet again.

  "Hold me?" she asked, feeling her anchor fraying, her oddly detached mind and thoughts floating further and further from her physical presence.

  "Of course," that gentle voice said from the blackness, and she sensed those huge, invisible arms folding themselves tightly about her. Even her detached thoughts knew that was ridiculous, that Bolos had no arms. But reality was unimportant just now. "I will hold you until the end, Maneka," his vast, comforting voice said.

  "Good," she murmured, nestling down into the embrace like a sleepy child. She sensed the flow between them, the glowing, intricately woven web which had made them one, allowed them to accomplish so much, and the beauty of it glittered before her fading mental eye like a tapestry of light. But the tapestry was also fading, dimming as she gazed at it, and she was oddly content to watch it go.

  There was silence for a time. A very long time, for two beings joined in the hyper-heuristic reality of Bolo-kind. And then, at the very last, Maneka Trevor spoke once more to the enormous presence sheltering the flicker of her life.

  "It's cold, Lazarus," she whispered sleepily. "It's so cold ..."

  10

  Edmund Hawthorne sat on the bluff above the ocean, watching its wrinkled silver and black roll towards him endlessly under Indrani's two moons. He could hear the booming mutter of the surf at the foot of the bluff, exploding in spouts of silver-struck foam and heaving black water, and the light of the paired moons spilled across the sea like rippled searchlights. The breeze atop the bluff was stiff, ruffling his hair and plucking at his clothing, bringing him the scent of the ocean mingled with the perfume of the native, night-flowering bushes about him which they hadn't gotten around to naming yet.

  He raised the bottle to eye height, holding it up between him and the brighter of the two moons to peer at the level inside it. Still almost half full, he noted. At the rate he was going, it would probably last him till at least first moonset. Of course, he could always just slug it back, use it for anesthesia. There were times he was tempted to do just that, despite his innate distaste for maudlin melodrama. It would be nice to forget, however briefly, how much it hurt. Someone had once told him that pain was part of life, that loss was the price human beings paid for allowing themselves to care in the first place. He'd thought at the time that it was a remarkably platitudinous thing for a reasonably intelligent person to say. In fact, he still did.

  He took another swallow, and smooth, liquid fire flowed down his throat, like biting honey with just an edge of rawness.

  Lauren Hanover was a woman of many parts, he reflected with a chuckle as he lowered the bottle once more. Not only had she saved her industrial module from the Dog Boys, but she'd put together a remarkably good distillery. At least she'd bothered to clear it with Governor Agnelli's council ahead of time, unlike one or two other operators he could think of. And once she had the opportunity to age some of it properly and take that raw edge off, she was probably going to become comfortably wealthy off of it. But for now, she was still giving away bottles of what she called "test product" to friends.

  "'The first taste is free,' hey, Lauren?" he murmured. "That's okay. That's fine."

  He realized he'd spoken aloud and looked around. Maybe he'd been killing this bottle a little more quickly than he'd thought he was, if he was starting to talk to himself. Or, worse, to people who weren't there. But there was no one to hear. No one but Lazarus, parked well back from the edge of the bluff, main battery trained out to sea. And Lazarus was wise enough to leave a man to his thoughts, even if the thinker in question was close enough to drunk to be speaking those thoughts out loud.

  Hawthorne's mouth twisted with a bitterness he knew was totally unfair as he gazed at the towering, moon-shot black bulk of the Bolo. It wasn't Lazarus' fault. It wasn't anyone's fault, aside from the goddamned Melconians. Mary Lou Atwater blamed herself for it. He felt confident that Lazarus blamed himself for it, too. But it was just one of those things, he supposed. One of those damned, bitterly ironic things.

  He capped the bottle carefully and lay back in the stiff, native grasses, listening to them hiss and rustle in the wind. The faint sounds of machinery came to him through the wind sound. They'd been going on nonstop, day and night, for the fifty-three days, twelve hours, and—he raised his forearm to consult his chrono—thirty-seven minutes since Lazarus had come grinding out of the mountains on his crippled tracks with his commander's body sealed inside the standard, military-issue body bag on his missile deck.

  His internal damage control and repair systems had already been doing what they could; the other repair remotes had deployed themselves from the automated depot aboard the assault pod after he had paused in the exact center of Landing while an honor guard of Jeffords' militia removed Maneka's body from his care at last.

  The Bolo hadn't said a word. It had simply sat there, optical heads tracking as the militiamen and women carried Maneka away, and then every one of its surviving secondary and tertiary weapons had elevated in salute before it lurched back into motion.

  No one had been quite certain where Lazarus was going, but they should have guessed, Hawthorne thought. This had been Maneka's favorite spot. She'd often parked Lazarus here and sat up on top of his main turret to enjoy the alien stars, the moonlight, and the sea. Now Lazarus stood in exactly the same spot, attended by the mechanical minions who were repairing as much of his damage as they could.

  Until they got their industrial infrastructure up and running, it would be impossible to repair him fully, of course. Just fabricating the necessary duralloy would be impossible for at least another couple of years. But Jeffords, Maneka's successor as the colony's senior military officer, had shared the Bolo's analysis with Hawthorne. The odds were overwhelming—better than 99.95 percent, according to Lazarus—that the Melconian transport which had managed to follow them here was the only ship which knew where they'd gone. If there had been a second ship, then the soonest it could possibly bring other Dog Boy warships back to Lakshmaniah would be at least three standard years in the future. By that time, it should be possible to complete the repairs to Lazarus' armor, although that probably wouldn't matter if the Melconians sent along a proper task force.

  It was good that Bolo logic had supported human illogic in this case, Hawthorne thought, uncapping the bottle and taking another swallow. Because whether it had or not, the illogic would have triumphed in the end. He was certain of that.

  He snorted and sat back up, turning to gaze back westward, away from the sea. He imagined he could just make out the loom of the mountains, but he was pretty sure he was fooling himself. It was too dark for that, despite th
e moons. Yet he didn't have to see them. He felt them, standing tall and tangled in the dark, the barrier which had done exactly what Maneka had hoped it would by breaking up the Melconians' attack force, letting her spring her trap and cut them up before they could reach the settlement. The Council had already announced that those mountains would henceforth be known as the Trevor Range, and that their tallest peak would be known as Mount Maneka. There was snow on that peak, year-round, despite Indrani's climate, and Hawthorne found that fitting somehow.

  Then there was the Cenotaph. The sketches Hawthorne had seen were still tentative and preliminary, but all of them included the towering column at the center of a formal garden, and the duralloy plaques facing it, listing the names of every single human—including the personnel of Commodore Lakshmaniah's task force—who had died to reach and hold Indrani. And atop the column, looking out across the sea she'd loved so much, would be a statue of Maneka.

  None of which would bring back the woman Edmund Hawthorne had loved.

  He grimaced, half-angry at himself for the undeniable self-pity of that thought. He wasn't the only person who'd lost someone. Hell, almost everyone on Indrani had lost someone they'd loved! Not to mention all the friends and family members they had left behind forever when they embarked for Seed Corn in the first place. And Maneka would have kicked his butt if she'd seen him sitting around nursing her memory like some sort of wound.

  He shoved himself to his feet and stood in the breezy dark. Not even a hint of a sway, he noted.

  Good. That probably meant he wasn't more blasted than he'd thought. He nodded to himself, slid the bottle into the thigh cargo pocket of his uniform trousers, and started walking towards Lazarus.

  An unwinking red eye turned in his direction as he approached. One of Lazarus' optical heads, he knew. As he got closer, the Bolo's exterior lights switched themselves on—dim, at first, in consideration of Hawthorne's darkness-accustomed vision, but growing brighter. The automated repair mechs working on him hadn't required light, of course, and Hawthorne recognized the Bolo's courtesy in providing it for him.

  He walked around to the front, standing between Lazarus and the ocean. That, Maneka had explained to him, was the position from which custom and courtesy required a human to address a Bolo.

  The jagged contours of Lazarus' wrecked glacis towered high above him, wrenched and twisted by the inconceivable fury of the blast of directed fusion which had finally breached it. The lights Lazarus had switched on for him threw the wreckage and the extent of the Bolo's damage into merciless contrast, and Hawthorne realized again that he could have walked through the gaping wound in Lazarus' frontal armor without even being required to duck his head.

  "Good evening, Lazarus," he heard himself say. His voice sounded harsh in his own ears against the rumble of the surf and the hissing voice of the wind. It was the first time he had spoken directly to the Bolo since before Maneka's death.

  "I've come to apologize," Hawthorne said abruptly. "I've been sitting over there resenting the fact that you're still alive and Maneka isn't. Stupid of me, I know. Wasn't your fault. And even if it had been, if you'd died, too, the Puppies would have wiped Landing out. But I did resent it. Stupid or not, I did. And you didn't deserve that."

  "There is no need to apologize, Lieutenant," the Bolo said after a moment. "Bolos understand grief and loss. And we understand it far better than I sometimes think our creators truly intended us to. I, too, have blamed myself for what happened to my Commander. I have replayed and reanalyzed my sensor data from the twenty-five minutes before her death, attempting to isolate the datum I ought to have seen and responded to. Yet I have found no such datum. The Enemy who killed her was simply too well concealed for anyone to detect before he fired."

  "I know." Hawthorne closed his eyes for a moment, then nodded. "I know," he repeated more strongly. "It's just that ... I miss her."

  He pulled the bottle back out of his pocket, opened it, and raised it in salute to the Bolo's optical head, so far above him. Then he took another sip.

  "That was for me," he said, recapping the bottle. "I'd drink for both of us, but I'm close enough to drunk already. Maneka wouldn't like it if I passed out in a drunken stupor out here. Hell," he chuckled, "I wouldn't like it! It's supposed to rain before morning, and it'd be damned embarrassing to manage to catch pneumonia in the middle of the summer because I was too drunk to come in out of the rain!"

  "I agree that the potential for embarrassment would be high," Lazarus told him. "However, if you should happen to go to sleep, for whatever reason, I would certainly employ my remotes to construct temporary shelter for you."

  "Decent of you," Hawthorne said. He folded his arms across his chest and leaned back against a towering stack of track plates, gazing up at the Bolo.

  "I talked to Dr. Agnelli day before yesterday," he said after a moment. "Maneka and I had both made donations, you know. And under the terms of her will, well ..."

  His voice trailed off, and he drew a deep breath. This is ridiculous, he thought. Here I am, in the middle of the night, explaining to a machine that I don't know what I really want to do. No, be honest, Ed. The real problem is that you don't know whether or not you have the guts to take it on by yourself.

  "I want to do it," he heard himself saying to the monstrous Bolo looming above him. "I really do. But I'm ... well, scared, I guess. I wanted to have kids with Maneka. For the two of us to raise them together. Now I'm not really sure I want them for themselves, or if I just want them because they'd be some kind of echo of her. Like managing to hang onto a little piece of her, even though she's dead. And kids need to be wanted for who they are, loved for who they are, not just because they remind you of someone else. And raising them by myself, a single parent. What if I fucked up, Lazarus? What if I made mistakes, failed her kids because I didn't know what I was doing?"

  "I am a Bolo, Lieutenant," Lazarus replied after another brief pause. "I am a war machine, a soldier.

  A killer. My perspective upon what makes a successful Human parent is not, perhaps, the most reliable one. However, it seems to me that the questions you are asking indicate both the depth of your grief and the seriousness with which you would approach the responsibilities of parenthood, and I feel certain that Captain Trevor would agree with me. I have had many commanders over the course of my existence.

  Some have been better tacticians than others. Some have been more aggressive than others. None were more compassionate or more aware of her responsibilities—not simply as the commander of a Unit of the Line, but as a human being—than Captain Trevor. I believe that she would urge you to make the decision you feel is correct. But I know from conversation with her, and from the time we spent linked, that she would cherish no doubts about your suitability as the parent of her children, single or not. You might make mistakes, as most parents do, yet it would never be because you had not done your very best. She loved you very much, Lieutenant, and Maneka Trevor would not have loved someone who was capable of violating his responsibilities as a father."

  "Thank you, Lazarus," he said, finally. "That ... means a lot to me."

  "You are welcome, Lieutenant. I wish it were possible for me to do more. Indeed, I had hoped it would be. But she is gone, and I must confess that I would very much like to watch her children grow to adulthood. For themselves, as you yourself said, and not simply as a living memento of her. But perhaps also as a promise that life continues. That what she died to protect, will live on."

  Hawthorne gazed up at the Bolo and surprised himself with a smile.

  "Well, Lazarus, I suppose a single parent could do worse for a godfather for his kids than a Bolo. It'd sure as hell trump the 'My old man can beat up your old man' thing, wouldn't it?"

  "I had not thought of it in precisely that light," Lazarus replied with a soft electronic chuckle.

  "Probably not," Hawthorne agreed. "I know you Bolos are supposed to be a bloodthirsty lot, but we humans have spent a lot longer than you have thinking
long and homicidal thoughts."

  "I imagine so, but even so, I would sus—"

  Lazarus' voice stopped. It didn't slow, or slur, or fade. It just stopped in mid-syllable, and Hawthorne jerked upright as the red power light on the optical head facing him blinked suddenly off.

  "Lazarus?"

  No response. Not even a flicker.

  "Lazarus?"

  Hawthorne took two quick steps towards the Bolo before he made himself stop. If something had happened to Lazarus, what did he think he could do about it? He was no Bolo tech! Hell, he would have been barely qualified to hand a real Bolo tech his tools! But if something was wrong with Lazarus then—

  "Ed."

  Edmund Hawthorne froze, his eyes suddenly huge, as the optical head power light blinked back on and the Bolo spoke once more. Not in the mellow tenor he heard before, but in another voice. A smoky, almost purring soprano.

  "Ed," the Bolo said again, and then it giggled. Unmistakably, it giggled, and the eyes which had gone wide in shock suddenly narrowed in a combination of disbelief and something else.

  "Oh, Ed," the soprano said contritely a moment later. "I'm sorry. But if you could have seen your expression—!"

  "Lazarus," Hawthorne said harshly, "this isn't funny, goddamn it!"

  "No, it isn't," the soprano said. "But it isn't Lazarus doing it, Ed. It's me—Maneka."

  "Maneka is dead!"

  "Well, yes, I suppose I am. Sort of." Hawthorne leaned back against the pile of track plates again, then somehow found himself sliding down them into a sitting position as the soprano continued. "It's just that, well, I don't seem to be gone."

  "What ... what do you mean?"

  "That's going to be just a bit difficult to explain," Maneka's voice—and it was Maneka's voice; somehow Hawthorne was certain of that—replied.

  "I will. But bear in mind that we're in some pretty unexplored territory here. All right?"