Old Soldiers

"Doctor, I—"

"I understand about your responsibilities," he interrupted in a firm tone. "But be honest with yourself, Captain. You aren't really ambulatory right now. You're simply sitting there, in that extremely uncomfortable chair, being stubborn. Well, you can sit in a hospital bed in considerably greater comfort and be equally stubborn while we try to salvage your leg, you know. Under the circumstances, the medical staff won't even object if people like Chief Branscomb come clumping into the ward to report to you."

"I—"

"Ma'am! I mean, Captain!"

The sudden, sharp voice over Hanover's earbug interrupted her stubborn, illogically obstinate resistance to Chamdar's suggestion. She tensed automatically, but even as she did, she realized that whatever had put that sharp edge in the voice wasn't yet another in the chain of disasters which had been reported to her over the past two days. This time the voice was excited, almost breathless.

"What, Foster?" she replied. At least with so few of her people left, recognizing voices was easy enough.

"Ma'am, somebody's just docked with the after lock!"

I am proud of my Commander.

She has refused to allow her fears and her doubt of her own capacity to prevent her from discharging her duties. In the fusion of our neural linkage, her awareness of how easy it would have been to allow Governor Agnelli to assume full control—and responsibility—was obvious to me. The strength of her temptation to do just that was equally obvious, yet however great the relief might have been, she never once seriously considered doing so.

It is fortunate that her reluctance to interface with me has disappeared. In the absence of a human support staff, she requires my capabilities as a substitute. Moreover, it is apparent to both of us—since it is impossible for either of us to conceal the realization from the other—that such intimate contact with my own personality has had a healing effect upon hers.

As hers has had upon mine, as well. I had not recognized the depth of my own "survivor's guilt" until I saw its mirror in her. And neither of us would truly have been able to recognize how irrational our own guilt was if we had not recognized how irrational it was for the other one to harbor such a self-destructive emotion.

Which is not to say my Commander is fully healed. She is, after all, Human, and Humans—as I have now discovered through direct personal experience—are both incredibly tough and equally incredibly fragile. Unlike Bolos, they are entirely capable of simultaneously entertaining mutually contradictory beliefs, and their capacity to question and doubt their past actions and decisions is .

. . extreme. My Commander has not and, I now realize, never will fully forgive herself for not preempting the Enemy's attack on Kuan Yin and the other two transports which were destroyed.

At the same time, she accepts as completely as I myself do that, painful as it was, it was the only viable tactic available to us.

Yet it occurs to me that within that characteristic lie the seeds which impelled a weak, nearly hairless biped, equipped with only the most rudimentary of natural weapons, to raise itself from a user of primitive stone tools to the conquest of half the explored galaxy. There is a strength, a dauntless willingness and courage to confront impossible odds and shoulder unbearable burdens, within Humanity. And without that strength and that ability, my kind would never have come into existence at all.

It is fitting, I believe, that my Commander should so thoroughly represent the refusal to surrender which has taken her people—and mine—to the stars.

Maneka Trevor leaned back in the command chair on Thermopylae's bridge and watched the navigational display as the convoy prepared to once again enter hyper-space and resume its interrupted journey.

She would have preferred to be back in her quarters, linked with Lazarus, watching the maneuver through his sensors. When the Brigade had decided to upgrade Lazarus with the neural interface capability and assigned her, as the sole surviving human member of the Thirty-Ninth Battalion, as his commander, the bright, enthusiastic Bolo tech had told her how wonderful it would be. At that moment, the last thing in the universe Maneka had wanted was to get that close to the single Bolo which had dared to survive when Benjy had not. Looking back, she was guiltily aware that she'd paid far less attention to the briefings and the training than she ought to have. But now, unlike then, she understood why that same enthusiastic tech had also warned her that one of the perils of the interface was the possibility of becoming dependent upon—addicted to, really—the sensors and computational speed and ability of the Bolo half of the fused personality.

That was an addiction to which, it seemed, it would have been only too easy for her to succumb. She knew Lazarus understood her concern, and that he certainly didn't "blame" her for putting a certain distance between them. Although, to be fair, that wasn't precisely what she'd done, either. It was more a case of rationing herself to those moments of semi-godhood when the two of them became one. She'd adopted a rigorously limited schedule, and established her own hierarchy of priorities to determine when circumstances truly justified linking fully with Lazarus outside of that schedule.

And there was another, intensely practical reason for her to be here on Thermopylae's bridge at this particular moment. She was discovering that her role as military commander of the expedition had a much greater political component than she'd anticipated. All of the adult members of the colony's perso

On the face of it, that was as ridiculous as her informing Governor Agnelli that her authority superseded his. Unfortunately, it would have been even more ridiculous for what amounted to an infantry brigadier who commanded a total of barely nine thousand militia men and women, to assert command over thirty-four thousand tons worth of Bolos and the woman who commanded them. Besides, the chain of command was legally clear and unambiguous.

But if she was going to command all those trained militia people in the event of an emergency, then she had to come to know them, and they had to come to know her. Just as it was imperative for Lieutenant Hawthorne and the crew of Thermopylae to know her and to trust her judgment. Which wasn't going to happen if she retired into a hermitlike symbiotic dependence upon her link to Lazarus.

"Liang'shu reports that the convoy will be prepared to enter h-space in another seven minutes, Captain Trevor," Hawthorne reported, as if to punctuate her own thoughts.

"Thank you, Captain," she said gravely, suppressing a temptation to smile as two people whose combined age was under sixty Standard Years, addressed one another with such formality. Although Edmund Hawthorne was clearly entitled to be addressed as "Captain" aboard the vessel he commanded, his formal rank was only that of a senior-grade Navy lieutenant. That was more than sufficient to command a vessel whose total human complement, exclusive of Maneka herself, numbered only thirty-six, but it was sobering to reflect that at twenty-six Standard Years, he was now the senior surviving regular Navy officer within several hundred light-years.