Old Soldiers

"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, begi

"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 i

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 ru