Bolo!

“You’ll be our youngest and most junior commander, and I’m giving you Eight-Six-Two-BNJ-’Benjy’-as your Bolo. He’s been around the block more than a few times, Lieutenant. You can learn a lot from him, just as you’d better be learning from everyone else around you. I’m sure you and your classmates at the Academy worked the math on your odds of surviving to retire. Assuming that anyone is allowed to retire in the foreseeable future, of course.”

He smiled briefly.

“If you did the math, then you know your odds aren’t especially encouraging. Recognizing that will probably contribute to a realistic perspective, but don’t fixate on it. That sort of thing can create a self-fulfilling prophecy situation. Instead, remember this, Lieutenant. Every single thing you can learn here, every trick you can pick up, every tactical insight and every speck of deviousness you can acquire, will shift the probabilities in your favor. It will also make you a more effective commander, more dangerous to the enemy in action. For right now, that’s your entire responsibility-to learn. To learn how to survive, how to meet the enemy, and how to defeat him. A Mark XXVIII Bolo like Benjy is too long in the tooth for front-line deployment in a war like this, but he’s been around for one and a quarter Standard Centuries. Over a hundred and twenty-five years, Lieutenant Trevor. He’s picked up quite a few tricks in that time. Learn them from him.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll try,” she said quietly, when he paused.

“Don’t ‘try,’ Lieutenant,” he said sternly. “Do.”

He held her eyes for another few moments, then nodded briskly.

“Very well, Lieutenant Trevor. Welcome to the Thirty-Ninth.” He stood and shook her hand briefly but firmly, then nodded his head at the door. “Sergeant Schumer will have your formal order chip assigning you to Benjy. Major Fredericks is out on maneuvers at the moment, so the sergeant will probably turn you over to Sergeant Tobias. He’s your company’s senior Bolo tech, and that makes him the best man to introduce you to Benjy, anyway. Good luck, Lieutenant.”

He straightened up, and she came back to attention and saluted. He returned it.

“Dismissed, Lieutenant.”

“Ever met a Mark XXVIII, ma’am?” Sergeant Alf Tobias asked respectfully as he and Maneka walked across the Company parade ground towards the looming mountain of weapons and alloy which awaited them.

“On active duty?” Maneka asked, glancing at him, and he nodded.

“Only once,” she admitted. “I did work with a couple of retired Mark XXVIII AIs at the Academy, though.”

“You did?” Tobias cocked his head at her. “That’s good, ma’am,” he told her. “I know the XXVIII’s not exactly first-line equipment anymore, but I always thought they had… I du

“I imagine so,” Maneka agreed, remembering the “staff” Bolo AIs retired from their war hulls and assigned to the Academy to interact with its students. One, in particular-28/B-163-HRP-had had a delightfully acerbic personality which made her cognomen of “Harpy” a perfect fit. Maneka doubted she would ever forget the afternoon Harpy had spent critiquing one Cadet Trevor’s less-than-brilliant solution to a tactical problem, and she smiled as she looked back at the sergeant.

“Personally,” she said, “I’m glad the Brigade started retiring and upgrading software instead of just burning personality centers, Sergeant.”

“You and me both, Ma’am,” Tobias agreed in turn, giving her a look which held a hint of approval. “Never did seem fair to just throw ‘em away when they got too old,” he continued. “Of course, the older models-before the XXIVs and XXVs-probably had too many inhibitory features to make upgrading their AIs into new marks practical. They weren’t really designed to be upgraded in the first place.”

“I know.” Maneka started to say something more, then changed her mind as the two of them stepped into the shadow of the looming Bolo. She half-expected Tobias to immediately introduce her to the huge combat machine, but the sergeant waited patiently for her to absorb its full impact, first.

Unit 28/G-862-BNJ was a 15,000-ton Mark XXVIII, Model G, Bolo, one of the old Triumphants. His hull measured eighty-seven meters from his much-decorated prow to his aftermost antiperso

BNJ’s glacis glittered with the welded-on battle honors of well over a century of active service. Maneka recognized perhaps half of the campaign ribbons, including awards for several of the Xalontese and Deng War campaigns. She felt embarrassed at not recognizing the others and made a mental note to look them up as soon as possible. But if she failed to recognize some of those, the awards for valor were another matter. She ran her eyes down the long, glittering row of platinum and rhodium stars and tried not to show her reaction to the discovery that BNJ had received no less than three Galactic Clusters. There were probably at least some equally or even more highly decorated Bolos still in service, but there could not have been many.

And yet, for all the Mark XXVIII’s undoubted firepower and all BNJ’s proven lethality and courage, Colonel Tchaikovsky and Sergeant Tobias were right. BNJ and his brothers and sisters were no longer fit for combat against first-line enemy opposition.

At the Academy, Maneka had studied everything she could get her hands on about the Melconian Empire’s ground combat systems, and she knew the human advantage in psychotronics and artificial intelligence generally gave even older Bolos like BNJ an enormous edge in any one-on-one confrontation with the Puppies’ ma

But if their cybernetics were vastly inferior to the Concordiat’s psychotronic-based systems, they were also less massive, and the Melconians had accepted the use of antimatter-reactors rather than the bulkier cold-fusion plants humanity employed. The result was an 18,000-ton fighting machine with two echeloned main turrets, each mounting the Melconian equivalent of three 81-centimeter Hellbores. The turret arrangement meant that each turret masked the other’s fire over an arc of about twenty-five degrees, but that still meant all six Hellbores could be brought to bear on a single target over a three hundred and ten-degree field of fire. That much main battery armament meant that the Surtur’s secondary armament was inevitably much lighter than current-generation Bolos mounted, although it was heavier than that of an older model, like BNJ, and the Surtur came in two distinct variants. One “standard” model, and a “support” model which suppressed the secondary armament almost entirely in favor of an indirect fire capability at least twenty-five percent heavier than BNJ’s.