Bolo!

The Surtur’s stablemate, the medium mech the Concordiat had code-named Garm, weighed in at barely nine thousand tons and was hopelessly outclassed against any Bolo. But the Melconians operated their armored forces in tactical units, called “fists,” each of which combined one Surtur with two of the Garms. With the lighter Garms to probe ahead and provide flanking units under the command Surtur’s tight tactical control, a Melconian “fist” was probably the most dangerous foe a unit of the Dinochrome Brigade had faced in centuries.

And there were a lot of fists out there. Which was one reason the Academy was now graduating two classes a year, instead of one.

As those thoughts flashed through her, BNJ’s forward main optical head unhoused itself and swivelled around to face her. She felt particularly buglike as the mammoth Bolo regarded her with every appearance of watching thoughtfulness, and her mouth wanted to twitch into a smile at the thought of how ridiculous she must look standing in front of him, with the top of her head reaching barely a quarter of the way up one of his bogey wheels.

“Benjy,” Sergeant Schumer said after a moment, “this is Lieutenant Trevor.”

The introduction, Maneka knew, was purely a formality. BNJ-it was considered the height of bad ma

“I am pleased to meet you, Lieutenant,” a resonant baritone said pleasantly over the Bolo’s external speakers.

“Thank you,” she replied.

“The Lieutenant’s being assigned as your new Commander, Benjy,” Schumer said. “Command authentication: ‘When the bluebirds sing in the spring.’”

“Authentication accepted.” A red light blinked on the optical head, and then the baritone voice spoke again, this time directly to Maneka. “Unit Two-Eight-Golf-Eight-Six-Two-Baker-November-Juliette of the Line awaiting orders, Commander,” it said.

“Thank you, Benjy.” Maneka fought, almost successfully, to keep the tremors out of her voice as for the first time one of the stupendous, awe-inspiring war machines she had trained for almost eight Standard Years to command acknowledged her authority. She had never expected this moment to come so early in her career, even with the war’s intensity growing steadily to fresh heights of violence, and she inhaled deeply as she savored it.

“You’ll have to give Benjy his head a bit more, Lieutenant,” Major Angela Fredericks said over Maneka’s mastoid transceiver from her command couch aboard Unit 28/D-302-PGY. Her voice wasn’t precisely unpleasant, but it most definitely was pointed. “Don’t second-guess him. You don’t have the experience for that yet.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Maneka kept her tone steady, but her cheeks burned with embarrassment. Damn it, she knew Benjy’s BattleComp had a better grasp of any tactical situation than her own merely mortal perceptions and brain could match. And God knew that everyone knew no human being could possibly match the speed with which a Bolo “thought” and responded. Yet even knowing all that, she’d found herself issuing orders when her own situational awareness was obviously at least several seconds behind the decision-making curve, and Fredericks and Peggy had handed them-her-their heads.

“It’s a common begi

“Yes, ma’am. I understand, and I’ll try not to let it happen again.”

“Do that,” Fredericks responded, and this time there was an actual suspicion of a chuckle in her voice. “Of course, if you manage to never let it happen again, you’ll have accomplished something absolutely unique in the Brigade’s history. Fredericks, clear.”

Maneka’s face felt hotter than ever, and she was devoutly grateful to the major for having officially terminated the conversation before she had to figure out how to respond to that last remark.

She lay back in the incredibly comfortable command couch in the center of Benjy’s command deck while Fredericks’ comments sank in. She was perched directly atop the Bolo’s personality center, her fragile flesh and his psychotronic brain both protected at the core of his warhull along with his powerplant. It would require a direct hit with a very heavy-caliber Hellbore to penetrate this deep, and protected by Benjy’s battle screen, antiradiation fields, and duralloy armor-over two meters thick across his glacis-Maneka could ride safely through the fringes of a nuclear blast.

None of which had offered her the least protection against her Company CO’s critique.

Actually, she thought, I almost wish the Major had ripped a strip off my hide. That “I have to be patient with the squeaky-new kid on the block” tone is even more devastating.

She watched Benjy’s tactical plot as he and the other three Bolos of Third Company rumbled majestically back from the training ground. Bolos left big footprints, and the several thousand square kilometers of the Fort Merrit reservation which had been set aside for training maneuvers had been hammered into a fairly close approximation of hell. Not that Bolos particularly minded grinding through mud a couple of meters thick or over the stubble of what had once been jungle trees forty or fifty meters in height. And Maneka had already discovered that her Academy instructors had been completely correct when they assured her that even the best straight simulation wasn’t quite the same thing as a live-fire exercise.

She closed her eyes, savoring the memory despite her embarrassment at the way she’d flubbed the final part of the maneuver exercise. Moving Benjy to the firing range, and feeling that fifteen-thousand-ton hull buck as she watched the incredible, flashing speed and precision with which his thundering weapons had ripped apart the ground targets and wildly evading aerial target drones had been… incredible. It irritated her to realize she was reusing the same adverb, but she literally couldn’t think of a better one than just that-”incredible.”

In that moment, she had truly realized for the very first time on an emotional level, not just an intellectual one, that she was literally in command of more firepower than any pre-space army of Old Earth had ever deployed in a single battle. Probably more than any pre-space nation had ever deployed in an entire war. And Benjy was only one of twelve Mark XXVIIIs in the Thirty-Ninth Battalion.

“Sorry I screwed up, Benjy,” she said after a moment.

“As Major Fredericks said, it is difficult even for experienced Bolo commanders to avoid occasional such errors, Maneka,” Benjy replied through the bulkhead speaker. “It is unfortunately true that human perceptions and chemical-based thought processes find it impossible to process information as rapidly as a Bolo is capable of processing it.”

“I know,” she sighed. “And I also know we can’t multitask the way you can. But it’s so hard to just sit here while you do all the work.”

The speaker rumbled with Benjy’s electronic chuckle, and she cocked a questioning eyebrow at the visual pickup centered above the tactical plot-by long tradition, the equivalent of looking the Bolo in the “eye.”

“Maneka,” the huge Bolo said with a certain gentle amusement, “you are the twenty-seventh commander who has been assigned to me in my career. And every one of you has found it difficult ‘to just sit here.’ The Brigade does not choose its commanders casually, and it is the very command mentality for which it selects which makes it difficult for you to refrain from exercising command.”