Bolo!

She closed her eye for just a moment, wishing with all her heart that she was still unconscious, but she wasn’t. And because she wasn’t, she had no choice.

“And the Battalion, sir?” she heard her voice ask levelly, almost as if it belonged to someone else entirely.

“And the Battalion… paid the price, Lieutenant,” Shallek said, meeting her single cobalt-blue eye unflinchingly. It wasn’t easy for him, she could see that, but he owed her honesty, and he paid in the coin of candor. Then he drew a deep breath.

“You’re the only surviving Bolo commander,” he said with terrible gentleness, and she stared at him in disbelief.

No, a small, stern voice deep within her said with ruthless clarity. Not disbelief. Denial.

But even as she thought that, she felt a wild, sudden surge of hope. Shallek had called her the only surviving Bolo commander, and that meant “Benjy?” she said. “Sir, Benjy—my Bolo. How badly is he damaged?”

Shallek looked at her, still meeting her gaze, and then, after a moment, shook his head.

“He didn’t make it, Lieutenant,” he said softly, and his gentle compassion was a dagger of fiery ice buried in her still-beating heart.

He was wrong. He had to be wrong. She was alive. That meant Benjy had to have survived, too, or she would have died in his destruction. She should have died in his destruction.

“The Bolo techs tell me one of your Bolos may survive,” Shallek went on and that same gentle voice. “Unit One-Seven-Niner-Lima-Alpha-Zebra. I understand his survival center is still intact, and the hit that took out his command deck and main personality center did surprisingly little additional damage. But every other unit of the Thirty-Ninth Battalion was destroyed in action.”

“But… but how—?” Her left hand moved weakly, gesturing around her at the hospital room and the medical equipment surrounding her bed, and Shallek shook his head.

“He got your survival capsule closed and pumped his entire command deck full of fire suppressant,” Shallek said. “The capsule’s emergency auto-medic kept you alive, and the suppressant had time to set its matrix before—”

He broke off, and Maneka’s eye squeezed shut in understanding. The fire suppressing foam used in the Bolos’ damage control systems was less effective at actually suppressing fires than other technologies might have been, but it was retained because within twenty seconds of deployment it set up into an artificial “alloy” almost as tough as the flintsteel Bolo warhulls had once been made of. Yet for all its toughness, it dissolved almost instantly under the touch of the proper nanotech “solvent.”

Benjy had used it to save her life. As he waded into that horrendous sea of fire, he had encased her duralloy capsule inside what was effectively a block of solid armor over three meters across.

Oh, Benjy, she thought miserably, her broken heart twisting within her. Oh, Benjy. How could you have done this to me?

“How did—” She broke off and clenched the fingers of her remaining hand into an ivory—knuckled fist.

“How did it happen?” she got out on the second attempt.

“I—” the Marine started, then paused and looked at the doctor.

“I advise against it,” the doctor said. “She’s in bad enough shape as it is. But—”

It was his turn to break off and look down at Maneka, and his mouth tightened.

“But I’ve seen this before,” he went on, his voice harsh, almost angry. Not at her, Maneka realized even through the crushing iron fist of her grief, but at something else.

“They pick them so young,” the white-clad man went on. “They train them. They give them war gods for friends. And when those gods die, something—”

He closed his mouth, jaw muscles clenching, then shook himself.

“Go ahead, Brigadier,” he said curtly. “Not knowing will only make her tear herself up inside even worse.”

Shallek gazed at the doctor for several seconds, then nodded and looked back down at Maneka.

“We got some of our own recon drones—the Ninth’s, I mean—in with you when your Battalion broke the line, Lieutenant,” he said. He reached into the left cargo pocket of his uniform and withdrew a small portable holo unit and laid it on a bedside table. “This is a recording of the imagery from one of those drones, Lieutenant Trevor. Are you certain you want to see it?”

Maneka stared up, wanting to scream at him for the stupidity of his compassionate question. There was nothing in the universe she wanted less than to view that imagery… and nothing that could possibly have stopped her. She tried to find some way to express that, but words were a clumsy, meaningless interface, and so she simply nodded.

Shallek’s nostrils flared. Then he pressed the play button.

The holo came up instantly, crystal clear, its shapes a light sculpture solid enough to touch, and Maneka felt herself falling into its depths. She saw six brutally damaged Bolos hammering forward, led by one whose hull bore the remnants of the unit code “862-BNJ” in half-obliterated letters down one scorched and seared flank.

From the drone’s perspective, she could see the glowing wound the Surtur Hellbore had blasted through Benjy’s armor. The one which had come so close to killing both of them. She could actually see a gray-white scab spilling out of the hole and some fragment of her brain recognized it as overflow from the fire suppressant with which he must have packed the entire web of his internal access spaces.

Explosions and energy weapons ripped and tore at them. Missiles screamed in and disintegrated under the pounding of point defense clusters and auto ca

A handful of Surturs reared among them, towering over them like titans, and thunderbolts slammed back and forth as main battery fire added itself to the seething holocaust. Two of the Bolos lurched to a halt, belching smoke and incandescent fury as multiple Hellbores blasted through their armor. Surturs exploded as the four survivors smashed back, but two more of the Melconian war machines loomed suddenly on the Bolos’ flank. The exchange of fire lasted less than ten seconds; when it was done, every Surtur was dead… and only Benjy remained, still charging forward—all alone now—into the teeth of the desperate Melconian fire.

Maneka blinked her remaining eye hard. The film of tears defied her efforts, and she scrubbed at them furiously with her left hand. Uselessly. Her vision still blurred and ran, and yet she saw every hideous detail as Benjy advanced single-handedly into the very maw of Hell.

I should have been with him, she thought, and knew it was insane even as the thought hammered in her brain. She had been with him. Her own body was inside that staggering, smoking wreck of a Bolo as it clawed its way onward. But it wasn’t the same thing. She hadn’t been with him—hadn’t been there for him in his march to Golgatha. He’d been alone, abandoned, left without the presence of even a single friend, and yet he never flinched. Never hesitated.

His entire starboard suspension system had been destroyed, but he blew the tracks and advanced on the bare bogeys. A Loki-class tank destroyer popped out of its hide behind him and lasted long enough to fire before a trio of ion bolts tore it apart. Its screaming plasma bolt smashed through the thi

Maneka’s hand no longer scrubbed at her eye. It was pressed to her mouth, covering her trembling lips as she watched Benjy still advancing. She knew about Bolos’ psychotronic pain sensors, knew about the agony which had to be shrieking through him, but his surviving weapons remained in action. His infinite repeaters went to continuous maximum-rate fire, a ruinous rate which must burn them out within a handful of minutes, unless they exploded first, and the lash of their ion bolts blasted a molten path through the enemies still swarming down upon him.