“Unit SPQ-561, prepare to receive Command VSR.”
“Acknowledged.” I attempt to contain my deep curiosity and wait for enlightenment.
“Unit SPQ-561, respond to command code VJ-2012. Your new designation is SPQ/R-561. You have been refurbished with a number of system upgrades and reactivated as a /R unit, to respond to a military threat in this sector.” I receive a flood of data regarding the world I am to defend, a world which has suffered a serious incursion of humanity’s old enemy, the Deng. At the time of my deactivation, the Deng were not expected to become a threat again for at least a century. Indeed, my own combat experience has been confined largely to the Quern Wars, which are not even mentioned in the data I am receiving now.
As I sift eagerly through the mission briefing material, I become aware that I am no longer in the Sector Command Depot Yard. Indeed, I am no longer anywhere near Sector Command. I occupy a cargo berth on what appears to be an interstellar military transport, with my war hull sandwiched between two Bolo units of unknown configuration. Hull designations tell me they are a Mark XXIV and a Mark XXV Bolo, respectively. It is an eerie sensation, to feel so antiquated, and rather disquieting, to have been on-loaded while remaining at a level of psychotronic activity below self-awareness.
I make my first request. “Unit SPQ/R-561, requesting clarification. I see no mention of a commander in the VSR just received. May I expect assignment to a human commander while in transit?”
“Affirmative, SPQ/R-561. Your commander is en route to your cargo berth now.”
I signal acknowledgment and wait with growing impatience to have my questions answered. Given the date stamp on my VSR from Sector Command, it is extremely unlikely that my commander remains Major Von Hurst. Jack was nearing retirement age when the orders came to mothball me in a Depot salvage yard. That order was transmitted twenty-three standard years ago. I find myself grateful for the reprieve from deactivation and salvage, but mourn the loss of my old comrade. Jack Von Hurst was a fine officer. I shall miss him. Even so, I await my new commander’s arrival with a sense of pleased expectation, for I have been given a rare second chance to serve.
Clearly, the strategic situation facing humanity is grim, if Bolo units twenty-three standard years out of date are being refurbished from salvage yards and sent into combat. I long to close with the enemy and fulfill my mission once more. Humanity must be protected. My strange new circuitry hums as I wait.
My external sensor arrays detect the sound of a shipboard lift in operation. I hear the soft hiss and thump as the lift halts at my level, followed by the pneumatic swish of lift doors sliding open. I locate the source of the sound with visible-light camera systems and observe carefully the individual stepping onto the cargo deck. She is slim and surprisingly short for a Concordiat officer, with the olive-toned skin and dark hair I have learned to associate with individuals of ancient Terran-Mediterranean descent. She surveys my war hull coolly, her expression remote, revealing nothing of her thoughts. She halts three point nine meters from my port-side treads and tips her head back to gaze into my nearest external camera lens.
“Unit SPQ/R-561, respond to code ‘bread and circuses.'”
This is not my old recognition code, but psychotronic engineers have been at work throughout my systems, for I recognize this as a valid code, even though I had not been aware until now of the change in my programming. The deeply unsettled feeling returns, full force, but I do my best to ignore it. “Welcome, Commander,” I respond. “May I know your name and rank?”
She delays answering for two point oh three seconds, leading me to wonder if she intends to respond at all. “Captain DiMario,” she says at length. “Alessandra DiMario. Open your personnel hatch, I’m coming aboard.”
I bristle silently. Major Von Hurst would never have issued such a baldly phrased order, devoid of standard courtesies. I theorize that Captain DiMario is not pleased with her new command. I know a moment of disappointment. It is good to have a genuine companion aboard when facing combat—but comradeship is unlikely to develop if I am not held in esteem by my new commander. Despite my past victories, I must seem an antique beside the other Bolo units in this cargo bay, enhanced as I am only with patchwork psychotronics.
Wordlessly, I open my personnel hatch, allowing my commander access to my command compartment. Captain DiMario climbs up in total silence, sliding through the open hatch and crawling down into the command chair. She powers up and checks my systems in stony silence.
“Well,” she mutters at length, having run through a thoroughly comprehensive systems check without pause, “the ham-handed morons who put you together apparently did something right.” She runs one hand through her short, dark hair. “God, I wish I knew what I’d done to piss off General Willard.”
I do not know General Willard. From her tone, I suspect I should be glad this is so.
Perhaps the old adage that wisdom comes with age has some merit, for I do not offer comment, doubtless the most politic thing I have managed to accomplish in my long and somewhat incendiary career. Obsolescence has a quelling effect on my once-bold brand of conversation. My new commander sighs and taps slim fingertips against the padded armrest of the command chair’s console. “Well, I guess we’re stuck with each other, huh?”
This appears to be an invitation to conversation. It also appears that I am far more pleased to have Captain DiMario as a commander than she is to have me as a command. I attempt to broach the awkward situation in which I find myself.
“I am grateful to be of service again,” I say carefully. “May I ask how I might best accomplish that task and aid you in yours?”
Captain DiMario thins her lips. “You could start by transforming yourself into something besides a jumped-up, rusted-out tub I wouldn’t trust to take over a kindergarten.”
This is not going well.
I decide that I have very little to lose, given my commander’s current opinions, and determine that I will cease to respect myself if I do not speak what is on my mind.
“Captain DiMario,” I say very formally, “I am a retrofitted Mark XXIII Bolo, without the modern systems to which you are clearly accustomed, but this is hardly my fault. May I request that you at least address me with the courtesy my war record should command from an officer of the line?”
Her mouth falls open. She stares into my video pickup lens, eyes growing wider with each passing beat of her heart. She remains totally silent for six point nine seven seconds, an eternity of shock. I detect a tremor which runs through her entire body. Then she explodes into motion, slapping at restraint releases on the command chair, swarming up the ladder toward my command hatch. Since I closed this in automatic reflex when she boarded, her exodus is momentarily blocked.
“Get that stinking hatch cover open!”
I comply speedily.
She disappears down the hull-side ladder and jumps to the cargo deck, striding angrily toward the cargo lift. A moment later, the lift doors open with a soft hiss and she is gone. I listen to the echoes fading into silence and wonder what on earth to do now. Perhaps General Willard was not so very wrong, after all, to assign Captain DiMario to command an obsolete Bolo of questionable value? It is a thought unworthy of a unit of the Dinochrome Brigade and it shames me the moment I conceptualize it, but I have never been treated so abrasively—or rudely—in my entire career.
I sting from the indignity of it.
And worry, intensely, about the combat which lies ahead.
Chapter Two
Ginger Gianesco was used to working under adverse conditions. A woman didn’t achieve an appointment as Operations Director of a colony like Rustenberg without the know-how to keep a community running under difficult conditions. Ginger—whose sixty-first birthday was a week away—had brought to the Thule Expedition forty years of experience, including three two-year tours as OD of highly profitable mines on other colony worlds. Those mines had been running deep into the red before she’d turned them around, mainly by improving the lives of the miners until they were cheerfully churning out solid profit—two factors inextricably interwoven in operations on far-flung colonies, out beyond the reach of civilized luxuries. She’d run successful mining ops through fire, flood, and famine, on howling methane hells and airless moons and swamps so treacherous, a body had to put on biochem isolation suits just to step out the front door.
But she’d never poured a plascrete defensive wall or dug bomb shelters during a hurricane-force ice storm, under the guns of an alien enemy. A more generous God would have thrown only one of those curves at Rustenberg; but the local gods seemed a bit short of generosity. Those gods had given them a Thulian winter storm breaking six weeks too soon and a surprise sentient native species that wasn’t supposed to exist, doing its dead-level best to exterminate Ginger Gianesco and every man, woman, and screaming infant under her care. If that ecosystem biologist over at Eisenbrucke Station hadn’t stumbled across the Tersae three months ago, the surprise attack against every colony on Thule would have been even more shocking. As it was . . .