“Let’s hear it.” Almost any distraction was welcome, at this point. She was going stir-crazy, trapped in this command compartment with no idea how much longer she’d have to wait.
The speaker crackled. “Captain DiMario, do you copy, over?”
Lieutenant Colonel Weyman’s voice had become very familiar, during the last few hours. “DiMario here. What is it, Colonel?”
“We’re sending Rustenberg’s refugees home. Humans are not at risk. If nothing else, you can climb out of your Bolo, now.”
A wave of giddy relief passed through her. “Thank God, all the way around. We’ll put candles in the windows for those poor folks.”
“I’m sure they’ll welcome the sight. Now, you’ve gone through Dr. Weyman’s reports?”
“Yes, sir. Twice.”
“Good, because we’ve got ourselves a ‘situation,’ here.”
She heard the emphasis, even through the speaker. “A ‘situation,’ sir?” she asked cautiously.
“We need Lundquist’s help again. Dr. Collingwood is trying to create an analog to the neurotoxin. Something that will block neuropeptide receptor sites in Tersae tissue.”
Alessandra’s mouth fell open. “For God’s own sake, why? I mean, why would we want to interfere with something that kills the enemy for us? That stuff may be horrible, but so is butchering helpless children! Have you seen the eyes of the survivors who fled Rustenberg? I really don’t understand why we should block something that will do the job we came here to do, without risk to human lives.”
Clipped anger shot through the speaker. “Genocide’s an ugly word, Captain.”
“You’re goddamned right, it is! And I don’t like being on the receiving end of it!”
“Neither do the Tersae. And you and I, Captain, are not the ones dishing it out. That’s the little situation I mentioned.”
All the arguments Alessandra had been marshaling to trot out in logical order piled up in the back of her throat. “What do you mean?”
He told her. In gruesome detail. And that explanation triggered a shocked reordering of everything Alessandra thought she’d known about the Tersae—which was a fair amount, after reading Bessany Weyman’s reports. As Alessandra listened, a cold sickness began to clutch at her. She’d never had children, but her sister had. It was far too easy to imagine the way she’d feel if something had held their lives under that kind of gun.
The explosive conflict that unleashed, between sudden sympathy and preexisting cold hatred, left Alessandra floundering in a brutal riptide of emotions. She genuinely didn’t think she could ever forget what the Tersae had done, or the shocked anguish that burned in young children’s eyes like cold flame. Murdered innocence was only a small step removed from murder, period. Certainly, the suffering went on longer, when the victims survived.
But much could be forgiven a species whose children were held hostage.
Weyman’s voice jolted her out of a hazy state of shock. “Any questions, Captain?”
Several thousand, she thought dazedly. Not one of which affected her immediate duty. “No, sir. I’ll start work with Lundquist immediately. Same routine as before? Coordinate research efforts through both Bolos?”
“Precisely. If you and Lundquist need anything—and I mean anything—holler.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said quietly. “We’ll get right on it.”
“Good. Keep me posted. Weyman out.”
Alessandra broke the connection and sat motionless in her command chair for several moments, trying to reorder her chaotic thoughts. They swooped and circled like carrion kites, coming back again and again to the unknown creatures who had set up this vast, planetary experiment. John Weyman’s voice echoed through those whirling thoughts: Genocide’s an ugly word . . .
Yes, it was. A filthy, ugly little word. She wanted to loathe the Tersae’s creators as much as she’d hated the Tersae until a few moments ago. It should have been desperately easy to hate the “Ones Above.” But it wasn’t, because a contrary corner of her mind whispered, with forceful insistence, Are we any better? And the reason she asked it was the guilt which had been preying on her mind ever since that moment on the battlefield, when Unit DNY had died.
Today, Alessandra sat inside another sentient machine, a thinking and feeling entity that was undeniably alive, one her own species had created, just as this unknown alien had created the Tersae. The Bolo she sat inside, right now, busily pumping life-saving drugs into her system, had been pronounced obsolete—and therefore slated for destruction—by the Corps of Psychotronic Engineers. The Corps had shown Senator no more pity, assigning him casually to oblivion, than the Ones Above had shown, reducing the Tersae to the status of lab rats, sacrificed at alien whim. It was only Senator’s extraordinary good fortune that the Deng War had come along, pulling him out of mothballs for an upgrade, before the Corps had gotten around to frying his action/command core.
Humanity had developed the Bolos specifically to die in the place of human soldiers. Bolos were thinking, feeling individuals. They loved life as much as she loved her own. They loved their duty—so much so, they delighted in the chance to demonstrate their worthiness and fulfill their destiny. A Bolo would charge gleefully into battle, delighted by the chance to prove itself capable of defending its beloved creators. Even when those creators gave orders that led to their deaths.
How did that differ from suicidal Tersae rushing into battle to die for their creators?
In many ways, Bolos were actually less free than the Tersae, who were able to hunt and pursue pleasure in their own time and in their own way. A Bolo was allowed no independent action outside a battlefield. Except for a few obsolete units scattered here and there as heavy farm and mining equipment, a Bolo had no way to exist other than as a platform of war. Until very recently, a Bolo had not even been permitted the full use of its multipartite mind outside the battlefield, for fear a machine carrying that much firepower, a machine able to think clearly and complexly during long stretches of peacetime, might start to entertain dangerous thoughts.
Self-aware, self-directing, able to appreciate music and literature and the sweet agony of friendship, Bolos were strictly bound to one purpose and never allowed to stray outside it, literally on pain of death. A Bolo that broke its programming to take action outside the allowable parameters was condemned as a rogue and executed, without mercy, without hope of reprieve.
There was no sidestepping it. Humanity held the same sword above a Bolo’s head as the sword held above the Tersae: obey or die. Worse yet for a Bolo: obey and die. Where did the difference lie? In the creator’s hands?
She held hers up, staring at them as though they belonged to someone—something—else. No, she realized slowly, frowning at her fingers as though seeing them for the first time, the difference didn’t lie in the hands. It lay in the mind. A Bolo was not just cannon fodder; it was far more than a lab animal to be sacrificed, with no more compunction than a biology student felt, drowning live worms in formaldehyde. A lab rat never knew why it was to be killed; but a Bolo always knew. Knew it and accepted it and went to that death gladly, demonstrating courage worthy of the best humanity had produced from its own biological heart.
She didn’t make the mistake of anthropomorphizing them. Bolos were not human. But there wasn’t a Bolo commander alive who didn’t recognize the essential humanness of a Bolo’s mind, of its soul, perhaps, standing as mirror image to the minds and souls that had created it. That was what inspired a commander’s unstinting friendship—and loyalty—that marked such relationships. It was the kinship of minds that created such wrenching grief when a Bolo passed out of existence. It was like the death of a child or a soulmate, leaving an ache far worse than a mere empty hollow in one’s life. In a way, a Bolo became immortal when it died, as immortal as the great heroes of old, the Leonidases who, in their living and their dying, became far more than merely human.
Such sacrifices would be honored as long as the Brigade—or human hearts—endured. Her own lost friend, Unit DNY, would be sung of by soldiers who understood, by cadets who would understand only too soon, by youngsters with shining eyes, who understood only that something precious had died, and far too soon.
As Alessandra gazed at Senator’s command compartment, his antique walls and data panels, she saw her Bolo with eyes that were finally clear again. And what she saw made Alessandra realize the most important thing she had ever come to understand. She had watched Senator struggle to overcome handicaps perpetrated on him by ham-handed technicians. Had watched him prevail anyway, with a rising sense of awe at the steady flow of brilliant solutions he fielded, one after another, to make up for those handicaps. Having finally recognized what had been there, all along, to see, Alessandra knew quite abruptly that she would fight like a cornered hellcat for his right to survive.