General Kiel laughed. “Well, from the looks of it, the entire Kezdai reserve force has been destroyed by some sort of space bombardment. The fleet has been crippled and is on the run, and the ground forces are in full retreat with no sign of stopping.”
“But what happened?” Veck demanded.
Keil shrugged. “I have no idea. But as I said, Lieutenant, trust the Bolos. I don’t know how they pulled this one off, but always trust the Bolos.”
“Well,” Veck said, “we still have a lot of work to do if we’re going to chase the Kezdai forces all the way back to the spaceport at Reims. We had better get to it.”
“Of that I have no doubt,” Kiel said.
For a moment he listened to the news coming over his headset from Kal, then smiled.
“Lieutenant, you can take a minute, can’t you?”
Veck looked at him with a puzzled frown.
“Kal has picked up a injured passenger and has been administering emergency treatment. The passenger is now awake, and would like to speak to you.”
“To me?” Veck asked. “Why me?”
“Just talk to him and quit asking so many questions,” Kiel said, laughing.
Veck opened the channel.
To Kiel, the look of shock and joy and relief mixed on the young lieutenant’s face was something he would remember for a very long time.
* * *
On the planet Delas, the first day of nighwinter was a time of both celebration and mourning. It was a time of celebration that the Kezdai were gone, their last ship having disappeared into subspace, their equipment abandoned and rusting all over the southern continent.
It was a time of mourning for the one-point-two million civilian casualties, and the many cities and towns reduced to rubble and ash.
It was a time of celebration for the heroes of the conflict.
And it was a time of mourning for those fallen in defense of humanity.
Of those who lived to see it, few would ever forget the parade of Bolos into Reims, banners flying over their blackened and scarred hulls, the anthem of the Concordiat sounding from their loudspeakers.
They streamed onto the spaceport aprons, passing in review before the planetary governor and the commanding generals, finally to form ranks and stand at wait.
It was there, as the entire planet watched, that the brave were honored.
Among the curious events of that day included a Concordiat Medal of Honor given to a small boy, and a decoration for extraordinary valor, given to a Bolo that, according to the official record never arrived on Delas at all. According to that record, Bolo R-0012-ZGY of the Dinochrome Brigade was merely listed as missing in action.
* * *
It was later that same day, as the sun was setting over the ruins of Chancellorton, three-hundred and twenty kilometers to the north of Reims, that a platoon of soldiers from the Delassian Defense Force’s 19th Volunteer Regiment spotted a robo-mule, of the type often used by miners. The robo-mule had various pots and pans affixed to its upper deck, and crudely lettered on its side, using some sort of marker, were the words: BOLO BESSY 1198TH REG. DINOKROM BRIGADE.
The little vehicle passed them on the dusty road, headed south, and they did not see it again.
Brothers
William H. Keith, Jr.
[Click]
Input . . . boot-up procedure initiated. Resident operating system routines loaded.
Building in-memory directories. Initiating psychotronic array cascade.
Boot process and initiation sequencing complete. It has been 0.524 seconds since I was brought on-line, and situational data is flooding into my primary combat processing center at approximately 29.16 gigabytes per second. Alert status Yellow, Code Delta-two. An alert, then, rather than a combat situation. I expand my awareness, switching on external cameras and sensory data feeds.
I am where I was when I was powered down and deactivated, which is to say Bolo Storage Bay One of the Izra’il Field Armored Support Unit, 514th Regiment, Dinochrome Brigade. Camera feeds from remote emplaced scanners show typical Izra’ilian conditions outside the bay’s flintsteel bunker walls—ice and snow broken by straggling growths of freezegorse and thermophilia, with the sawtooth loftiness of the crags and glaciers of the Frozen Hell Mountains on the horizon. It is local night, and The Prophet looms huge, swollen in star-rich blackness beneath the golden arch of the Bridge to Paradise.
The human names for these things, I sense, are rich with evocative imagery, but, as usual, their import is lost on me, save in the lingering awareness of something much greater than the words alone, forever beyond my grasp. My history archives long ago informed me that many of the names associated with this world are linked with certain systems of human religious belief. Religion, either as spiritual solace or as epistemological investigation, is meaningless within my own worldview and existential context. I am a Bolo, Mark XXIV Model HNK of the Line. While I have no data either to support or discredit the objective reality of religious statements, they are for me null input.
I am far more concerned with the unfolding tactical situation that has initiated my retrieval from deep shutdown and storage; my internal clock, I am surprised to note, indicates the passage of 95 years, 115 days, 6 hours, 27 minutes, 5.22 seconds since my last deactivation from full-alert status.
The situation must be desperate to compel Headquarters to reactivate me after so long a downtime period.
2.073 seconds have now elapsed since reactivation sequencing, and all processors are on-line, power flow is optimal at 34 percent, weapons systems read on-line and fully charged or loaded, battlescreens check out as activation ready and on standby, and all autodiagnostics indicate optimal combat readiness. QDC channels are activated, and I sense my counterpart, NDR of the Line, stirring as he wakes from his ninety-five-year sleep. This is unusual. Normally, under a Code Yellow Alert, only a single Bolo Combat Unit would be activated in order to assess the situation and initiate a coherent defense.
I pass the coded signal indicating status, then extend the range and sensitivity of my long-range sensors. I also recheck all communications channels, both encrypted and open. Logically, the local Combat Command Center will brief me on the situation, given time, but I admit to both curiosity and impatience.
What, I wonder, is the tactical situation I have awakened to after so long a sleep?
* * *
“What,” Mustafa Khalid asked, angrily, “can you tell me about the tactical situation?”
Lieutenant Roger Martin looked up from the scanner display, startled. Consortium Facility governors did not talk to junior Concordiat officers, whatever the provocation. The fact that Colonel Lang was strictly a supply maven whose combat experience was limited to exchanges of pyrotechnic verbal force packages with his wife meant nothing. Chain-of-command protocol restricted discussions both of strategy and diplomacy to the upper echelons of command, which in a base as small as Icehell meant Thomas Lang.
Martin also knew, though, that Khalid required an answer. He was responsible for almost seventy thousand colonial civilians on Izra’il, and that was a responsibility he took damned seriously.
More seriously, Martin thought, than the responsibility Lang took for the three hundred Concordiat troops, technicians, and base support personnel within the Consortium Defense Command.
“They’re Kezdai, sir,” Martin said. “There are a hell of a lot of them and they’re not friendly. Don’t know what I can tell you other than that.”
“You could be wrong with that ID, Lieutenant,” Colonel Lang said, his pinched face lengthening with his frown. “In fact, you’d better be wrong. The last time the Kezdai came through here, we almost lost Delas.”
“ID is positive, sir. The ship configurations, their drive signatures, match the archived Kezdai data perfectly. We’ve counted thirty incoming ships already, and all on approach vectors to Izra’il.” He looked up at the colonel. “My guess is that we’re going to be neck deep in the bastards in the next couple of hours.”
“I’m not interested in guesses, Lieutenant. I want facts, and I want them now.”
“Can your Bolos do anything, my friend?” Khalid asked.
The way he inflected the word your spoke volumes. The Consortium governor didn’t like Lang; that much was common knowledge, the centerpiece of much gossip at the Allah-forsaken Prophet outpost. He knew he needed the military’s help, but it sounded as though he was despairing of ever getting that help from Lang.
Perhaps he was grasping at straws, desperate for any positive news at all.
“I suppose,” Martin said carefully, “that that depends on how much the Kezdai learned last time around. They know what they’re up against now. They’re tough and they’re smart. I don’t think they’d launch an assault of this size unless they were confident they could take on at least what they found themselves up against last time.”
“Well, suppose you wake those dinosaurs of yours up,” Lang said, “and put them out where they can do some good.”