Thomas Mallory crouched on the hilltop. It hadn't been hard to make the younger kids hide-not after the horrors they'd seen in Morville. But Thomas couldn't join them. He had to be here, where he could see the end, for someone had to see it. Someone had to be there, to know how fifty-one children had been saved from death... and to witness the price their dying savior had paid for them.
Distance blurred details, hiding Lance's dreadful damages as he ground steadily up the valley, but Thomas's eyes narrowed as he saw the cloud of dust coming to meet him. Tears burned like ice on his cheeks in the sub-zero wind, and he scrubbed at them angrily. Lance deserved those tears, but Thomas couldn't let the other kids see them. There was little enough chance that they could survive a single Camlan winter night, even in the mountains, where they would at least have water, fuel, and the means to build some sort of shelter. But it was the only chance Lance had been able to give them, and Thomas would not show weakness before the children he was now responsible for driving and goading into surviving until someone came to rescue them. Would not betray the trust Lance had bestowed upon him.
The oncoming dust grew thicker, and he raised the electronic binoculars, gazing through them for his first sight of the enemy. He adjusted their focus as an iodine-colored turret moved beyond a saddle of hills. Lance couldn't see it from his lower vantage point, but Thomas could, and his face went suddenly paper-white. He stared for one more moment, then grabbed for the com unit's microphone.
"No, Lance! Don't-don't! It's not the enemy-it's another Bolo!"
The Human voice cracks with strain as it burns suddenly over the command channel, and confusion whips through me. The transmitter is close-very close-and that is not possible. Nor do I recognize the voice, and that also is impossible. I start to reply, but before I can, another voice comes over the same channel.
"Cease transmission," it says. "Do not reveal your location."
This time I know the voice, yet I have never heard it speak so. It has lost its crispness, its sureness. It is the voice of one on the brink of madness, a voice crushed and harrowed by pain and despair and a purpose that goes beyond obsession.
"Lance," the Human voice-a young, male Human voice-sobs. "Please, Lance! It's another Bolo! It really is!"
"It is the Enemy," the voice I once knew replies, and it is higher and shriller. "It is the Enemy. There is only the Enemy. I am Unit Zero-One-Zero-Three-LNC of the Line. It is my function to destroy the Enemy. The Enemy. The Enemy. The Enemy. The Enemy."
I hear the broken cadence of that voice, and suddenly I understand. I understand everything, and horror fills me. I lock my tracks, slithering to a halt, fighting to avoid what I know must happen. Yet understanding has come too late, and even as I brake, LNC rounds the flank of a hill in a scream of tortured, over-strained tracks and a billowing cloud of dust.
For the first time, I see his hideously mauled starboard side and the gaping wound driven deep, deep into his hull. I can actually see his breached Personality Center in its depths, see the penetration where Enemy fire ripped brutally into the circuitry of his psychotronic brain, and I understand it all. I hear the madness in his electronic voice, and the determination and courage which have kept that broken, dying wreck in motion, and the child's voice on the com is the final element. I know his mission, now, the reason he has fought so doggedly, so desperately to cross the Badlands to the life-sustaining shelter of the mountains.
Yet my knowledge changes nothing, for there is no way to avoid him. He staggers and lurches on his crippled tracks, but he is moving at almost eighty kilometers per hour. He has no Hellbore, no missiles, and his remaining infinite repeaters cannot harm me, yet he retains one final weapon: himself.
He thunders towards me, his com voice silent no more, screaming the single word "Enemy! Enemy! Enemy!" again and again. He hurls himself upon me in a suicide attack, charging to his death as the only way he can protect the children he has carried out of hell from the friend he can no longer recognize, the "Enemy" who has hunted him over four hundred kilometers of frozen, waterless stone and dust. It is all he has left, the only thing he can do... and if he carries through with his ramming attack, we both will die and exposure will kill the children before anyone can rescue them.
I have no choice. He has left me none, and in that instant I wish I were Human. That I, too, could shed the tears which fog the young voice crying out to its protector to turn aside and save himself.
But I cannot weep. There is only one thing I can do.
"Good bye, Lance," I send softly over the battalion command net. "Forgive me."
And I fire.
With Your Shield
Lieutenant Maneka Trevor had seldom felt quite so young.
She climbed out of the hover cab which had delivered her to Fort Merrit and made herself stop and stretch thoroughly. She was a slender, fine-boned young woman, but the cramped passenger compartment of the small cab she'd been able to afford hadn't been designed to transport baggage as well as people. She'd made the entire flight from Nike Field to Fort Merrit with her duffel bag and footlocker piled in on top of her legs. Besides, stretching the kinks out gave her an obvious reason to stand in place, gazing out over what she could see of the Merrit reservation.
The sprawling military base, named for one of the Dinochrome Brigade's fallen heroes, stretched as far as the unaided human eye could see. Most of its visible structures were low-lying, mere swells of ceramacrete rising like enormous, half-buried golf balls from the surrounding tropical vegetation. There were a few exceptions. One of them, judging by the signs in front of it, was the fort's primary administration block. That particular structure was close to thirty stories tall, and crowned with a bewilderingly complex clutter of communications arrays. Maneka wondered if it had been built so much taller than the base's other buildings specifically to make very youthful officers reporting for their first field assignments feel even more nervous, or if that had simply been an unanticipated bit of serendipity.
Her mouth twitched in a wry little smile at the trend of her own thoughts, and she stopped stretching, tugged the hem of her uniform tunic back down, and activated her baggage hand unit.
The footlocker and duffel bag floated out of the cramped cab and arranged themselves in neat formation behind her on their individual counter-grav units. She'd already paid the fare, and the cab's AI called a cheerful "Have a nice day!" after her before it zipped its door shut, pivoted, and went whining back towards Nike Field.
Maneka squared her shoulders and advanced along the seemingly endless ceramacrete walkway towards Admin's imposing front entrance with her baggage tagging obediently along behind.
Mirrored armorplast towered above her, reflecting the deep-toned blue sky and brilliant white clouds of Santa Cruz. The day was only moderately warm for early summer on Santa Cruz, but Maneka had been born and raised among craggy peaks of the planet of Everest. She much preferred a cooler, drier climate, not to mention a considerably lower atmospheric pressure, and although her Brigade uniform's smart fabric maintained her body temperature in the range she'd selected, she felt sweat beading her forehead and gathering under her short, dark hair. At least Everest wasn't so far out of the human-occupied norm that its citizens couldn't adjust even to sweltering, humid sweat boxes like Santa Cruz if they had to... eventually. And at least her genetic heritage meant she tanned quickly and deeply.
Of course, she admitted to herself, the climate isn't the only reason you're sweating today, now is it, Maneka?