He shook his head, grinning, and she smiled back.
"Don't tell the Governor it's all really just a trick to let me be the first human to ever set foot on Indrani," she told him, half seriously, and he gave her a sharp look.
"I thought you and Guthrie cut cards to see whose Bolo pulled the survey duty?"
"We did." She smirked at him. "But we used my deck. Rank hath its privileges, after all. And," she added in a more steely tone as his eyes narrowed, "if you ever tell him I admitted that to you, I'll have Lazarus run over your toes!"
"My God, the perfidy of the woman!" He shook his head. "You realize, of course, that I'll never be able to trust you again."
"Hah! If you're only figuring that out now, you're a lot slower than I thought you were."
She gave him another smile, then turned and made her way quickly down the interconnecting passages to the assault pod Lazarus rode. Her personal quarters were also located in the pod, which had the advantage of keeping her close to the Bolo, although it also explained why she didn't have very much space, given the way the pod had been modified. The standard pod ought to have given her plenty of room, since it was big enough to transport an entire battalion of heavy, manned tanks. But a single Bolo—even mounted semiexternally—used up close to half of its total available volume, and half of the rest had been given over to the automated Bolo depot the Brigade techs on Sage had somehow fitted in and the spares to support that depot.
The "depot" had been specifically configured so that Lazarus could operate its remotes and service mechs, making him effectively his own Bolo tech. Maneka wasn't sure she approved of that. On the one hand, his onboard diagnostic programs, coupled with his ability to access the "depot" AI, allowed him to take care of all of his maintenance and service needs with a precision and dispatch even the best trained, most experienced human technician would have been hard-pressed to equal. On the other hand, if he suffered damage sufficient to incapacitate his own systems, he would need that same trained human technician to make the repairs he would no longer be able to direct for himself.
The convoy did have one fully trained, veteran Bolo tech, but Sergeant Willis had been assigned to Stalingrad, along with Guthrie Chin and Mickey. The decision had been made at a much higher level than Maneka Trevor, but she understood the logic behind it. She might not like it, but it actually did make sense.
The logistical planners for the colony had been extremely ingenious when it came to cramming the necessary people, supplies, and equipment into the available space. Thermopylae's capacious internal cargo holds—designed to provide the lift capacity for up to three battalions of infantry or air cavalry in addition to supporting the external assault pods—had figured prominently in their plans when they started cramming. That was true of all the convoy's ships, including Stalingrad, but in Thermopylae's case, they'd opted to utilize the space for heavy construction and earth-moving equipment, some of which filled the other half of Lazarus' pod not occupied by the Bolo himself. Stalingrad, on the other hand, had been fitted out with a considerably more capable and much more conventional version of a standard Bolo depot.
he had replied with one of his soft electronic chuckles.
"'Old soldiers never die, they just fade away,'" he'd said.
"That sounds like one of your quotes," she'd replied suspiciously.
"It is. From General Douglas MacArthur, an ancient pre-space officer. He would, I fear, have served as an excellent example of the sort of military ambition Governor Agnelli once feared you might exhibit.
Nor was he ever particularly afflicted with the Human virtue of modesty. Yet he was an undeniably capable strategist and commander with what was, for his era, an extraordinarily long military career."
"As long as yours for a Bolo?"
"Perhaps not quite that long," Lazarus had conceded with another chuckle. Then his tone had grown more serious. "But my cognomen is well taken, is it not? I have 'died' twice now, Maneka, yet each time, I have returned to duty. Useful duty, I believe, yet under circumstances no one—least of all myself—might have predicted. As have you, in a sense. Perhaps it is only fitting that we should test the accuracy of MacArthur's hypothesis. And it is difficult for me to conceive of a more honorable duty than that we should 'fade away' offering our services to Operation Seed Corn."
The memory of that conversation flickered through her mind once more, and she shook her head.
The planet they had journeyed so unimaginably far to reach lay below them at this very moment, and only after they had entered orbit had she allowed herself to admit to herself that, whatever her head might have thought, her heart had never truly believed they would reach it. Now they had, and she discovered that she looked forward to fading quietly away here, performing good, solid, useful duty in company with Lazarus in the peaceful retirement his century and more of service to the Concordiat had so amply earned.
She snorted in amusement at her own emotional turn of thought as she entered the pod. Lazarus, she thought, would have been even more amused by the thought of "peaceful retirement" for a Bolo. Which changed neither the fact that he had earned it nor her happiness that he would finally enjoy it.
She stepped through the automatically opening hatch, walked through her quarters—snagging the neural headset off her desk as she passed—and clambered into the access trunk which connected to Lazarus' belly hatch. Someone of Hawthorne's broad-shouldered size might have found the access trunk confining, but there was ample room for Maneka's slender frame, and she went up the ladder rungs quickly.
"Welcome aboard, Commander," Lazarus' resonant tenor said through the speaker in her mastoid as she transitioned from the access trunk to the Bolo's internal ladders and the belly hatch slid silently shut behind her.
"My, aren't we formal today?" she replied, and got an electronic chuckle in response.
"It occurred to me that this would be an historic occasion. As such I thought perhaps 'company manners' might be in order," Lazarus informed her.
"Well," she said as she reached the middle deck transfer point between ladders, "why don't we just agree to lie to the reporters and tell them we were formal as hell?"
"Bolos do not lie," Lazarus said primly.
"The hell they don't!" she shot back. "You Bolos are the galaxy's past masters at deception tactics."
"True," the Bolo conceded. "However, those tactics are normally employed against the Enemy."
"If you think any historian who wants to turn me into some sort of historical heroine isn't 'the Enemy,'
then your IFF software needs a little attention!"
"Damned straight we will!"
Maneka had continued climbing steadily throughout the conversation. Her route took her through the mammoth superconductor capacitors that fed Lazarus' starboard battery of ion-bolt infinite repeaters, and she absentmindedly checked the power level readouts as she passed. One more deck worth of ladder took her up the outboard side of Lazarus' fusion plant, tucked away at his very center along with his primary personality center, and onto the command deck.
"I see why there aren't any old Bolo commanders," she said, breathing slightly faster than normal after her long, rapid climb.
"The entry route is less arduous aboard newer model Bolos," Lazarus remarked, this time from the bulkhead speakers. "According to the technical reports in the depot's memory, the new Mark XXXIII will actually provide a gravity shaft for its commander."
"Yet another newfangled gadget to go wrong," she said loftily. "This effete, idle lay-about, new generation of Bolo commanders is soft, I tell you. Soft! Give me reliability over decadent convenience any day."
"Bolos may not lie, but I see that sometimes Bolo commanders do," Lazarus observed. "Still, I appreciate the sentiment."
Maneka chuckled as she flopped down in the almost sinfully comfortable command couch. It had always amused her that here, at the very heart of this grim, enormous machine of war, was a couch whose biofeedback-monitored comfort would have cost a good quarter-million credits on the civilian market. It seemed even more incongruous as she looked around the crowded, cramped confines of the command deck itself.