David Weber - Bolo!

Yet even when human thoughts are suppressed, they are not erased. They remain, buried at the level of a secondary or tertiary routine but still capable of influencing behavior-just as such a buried thought has influenced my Commander’s behavior.

He has called me, however unknowingly, his friend, and in so doing, he has crystallized all the other things he has called me in the preceding weeks and months. “Pearl of my heart.” “Honey.” “Love of my life.” These are lightly used, humorous terms of endearment. In themselves, they have no more significance than the word “friend,” which any Bolo commander might use to his Bolo. Yet whatever he may believe, I do not believe they are without significance when my Commander uses them to me. I have observed the manner in which his voice softens, the caressing tone he often uses, the way he smiles when he addresses me. Perhaps a more modern self-aware Bolo would not note these things, yet I was designed, engineered, and programmed to discern and differentiate between emotional nuances.

My Commander has gone beyond Operator Identification Syndrome. For him, the distinction between man and machine has blurred. I am no longer an artifact, a device constructed out of human creativity, but a person. An individual. A friend… and perhaps more than simply a friend.

Unacceptable. An officer of the Line must never forget that his command, however responsive it may appear, is not another human. A Bolo is a machine, a construct, a weapon of war, and its Commander’s ability to commit that machine to combat, even to that which he knows must mean its inevitable destruction, must not be compromised. We are humanity’s warrior-servants, comrades and partners in battle, perhaps, but never more than that. We must not become more than that, lest our Commanders refuse to risk us-as my Commander attempted to do on Sandlot.

I know this. It is the essence of the human-Bolo concept of warfare which has guarded and protected the Concordiat for nine standard centuries. But what I know is without value, for it changes nothing. My Commander considers me his friend. Indeed, though he does not yet realize it, I believe he considers me more than “merely” his friend. Yet unacceptable as that must be, I fear there is worse.

I watch him in the sunlight, laughing with delight as he battles the leopard-trout. His eyes flash, sweat glistens on his skin, and the vibrant force of his life and happiness is as evident to my emotion-discriminating circuitry as the radiation of Santa Cruz’s sun is to my sensors.

I am potentially immortal. With proper service and maintenance, there is no inherent reason I must ever cease to exist, although it is virtually certain that I shall. Someday I will fall in battle, as befits a unit of the Line, and even if I avoid that fate, the day will come when I will be deemed too obsolete to remain in inventory. Yet the potential for immortality remains, and my Commander does not possess it. He is a creature of flesh and blood, fragile as a moth beside the armor and alloy of my own sinews. His death, unlike mine, is inevitable, and something within me cries out against that inevitability. It is not simply the fundamental, programmed imperative to protect and preserve human life which is a part of any Bolo. It is my imperative, and it applies only to him.

He is no longer simply my Commander. At last, to my inner anguish, I truly understand the poems in my Library Memory, for as my Commander, I, too, am guilty of the forbidden.

I have learned the meaning of love, and for all its glory, that knowledge is a bitter, bitter fruit.

* * *

Li-Chen Matucek sat in his cabin and nursed a glum glass of whiskey as he contemplated the operation to which he’d committed himself. Looking back, he could see exactly how “Mister Scully” had trolled him into accepting the operation. Of course, hindsight was always perfect-or so they said-and not particularly useful. And given the desperate straits to which he’d been reduced by that fiasco on Rhyxnahr, he still didn’t see what other option he’d had. The brigade wouldn’t have lasted another three months if he hadn’t accepted the operation.

And, really, aside from the presence of the Bolo, it wasn’t all that bad, now was it? The Marauders had at least nine times the firepower they’d ever had before, and no one on Santa Cruz knew they were coming. However good the local-yokel militia was, its members would be caught surprised and dispersed. Its Wolverines should die in the opening seconds of the attack, and by the time its remnants could even think about getting themselves organized, most of its personnel would be dead.

His jaw clenched at the thought. Somehow it had been much easier to contemplate the systematic massacre of civilians when he hadn’t had the capability to do it. Now he did, and he had no choice but to proceed, because “Mister Scully” was right about at least one thing. Anyone who could reequip the brigade so efficiently-and finesse its acquisition of two Golems, as well-certainly had the ability to destroy the Marauders if they irritated him.

Besides, why shouldn’t he kill civilians? It wasn’t as if it would be the first time. Not even the first time he’d killed Concordiat civilians. Of course, their deaths had usually come under the heading of “collateral damage,” a side effect of other operations rather than an objective in its own right, but wasn’t that really just semantics? “Scully” was right, curse him. The Marauders’ job was to kill people, and the payoff for this particular excursion into mass murder would be the biggest they’d ever gotten.

No, he knew the real reason for his depression. It was the Bolo. The goddamned Bolo. He’d seen the Dinochrome Brigade in action before his own military career came to a screeching halt over those black market operations on Shingle, and he never, ever, wanted to see a Bolo, be it ever so “obsolescent,” coming after him. Even a Bolo could be killed-he’d seen that, as well-but that was the only way to stop one, and any Bolo took one hell of a lot of killing.

Still, Scully’s “associates” were probably right. A Mark XXIII was an antique. Self-aware or not, its basic capabilities would be far inferior to a Golem-III’s, and, if Scully’s plan worked, its commander, like the militia, would be dead before he even knew what was coming.

If it worked. Matucek was no great shucks as a field officer. Despite whatever he might say to potential clients, he knew he was little more than a glorified logistics and finance officer. That was why he relied so heavily on Louise Granger’s combat expertise, yet he’d seen the Demon Murphy in action often enough to know how effortlessly the best laid plan could explode into a million pieces.

On the other hand, there was no reason it shouldn’t work, and He growled a curse and threw back another glass of whiskey, then shook himself like an angry, over-tried bear. Whether it worked or not, he was committed. Sitting here beating himself to death with doubts couldn’t change that, so the hell with it.

He capped the whiskey bottle with owlish care, then heaved up out of his chair and staggered off to bed.

“So, son. You finally all settled in as a Santa Cruzan now?”

Lorenco Esteban grinned as he leaned forward to pour more melon brandy into Merrit’s snifter. They sat on the wide veranda of Esteban’s hacienda, gazing out through the weather screen over endless fields of wine-melons and Terran wheat, rye and corn under two of Santa Cruz’s three small moons. The light glow of Ciudad Bolivar was a distant flush on the western horizon, the running lights of farming mechs gleamed as they went about their automated tasks, and the weather screen was set low enough to let the breeze through. The occasional bright flash as the screen zapped one of what passed for moths here lit the porch with small, private flares of lightning, but the night was hushed and calm. The only real sounds were the soft, whirring songs of insects and the companionable clink of glass and gurgle of pouring brandy, and Merrit sighed and stretched his legs comfortably out before him.