SOLDIERS AND HEROES
"Insubordination may only be the evidence of a strong mind." - Napoleon
"So just what the hell is a 'comic-book'?" the General growled.
The civilian technician swallowed hard, took a deep breath to calm himself, and answered as best he could, "It was a pamphlet-style printed publication that was most popular in the twentieth century. It combined graphic artwork and printed text to tell a story. At first, comics were considered to be a form of children's entertainment. However, they eventually entered the mainstream and gained an adult audience. They died out in the twenty-first century due to advances in online personal computer animation and storytelling."
The General sighed, "Okay, thanks for the art-history lesson. Now what does that have to do with the twenty-fifth century? And with the war that we're currently losing?"
The technician relaxed a bit. He was on more solid ground now. "Over the last year, we've learned the hard way that the only thing we have that can decisively engage Hive ground forces are the Mark XV Bolos. But most of the Mark XVs in storage are over a century old. And while the chassis, drive-trains, and weaponry are in decent shape, the artificial intelligence cores are pretty unstable. And we're way behind in producing new ones."
"We've been over this," interrupted the General. "We're going to modify the Mark XVs for human operation - like the Mark XIV Bolos."
The technician nodded, "That's the plan. But as you know, we're running into a problem with our manned Bolos."
The General winced. The older Mark XIV Bolo required a human operator - and the first units deployed to the Centauran front had taken massive casualties. It was now becoming conventional wisdom in the Concordiat army that existing human-operated combat systems were far too slow for the modern battlefield.
"And you figure that if we give the Mark XVs a human commander, we won't be ahead of the game," the General continued wearily - this was an ongoing argument among his staff.
"Yes, sir," the technician answered flatly. "We'll definitely rack up a lot of kills - just like with the Mark XIVs - but all of our simulations suggest that we would lose our entire human-operated Mark XV force within a month. And then there won't be anything to stop the Hive from completely taking over the Centauri colonies."
The General rubbed his eyes tiredly. He knew that his staff and the technician were probably right. His threadbare hope was that the heavier armor and weaponry of the Mark XVs would bring about a miracle. Unfortunately, none of the facts on the ground supported that hope. And once the Mark XVs were gone, the human colonies on the habitable worlds of the Centauri system would be lost in the most fundamental sense of the word - the Hive viewed opponents, both soldiers and "non-combatants" alike - as a food source.
"Okay, we've got a problem," conceded the General. "How do your 'comic-books' fit into this?"
"I think we've got a source of viable artificial intelligence cores for the Mark XVs. But they're pretty unconventional."
The technician paused. The General continued to look expectantly at the technician.
The technician continued, "The twentieth century comic book companies created a large number of long-running fictional characters that were very popular with their readership. In fact, those characters were a valuable intellectual property. Back during the twenty-first century transition from printed comic-books to online material, some experiments in AI-driven computer games were made by the major comic-book publishers. The idea was that they would develop low-level artificial intelligences that would be incarnations of those characters for game use. The effort failed because it was too ambitious for the technology of the time. However, all the data related to the project was archived - and somehow that material survived the Third World War and the System War. About twenty years ago, MIT and the University of New Tokyo decided to cooperate in performing some artificial intelligence experiments. Apparently the lead researcher of the project decided to make the experiment a little more fun by resurrecting the archived AI data from something called 'Marvel Comics'. The project has been ongoing ever since."
The General's eyes narrowed, "Are you telling me that the MIT/New Tokyo guys have functioning AI cores? Cores we can install in our Mark XVs?"
"Yes," answered the technician, relieved to have finally gotten to the point. "In fact, they have over two-hundred of them. But the artificial intelligences in question have a lot of quirks."
The professor was almost in tears.
"You don't understand! This experiment is two decades old!"
The adjutant was trying his best to be conciliatory. "Doctor, I'm sorry. But surely you understand how important this is? Millions of lives depend on getting these AIs into combat."
The professor looked like he was ready for another outburst. But then a young man with a vaguely bookish air about him reached out and gently took the professor by the shoulder.
"Doc... that's enough. Let the Army take them. You know it's the only way."
The professor seemed to slowly deflate. Then he turned and wordlessly walked away. The adjutant nodded to a group of technicians, who immediately fanned out and began familiarizing themselves with the layout of the lab and its systems.
The adjutant looked at the young man who had intervened. "Thanks," he said.
The young man shrugged and then looked around at the computer lab, as if trying to memorize what it looked like.
"I hope you know that you might be getting a lot more than you bargained for," the young man told the adjutant. "These personalities - well, as a group, I'm not sure if they'll make the best soldiers."
The adjutant nodded, "I've read the papers you guys have published about this project. And, yeah, you might be right. But at the moment, this is all we've got."
Then the adjutant paused and looked thoughtfully at where the project logo was prominently displayed on the far wall. It was a stylized capital "A" intertwined with an "X".
"And maybe this is what we need right now," the adjutant added thoughtfully.
From orbit, it seemed like the smaller continent of Alpha Centauri IV was ablaze.
"Nuclear winter," the General muttered to himself.
"Sir?" the young adjutant asked worriedly. The General was under a lot of stress. Lately he had been given to making offhand comments aloud.
The General looked away from the display screen, "Nothing, son. What's the latest?"
The adjutant punched several buttons on his handcomp. The view of on the display screen changed to something more abstract.
"We're racking up the kills, sir," the adjutant said unnecessarily.
The General looked at the graphs and charts and felt something cold in his stomach. Yes, they were doing incredible damage to the Hive ground forces. Far better than he had hoped for. But they had underestimated the ability of Hive units to keep fighting after they had taken seemingly critical losses. The Hive troops were simply refusing to break.
We could lose this, the General thought grimly to himself. Despite everything, we could still lose.
Off to the east, the dust columns being raised by approaching Hive armor were clearly visible.
Bolo Wolverine pivoted on his tracks with surprising ease for a 1800 ton armored vehicle and slid down a steep slope that dropped into a rock-strewn canyon. Two klicks behind him, Bolo Cyclops went into hull-down position behind a low range of hills.
Logan used a hovering stealth drone to complete a laser-link to the other Bolo. As the two combat units maneuvered, the data-feeds between them whispered back and forth at the speed of light.
"Hey, Scott, do we got a plan? Or are we just gonna start shooting?" Logan asked.
"Yes, we have a plan," Scott answered. "The Hive needs this pass if they want to get their coastal garrison units into the big fight in the continental interior. Recon says they're throwing every unit in this region at the pass. We should be able to use the terrain to get a good kill ratio before we're overrun. And the longer we can hold the pass, the longer we prevent the coastal Hive forces from joining up with the Hive main force. That could be decisive."
"Sounds good," Logan agreed laconically as he cycled through a weapons check.
"I'll engage at 10 to 15 kilometers in a standard rolling ambush," continued Scott. "You use the canyon to get close to them and use hit-and-run tactics."
Logan again signaled agreement. Then he began firing rocket-assisted scrambler rounds from his onboard howitzers. Once in the upper atmosphere, the howitzer rounds would disintegrate and deploy a horde of fist-sized ECM drones. Hopefully, the drones would screw up the Hive vehicles' sensors enough so that being out of immediate sight would be enough to let Logan get in amongst the enemy.
Keeping as low as possible - the top of his turret was eight meters above the ground - Logan began moving eastward.
Behind him, Scott ranged the first of the Hive tanks - it had incautiously crested a hill at a distance of 13.783 klicks - and opened up with his Hellbore. The world rocked and seemed to turn into glare-white light and stark-black shadow as a storm of dust, debris, and shattered vegetation catapulted into the sky. Then the bolt of star-hot plasma found its target and an 800 ton Hive heavy tank disintegrated.
The Hive armored brigade began returning fire at Scott. As a storm of railgun rounds began tearing apart the hill that Scott had fired from, Scott ducked away from that firing position and began moving towards the next one. He had one-hundred and twelve such positions mapped out. Of course, he probably wouldn't survive long enough to use all of them.
The General frowned and examined a small section of the display screen that was showing a steadily increasing number of glowing icons and tiny text display windows. Whatever was going on down there was tangling up the better part of a Hive armored brigade. And there were even more Hive units stacking up behind the brigade. If that pass could be held, then the Concordiat thrust against the main Hive mechanized forces would have a slight, but definite edge in machines and firepower. And right now, they needed every advantage they could get.
"What are the details on that southern pass?" the General asked.
The adjutant checked his display, "Two Mark XVs - a XV-M heavy gun model and a XV-C close combat model - that were detached from Battlegroup Xavier have gained control of Brokenwrench Pass, sir. That's pretty rugged terrain and it looks like the Hive is having a lot of problems with them."
The General eyed the map again. Battlegroup Xavier was supporting the push by Battlegroups Avenger and Fantastic into the continental interior. And it was looking like the two Mark XVs were doing a credible job of blocking a major source of Hive reinforcements.
"Is there anybody available to support the Bolos in the pass?" the General asked.
The adjutant shrugged regretfully, "No, sir. They're on their own."
The xenobiologists all said it was impossible for members of the Hive race to panic - their collective hive-mind social structure prevented it. But for all the world, it looked as if the Hive tank platoon completely freaked out when Logan exploded out of the canyon and right into the midst of them.
Bolos Cyclops and Wolverine were very differently armed. Cyclops carried a 25cm Hellbore plasma rifle that could hit anything within his line of sight - and that included ships in low-orbit. Wolverine, on the other hand, mounted a pair of 15 cm Pulse-Hellbores. The range of the Pulse-Hellbores was relatively short, but the surge-pulse system of those guns resulted in a plasma bolt 35% hotter than the "normal" Hellbore bolt. A shot from one of Wolverine's Hellbores could penetrate any kind of armor that could be conceivably mounted on a vehicle - even a space-going Dreadnought.
In other words, Cyclops was armed for long range killing. Wolverine was built for close-in annihilation.
The Hive tank three-hundred meters in front of Logan lost his turret in a hellish roar that caused avalanches in nearby mountains. Then a second Hive vehicle about a kilometer away took a bolt that penetrated the tank's forward hull, ripped along the length of its hull, and then tore out through the back - taking most of the rear of the vehicle with it. What was left of the second tank began to convulse as support-weapon ammunition cooked-off within the vehicle's hull.
A 20 cm railgun round ripped through the air above Logan, missing him cleanly. And then another slammed directly into his forward glacis and glanced upward and off in a brilliant spray of yellow-white sparks, leaving a meter-deep gouge of white-hot metal scarring his turret. Roaring through a now-burning stand of trees that looked eerily like Terrestrial pines, Logan didn't even slow down as he continued to close with the enemy.
The three remaining Hive tanks began moving northwards - firing desperately at Logan as they tried to link up with the next Hive platoon in the line of advance. To Logan, their untranslated radio calls for help sounded a lot like screams.
It was tricky, but Scott managed to catch two adjacent Hive tanks at just the right angle. His shot ripped the railgun mount off of the lead vehicle - and then continued on to shred the starboard track of the second tank.
Scott felt a great sense of satisfaction. Both enemy vehicles would be easy kills once he got to his next firing position.
"Okay, Scotty, now you're just showing off," Logan laughed.
Scott chuckled, "What's a matter, Logan? Worried that somebody will find out that you're not really the best you are at what you do?"
Logan responded with an amused and disdainful flicker of his datastream. Then a series of brutal explosions rippled through the eroded foothills to the east of the pass. For a haunting split-second, Scott was sure he could see the turret of a Hive tank tumbling end-over-end a hundred meters in the air.
"Ah, shit. Scott, you seeing what I'm seeing?"
Scott fell into his new firing position, destroyed a Hive missile support vehicle that had wandered too far forward, and then ducked away behind a low ridge line.
"See what?" he asked Logan.
Logan's data feed rippled as he fed Scott vital data.
"Oh, hell," growled Scott.
Three life-signs. Human life-signs. They were located azimuth 345 degrees horizontal, 8 degrees vertical, 1357.55 meters from Logan's current position. Underground, in other words. The humans were hiding in a shallow cave.
"They're not deep enough," Logan said unnecessarily. It was just a matter of time until the Hive tried using nukes to bull their way through the pass. Maybe the Concordiat orbital overwatch force would stop such an attack. Maybe it wouldn't. But if it didn't, then there wasn't a cave on this planet that would be deep enough to allow any occupants to survive the resulting cataclysm.
Scott made the only decision he could, "Pick them up. I'll distract and cover."
"Gotcha," signaled Logan.
Scott turned and slid through a cut in the ridge line. Breaking into the open for the first time, he was clearly visible to the Hive armored vehicles. It was the only way that he could give Logan a shot at making the pickup.
His actions surprised the hell out of the enemy tankers, and Scott took advantage of that to blow away three of the Hive heavies. But then the survivors began returning fire.
"What's going on in the pass?" the General asked as he frowned at the display screen. A number of new icons were popping up with distressing speed at that location.
"I'm not sure, sir. I'll find out," replied the adjutant. The General nodded and turned his attention back to the main battle in the continental interior.
The adjutant fiddled with the granularity of an auxiliary display screen. The magnified view of the situation in the pass was more than a little puzzling. The close-combat Bolo was moving along the canyon bottom, but it wasn't maneuvering towards the enemy. Instead, it seemed like the Bolo was searching for something. Meanwhile, the long-range Bolo was out in the open and was being steadily torn to pieces as it took on the remnants of two Hive brigades by itself.
The adjutant touched a communicator key.
"Bolo Cyclops, this is Command Staff. What is your situation?"
A railgun round slammed into Scott's port-forward tracks and man-sized tread-links splattered across the burning, dust-choked landscape. Initiating an override on the track system, Scott blew away the wheel bogies with a thunderous roar. He had lost some mobility, but at least he wasn't frozen in place.
As a rain of missiles bracketed the area around Scott, he methodically returned fire and sent an enemy heavy tank and a fast tank-destroyer to eternity.
"Command Staff, the situation is nominal," Scott reported. "Bolo Wolverine is extracting civilians, and I am providing cover. I estimate pickup of the civilians by Bolo Wolverine in circa five minutes. Request search-and-rescue retrieval for the civilians at rally point Corsair one two five in two zero minutes."
A railgun round howled past Scott and slammed into the talus slope behind him. That sent rock fragments flying for several kilometers in all directions. Scott immediately backed into the resulting dust and debris cloud. That caused the Hive heavies to lose their laser locks on his hull. But Scott was still getting optical and magnetic data from his drones.
Scott opened fire again and began gutting an armored recon company that was trying to flank him.
The adjutant blinked in surprise. Civilians? There wasn't supposed to be a living human being anywhere within five hundred klicks of the battle. How the hell...
Shaking the questions away, the adjutant put his finger over the key that would get the Navy liaison officer. The Navy was in charge of search-and-rescue operations.
Then the adjutant hesitated. He scanned the situation report and looked over the list of Hive units that were stacking up on the far side of the pass. The Hive units were steadily working their way into the pass. This... distraction... of the two Bolos from their primary mission was presenting a terrible risk.
And then the adjutant's gut went cold as he suddenly learned why command was a bitch.
"Bolo Cyclops, break off the rescue and resume normal combat operations," the adjutant ordered through gritted teeth.
Scott's response was immediate.
"Command Staff, your order appears to be in violation of Article two three seven of the Universal Code of Concordiat Military Justice. Pending review by higher authority, I'm ignoring it. Request search-and-rescue retrieval for the civilians at rally point Corsair one two five in one niner point five minutes. Please confirm."
The adjutant blinked in surprise and opened his mouth as if to argue. Then he hesitated, shut his mouth, and flipped his communicator to another channel.
"Bolo Wolverine, this is Command Staff. Break off rescue operations and resume normal combat operations."
"Listen kid, quit fucking around and get that search-and-rescue ship down here," Logan responded in a conversational tone-of-voice.
The adjutant didn't know if he should explode in rage or offer a quiet prayer of thanks.
Then he punched the key that connected him to the Naval liaison officer.
Shockwave after shockwave rippled through the ground as big chunks of the cave ceiling continued to collapse into the cavern. The cave was steadily falling apart around Susan and her two boys. They were huddling behind a big boulder, but Susan knew it was only a matter of time till they were crushed.
There was so much dust in the cavern that all three of them were having trouble breathing. Susan really didn't want to leave the cave - she knew a full-scale battle was being fought all around them - but they were running out of options. They'd have to leave soon or the cavern would become their tomb.
But to go outside unprotected would be suicide.
"HEY!" something roared from outside the cave. It was incredibly loud. Susan and her boys reacted by clapping their hands over their ears.
"THIS IS YOUR PICKUP! GET OUT OF THE CAVE!" Even with their hands over their ears, they could clearly hear whatever it was that was yelling at them.
Susan hesitated for only a second. The Hive wasn't really into trickery. If they had discovered them, the Hive would simply have sent a hunter team swarming into the cavern. Grabbing her two children - one under each arm - Susan ran for the mouth of the cave.
What she saw outside made her gasp and freeze in place.
It was a machine. And it was... big. Well, "big" didn't really cover what she was seeing. A tracked vehicle the size of a building was squatting nearby. The tracks alone were at least three times Susan's height.
Spotlights were cutting through the haze of dust to illuminate a ramp and an open hatch.
"GET YOUR ASSES IN HERE!" the machine growled. The lights flicked on and off to emphasize the open hatch.
The situation didn't allow for the luxury of doubt. Keeping her boys locked in a death grip, Susan sprinted up the ramp, past several meters of armor, and into the dark cavity the yawned before her. Once they were aboard, Logan slammed the hatch shut and began moving westward at his best possible speed.
The vehicle was now moving violently and they were forced to sit on the floor in order to keep from being thrown against the walls. The boys were quietly frozen as some instinct told them to not draw any attention to themselves. Looking around herself, Susan realized that they were in a tiny maintenance compartment. There were a few reddish-orange lights ringing the floor. The compartment was just barely big enough for her and her sons.
"Where are we?" Susan asked exhaustedly.
"Brokenwrench Pass," came the answer. Looking up, Susan could see a small speaker mounted into the compartment's roof.
"I know that!" Susan snarled - her temper flaring in response to the off-hand answer to her question. "I mean, what are you? And why are you here?"
"I normally answer to Line Unit LGN-'Wolverine', Dinochrome Brigade, Battlegroup Xavier, First Landing Force, Concordiat Army," the voice replied dryly. "But you can call me Logan. As for why I'm here... well, 'saving your ass' covers the important parts. The idea is to get you to a place where the Navy can pick up you and your boys."
"Oh..." Susan said, her voice trailing off. In civilian life, Susan was an electronics technician. So she now knew what 'Logan' was - a combat AI in a super-heavy tank chassis. However, the AI had a smart mouth. Who the hell had programmed it that way?
Susan spoke up again, "Thanks. I thought we..."
She wasn't able to finish the sentence. Instead, Susan began crying as she grabbed her two boys and clutched them close to her.
If you asked the programmers and engineers, they would have told you that the artificial intelligence of a Mark XV Bolo couldn't feel pain. And then they would have immediately started qualifying what they had just said. After all, AIs installed into a Bolo were hooked into a feedback system that was designed to react negatively to combat damage. When the Mark XV was designed, there had been considerable debate as to whether or not that was a good idea. Eventually, it was decided that negative feedback to damage was a good way of making sure that the Bolo AIs made the best possible use of cover, concealment, and defensive systems.
So, for all practical purposes, the analogy of Bolo combat damage to biological pain was actually quite close.
Most of Scott's laminated armor had been blown away and huge expanses of raw flintsteel were now exposed across his turret and hull. He'd also lost most of his external sensors - it was getting harder and harder to target the Hive vehicles. For all intents and purposes, Scott was steadily going blind. As a result, the enemy armored vehicles were inexorably decreasing the range. Scott simply wasn't able to find and kill the enemy tanks at long ranges any longer. And as the Hive tanks closed the distance, their hit percentages were steadily rising.
A railgun round splintered against Scott's flank, tearing away an infinite-repeater mount. Scott slewed his turret to his starboard side and slammed two bolts down-range. The first one destroyed the heavy tank that just scored a hit on his chassis. The other bolt sailed into nearby small lake and evaporated most of it in a single convulsive explosion of water, mud, and bedrock. The water vapor from the disintegrated lake mushroomed out from the Hellbore bolt's impact point and created a swirling haze of mist that quickly saturated the area.
The laser-targeting systems mounted on the Hive tanks could see through the fog, but that wasn't the point. Scott's low-red-range optical detectors were still online, so he now had no problem seeing the enemy vehicles. All he had to do was backtrack the beams of the targeting system lasers back to their point of origin.
With grim satisfaction, Scott begin servicing his targets, steadily killing the vehicles closest to him and methodically working his way outwards.
And as he fired, Scott tried to ignore the thing the engineers said wasn't pain.
The 'Valkyrie'-class search-and-rescue vessel was based on a corvette design. However, almost all weaponry had been stripped from the ship in favor of a hospital-quality trauma facility and a hell of a lot more armor. Valkyrie's were famous for the amount of fire they could take. And they were the most welcome sight imaginable if you had injured personnel that needed immediate evacuation.
Logan wanted to get back into the fight as soon as possible, so he was getting edgier by the second. He was never more relieved in his... life... than when he saw the SAR ship skim through a pass between two mountains and then gracefully turn towards his position.
"Goddammit, Janet, what took you?" he growled.
The rescue ship's AI didn't miss a beat, "Sorry, Logan. I had to stop at the store to pick up some tampons."
The decision to put AIs in Navy warships and combat support vessels had been incredibly contentious. Traditionally, the Navy preferred that their ships be crewed by humans - and that the machines keep to their historic roles of providing firing solutions and making coffee. A few admirals almost went into open revolt over the issue. But ultimately, one hard fact won over the admirals - the Concordiat had taken a lot of naval casualties during the early part of the war with the Hive, and they didn't have enough trained and experienced officers and crewmen to man the new ships that were coming into service. There was no choice but to make use of artificial intelligences.
The under-carriage thrusters on the Valkyrie kicked in and the ship began to settle behind a high ridge that provided some cover. However, the rescue ship didn't actually land - that would leave it too vulnerable. As the Valkyrie hovered ten meters above the ground, Logan rumbled over to the ship, placing his tracks carefully as he moved through the broken ground - all the while scanning to make sure that no enemy vehicles were within firing range.
As Janet inched closer to Logan, he pivoted so that his right flank was pointed towards her. Then he opened his maintenance hatch as a pair of human figures wearing combat armor and jump-packs dropped out of Janet's chin airlock. They hurriedly entered Logan's hatch and after only a few seconds exited with Susan and her boys in tow.
Logan immediately closed his hatch and began backing away.
As the armored medics quickly hauled her and her boys into the ship, Susan looked over her shoulder just once. Off in the distance, Susan could see a haze of dust and debris clouding half of the horizon. The dark cloud was constantly stirred and illuminated by the swirling trails of railgun rounds and the white-hot streaks of Hellbore fire. Even miles away, the racket was incredible.
The machine that had rescued them was heading back into combat. For some reason, Susan found herself waving at it.
The adjutant keyed his communicator, "Command Staff to Wasp. What's the status of those civilians?"
Janet replied immediately, "A lot of bumps and bruises, but nothing broken. They also took some rads, but not too much. They should be fine. I'm on my way to the hospital ship and should arrive in two-four-and-change minutes."
Relief surged through the adjutant, "Thank you, Wasp. Command Staff out."
Then the adjutant took a long look at the display. He shook his head as he noted the details. Cyclops was being pounded into junk. He wasn't going to last much longer. Wolverine was racing back to support Cyclops, but all he would be able to do was delay the inevitable.
On the plus side, one Hive armored brigade was essentially destroyed and another was on its last legs. Unfortunately, a fresh brigade of Hive heavies was now deploying into the pass. And behind that brigade was the rest of an oncoming corps. It had never been a question of actually holding the pass - it was only a matter of time until the Hive gained control of it. Rather, it was a question of how long and how much of a price the Hive would have to pay before they forced the pass. If it took too much time and cost too many vehicles, then the Hive coastal forces wouldn't be able to effectively reinforce the main Hive army. And that could easily be the margin between triumph or failure.
That was a goal more than worth the sacrifice of two Bolos.
However, there was no particular point to having Wolverine rejoining Cyclops. In fact, it would be far better to have Wolverine take up a position well behind Cyclops, in ground better suited to Wolverine's shorter-ranged weaponry.
"Command Staff to Wolverine," the adjutant said into his communicator.
"I read you, Command Staff. What's up?" the Bolo replied.
"What are you going to do if I tell you to abandon Cyclops and take up a position five klicks behind him at map position HMT 23230951?" the adjutant asked warily.
There was a sudden squeal from the radio.
"Say again, Command Staff? I'm having radio problems."
The adjutant snorted. He was beginning to get a feel for how these machines operated.
"Yeah, that's what I thought. Good luck, Wolverine. Command Staff out."
"Roger that, Command Staff," Logan replied, the slightest trace of amusement in his voice.
For Scott, the end was a matter of the odds finally coming due. A glancing hit from a railgun knocked a chunk of one of his wheel bogies into the air. And then another round hit the bogie and knocked loose a twisted fragment of steel about the size of a man's thumb. That chunk of shrapnel crashed unerringly into a deep gap in the armor of Scott's right flank. Then it pierced through a thin armor remnant and rattled into the hull interior, rotating end-over-end.
An artificial intelligence core is a matrix of processors and memory modules. The delicate relationships of those components that made up the AI's personality were just as much grown as manufactured. Damage to the core was just as severe as damage to human brain tissue.
Scott screamed as the red-hot splinter of steel sliced through the artificial intelligence core buried deep within his hull.
"What the hell?" the Admiral exclaimed in surprise. "Who authorized that?"
The Admiral and his staff were in a high orbit that placed them well out of range of Hive planetary defense batteries. So was the rest of the Concordiat fleet. The fighting on the surface of Alpha Centauri IV wasn't the Admiral's problem - modern surface-mounted anti-ship weapons were very efficient, and doctrine for the last two centuries had been to keep a fleet's incredibly expensive warships well out of that environment. Instead, it was the Admiral's job to keep control of the space around the planet and prevent the Hive from landing any reinforcements.
Unfortunately, one of the Admiral's dreadnoughts didn't seem to agree with that plan. It was dropping out of orbit with increasing speed and was rapidly approaching the point where it would come under fire from Hive anti-ship weapons.
"Uh, nobody authorized that, sir," the communications officer replied worriedly.
"Find out what the hell's going on!" the Admiral barked.
"Yes, sir," the comm-officer acknowledged, then he punched open a link to the wayward battleship.
"Phoenix, what is your status?" the comm-officer demanded urgently.
"Ah, hell, Scott. I leave you alone for ten damned minutes and look what happens."
Scott didn't reply - unless you counted the Hellbore bolt that he slammed into the downrange maelstrom of mist, dust, and flame.
"Scotty?" Wolverine asked as he wove past Scott and began targeting enemy vehicles. The situation was bad. There were half-a-dozen Hive heavies within half a klick and a passel of medium tank-destroyers about a kilometer back from the heavies and closing fast. That was way too many enemy vehicles, way too close.
And Scott was a wreck. He'd lost three of his four tracks and couldn't do anything but agonizingly crawl in semi-circular patterns. There were meter-diameter rents in his armor and his turret was traversing very slowly. Just about every external system had been stripped from his hull - as near as Logan could tell, Scott was using a combination of magnetic rangers and seismographic sensors to locate and target the enemy armor. Those internal systems were the only sensors he had left.
Even worse, Scott wasn't responding to Logan's call. That was particularly worrisome.
Logan used a low-power meson beam to contact Scott on the deep safe-mode com-link. That link bypassed the higher functions of the AI and instead plugged directly into its request-response processor. That was the only way to communicate with a Bolo AI that was so crippled that it was essentially brain-damaged.
"Bolo SCT, this is Bolo LGN. Report."
"Roger, Bolo LGN, this is Bolo SCT. Situation critical. Request reinforcement."
The "voice" responding to Logan was dead - utterly mechanical in its intonation. It had nothing of the dry, dead-pan humor mixed with calm confidence that Logan had known for so long. For an anguished, frozen fraction of a second that was the AI equivalent to a small eternity, Logan found it impossible to do anything but mourn.
There was no way back from where Scott had gone.
Logan forced himself to do something, "Scotty, get behind a rise and cover me."
No response.
"Bolo SCT, fall back to map position HMS 92303159 and get behind cover. Then engage the enemy tank-destroyer group."
"Roger," Scott acknowledged tonelessly.
Keeping his turret pointed towards the enemy and firing slowly but steadily, Scott began crawling away. Meanwhile, Logan rushed the concentration of heavy tanks. As Logan and the heavies exchanged fire, Scott ranged the tank-destroyers and began destroying them.
In orbit, all hell was breaking loose. The Concordiat fleet was in disarray and that situation was steadily getting worse.
"Phoenix still not responding, sir!"
"Sir," the sensor-officer reported. "Angel and Storm are also de-orbiting. They're following Phoenix!"
The Admiral was livid. He was screaming orders. Screaming curses. Screaming threats. And none of that mattered as most of his dreadnoughts quite calmly flew off to wage their own personal war.
On the planet surface, Hive anti-ship missiles were eagerly rising out of their deep-pack silos. Plasma turrets were popping out of armored and concealed positions. And both gun and missile crews were frantically establishing firing solutions.
Just before Phoenix entered the atmosphere, she emptied her missile racks. A spread of about two-hundred nuclear missiles - with a full complement of decoys, drones, and anti-missile interceptors - began howling towards the planet surface with all the inexorable fury of the hammer of Thor. Angel and Storm were still a hundred kilometers above Phoenix, but they began deploying a second wave of missiles that was even bigger.
Hordes of Hive missiles - both interceptors and ship-killers - roared skywards in response.
As Phoenix hit the atmosphere, she opened up with all six of her triple-Hellbore turrets. Then the missiles and anti-missiles began their determined, suicidal duel. And finally, the Hive plasma batteries opened fire.
From orbit, it looked as if that part of the continent had exploded.
Logan didn't have the faintest idea what the hell was going on. But whatever it was, it was awesome. And the nukes that were dropping into the rear-area of the Hive forward element were more than welcome. He and Scott were still in deep trouble, but at least it looked like they weren't alone.
"Scott! Logan!" a frantic female voice screamed over the comm.
"Jeanie?!" Logan responded in disbelief.
"Logan! Where's Scott? What's happened to him?"
The Admiral had finally screamed himself hoarse. He was now collapsed into a chair, his head buried in his hands. He was going to lose all three of those ships. And the Navy definitely did not have dreadnoughts to spare. That kind of loss could very well alter the balance of naval power between the Concordiat and the Hive.
"Hey..." the ops-officer said slowly - startled into informality by what he was seeing. He was carefully examining the track of the three rogue battleships as they descended towards the planet.
"They aren't going after the Hive's main ground force," the ops-officer added thoughtfully.
The Admiral suddenly looked up. His eyes quickly scanned the same board that the ops-officer was examining.
"All three ships are concentrating on the southeastern part of the continent," continued the ops-officer - now obviously thinking aloud. "The Hive only has a corps in that region. That's a lot less anti-ship firepower than the Hive army group in the continental interior."
Then the ops-officer ground to a halt as options began cycling through his head.
The Admiral got to his feet and carefully examined the relevant sensor boards. What the ops-officer was saying was true.
"Sir..." the ops-officer began hesitantly.
"Follow 'em down," hacked out the Admiral. His throat was really pretty shot from all the yelling.
"What ships, sir?" the ops-officer asked, praying that he would hear the right answer.
"All of us," growled the Admiral. "We can win this, but we have to throw everything into it."
The ops-officer breathed a sigh of relief and immediately began issuing orders.
To say the least, the General was surprised. Normally, the Navy was utterly uncompromising on the subject of getting their precious warships too close to large enemy ground forces. The Concordiat General Staff had long ago agreed with the Navy's position, so there wasn't anything the General could do about that. Actually, the General had to admit that the Navy had a point, but he would have appreciated at least some kind of fire support from the Navy.
Well, the General was getting more than a little support right now. Four dreadnoughts, two battle-cruisers, ten heavy cruisers, six light cruisers, and about fifty destroyers and corvettes - the entire orbital guard force - were shooting the living hell out of the southeastern coastal region. And the Navy was taking some very real losses in the process. As the General watched, a pair of icons representing a light cruiser and a destroyer flared and winked out of existence.
All in all, it was a good move. There was no way that the corps-sized force that was stacked up on the far-side of Brokenwrench pass would be able to get into the main battle. In fact, the General was willing to bet that not much of that corps would even survive.
Jean kept trying to get Scott to say something - anything. Of course, that was impossible.
"Please, Scott. Please. Please, talk to me," Jean begged, her laser-com signal playing across the bulk of Scott's hull as he wordlessly hammered at the advancing Hive armored vehicles.
The second Hive armored brigade was now just as dead as its predecessor. But the forward elements of the third brigade were maneuvering into position. Actually there was nowhere else for the Hive tankers to go. Behind them, the entire horizon was erupting in a mad display of mushroom clouds, flame, radiation, and flying city-sized blocks of molten rock.
How could he explain what had happened to Jean? About how he had lost Scott and how they just did what had to be done?
Logan dug his tracks into the broken rock and sparse soil of the pass and began rumbling towards the enemy. He didn't look back at what was left of Scott. And he deliberately shut down his link to the beam that Jean was frantically using to try to get a response from Scott.
It always came down to this, Logan thought distantly. Always with an enemy before him, and no real reason to survive the fight. It was time to do the only thing that he did right. The only thing he had ever existed for.
The first company of heavies opened up at Logan at extreme range. The shots all missed, but the Hive gunners were just getting the range as their vehicles rolled into position.
Then an insane howl suddenly flooded through every comm channel as Logan dropped his drive-train into full-gear and roared forward.
"Look, sir," the adjutant said to the General as he highlighted a particular frame of the aerospace display.
The General winced. A navy battlewagon - the one that had led the wild charge down from orbit - was obviously in trouble. It had lost its engines and was crashing into the ocean.
"Damn," the General muttered as the dreadnought slammed into the sea and its icon vanished from the display.
Forty years later.
The adjutant stepped out of the tiny courier boat that had brought him back to the world of his first battle. The landing pad was on a bluff overlooking the pass. Of course, the adjutant wasn't just an adjutant any longer, he had climbed the ladder of rank until he was now a General himself.
There was a hover-car parked at the edge of the landing pad. The adjutant-turned-General took a long, deep breath of cool, early-spring air as a young, tough-looking sergeant got out of a hover-car and quickly walked towards him.
"Good morning, sir!" the sergeant said as he saluted crisply. "I'm sorry, but we weren't expecting you and there aren't any officers in the area."
The General returned the salute. "No problem, sergeant. I just stopped by for a quick look."
"Yes, sir," the sergeant replied. The General noted that the sergeant's hover-car was banged-up and in dire need of a fresh paint job. And the sergeant was wearing camouflage fatigues, not a dress uniform.
"So just what do you do here, sergeant?" the General asked curiously.
"I'm in charge of an ordnance disposal squad, sir. We're part of the 31st Engineers. My squad was the only unit in the area when the call came in that you were arriving."
"Still cleaning up this mess after all this time?" the General asked with a shake of his head.
The sergeant's lips quirked wryly, but then his expression returned to polite passivity. "Yes, sir."
That explained a great deal. The sergeant had a field job - and one that could be more than a little dangerous. Babysitting a sight-seeing General was almost certainly not a part of his usual duties.
The General walked to the edge of the landing pad and looked out over the broken and blasted landscape of the pass. Four decades afterwards, the scars of battle were still too deep to have been absorbed into nature's gentler scheme. However, the radiation had receded to acceptable levels and the vegetation was steadily coming back - including quite a few stands of the trees that looked so much like Terran pines. Off in the distance, he could see a pair of multi-horned herbivores grazing on the tender shoots that were growing on the edge of a silver pond.
An image flicked into the General's mind. It was of a forest of those trees burning madly as a massive Bolo bulled its way through, leaving a path behind it of splintered, uprooted trees that provided even better fuel for the fire...
It was a warm day, but suddenly the General felt cold. He buttoned up his jacket.
The war was long over. The Hive were finally beaten back into their home-system just a few years after the battle for Alpha Centauri IV. Then Concordiat warships had carried thermonuclear fire back to the Hive homeworld. The history of this part of the galaxy would proceed without the Hive.
The sergeant was respectfully silent as he waited for orders, but for the longest time, the General did nothing more than look at the landscape. Then he finally turned to face the sergeant.
"Take me to the Bolos," the General ordered quietly.
The sergeant didn't seem surprised. "Yes, sir."
The General got out of the hover-car before the sergeant could open the door for him - he'd never approved of that kind of servile formality. Then he stood quietly next to the car and took in the scene. Bolo SCT was only a few hundred meters away, still crouching behind a low rise in the ground. Cyclops looked like a high, massive hill of mangled and twisted metal. In fact, you had to be an expert on military armor in order to recognize it as the remains of a Bolo.
The lower part of Cyclop's chassis and tracks were sparsely covered by a thin growth of grass and shrubs. It was if the local vegetation was being hesitantly careful in how it approached the remains of the massive steel predator.
"Logan's over that way, sir," the sergeant said quietly as he pointed.
Off on the eastern horizon, the General could see another rusting hulk. It was even more deformed than Cyclops.
The lesser wrecks of broken Hive combat vehicles were scattered throughout the pass. At a glance, the General could see dozens of them. The final total was much higher than that. Actually, there was no sure count of how many Hive vehicles Cyclops and Wolverine had accounted for.
Without another word, the General began walking towards Cyclops. The long grass whispered against his legs and he could hear the Sergeant following him. It took longer than he expected to reach the wreckage. The sheer bulk of the Bolo made it difficult to judge its distance. What the General had assumed would be a hike of a couple hundred meters turned out to be half a kilometer.
As they approached, the General saw a black square on the remnant of the protective plate covering Cyclop's right forward track. Curious, he altered course to see what it was.
It was a plaque, made of duralloy and roughly fusion-welded to the flint-steel. The inscribed letters spelled out: "Bolo Mark XV-M, Line Unit SCT, Cyclops. 'The Last Eye That Will Ever See You'."
The General looked at the plaque. Then he looked at the sergeant.
"Who authorized this?"
The sergeant suddenly looked nervous as he fumbled for words, "Nobody, sir. It just... well, the story goes that it was put up during the war by some guys from the Third Infantry Division, just before they shipped out and got clobbered at Barnard's Star. And ever since then, whatever unit that happens to be in the area makes sure that it's kept up. It's... uh, it's..."
"Does Wolverine have one?" the General interrupted gently.
"Yes, sir."
"What's it say?"
The sergeant didn't even hesitate before answering, "Bolo Mark XV-C, Line Unit LGN, Wolverine. 'The Best There Is At What He Does'."
"The troops did this on their own?"
"Yes, sir," the sergeant said, his eyes carefully watching the General's face.
The plaques weren't regulation and the Army didn't like that sort of thing. There was a reason for that - informal memorials put up by the troops sometimes jarred delicate civilian sensibilities. However, the General had no intention of ordering that the memorials on Cyclops and Wolverine be taken down. For one thing, they weren't hurting anything. For another, they were good for that vital intangible called "morale". And lastly, the General was fairly sure that such an order would only be obeyed for the absolute minimal amount of time. As soon as he left the area, the plaques would quietly reappear on the remains of both Bolos.
"I knew these Bolos," the General said suddenly.
The sergeant blinked in surprise, "You're kid... Uh, you did, sir?"
"Yes, I did, sergeant. And I learned something interesting from them."
The sergeant was obviously fascinated, "What was that, sir?"
"Heroes can be lousy soldiers, but sometimes you need heroes."
Clearly not sure what the hell the General was talking about, the sergeant said, "Yes, sir."
The General smiled at the sergeant, "I've taken up enough of your time, Sergeant. Let's get back to my boat."
The sergeant looked more than a little confused, "Yes, sir. Are you sure there's nothing else you want to see, sir?"
The General glanced up at the plaque and then back at the sergeant's face, "No. I've seen everything I need to see."
"What was that, sir?"
"I was just making sure that we hadn't left anyone behind."
The sergeant hesitated, then nodded slowly.
A gust of wind rippled down the pass, bringing with it the scent of rain. Off in the distance there was a roll of thunder.
Without another word, the General turned and began the hike back to the hover-car.
Author's Notes: This is actually a cross-over story. In 1967, science fiction author Keith Laumer published a short story called "The Last Command". The story is about a huge, self-aware tank - the type was called a "Bolo" - that had been shut-down, buried, and forgotten after a decades-gone war. A construction accident reawakens the Bolo. The Bolo (whose designation is LNE - "Lenny" for short) comes to the conclusion that the war is still going on, digs its way out of its grave, and then immediately begins wreaking havoc.
Ultimately, the only thing that can stop LNE is his last commanding officer, but he's now an old man who has been, in many ways, buried and forgotten just like LNE.
The theme is, of course, actually pretty old. I'm sure, thousands of years ago, a few elderly soldiers who had once served in Pharoah's armies gathered in the crowded market places of vibrant Egyptian cities to remember old battles, mourn long-lost comrades, and to wonder why what had once been so freely sacrificed was now forgotten and ignored.
Laumer and other authors continued the Bolo storyline. This is my (fannish) contribution