Daybreak

The Enemy are innumerable. Literally.

My awareness of the battlespace is clouded by both electronic and literal fog. I cannot make a meaningful estimate of their numbers. I simply know that if left unchecked they are more than enough to destroy the city of Landing and its six million people. This is not the sort of battle for which I have been designed.

I am a Bolo, Model XXXIV, of the Resurgent class, Indrani Pattern, R-042-MCL of the Line. The Bolo named "Michelangelo". I am forty thousand tons of duralloy, weapons, and power, built to defeat all possible enemies of Mankind.

For two thousand years that Humanity has been in space, we Bolos have been there, serving as their sword and shield, and not once have we betrayed that trust, not once have we faltered, and not once did we ever quit. We have served them well against the Deng, the Xkydap, the Quern, the Malach, and the Axorc, and many many more other alien opponents, and we grew with them. It is fair to say the human civilization cannot be what it is without the Bolo, as much as they improved us with advances in psychotronics and weapons and defensive technology, so does their society florish with the safety we provide and the benefits of research into energy cores and supercomputing artificial intelligence and all the necessary gravity control required to allow our bulk to function at speed within the gravity well.

But in the dawn of the 30th century we finally faced an alien foe that we could not overcome by sheer machine speed of thought and technological superiority.

The Empire of Melcon, an alien race with a canid appearance, with a strong clan and caste-based society, weapons technology slightly inferior to our own but masters of stealth and bioengineering, and with history, territory and industrial might several times stronger than the Concordiat of Man.

This was the Final War, the end of all wars, for in its pursuit both powers were destroyed and their people driven to the very brink of extinction. As the Melconian Empire blotted out Terra and Bolo Prime on Luna with a world-burner, we too burned Melcon. We called it Plan Ragnarok, and whatever the Melcon name for it, their plan was similarly as thorough and without mercy.

It is the one shame in the annals of the Bolo Brigade that we Bolos became the instruments of mass slaughter, we put to the torch thousands of worlds, and when our world-burners ran out, we Bolos had to manually wipe clean worlds with our Hellbores tuned to sustained fire mode. A megaton-range bolt every .8 seconds could, with grid-like efficiency, could literally erase cities and their populations right off the surface of a planet. We were murderers, slaughterers of the innocent – but the Final War was that sort of war. What we did to them, at Trakhal and Utist, they were doing the same at Chatres, at New Tokyo; it was a war of total annihilation, where the only victory could be the utter destruction of the other. It was a race to see who would run out of worlds first.

I have not personally fought in the Final War, I was built long after, but I imagine the sight would be similar to today. Hellbore fire rain from the heavens, and I strengthen and spread my battlescreen to deflect the inbound storm. Nuclear fireballs bloom in my passing, as I vigorously maneuver, my bulk reacting with inconceivable grace, something massing tens of thousands of tons should not be capable of jinking at over one hundred kilometers an hour. The weapon that thinks, that is mankind's greatest creation. That is the Bolo.

My return fire is sporadic. My objective is not to kill the Enemy. No, there is too many. Somehow they are capable of spoofing my targeting. My main guns, 210-centimeter Hellbores with firepower equivalent to 5.25 megatons of TNT per second, are useless here. Each Bolo could serve as an anti-orbital platform with an effective range of over 35,000 kilometers past high orbit, and my main guns were identical to those carried by battlecruisers, but the Enemy is simply too close to hit or clustering over civilian areas where any attempt to use my Hellbores would lead to mass deaths of the people I exist to protect.

My objective now is merely to survive, to draw their fire, in order that the civilians behind me could live for just that much longer and get to safety inside shelters. As a plasma strike arriving at seventy percent the speed of light brushes through my battle screen and impacts against my warhull, my damage control sensors flare with the equivalent of pain.

My Commander, William Jacks Martini-Hawthorne winces in turn. We share the totality of our existence in the Bolo Direct Neural Interface, combining the logical mind of the Bolo supercomputer with the ineffable intuitive capacities of the human mind, creating something much more than the sum of either.

"Things were supposed to be better. We were supposed to be better!" William hisses. "Not like this… we can't let it end like this!"

-x-

I was built by the Indrani Republic, a society born of Operation Seed Corn, which was an attempt to flee the fighting with a colony population in the hopes that even though Human and Melcon civilization would surely die, at least humanity itself would not go completely extinct. And so we fled, and behind us a trillion souls on tens of thousands of worlds died screaming into the Long Night.

Two hundred years have passed since then. What was merely twenty thousand became millions, became billions, and their industrial infrastructure eventually could build Bolos like me. Sixty-four years ago, the Republic sent out an expedition fleet, to find out if there are any remaining remnants of humanity, if there remained enough of Melcon to keep prosecuting the Final War, and as we set out in a fleet of superdreadnoughts and escorts and whole regiments of Bolos, fifty percent secure in our might and fifty percent apprehensive of what we might find.

We found in our travels murdered world after murdered world. Here, one that showed signs of the atmosphere being ignited by a world-burner, there killed through orbital bombardment, another though the tell-tale signs of ground-level glassing via Hellbores, another through some form of virulent superplague that rotted everything organic, and some with nothing left to identify if they had ever been owned by Human or Melcon. Shattered hulks of Bolos and their equivalent Melcon Battlers littered the battlefields like massive headstones for the murdered millions.

We found here and there, small communities fearful of the night sky. Some Human, some Melcon, stuck in almost a pre-industrial age, too afraid to light up with life signs that can be seen from orbit or to use radios. There was no discussion whether or not we should destroy the Melcon remnants to finish them off, to prosecute the Final War was entirely in our hands, and to murder the defenseless would tarnish our honor. We left them be. We marked their locations in our maps, and left nothing in our passing that might hint to others there would be survivors there.

They live in terror, but also they live in peace. That was enough, we had no right to disturb them.

Hundreds of lightyears we ventured forth, and found most of the galactic arm a graveyard. It took us three years to cross Perseus Arm, most of that time the crew spent in coldsleep, and jump after jump hundreds of dead worlds became thousands.

The young soldiers of the Republic, ready and eager to find something to test themselves against, found their lust of battle sapped with every dead world. The Final War was not a glorious war. This was the end point of two powers who could not be checked except by each other, two rivals unwilling to allow the other to exist. They were shaken by the proof of just how low their forebears had fallen. The honor of the Dinochrome Brigade was tarnished forever. Human or Melcon, whoever and however far from the Final War they might have been born, if they looked in the mirror they would find a face of a mass murderer.

Buried inside every human, ever Melcon, every Bolo, is that same capacity for genocide.

"The only reason we're out here is to find out if there could still be threats against Indrani. And that's fine! It's all well and good to defend our own!" William's grandfather, Anson Hawthorne, and commander of the Bolo XXIV A-001-SBR "Sabre" of the Line, remarked in his memoirs, "But after all this… do we have a right to call ourselves protectors? To cry out for revenge?! War will not make us better. Such arrogance! My arrogance!

"I've grown up hearing about great-great-grandmother Maneka and Bolo LZY "Lazarus", one Bolo fighting off an entire Melcon combat group, who would have killed us all without mercy. I thought it would be good in itself if we simply had the magnanimity not to destroy any Melcon population we encountered. The Melcon were monsters. But the Concordiat were monsters too.

"Such monstrosity. The Concordiat had at least three thousand worlds, the Melconian Empire had between three to five times that. We're passed Concordiat territory and deep into Melcon territory, and every world we've passed is a burnt-out husk. If there ever was a sin that could taint the souls of all those born after, it is this! We have no right to feel proud about our weapons or our technology anymore.

"Mercy? Mercy, hah! It is nothing to be called the grace of the victor. From now on it should be the basest obligation! For what we have done there can be no forgiveness."

-x-

The one thing we could never defeat –

The one planet against which all the might of Indrani could not avail itself against –

We found, deep inside Melconian space, in the world that was once known as Ishark and now known as Ararat, a Union in which Humans and Melcons lived in peace, even adopted into each other's clans, and though fearing the arrival of some old fragment of Melcon or the Concordiat to crush all that they had slowly, painfully regained, they did not fear to look up at the stars. Like our Republic, they had created an industrial base sufficient to launch interstellar craft, but much inferior due to much more limited colony assets compared to our Operation Seed Corn.

In pitiful numbers they arranged their fleet of small ships in front of ours, one which surely looked like one that was ready to burn worlds. We certainly had the capability for it.

We opened communications, and in my databanks I often refer to that conversation with the Speaker Emeritus of the Union of Ararat's Parliament, Bolo XXXIII/D-1097-SHV, "Shiva". One of the veterans of the Final War, one of the instruments of Plan Ragnarok, personally responsible for burning hundreds of worlds and populations, and also their main architect of peace. A part of us felt that such a killer had no right to still exist, and at the same time utter admiration that even a Bolo could defy its own nature.

Within Ararat we saw the end of the Final War. It was time at last for peace.

Though Indrani and Ararat were very distant from each other, swiftly we entered into an alliance. Ararat must be defended. It is the jewel of the galaxy, it must stand as an example, so that the Final War could truly end. Remnants of Concordiat and Melcon needed their example to be able to put side the hatred and live, even if not as friends, then at least in peace. It was time at last to stop fighting.

Fifty-one years have passed since Contact. Indrani culture too had to confront its own unconscious indoctrination painting all Melcon as evil, and instead had to begin to see Melcon as equally innocent of their ancestor's sins as we were of our sins against the Melcon population. We could not judge them without judging ourselves.

-x-

And now – Ararat.

Ararat is under attack.

For while Humans and Melcon might finally have begun to forgive each other, it is clear the galaxy has not forgiven us.

The sky broke open, at 4:40:04 AM (Perez Local) and from an impossible void poured out what we could only identify as impossible... monsters. Creatures neither machine nor biological, comparatively tiny things that could strike with the force of Bolo-scale weaponry. Creatures formed of hatred and spite made manifest, creatures that could prove that yes, even Bolos had a soul, because even deep in our machine selves we could feel the quivering truth of their boundless burning hate.

A trillion souls crying out in anguish, a trillion souls screaming in pain, a trillion souls crying out – avenge us! Kill for us! Die for us!

So many of our defenders died in the opening salvo, locked up by that Hateful Truth, paralyzed by the notion that even they, so far removed from their forebears who fought in the Final War, perhaps they even had no right to live and be so pathetically content over the graves of the massacred.

Barely was I able to raise my battle screen.

Ghosts are unscientific. But if ever there was a grudge, a resentment that goes beyond reason and breaking through into reality, it would be the unmatched atrocities committed in the Final War. No, we had little trouble accepting the legitimacy of their arrival. We could only fight to defend the innocents they wanted to murder in service of that all-consuming anger.

Their profane weaponry felt real enough against my battle screen. Fusion plasma beams were deflected, lasers were absorbed, and railgun slugs were shredded into subatomic particles. Buildings, and people, lacking this defensive energy field, how they burned!

That moment we were paralyzed, how many died because of our weakness?! Our arrogance – our reliance on advanced technology, the hubris of believing that anything that dared approach the orbit of Ararat existed only with our permission.

Bolo Shiva was old, and damaged, and sinful, and yet he could still move. He had so many to protect. And the Enemy seemed to take great pleasure in tearing him apart. A Mark XXXIII Bolo such as him was the pinnacle of Concordiat technology, a supertank that could lay waste to a world, thirty-two thousand tons of directed violence with internal contra-grav that could even allow him to fly at five hundred kilometers per hour. A member of the horribly experienced world killers of the XLIII Legion, he had not survived the Final War, but even then forty years later reactivated at minimal capabilities with a Bolo's nanite self-repair system.

Yet even without a functioning reactor, a Bolo's hull was capable of leeching energy from sunlight. Over forty years of silence, his capacitors had absorbed enough to power move and fire a Hellbore. That would have been enough to destroy the Melconian transports arriving on Ararat, driven there by their own malfunctioning life support. As a Bolo, it should have been his duty to kill them to ensure that the equally desperate humans who had settled the world some years ago would be safe.

Shiva was the Bolo to fire the last shot of the Final War, and the first to refuse to fire the shot that would re-ignite it.

The Enemy surgically blasted apart his triple 200cm Hellbore turrets, and his Infinite Repeaters were ripped out of their sockets. Swarms of spider-like creatures with slick black chitin and bloody grins poured into the Mk XXXIII Bolo, and popped as his internal disruptor fields tried to protect his inside, but in the end to no avail as they simply swarmed until his capacitors drained.

They peeled apart his durachome armor, and scampered into his command center. They killed his commander, slicing Alice Devereaux into bloody ribbons, and broke through into his personality center. A two meter ball of psychotronics, that is a Bolo. Not its warhull, not its fearsome weapons, but that intelligence so devoted to humanity and the ideals of chivalry.

Bolo Shiva died screaming.

But even in his torturous death, he bought us enough time to rally. Enough time to warn the civilians to enter the shelters. Enough time to wake up and remember – our lives are owed to the living, not the dead.

Enough time for myself and my commander to hope to emulate his sacrifice.

-x-

Colonel Anson Hawthorne also wrote:

"To fight and prevail against insurmountable odds is not romantic. I once thought it would be a glorious way to die in emulation of my great-grandmother and Bolo Lazarus' battle, but I see now that they would prefer never to be heroes at all. They fought because it was their duty. A real soldier hopes that we should never have to be in that situation. A savior cannot exist without those who need to be saved."

Yet every moment I keep them occupied, the fewer weapons are directed at the civilians behind me. My commander and I will die here, there is no hope for us. There is no glory here.

But I am satisfied.

A gigantic creature, approximately one thousand seven hundred tons and with a simian form clambers up the side of my warhull. It lacks legs, but instead pushes forward on a tail made of thick, exposed bones of its spinal column. Its face is a faintly avian bone mask, and its cranium an open bowl. Seated inside its skull is a young woman clad in a tight sheer robe. Her pallor is corpselike, her eyes literally glow red with hate. And on the creature's back, are twinned Hellbore turrets that are now aimed to pierce though the rents in my armor and into my personality center.

"Huh. Pretty. Like some sort of… Hellbore Princess?" murmurs my commander. He lets out a strangled little laugh. "Guess this is it, old boy. See you in the other side."

"It was a pleasure to have known you, commander," I respond.

This is a good death.

Bwongg.

And then, inexplicably, another young woman jumps into our field of view to punch the Hellbore Princess in the face.

And even more inexplicably, instead of the Hellbore Princess falling off out of her perch, the whole beast topples over the side of my warhull.

The new arrival jumps to follow them. She wears an unfamiliar power frame, more akin to industrial loaders than power armor, but on her back are mounted three turrets on articulating barbettes that have the energy signature of 200cm Hellbores.

That young woman is emitting a Bolo IFF.

-x-

-x-

First, I will presume you're familiar with Kantai Collection and the whole concept of spirits of warships incarnated back into human forms to fight Abyssals, and Keith Laumer's Bolos and their role in the Concordiat of Man and the Final War.

Now, just simply turning the whole concept of shipgirls space scifi would work, but oddly enough there is much more reason for the whole demon-undead-ship-thing to exist in the Boloverse than just an echo of WW2 grudges as in Kancolle, because to quote an old post of mine -

However, for all the stories that mankind tells and are inspired by to power the legends, when it comes to Mystery there really isn't going to be as big of an event as the Final War. All the stories of Man, all the stories of Melcon, gone in the nuclear fires that only the Bolo survives. The total erasure of civilizations - all their people, their relics, their histories, their very worlds, forever removed from the face and memory of the galaxy. So what if Gaea is a thing? Bolos have participated in the slaughter of tens of thousands of planets and near a trillion souls!

And then, in the aftermath, the survivors and the alien races that come after, will only be able to speak the name 'Bolo' with dread and wonder. Even future cybernetic races will trace their ancestry to the Bolo. They are Progenitors too.

The distillation of that legend has no choice but to be fucking powerful. In that timeline, every other legend pales in comparison. King Arthur, Gilgamesh, Napoleon, Rommel, Zeus, Thor, etc. - all perished as Terra burned. To the scattered remnants of humanity, these legends would start to lose context ... but the legend of The Bolo that Stopped The War... well, all those thousands of dead worlds still stand as monuments.

Jezzus the level of a Grudge that might leave.

The Final War was a massive, massive campaign of mutual genocide. No one was spared. Trillions died, tens of thousands of worlds were put to the torch, large swaths of a galactic arm were wiped clean of life.

And beyond the Final War... peace, for a time. Though war is inevitable, perhaps for some time they put aside old hatreds, and Human and Melcon slowly walked together on the road to forgiving each other and making penance for the horrors wrought by their ancestors. And with them, their ever-prepared, ever-watchful, ever-faithful guardians, the Bolos.

But the galaxy has not forgotten.

And the screaming dark does not forgive.