"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.

Every surface was covered with displays, readouts, battle board lights that winked at standby or glowed with the steady illumination of full readiness. Aside from an old-fashioned joystick, there were no manual controls at all. No single human being could possibly have operated a Mark XXVIII Bolo without full computer support, so there was no point in using up precious internal volume with weapons control stations or EW consoles. Even the joystick was no more than a sop to convention. In theory, it was possible for a human commander to drive a Bolo home if its personality center was knocked out.

Given the fact that the personality center in question was located directly under the command deck, however, the chance that any commander would survive its destruction in any shape to drive anything anywhere was remote, to say the least.

A spasm of remembered grief and loss flickered through her at the thought. Once again, she remembered the blur of the closing armored shell around the equally comfortable couch which had once stood at the center of Benjy's command deck. That deck had been virtually identical to this one, and she sat for just a moment, reminding herself that Lazarus was not Benjy ... and Indrani was not Chartres.

She took long enough to be certain she had control of her emotions, then slipped into the headset and activated the neural net.

Once again I experience the instant of fusion with my Commander.

I sense her rueful amusement as her reflex effort to conceal the mental flashback to her time with Unit Eight-Six-Two fails. It cannot do otherwise when her thoughts and mine are so intimately melded, yet it is typical of her that she should attempt to "spare my feelings." Her amusement at her failure, however, is yet another sign of how far she has come in recovering from the mental wounds the Battle of Chartres inflicted upon her.

Her mind settles fully into place, nestled at the core of our joined personality as her physical body is nestled at the core of my own ponderous combat chassis, and she/we open our sensors fully to the universe about us.

Her/their passive and active sensors flooded her/their mind with data. It was no longer presented to the Maneka component of their joint personality via graphic display. The data simply was. She had discovered that there were no human words to express precisely what she perceived in these moments of union with Lazarus. It was as if she could literally see radar and lidar, as if she could taste cosmic radiation on her tongue. Ranges and firing bearings, signal intensities, frequencies, pulse repetition rates . .

. All of them were as fully, naturally, and instinctively part of her perceptions as the texture of her own palm seen with her merely human eyes.

She/they allowed themselves a brief moment—almost an eternity to one such as they had become—to savor the sensuality of their merger. In many respects, Maneka often thought, with the total honesty and openness which the link with Lazarus enforced, it was more satisfying, in a very different way, than any physical act of love she had ever experienced.

"I will not inform Lieutenant Hawthorne of that," the Lazarus component of her/their personality told her with gentle amusement, and she sent a silent ripple of mental laughter back to him.