Last Stand

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Book cover of Last Stand.
by S. M. Stirling, David Weber, John Mina, William R. Forstchen, Robert Greenberger, William H. Keith Jr., Todd Johnson, Steve Perry, John DeCamp, Mark Thies, and Linda Evans
Book 13 of the Bolo series

Review

Last Stand is the thirteenth book in the Bolo series. It features ten stories by eleven authors, many of whom are new. Their stories explore themes of Bolos going rogue, the distant future of the setting, and new details about the Final War with the Melconians.

Last Stand returns to the format used in Honor of the Regiment and The Unconquerable, where multiple authors each contribute one or two short stories, instead of a few authors writing long novellas as in The Triumphant, Old Guard, and Cold Steel. I prefer the short story format because it allows for a wider range of ideas and tones, but it does have a downside: there will always be some stories I just don’t like. That’s what happened here.

David Weber delivers two excellent stories, and S. M. Stirling wraps up his Lost Legion storyline perfectly. But several of the new authors stumble, either taking too many liberties with the setting or just failing to make their stories come together.

I suspect the editor proposed a few shared themes to make the stories feel more connected to the universe, especially since this anthology includes so many new writers. Hold Until Relieved and In the Flesh both take place in the far, far future and have Bolo minds being placed in new bodies. The Traitor, Memories of Erin, and A Question of Valor all deal with Bolos going rogue. And Memories of Erin, And Don’t Come Back, and A Time to Kill are set during the Final War.

Overall, I didn’t enjoy this book as much as some of the earlier anthologies. Part of that might just be fatigue; I’ve been reading a lot of Bolo stories in a short time. I’m going to take a break before diving into Old Guard, maybe catch up on Murderbot with Fugitive Telemetry and System Collapse, and definitely re-read The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.

The Sixth Sun

by S. M. Stirling

This story wraps up the arc started in Lost Legion and Ancestral Voices. The main characters are the children and grandchildren of the soldiers from those earlier stories, and their enemies are the remnants of the Aztec Empire from Ancestral Voices. It’s mostly a story about people, but at the end the Bolo saves the day in a very satisfying manner.

It’s interesting how these stories manage to feel bright and even hopeful, while actually being some of the darker Bolo tales. In this one, the Aztecs are constantly cutting out hearts and slaughtering hundreds of their own slaves to prevent revolt during the attack. There are also nods to the American fiefdoms with their constant atrocities from The Night of the Trolls and The Stars Must Wait. The inclusion of the dark content makes the village itself seem more idyllic by contrast: a small remnant of civilization that has managed to endure.

The Traitor

by David Weber

The Bolo LNC Lance appears to have gone rogue, and it’s up to Bolo ART Arthur to hunt him down. Weber is great at writing Bolo combat scenes, and this story is no exception. It is packed with detail about how Bolos fight and the technology they use. It’s similar to Field Test in its exploration of the fear of Bolos turning rogue, with a reveal that Lance actually has a motive: saving a group of children. Other stories that explore similar ideas include Rogue Bolo, The Legacy of Leonidas, Little Red Hen, and Weber’s own Miles to Go.

Yesterday’s Gods

by John Mina and William R. Forstchen

I really enjoyed Forstchen’s Endings, which invented the Last War, explored the cost of vengeance, and delivered some awesome Bolo combat. But I didn’t like this one. The plot is fine: a bomber pilot is shot down, tries to survive, and encounters the descendants of humans on a bug-infested planet. The concept of the survivors using religion to pass down knowledge about their Bolo could have been fascinating, like Foundation or A Canticle for Leibowitz. But the story leans too much into the juvenile and salacious, with the main character obsessing over sex, and how attractive all the women are, which distracts from the story.

Memories of Erin

by Robert Greenberger

This one doesn’t really feel like a Bolo story. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing; the idea of a Bolo and its commander struggling but ultimately failing to achieve their goal is new, and it’s an interesting idea. But the problem is that this story takes too many liberties with the setting. It invents a new Galactic Empire to replace the Concordiat, and it makes the universe feel smaller by tying almost everything back to Earth and the Solar System. It also adds new “facts” about Bolos that don’t make sense, like their computer core being over a dozen stories tall (how does that fit inside a Bolo?), that they can travel at 800 kph, or that they have a secret radio channel the humans don’t know about for private conversations.

The story follows Erin as she tries to stop the virus that’s corrupted her Bolo, similar to The Murphosensor Bomb. It alternates between flashbacks about her life and the battle that led to the infection as she faces her impending death. But Robert Greenberger doesn’t make Erin compelling enough for her death to have real weight.

Hold Until Relieved

by William H. Keith Jr.

Four billion years in the future, a Bolo is excavated by cyborg aliens and relives the moments before its “death” in the failed defense of the imperial palace near Geneva, Switzerland. This is the second story to mention an “Empire” after Memories of Erin, so maybe the editor and authors agreed on a general shared timeline for the universe. The story introduces “Cybolos”, human minds fused with machines, a theme we’ll see more in A Time to Kill. The Bolo’s mind is finally transferred into a new, alien form, which ties in with In the Flesh.

This one is a little like Combat Unit, with a Bolo waking up while being probed by aliens it assumes are hostile. Digging up the Bolo because it was a large magnetic anomaly reminds me of the excavation of Tycho Magnetic Anomaly One—the monolith—in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

A Question of Valor

by Todd Johnson

I love the concept of this story. A Bolo is ordered to “defend my people” and realizes that, even if they win the war, the mining colony will still be economically devastated, unable to grow or import enough food, and eventually destroyed by earthquakes. So it flees, triggering an investigation into its supposed cowardice and a large settlement payout from GM that ends up saving the colony. But the writing’s a little rough, and it doesn’t feel like there are enough clues for the reader to solve the mystery along with the detective.

There are a couple of fun easter eggs: a character has a mustache like Hercule Poirot’s from Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles, and an aircar’s call sign mixes THX-1138 and 1984. This story is also a bit like Rogue Bolo, where the Bolo deliberately bends its orders to better fulfill its mission, and like The Last Command, where the Bolo causes earthquakes while operating underground.

In the Flesh

by Steve Perry and John DeCamp

A Bolo’s mind is resurrected and placed in a human body by energy beings in the far future, who need help fighting off invading insect-like aliens. As a human, the Bolo realizes it loved its former commander. It dies willingly on a suicide mission to protect the aliens, who it believes can create a new, more just universe.

The human–Bolo relationship is similar to Little Red Hen and Miles to Go from The Triumphant.

And Don’t Come Back

by Mark Thies

The Bolo DLS Dallas detects and hacks an armada full of slave soldiers before they can cross the Concordiat border. It conspires with one of the slaves to turn the ships around and send them back to attack their masters. At the same time, Dallas has a pleasant chat with some children on a beach. A simple story, but it adds Kloude Chambers as new Bolo tech for subspace manipulation, shows a bit of normal life in the Concordiat, and ends with a satisfying “the bad guys messed with the wrong people” revenge plot.

A Time to Kill

by David Weber

The Mk. XXXIII Bolo Shiva is destroyed as it finishes Operation Ragnarok: a genocidal campaign against the Melconians during the Final War. Years later, human refugees settle on the planet, only to have a fleet of Melconian refugees arrive in orbit, their ships too battered to go on. Both groups decide the only option is to annihilate the other, but when Shiva wakes up and is commanded to take part, it realizes it’s already done too much killing. This story is similar to Endings, but with a twist: here, the Melconians land on a human world.

David Weber is the undisputed master of Bolo stories. All three of his, Miles to Go, The Traitor, and this one, are fantastic. He really understands that a good Bolo story centers on the Bolos themselves and the moral and philosophical dilemmas they raise, while adding enough cool tech and battle scenes to sugarcoat it. It makes me excited to read his short story Dyma Fi’n Sefyll in the Bolo-inspired World Breakers, and even his Honorverse series, starting with On Basilisk Station.

A Brief History of Human Expansion Beyond Concordiat Space

by Linda Evans

An in-universe technical paper, similar to A Brief Technical History of the Bolo, but about the various alien races. It includes a tongue-firmly-in-cheek paragraph about the “challenge scholars face in gathering, reconciling, and validating information from existing and often contradictory sources”, a clever way to explain how the different authors have inconsistent descriptions of Bolos. It also waves away the “abandoned Bolo is destroyed by the Concordiat” storyline we see in A Relic of War and Little Dog Gone as either apocryphal or the result of an overly cautious policy.