Bolo Brigade (14 page)

"Nice job, Commander," he said, allowing himself to relax. "For a time, there, I didn't think we were going to make it."

"Don't congratulate me yet, Lieutenant. We ain't out of the woods, not by a long shot." The aircraft lurched heavily, nose coming up. It felt sluggish.

"What . . . what's the problem?"

"Can't tell. Starboard control surfaces are jammed, it feels like, and I can't pop the air brakes. The leads're melted through, I think. And the engine's dead. Can't restart. Looks like we're going down, and hard."

Damn!
"How far to this Scarba they told us about?"

"Not too far. Two, three hundred kilometers, maybe. I'll get us as close as I can. Then we're going to have to punch out."

He kept quiet after that, though rivulets of sweat beaded his face and tickled their way down his cheeks. They were steadily losing altitude now, a dead-stick glider with the aerodynamic grace and precise control of a falling rock.

Ocean gleamed in the distance, just ahead of the dark purple band of the approaching nightside terminator. To the north, smoke stained the sky—another burning city.

He wondered how close they were to the human perimeter.

Another lurch . . . a kick in the seat of his pants accompanied by the screech of ripping metal. Suddenly, the air was buffeting them wildly as the courier began a lazy roll to port.

"Hang on, Lieutenant!" Ross yelled above the sudden roar. "Can't hold her! We're punching out!" Plastic shields snapped out of the chair, embracing him in a wind-proof bubble. Thunder exploded, coupled with a wrenching, gut-sick sensation of heavy acceleration, of falling . . .

And then Donal lost all awareness of any sensation whatsoever.

"
C'mon
, Lieutenant!" The voice was low, the words whispered, but with sharp urgency. "Snap out of it!"

Someone slapped his face again, and Donal opened his eyes. At first he thought something was wrong with his eyes because it was so dark, but then memories began dropping into place. Kathy Ross was leaning over him, one hand holding a stim injector from a medkit, the other holding his jaw as she moved his head back and forth and peered down into his face.

Awareness returned. It was dark because it was night. The sky was clear, but with the empty loneliness of skies out on the Rim; two moons glowed with orange-gold beauty, one full, near the zenith, the other crescent-sharp, above the mountains inland. He smelled the salt spray, heard the gentle hiss of ocean surf nearby. He was lying on his back in the sand, and his clothes were wet. He tried to sit up.

"Ssst! Careful!" Ross warned, pressing him back with a firm hand against his chest. "We've got company. No fast moves. . . ."

He looked past her, at the . . .
things
moving up the beach.

Invader war machines. They had to be, because they looked like nothing he'd ever seen in human space.

There were two of them, perhaps half a kilometer down the beach, both painted ebon-black but clearly visible by the moonlight and by the phosphorescent glow scattered back by the sea. Each was perhaps five or six meters tall. They stood on two slender legs, claw-footed and broad at the bottoms, narrower at the tops where they merged with the shadowed complexities of drive machinery beneath their flat bodies. The knee joints were angled backward, the opposite of human legs, with the digitigrade articulation of a bird or bipedal reptile.

In fact, they reminded Donal of birds in a way . . . of giant chickens, perhaps, picking their way through a farmyard with mincing, strutting movements.

He fought an insane compulsion to laugh. They looked ridiculous.

They also, clearly, were deadly. The upper body of each of the machines was flat, a triangle with rounded edges and slightly down-curved wingtips, a little like the stingrays or giant mantas that still swam the oceans of Terra. There was no sign of a cockpit or fighting compartment, but the blunt prow of each machine was studded with short, vicious-looking muzzles of various shapes and calibers, weapons of various types, without a doubt.

Other details became clearer as they moved closer. There were jet venturis of some sort on the bellies, suggesting at least a limited ability to fly. The feet were flanged, with three blunt toes on each, two ahead, one behind, but there was also a forward-facing claw, sickle shaped and razor-edged. He couldn't imagine what that was supposed to be for. Their movements had a smooth and curiously organic feel, as though the machines were in fact alive, or at the very least as if they were enormous, string-dangling puppets. There was a quickness to their movements, an alertness in the attitudes of the huge bodies, that far transcended the stalwart, massive, and uncompromising solidity of a Bolo.

Teleoperation,
he thought.
They move as though they're wired up to living beings, moving in step with them.
That would explain why they walked on spindly legs, rather than moving on more stable and solid tracks. Humans had been experimenting with teleoperated systems for the past thousand years or so, but when it came to weapons, humanity had chosen the path leading to huge, mobile fortresses; the tanks of the early twentieth century had evolved into tracked behemoths, slow-moving, heavily armed and armored mountains of metal that could withstand damned near anything thrown at them. He couldn't imagine one of these frail-looking things lasting for more than an instant against the two-megaton-per-second firepower of a Bolo's Hellbore.

Donal knew that it would be dangerous to judge the invader machines by their silly looks, though.

Several alien designs had gone the way of legs rather than tracks. The Axorc robot hunters with their jointed crawler-legs, for instance, like great, black millipedes. Or the Yavac walkers of the spider-like Deng. Bolos had fought the combat machines of those races, and others even stranger, in the thousand years since Man had gone to the stars, and it was never smart to assume that an odd look or a twist of alien psychology indicated an inherent inferiority to human designs. These machines could be tougher than they looked. Too, reports that had made it through from Wide Sky suggested that the invaders had used mass assault tactics on the Mark XVIII. Throw enough machines at a Bolo all at once, and even the best could be overwhelmed by numbers and worn down by repeated hits.

A lot depended on what the beings piloting those things were like, where they came from, how they
thought
.

He snuggled himself a bit further back down out of sight. Donal and the courier pilot were lying on the reverse slope of a grass-cloaked sand dune, just behind the top, looking over the crest toward the broad, flat beach where the two invader machines were walking. They were far enough off that he could take some comfort in the distance, and in the insignificance of two shadows-clad humans hidden in the dunes, but it was hard to tell what they might be able to see or not see with the instruments of an alien technology. If they had sufficiently sensitive IR scanning, the two watching humans were probably standing out against the darkness like a pair of small bonfires; a Bolo, certainly, would have had no trouble seeing them at this range.

On the other hand, the invaders didn't seem terribly interested in searching the area. They'd found one of the eject capsules from the crashed Lightning lying in the sand at the edge of the surf. Even without image enhancement, Donal could see by the light of the two moons in the sky the footprints and drag marks where Kathy Ross had hauled him up the beach, leading more or less straight to their current hiding spot, but the two invader machines seemed more interested in the wreckage of the capsule. Though it was difficult to see in the darkness, it looked to Donal as though a slender set of claw-tipped arms was reaching down from the flat, manta-body of the thing and was lifting the seat and its shattered plastic canopy from the surging waves. It drew it up, dripping, then gave it a shake. Was that machine's operator looking for the human who'd ridden inside? Or trying to figure out what it was?

One of the machines turned in place until it was directly facing them across two hundred yards of open sand. Donal felt Ross stiffen beside him, getting ready to run; he laid a hand on her arm, willing her to be still. It looked . . . it
felt
as though these invaders simply didn't care about anything as small or inconsequential as humans. Certainly, if these were the combat vehicles that had done in a Mark XVIII Bolo in less than half a minute—more, if these were the machines that had actually survived an all-out assault against the Bolo—then there probably wasn't much a couple of isolated soldiers could do to hurt them.

Another much larger and slower machine appeared on the beach, lumbering along on four jointed, massive legs toward the pair of bipedal combat walkers. Straddling the junked ejection seats, it dropped multiple clawed arms from its belly, grasped the wreckage, and hauled it up inside. After a moment more it began waddling away, leaving the biped invaders where they stood. There was something about their manner now, an agitation, that worried Donal. They turned away from the two humans and seemed to be scanning the horizon to the southeast.

Could they have spotted something in that direction? A ship perhaps, or . . .

Both walkers pivoted suddenly, fixing their attention on one small part of the sky. A moment later, a howl sounded out of the southeast, and the walkers turned slowly, weapons tracking the dark sky out over the ocean. Then Donal saw them, a pair of shapes hurtled in toward the beach, wave-skimming, afterburners glaring in star-banishing cones of blue-white light. The two invaders opened fire, dazzling beams of light slicing across the night; one of the aircraft—they looked to Donal like old, K-100 Gremlins—exploded in a dazzling spray of burning fragments while it was still far out over the water.

The second Gremlin managed to loose one missile before its port-side wing was sheared away and it pancaked into a dizzying tumble toward the water. The missile exploded far short of its intended target, vaporized by a particle beam of some kind, Donal thought. The aircraft hit the water several kilometers out to sea, exploded in a white flash, and sank.

"Oh, my God . . ." Ross said quietly.

One of the walkers was striding off down the beach, following the big four-legged machine. The second walker stood on the beach alone for a moment. Suddenly, with no warning, it pivoted to face the hidden humans once more.

Something in the aggressive way it twisted about warned Donal. "Duck!" The two slid down the reverse slope of the dune, scrabbling deeper into the cool embrace of the sand. With the suddenness of a thrown switch, the night above them flared into noonday brilliance, a harsh, actinic blue-white light that burned their eyes even through tight-shut eyelids. The thunderclap that accompanied the light shrieked in Donal's ears, threatening to lift him from the sheltering sand, clawing at his consciousness.

And then the night was dark and silent once again.

Dazed, he sat up, brushing sand from his uniform. Kathy Ross sat up beside him, blinking. "Look . . ."

He followed her gaze. The entire top of the dune they were hiding behind had been fused, the grass scoured away cleanly by the white hot beam, the individual grains of sand melted together into a cracked and irregular cap of dirty, frosted glass that extended in a ragged zigzag along ten meters of the dune's top. The stuff was still hot. Donal could feel the heat rolling off the surface in waves, and as it cooled, cracking and popping sounds emanated from the glassy mass.

The walkers were gone, and only the churned-up footprints they'd left at the water's edge remained to show they'd been there. That, and the fused glass at the top of the dune.

"Well," Donal said, trying to keep the shakiness out of his voice. "What now?"

Ross let out a deep sigh, her hands hanging limply at her side as she stared wide-eyed at the spot where two high-performance aircraft had just been swept from the sky. "We need to go
that
way," she said, nodding toward the southeast, and the moons-gleam on the ocean's empty horizon. "Scarba is out there."

"In the middle of the ocean?"

"Wide Sky's got these fishing centers," she explained. "The biggest one is called Fortrose. They're kind of like cities raised on enormous, sea-going platforms. Scarba's the name of the island chain where they're anchored right now. I gather they usually follow certain fish on long, deep-ocean migrations, harvesting as they go, and the Scarba Chain's where the fish are. I guess when the invasion came—"

"They became a sanctuary," Donal said, completing the thought. "Yeah." He looked at her. "You've been here before?"

"A time or two. Used to work for a free trader who pulled his circuit throughout this part of the Cluster." Turning, she looked up at the star cluster, hanging low in the western sky. "Wouldn't mind seeing his rattletrap old freight hauler now.
Nefertiti
, her name was."

Donal moved his hand closer to the fused glass, experimentally testing the heat. "What do we have in the way of emergency gear?" he asked. "I wasn't much aware of what happened after you hit the eject button."

"Not much," she admitted. "Those seats are fitted with emergency packs. You know, first aid kits, survival radios, stuff like that. But after we touched down, I was kind of busy getting you out of your pod and dragging you ashore before you drowned. Your eject pod was smashed open when it hit, and was filling up with water."

"Thanks," he said, seriously. He tried to picture Kathy Ross battling the surf to haul his inert body out of the partly exposed seat in the eject pod. He outmassed her by twenty-five kilos, at least.

"No problem. But, well, by the time I'd hauled your tail up onto the beach, I saw those . . . things coming. I dragged you the rest of the way up the beach and over the dune. You started moaning and coming around a few minutes later."

"So. No radio?"

"I'm afraid not. That four-legged stilter has them now."

"Then," he said slowly, "Maybe we'd better start walking."

"To an
island
?" She laughed, and there was a brittle edge to the sound.