Bolo Brigade (15 page)

"It would help if we knew if the bad guys were everywhere except those islands . . . or if there are still some hold-outs on the mainland we could reach."

"If there are," Kathy said, "they might not be around much longer."

"Well, damn it!" Donal exploded. "We can't just
sit
here!"

His thoughts were racing. He'd
seen
the invaders now; that fact was just beginning to seep down into his conscious awareness. He'd seen them in action, and he knew that they posed a deadly threat to the Strathan Cluster. The power behind that brief bolt of energy—he was pretty sure it had been a particle beam of some kind—had been enormous, at least the output of a small fusion reactor. If the invaders attacked in massed groups, the way the message from Wide Sky had implied, even a Mark XXIV Bolo might have a tough time against them.

They had to find a way to warn Muir. . . .

"You know," Kathy said suddenly. "That's exactly what we're going to do."

"Huh? What?" His thoughts had wandered far enough that he didn't know what she was talking about. Had he spoken aloud about the need to get the news to Muir? "What are we going to do?"

"Just sit here." She pointed toward the southeast. "Look!"

Thunder rolled in the distance. A pair of dark shapes, silhouetted against their own tailpipe flares, rocketed in low across the sea. In a thrilling instant, they boomed low overhead, separated, and circled back, looping around the area.

Gremlins! Like the two downed minutes earlier. They appeared to be flying a search pattern over the area. As one of the aircraft passed again overhead, a single bright star flashed from its fuselage, dazzling against the night overhead. Before the flare had drifted slowly into the sea minutes later, a third aircraft could be seen approaching from the southeast, a larger, slower machine with heavy lines and tilt-jets mounted on the tips of four stubby wings.

"SAR!" Kathy cried. "Search and Rescue! They came looking for the pilots of those downed aircraft!"

They stood, waving, stepping away from the cracked and cooling glass at the top of the dune so their IR signatures wouldn't be washed out by the fiercely radiating patch of sand. Another flare turned the night sky above them a flickering neon green. Donal and Kathy, taking care to stay carefully clear of the hot glass, stumbled down to the beach.

The SAR vehicle—an aging and rust-streaked T-950 Percheron—settled to the beach in a swirl of jet-blasted sand and sea spray, hatches swung open along the sides, and armored men packing massive personal weapons leaped out, forming a defensive perimeter. The Gremlins continued to fly air cover low overhead.

A young second lieutenant in bulky armor and carrying a Mark XII powergun that would have been laughably outmatched by the invaders' weaponry, trotted toward them across the beach. "You two from the
Black Flash
?" he asked.

"That's right, Lieutenant," Kathy said. "I'm Commander Ross, pilot. This is my passenger, Lieutenant Ragnor."

The lieutenant nodded; Donal noted that he had the sense—or the experience—not to salute in the field. "Commander. Lieutenant. I'm Lieutenant Foster." He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "Best get your tails on board the Perch, now. We don't have much time."

"We haven't seen any sign of your people on those downed Gremlins," Kathy told him as they started trotting together toward the waiting transport. "I'm sorry."

"Didn't expect to, ma'am. Telemetry indicated immediate kills on both of 'em."

"Then why—"

"We're out here looking for
you
. So were they." They trotted up the Percheron's boarding ramp with a metallic clatter. "Scarba Approach Control saw you going in and pinpointed your crash site. But we also knew some stilters were in the area, and we thought they might get to you first."

"They did," Donal told him. "But they didn't seem that interested in us. They tossed one p-bolt in our direction, like a man might swat at a fly. Casual, like they didn't really care about us at all."

They were settling into the straight-back, thinly padded chairs in the Percheron's cargo bay now, as a sergeant outside bawled at the troops to file back on board, leapfrog withdrawal. "That sounds like the stilters, all right," Foster said as he helped them buckle on their seat harnesses, then dropped into a seat facing them across the central aisle and strapped himself in. "I don't think they're really interested in anything except scrap."

"Scrap?" Donal prompted.

"Metal of any kind. Some plastics and ceramics. Mostly stuff like copper wiring, lead shielding, steel girders. They smashed their way into just about every city on Wide Sky, and as soon as we'd been booted out, they just started taking the places apart."

"We saw some of that from space, coming in," Kathy said. "They were loading stuff onto big barges or transports of some kind."

Foster nodded. "Scavengers. They're damned vultures, feeding on the dead body of Wide Sky's civilization."

"There's one difference," Donal told him.

"What's that, sir?"

"Vultures usually don't kill the body they're feeding on in the first place."

The last of the soldiers was aboard. The sergeant barked into a microphone, "
Go! Go!
" Outside, the idling hum of the Percheron's engines spooled into a shrieking howl. With a lurch and a swift-tilting deck, the transport hurled itself at the sky.

The sun was rising as the Percheron descended toward Pad Seven on the floating city of Fortrose, giving Donal a splendid view of the sprawling, six-sided patch of green and sand-white. The structure had originally been designated as Industrial Fishery Complex Two, but the artificial island with its lagoons and palm orchards and central spires was far too much a
place
to be known only by the cold number of a catalogue designation. The fishing city covered perhaps a hundred square kilometers of ocean, a vast, artificial island of seament electrically accreted out of the water and plated out across the surface of a preform molded in slender conducting wires.

Most of the outer portion of the hexagonal cell was given over to breakwater and dunes, shielding the central habitat from storms and wave damage. At the center, near the emerald-green sweep of the lagoons, the island's habitat rose in a series of slender, spire-tipped columns of seament and sun-sparkling transplas, a city, Donal was told, that normally housed some tens of thousands of workers and their families. Unseen, plunging deep into the emerald waters below the structure's center, was the vertical support core containing the seament accreters, the thermal power generators, sub pens, fish intakes, stabilizers, and all of the rest of the technological complexities necessary to support the idyllic, upper-surface environment.

Perhaps, Donal thought,
idyllic
was no longer exactly the right word. The towers of Fortrose still gleamed in the sun like the turrets of a fairy-tale castle, but as the Percheron descended toward the landing pad, the clutter and chaos everywhere on the floating city's upper works became more and more evident. The open areas, the malls, the parks, the sandy expanses around the lagoon, even the broad, hard tops of the breakwaters had all been taken over by brightly colored tents and shantytown structures of plywood and cloth and fiberboard. The lagoon and the gated channels leading to it from the sea, as well as the outer reaches of the seawall itself, were thickly crowded with ships and smallcraft of all sizes and descriptions, from vast hordes of personal yachts, trimarans, and hover runabouts to a three-hundred-meter submarine liner surfaced and moored in the main channel.

A half-dozen space transports were moored by the seawall as well, including three of the big, spherical D-12 Conestogas that handled so much of the freight and passenger service out here along the Rim. Donal turned from the Percheron's window to glance at Lieutenant Foster, questioning, but the soldier was slumped back in his seat, powergun cradled against his chest, eyes shut in exhausted sleep. Turning back to the window, he surveyed the human sea crowding the artificial island below and shook his head. It looked to Donal as though refugees from all over the planet must have been flocking to the Scarba floating city complex for some days, now, while at the same time, star transports gathered here, a last, desperate chance for them to get off-world.

It would be up to Wide Sky's military forces, though, to buy time enough for the civilians to get clear.

Not exactly an enviable responsibility.

"Those poor people," Kathy Ross said quietly, at his side. Her face was pressed against the window as she stared down into the enormous tent city below.

"I'm surprised the invaders haven't attacked here," Donal said. "If they're as ruthless as everyone's been saying . . ."

"Maybe the invaders don't see the place as a threat," she replied. "They ignored us, after all, back on the beach . . . until it looked like we'd called in an air strike. Then they came down on us with both metal feet."

"They've attacked civilian targets before this," he reminded her. "Hell, Wide Sky didn't have much in the way of a standing army to begin with, and these monsters still started hitting every city and town on the map and taking it apart. I think we need to learn more about the enemy, about how they think, before we can start taking guesses at their motives."

Out of sight but close by, just over the curve of the horizon, Donal knew, four more of the floating cities had gathered, a slow-moving fleet that ought to make an excellent target for the invaders. He wondered again why they hadn't attacked already.

The Percheron settled to the hard-surfaced pavement of the landing pad with a dwindling shriek of belly jets and blast-swirled sand. As the cargo bay doors hissed open, he heard another, more ominous sound . . . the thunder of a large, desperate, and angry crowd.

As he jumped down from the cargo deck, he paused and looked around. Thousands of people, it seemed, most of them in rags, surrounded the landing pad, restrained—just barely—by a thin line of armed troops.

"
Do
something about the invaders!" one voice called, rising above the others. "
Do
something!" Other voices pitched higher and louder in response, in agreement.

A pair of Gremlins howled low overhead, circling the area. It was hard, on the face of it, to know whether they were watching for invaders . . . or keeping watch on the near-riot below.

A harried-looking junior lieutenant met Donal and Kathy with a salute and a gesture toward a waiting aircar. "What's with the crowds, Lieutenant?" Kathy asked.

"They want off of Wide Sky, Commander," he replied as they slipped into the passenger compartment of the vehicle and a military pilot up front spooled up the turbines. "And you know, I'm not sure I blame 'em."

It was a five-minute aircar flight from the landing pad up to a broad balcony in the tallest, central tower. Military uniforms were more in evidence up here, including more uniforms of higher ranks. The lieutenant escorted Kathy away to another suite of offices for debriefing by naval officers, while depositing Donal in a large, transplas-walled office overlooking the entire island, occupied by an overweight man in an army major's uniform and at least a battalion of aides, mostly lieutenants with a smattering of captains.

"I'm Major Fitzsimmons, CO of the Wide Sky militia here," the man said brusquely and without preamble. He looked Donal up and down, a quick and less-than-pleased evaluation. "Have a seat. I understand that you are our cavalry from Muir."

"Cavalry? No, sir. I am here to try to find out what's going on for my bosses back at HQ. They, ah, were having a bit of trouble believing in the reports they were getting from Wide Sky."

Fitzsimmons's face puckered into a wry smile. "They were, were they? Well, I can sympathize. None of us has really been able to believe in this threat. But it's real enough, as you've discovered for yourself."

"Yes, sir."

"These Dinos are deadly. Never seen anything like 'em."

"Dinos?"

"We've recovered some bodies. Not many, not as good as their combat machines are, not as hard as they are to stop. Four-armed dinosaurs, sort of. Tough. Fast. Mean. These things are
good
, Lieutenant. Their walkers are much faster and more maneuverable than anything we have. They leave Bolos in the dust, quite literally run rings around them. Individually, they're not as heavily armored as a Bolo, of course, but they operate in close-knit packs that make them far more deadly."

Donal's eyebrows rose. "Deadlier than Bolos, sir?"

Fitzsimmons snorted. "I take it from your file that you are a Bolo officer."

There it was again. That challenge, as though admitting to working with Bolos was somehow admitting to some small, secret perversion. "Yes, sir."

"Well, simply take it from me that two-megatons-per-second firepower is not the ultimate in military strategy and tactics. Accurate placement of that firepower, and the maneuverability to survive while placing it, are of considerably more importance than the firepower itself."

"I can't refute that, sir. Bolos are designed for accurate placement, however."

Fitzsimmons waved a pudgy hand in casual dismissal. "Foolishness. These things took a Mark XVIII apart piece by piece as though it . . . I don't know. As though it was some sort of big, slow, clumsy game animal or something. Yes. That's exactly the impression I had, watching it. The Bolo was
game
."

"Bolo Mark XVIIIs aren't exactly the latest thing in military hardware, Major. The invaders would have a bit more trouble with a Mark XXIV."

He sighed. "I'm not going to argue force structures and maneuvers with you, Lieutenant. What we are facing here is unlike anything I've ever seen or heard of. We've been running computer simulations, and they suggest that we would need a far more powerful force of Bolos than the Cluster has available, simply to have a chance of matching this threat, let alone overcoming it. And now," Fitzsimmons added, with the definite air of someone who has said all there is to say on a topic, "my staff and I here would like to hear what happened to you and your pilot out there, when you got shot down."