Bolo Brigade (18 page)

Everything seemed to happen at once. As the eight invaders hurtled closer to the city, a massive Percheron on one of the city's landing pads—Donal thought it must be the craft that had rescued them hours before—began lumbering into the sky on howling ventral thrusters. A missile arrowed in from the west at the tip of an unraveling white contrail, striking the Percheron squarely in the center and detonating in a thunderous crash and rising ball of orange flame. The Percheron staggered under the impact, then tumbled back to the pad, metal crumbling and burning with a fierce white heat. Three more missiles streaked in through the air. The Gremlins banked left and right, scattering flares and antimissile scattershot. Two of the missiles detonated short of their target; the third sheared the wing off one Gremlin in a blossoming white detonation, sending the aircraft spinning wildly, tumbling out of control just above the crowded breakwater and smashing into the sea.

In another instant, the Malach aircraft were shrieking low above the city. Donal realized with a start of recognition that the vehicles were identical to the combat machines he and Kathy had seen on the beach the night before. The legs on each were telescoped in and tucked up tight against the belly, transforming the alien walkers into huge, winged fliers. Ducted venturis along the crafts' undersides held them aloft on shrieking blasts of hot plasma. Where those invisible jets touched the sea they erupted in boiling clouds of steam. As the craft drifted across the breakwater and over the artificial island, the jets kicked up swirling clouds of sand and dust, lashing the rows of carefully planted trees into whiplashing frenzies.

There was a desperate need, Donal decided, for high-powered cannon mounts or laser turrets somewhere on the city's walls or towers. A few dozen such weapons would have brought down those hovering craft in moments. Banking hard, the surviving Gremlin fired a pair of Skystreak missiles. Both impacted against the same Malach flier with dazzling flashes of high explosive, but the Malach craft kept flying, its armor scorched and charred in places but with no apparent damage to either its hull or its performance. Perhaps, Donal thought, it would take more than cannon mounts or lasers after all; those flying craft were
tough
, more like miniature airborne Bolos than traditional aircraft.

The last Gremlin fell from the sky, its tail sheared away by a beam as cleanly as a hot knife slicing through plastic. The Malach craft were circling the artificial island now, weaving back and forth in a complex pattern of multiple loops and figure-eights. A dazzling, blue-white beam like a razor-straight bolt of lightning flicked down across the lagoon, striking several boats in rapid succession. The attack stirred the milling, scattering crowd to greater panic. As flame and smoke exploded from the lagoon, people everywhere, on the plaza, on the walkways next to the lagoon, in the open, sandy areas covered by refugee tents, began fleeing wildly, running in no particular direction, guided only by a desperate need to escape the darting, airborne attackers. Several screaming men and women smashed past Donal, Alexie, and Kathy as they stood at the edge of the plaza overlook; one of them hit Alexie hard enough in the back that she nearly catapulted over the railing, but Kathy and Donal both grabbed her and kept her from falling.

"We'd better find shelter," he told them.

"It's too late for that," Kathy replied. "Look!" She pointed. Eight more airborne vehicles were approaching on shrieking ventral jets. These were similar to the first but larger, much larger, and as they howled over the breakwater, their legs began unfolding like complex puzzles, telescoping out with clawed, grasping feet that sank into sand or grated on seament.

The Malach were landing and in considerable force.

"Come on," Donal shouted. "We have to get out of here!"

"We'll go to Cee-cubed," Alexie said.

"Command-Control-Communications?" Donal asked her as they turned from the railing and started across the plaza, angling toward the central cluster of towers.

"We call it the City Control Center," Alexie replied. "Same thing, I guess, though. It's where Major Fitzsimmons will be. And we can follow things on the big city map."

As the women dashed on ahead, Donal stopped, turning to have another look at the grounded invader craft. They were opening up now, spilling large numbers of Malach troops, and Donal felt a small shock of surprise at the sight. Only a few minutes before he'd seen the computer-generated image of a Malach in the presentation in the auditorium; there was a vast difference, however, between the simulation and the reality. These creatures, no, these
beings
, moved with the fluid grace of born predators. Their heads didn't turn, they
snapped
from side to side with the quick and alert agility of birds. Their gait could be almost comical when they walked slowly, like the mincing strut of chickens . . . but then they would dash ahead with breathtaking speed, the muscles rippling beneath their green-and-ruby-scaled hides, and there was suddenly nothing in the least amusing about them.

Each wore a complicated harness of metal and black leather; each carried a weapon, a slim, exotically curved and fragile-seeming artifact that still managed to look deadly when wielded by those long-clawed hands. They tended to hold them in the upper, slender pair of arms, saving the lower, more muscular pair for picking things up or moving debris. As he watched, a pack of eight of the Malach sprinted ahead in a tight-packed wedge, plunging into the tent city near where their lander had parked.

"Lieutenant!" Kathy yelled at him from twenty meters away. "Come
on
!"

"You two go ahead!" he yelled back, waving them on. "I'll be along soon!"

He had to see this. If he ever made it back to Muir alive, his memories of the Malach in battle would be invaluable. Not for the Confederation Military Command, necessarily . . . but for Freddy and Ferdy, the two Mark XXIVs waiting for him back at the maintenance depot. He wished he had a vid recorder; the Bolos, almost certainly, would be able to analyze the Malach attack profiles and tactics with far greater accuracy and detail than was possible for any mere human soldier.

A pair of Malach fighters howled overhead, traveling so close to the city's surface that Donal was knocked down by a blast of hot air from one of those ventral jets. Ball turrets beneath the fighters' rounded prows loosed stuttering volleys of needle-thin, blue-white bolts that sprayed across the buildings of the central towers. Glass shattered, seament exploded in the heat, sending an avalanche of rubble cascading down the faces of several of the towers and smashing onto the plaza below, close to where Kathy and Alexie had been moments ago.

"Kathy!" he yelled. "
Kathy
!" Oh, God! Had they been caught by that avalanche? He couldn't tell. Scrambling to his feet, he started forward, searching. Pain clawed at his left arm. When he looked down, he saw that the sleeve of his uniform tunic had been burned away, and the skin beneath turned boiled-lobster red. He could feel burns on his side and his face as well, but only as a kind of tightness, as from a sunburn that hadn't really started to hurt yet.

No matter. He could still function. Where were Kathy and Alexie?

Behind, above, and around him, explosions thundered and civilians screamed. For them, he thought, it must seem like the end of the world . . . and in a sense, it was the end of
this
world, at least.

The Malach had arrived to challenge Man for the mastery of this planet, and, so far as Donal could see, there wasn't a damned thing that Man could do in the way of fighting back. . . .

Donal reached the edge of the spill of rubble from the front of one of the city towers. Several people lay dead or wounded beneath jagged white blocks of seament or twisted pieces of metal, but he didn't see either the commander or the deputy director. He helped several civilians pull a massive block of seament off of a man with badly crushed legs. More and more civilians were rallying around, now, helping rescue the injured. Donal looked around, to see what more he could do.

Fresh screams and shouted warnings attracted his attention back to the west, toward the railing a hundred meters away, not far from the spot where he and the two women had been standing moments before. Another of the big Malach troop carriers was hovering there, an oval door in the side dilating to disgorge a small army of bipedal, green-and-ruby-scaled lizards directly onto the plaza.

A security guard had been killed in the avalanche. Part of his light-blue uniform, stained with blood, showed from beneath a pile of rubble. A military rifle lay next to one outflung, paste-white hand. Donal scooped the bulky weapon up, worked the action, and checked safety and receiver.

It was a Guiscard-DuPres-90, an accelerator rifle, a ten-kilo monster originally developed as a big-game rifle for some hunter's world deep in human space, but adapted to military use. The original design was at least seven centuries old, but that made it no less deadly. Checking to see that he had a full magazine of iron-jacketed vanadium-uranium slugs, he dropped to one knee and took aim at the advancing Malach warriors.

They were coming across the plaza in a tightly packed wedge formation. Assuming that the one in the lead, at the arrow's tip, was the leader, Donal took aim, centering the glowing crosshairs in the tiny view screen above the receiver smack between the Malach's four bright red eyes and squeezing the trigger.

With an ear-ringing crack, the GDP-90 slammed back painfully against his shoulder, the recoil and the noise both catching him by surprise. Accelerator rifles used a powerful magnetic pulse to launch a dense, iron-jacketed needle at something like Mach five. The magfield itself was silent, but the sonic boom emitted by the projectile could be startling, and the recoil—the action-reaction generated by a small slug traveling very fast indeed—slammed the buttstock against his shoulder despite the rifle's considerable mass and its internal recoil dampers.

The effect was immediate and spectacular, however. The lead Malach, which must have massed a good two hundred kilos, had been flung backward by the impact, and most of its heavy, bony dome of a skull above the eyes was missing. Malach, Donal saw, had greenish-blue blood.

The death of their leader—assuming Donal had been right in his guess about their squad organization—did not slow the others. They closed ranks and kept coming, loosing bolts of blue-white coherent light from their hand weapons as they advanced. Donal dove behind a tumble of broken seament blocks as the laser beams scored the air above his head, then came up with the accelerator rifle at the ready, drawing a bead on a second Malach and squeezing off a second, painful thump of a shot.

The high-velocity slug tunneled into the Malach's chest, between the joints of its upper set of arms. Flesh and blood could not resist that much kinetic energy dumped into soft tissue that quickly; a bubble of superheated steam and expanding, vaporized tissue literally blew the Malach's upper torso apart in a bloody green splatter. Donal shifted aim and fired again . . . and again . . .

His deadly accuracy stopped the Malach rush at last. Four of the invaders remained now, crouched on the plaza, firing at random into the people scattering away from this deadly new threat. Donal bit off a sharp curse as three women and a man died on different parts of the plaza, laser bolts searing into their backs . . . followed by four more people in another heartbeat, and four more after that. His one-man stand had generated an indiscriminate slaughter of the fleeing civilians.

Taking aim once more, Donal shot another Malach, watching the toothily grinning, green-and-red head explode under the impact of the vanadium-uranium projectile. By that time, however, twenty-four more of the jewel-scaled monsters had emerged from the hovering Malach transport and were fanning out in three groups of eight across the plaza.

Donal knew when a cause was hopeless. The enemy had apparently lost track of where he was and hadn't been able to spot where his sniper fire was coming from, but they would keep killing the civilians until they flushed him into the open, and then he would die.

Or . . . was it possible that they weren't even distinguishing between civilians and armed men? Peering around the side of his ten-ton chunk of sheltering debris, he saw eight of the Malach rush into a fleeing gaggle of civilians. Several of the aliens carried odd-looking weapons different in design from the lasers. When they fired them, they spewed unfolding nets of some gray-silver, sticky filaments that entangled a dozen running humans at a time and knocked them kicking to the ground. A couple of Malach grabbed the ends of the nets then and began dragging them back toward the waiting transport.

A prisoner snatch. Donal understood suddenly that this was why the Malach had launched their attack on the city. They weren't here in strength enough to capture Fortrose; this was a raid, one aimed at capturing a number of humans. No doubt the Malach found humans as strange as humans found the Malach, and they needed prisoners for interrogation . . . or worse.

Angry, now, Donal took aim at one of the Malach dragging away his prize of half a dozen entangled humans, shooting the dinosaurian monster through its grinning head. A flurry of laser shots replied; they'd seen him that time and were peppering his seament cover, the flashes cracking and hissing like miniature lightning bolts. Flat on his belly, his GDP-90 cradled in his arms, Donal snake-squirmed himself away from the block of rubble, staying beneath the cover of the debris spill as he sought another, better vantage point from which he could continue his one-man campaign.

When he poked his head up once more, he was startled to see that the Malach were pulling back. A line of the creatures had formed up in a ragged perimeter around the hovering transport, weapons leveled outward, while the rest—dragging along their human captives—scrambled back into the open hatchway.

One young man—a boy, really, a teenager—managed to break free of the net and scramble away. His captor grappled with him, using all four clawed arms to drag him back toward the ship. Donal snapped his rifle to his shoulder once more, taking aim at the Malach even though he knew the boy's plight, inside the enemy's perimeter, was hopeless. Before he could squeeze the trigger, he saw the boy struggling wildly, the image magnified on his targeting screen. An instant later, the Malach, exasperated, possibly, by the boy's struggles, ducked its head sharply, the jaws clamping down hard on the boy's arm, torso, and shoulder in a spray of bright red blood. Viciously, the Malach shook the body, now gone deathly limp, like a terrier worrying a rag doll. Sickened, Donal was about to squeeze the trigger again when he saw something unusual, something that made him hold his fire.