Bolo Brigade (19 page)

The Malach, clearly, was injured . . . no, it was
sick
. The sharply mottled green and red coloring of its scaly face had gone so pale it was difficult to distinguish between the two colors, and all four of its eyes were squeezed tightly shut. Abruptly, it vomited, took another pair of steps toward the transport, and then collapsed in a tangle of weakly thrashing limbs and twitching tail. Two other Malach, withdrawing toward the transport, stopped and dragged their stricken companion between them. As they dragged it aboard, he could make out a greenish froth bubbling from its mouth.

Interesting. That single bite it had taken out of the human captive had poisoned the Malach. That had to be a useful datum, though Donal couldn't think how to apply it at the moment. The last of the invaders, meanwhile, crowded aboard the transport, which slowly rose above the plaza on shrieking underjets, laser fire spraying wildly in every direction.

The raid was nearly over. As Donal emerged from cover, he could see that the transports that had landed elsewhere on the island were also beginning to lift off one by one, as the smaller, faster fighters continued their tight loops and turns overhead. The Wide Sky military was engaging the attackers, though there simply wasn't enough firepower on Fortrose to more than inconvenience them. A dozen Firefly hovertanks had appeared from somewhere, sweeping past the city on high-splashing roostertails of spray. The hovercraft were fast and highly maneuverable, but they were thin-skinned and possessed only light weapons—three-centimeter rockets and half-megajoule needle-beam lasers that reflected off the Malach armor in jeweled scatterings of light. Worse, the Malach vehicles were nearly as maneuverable as the hovertanks, skittering from side to side on howling underjets as they poured volleys of laser and particle beam fire into the defenders. One after another, the hovertanks were marked down and smashed, their thin armor holed or melted away, with oily black pillars of smoke to mark the junk-pile funeral pyre of those destroyed over the island, or oily patches on the water where they'd been destroyed over the sea.

Before their destruction, one by one, the last five of the Fireflies managed to gang up on one of the circling Malach fighters, pounding at it with volleyed rockets and laser fire. The vehicle broke off its circling and limped off toward the west, trailing smoke, but it was a dearly purchased victory.

And the attack, valiant as it was, had been far too little, too late. The transports departed toward the west, howling off low over the sea, their ventral jets churning up the surface of the water in steaming gouts of spray. The fighters followed, delivering a final volley of laser and plasma bolts that shattered building facades and smashed craters into unyielding seament. Then they were gone, and the only sound was the crackle of scattered fires, the despairing calls of people searching for loved ones and companions in the rubble, and the moans and occasional heart-rending shrieks of the wounded. The alert siren, the wailing that had first attracted his attention and unheard during the thunderous cacophony of the battle, was still going.

Not that it could do any good now, save, possibly, adding to the mournful atmosphere of loss and devastation that hung above Fortrose now like the pall of black smoke that rose from a hundred scattered fires.

Perhaps an hour later, Donal found the City Control Center and there, to his tremendous relief, he found both Kathy Ross and Alexie Turner, huddled in conference with Major Fitzsimmons and a small army of aides. "Donal!" Kathy cried as he entered the room. "We thought you'd been killed!"

"I thought the same about you," he said.

She started to hug him, then drew back when he winced. "Ow!" she said, eyes widening. "What happened to your arm? And your face?"

He looked down at his arm. Blisters had formed a cluster of long, puffy sacs along the outside of his forearm, and his entire hand and arm were beet red. "It's not too bad," he lied. "I caught the edge of a Malach flier's exhaust."

"You were lucky, then," Fitzsimmons told him. "We've been getting reports of lots of people boiled to death when those things flew low overhead. They use superheated water as reaction mass, and steam burns can be pretty nasty."

"We should get you to a medic," Alexie told him.

"Nah, I'm okay," he told them. In fact, he was feeling dizzy and sick with the onset of shock, but so far he was managing to hold the worst effects at bay. He needed to talk to them first about what he'd learned. "Mind if I sit down, though?" He was dangerously close to collapse.

Fitzsimmons signaled an aide, who produced a chair. Donal unslung his rifle and slumped into the chair with heartfelt relief.

"Thanks." He fixed Fitzsimmons with a hard look. "Well, so much for hoping the Malach had overlooked your cities."

"We beat them off."

"We didn't beat anything off," Alexie told him, her voice sour. "They walked all over us and left when they'd done what they'd come here to do."

"Prisoners," Donal told them. "They grabbed, I don't know, twenty or thirty people that I could see, up on the plaza outside of the auditorium. The other landings probably grabbed more, but I didn't see what happened with them." He patted his bulky accelerator rifle, propped up next to his chair. "I was a little busy at the time."

"So far, we've had reports of two hundred twenty-one people snatched by those damned things," Fitzsimmons said. "We assume that they are curious about both humans and these cities." He cocked his head. "We had reports of someone shooting down a lot of Malach on the plaza. Was that you?"

"Probably. It didn't get us anything, though. Just made them mad."

"The reports said six confirmed kills on the plaza," Kathy said. "And another one wounded. Witnesses saw it being helped aboard the landing craft."

"Yeah. I don't know how many I shot," Donal told them. "I lost count. But the wounded one, that wasn't my doing." He told them what he'd seen through his rifle's scope, how the Malach had bitten the boy to death, then suffered an apparent reaction.

"I'm not sure how to interpret what I saw happen," he told them then. "I see two possible reasons the critter got sick."

"We were speculating here on heavy-metal poisoning," Alexie said. "If the Malach are from a relatively metal-poor world, you would expect them to have a pretty low tolerance for, well, the iron in human blood and tissue, say."

"Good possibility. Though the fact that they have a fair amount of metal trappings on those harnesses of theirs and are carrying metallic weapons argues they're not
that
sensitive. Otherwise, their skin would break out in hives just from picking up one of their weapons."

"You said you saw two possibilities," Kathy prompted.

"Incompatible proteins. Our body chemistry is based on right-handed sugars and left-handed amino acids. Assuming they're based on sugars and amino acids, like us, there's still only a one in four chance that their chemistry would be like ours."

Alexie shook her head. "If they had different proteins, that would just mean they couldn't get any nourishment from eating us. Like eating cardboard. It wouldn't necessarily poison them."

"Well,
something
poisoned that Malach soldier," Donal said. He was too tired, too sick to think the thing through now. "If you have your people do an autopsy on the bodies, it might tell you enough about their body chemistry to tell us what their weaknesses are."

"We've had people doing chemistry work-ups on some of the other bodies we've picked up," Fitzsimmons said, "but I don't think they did anything beyond a basic carbon chemistry work-up. I'll have some of our bioscience people start modeling the protein structure. That ought to tell us something about these things, anyway."

"Somehow, I don't think we're going to beat these monsters by making them take bites out of us," Kathy observed. She looked at Alexie. "I also don't think you can delay in getting your evac ships away. The Malach probably just learned one hell of a lot more about you and these floating cities of yours than we've learned so far about them. They've been here once, they'll be back. And soon."

"You're right. Of course, we've learned one vital fact." Alexie smiled at Donal. "We learned the Malach aren't superhuman. They can be killed."

"Yeah," Donal said. "But it isn't easy. I saw your Firefly hovertanks tangling with those things. They managed to damage,
damage
, mind you, one. Twelve Fireflies were destroyed in the process. You can't afford those kinds of trade-offs. Not and survive."

"What about the Bolos?" Fitzsimmons asked. "The advanced ones, I mean, back on Muir. The Mark XVIII we had here didn't last for long, and that was against just sixteen of those Malach machines. How do you think a Mark XXIV would do?"

Donal shook his head. "Impossible question to answer."

"Not that hard, surely. If sixteen Malach walkers—I guess we can't call them that anymore, since we saw them in an air role today—sixteen combat machines took out a Mark XVIII, well, how much better is a Mark XXIV? Twice as good? Three times?"

"The point is that a Mark XXIV is intelligent and self-aware, while a Mark XVIII isn't," Donal said. "Self-evident, I know, but it makes a hell of a big difference, and people don't think about it that much. The Mark XVIII, you see, would have been working off of a standard attack/defense program. That software would have been flexible, of course, to give the machine a lot of latitude in its approach, but the chances were it couldn't rewrite its own reaction code fast enough to respond to what was probably a threat unlike any in its historical archives or sim banks."

"It was destroyed in just under thirty seconds," Fitzsimmons said with a sour set to his mouth.

Donal nodded. "I know. And that's pretty amazing. These Malach machines are a hell of a lot tougher and more dangerous than they look. You know, if you people have tapes of that action, I'm going to need copies to take with me back to Muir. I'll give them to Freddy and Ferdy and see what they make of them."

"Freddy and Ferdy?" Alexie asked, her eyebrows arching.

"The Bolos. Mark XXIV, unit designation FRD." He grinned at her. "You'll like them."

Her eyebrows climbed higher. "What's
that
supposed to mean?"

"That you're coming with us, back to Muir."

"I haven't agreed to that." She shook her head. "I'm needed here. More than ever."

"If I may, Deputy Director," Fitzsimmons said, "let me point out that you can do more good on Muir than you can here."

"What is this, a conspiracy?" she demanded, "Have you two been discussing this behind my back?"

"Not at all," Donal told her. He looked at Fitzsimmons, who wore a quizzical look on his face. "I was suggesting that Deputy Director Turner would be of more use to Wide Sky if she came with us back to Muir. Her word will carry a hell of a lot more weight with my bosses in the Confederation Military Command than mine will."

"He's right, you know," Major Fitzsimmons said. "The situation here requires a military approach, not a civilian one."

"Wide Sky is a civilian-run democracy, Major. Not a military dictatorship."

"With all due respect, ma'am, there are times when democracy has to give way, temporarily, at least, to dictatorship. In cases of martial law, for example. We're going to be fighting for our lives here. We won't be able to stop and take a vote on whether or not to attack or lay low. Am I right?"

"I'll be seen to be running away."

Donal gave a tight smile. "I can't say what it'll look like to the people who stay here," he told her. "Maybe you're right. Maybe they'll think it's cowardice. Maybe the brave thing to do, though, is to say to hell with what people think, and do what you know is right."

"I respect you for your convictions, Deputy Director," Fitzsimmons added. "But you have to do what's right, not what is politically expedient."

"And running away is right?"

Donal shrugged, spreading his hands. "I know that you'll do a whole lot more for the cause of your people if you come talk to my bosses on Muir yourself. They're not likely to believe me when I tell them what's coming. The Director of Wide Sky, well, I'd guess they're going to have to listen to you."

"Deputy Director," she reminded him. "I would say that people couldn't possibly be so blind," she added quietly, "except that I've seen that sort of blindness for myself, here."

"Then you know what I mean."

"We'll need a resolution passed in the legislature. If they decide that my leaving is . . . politically unfeasible . . ."

"I imagine that issue will take care of itself," Fitzsimmons told her.

She sighed, then looked at Fitzsimmons. "You'll take care of . . . of everyone who stays, Fitz?"

"You know I can't promise safety for them, Alexie," the major replied. "Rather the opposite, I should think. But I'll do what I can. For your dad's sake. And for yours."

"I guess I have no alternative, then."

"No, ma'am," Fitzsimmons told her. "No, you don't. Because if you
don't
get on that transport when it comes time to leave, I'll carry you aboard myself. I promised your daddy I'd look after you, and by God that's what I'm going to do." He looked at Donal. "Son, you take care of getting her to Muir. You see that she gets what she needs to get the job done, okay? Or I'll know the reason why!"

Donal smiled. "Yes, sir!"

An aide called to Fitzsimmons from the other side of the room. "Excuse me a moment."

"What was
that
all about?" he asked as Fitzsimmons walked away. "About you and your dad?"

"Fitz was a good friend of my father, back when he was Director General of the colony," she said. She sighed. "He was always kind of like an uncle. I think he still wants to look out for me, for my interests, some times."

"How long before the transports can be loaded?" Kathy asked.

"We're working on that now . . . or we were, before the attack. Last I heard, the first would be ready for boost early tomorrow. The rest by the day after that."

"It's going to be damned hard to slip past that blockade," Donal said. He sank back in the chair. His arm was hurting badly now, and he was feeling cold. "And if we do it once, they're not likely to let it happen again. I think I'd suggest waiting until they're all ready, then go in a group."