Bolo Brigade (33 page)

From his vantage point inside Freddy, Donal activated a viewscreen that gave a view of the sky above the battlefield. Clouds were growing there, ragged tatters of white vapor that expanded, minute by minute, lumping together into a larger, high-piled mass of fleecy white visibly twisted by the high pressure system into a clockwise spiral.

Plasma bolts continued to fall from the zenith, fired by the Malach ships still positioned eight-tenths of a light second beyond Muir's atmosphere, but the strikes were growing more and more infrequent. Already, McNair—Muir's intensely bright, white sun—was fading somewhat behind a high, thin layer of gathering haze; in another few minutes, an arm of the growing cloud layer drifted between the ground and the sun. In minutes more, the haze had thickened into overcast and the crystalline blue sky had become a leaden gray. In the distance, over the mountains to the north, over the ocean to the west, sunlight still gleamed from a clear, blue sky, but the tent city was now almost completely masked by clouds.

The Malach gunners were firing blind now.

"We can still track the giant combat vehicle with radar," the gunnery officer on Aghrracht's screen reported. "But it continues to move erratically and we cannot target it from this distance. The strange collection of shelters at that site does not offer a solid lock, however, and we have had to break off firing at it. The ships in the lake have been hit several times and we have lost our locks on them. They may have sunk, or their returns may be lost in the reflections from the water. It is difficult to distinguish targets at this range."

"Then shift to other targets," Aghrracht said. "The large city in the south, close to the spaceport, is not cloud-covered."

The officer raised her chin on the screen, exposing her throat in submission. "The hunting is good, Deathgiver." Her image faded from the screen, replaced a moment later by a long-range view of the planet. The cloud cover over the target area was thickening and growing, moment by moment.

Aghrracht considered this. Clouds alone could not shield the planet's surface from plasma bolts, but they could block optical observation of the target area, and they could block the laser beams used to guide the plasma bolts to the target and prevent bloom when they struck dense atmosphere. Beings who could control the weather in this manner, who could summon a shield of clouds at such short notice, were beings to be respected.

She thought again of the machine firing repeatedly into the waters of the lake. Had that been how they did this? Vaporize water and the vapor would rise with the rising column of hot air. When that vapor hit a layer of colder air at high altitude . . .

Yes. These humans were worthy of respect indeed, clever in battle.

Their defeat would glorify them, as well as the clan of Aghrracht.

"Second!" she snapped.

Zhallet'llesch Scent Finder hurried to Aghrracht's side, lifting her chin in salute. "Here, Deathgiver!"

"We will transfer our operations to the planet's surface."

Zhallet'llesch's feeding tendrils twitched confusion. "But . . . we do not yet have a secure claw's grasp on the planet, Deathgiver. It will be almost a
quor
before our first units land."

"And you and I can do nothing from this perch," Aghrracht replied. She gestured at her screen. "We can see nothing, and time delay makes targeting next to useless. We should be on the surface, directing the attack from close at hand."

"It will be done, Deathgiver."

The tip of Aghrracht's tail twitched with a decisive flutter, an indication of determination and will.

"Prepare the command shuttle for immediate launch. Kill and eat!"

She would face the humans herself, on their own ground, fang and claw against fang and claw. . . .

Schaagrasch the Blood-Taster found herself once again entrapped in the narrow, stinking confines of her Hunter, hurtling toward an alien and unknown world. The intelligence briefing had suggested that this time the enemy would be expecting them; a robot probe inserted onto the surface had recorded and transmitted mechanized forces digging some sort of defensive position on the smaller of the two major north continents, close by the body of water where the escaped enemy ships had landed.

Use your fear
. . . .

She felt the entry capsule bump and shudder, subjected to the searing temperatures and unimaginable stresses of high-speed atmospheric entry. She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again. Both hearts were pounding in a staggered, jackhammer beat, one behind the complex four-jointed shoulder girdle in her upper torso, the other farther down, a muffled throb just above her hips.
Not much longer. Hold tight with all six . . . and direct your fear into slashing, blood-spilling hatred of the enemy!

This time, the Deathgivers had ordered a far more massive assault, one designed to crush the prey's resistance from the start and guarantee immediate superiority.

Why do I keep doing this to myself?
Schaagrasch thought with a hot-blooded, single-minded intensity.
I hate being alone, I hate being shut in. Maybe it's time to celebrate the Final Kill, then return to Zhanaach where I can care for males or pre-warrior young. I would prefer the young, of course. I've never cared for animals, save as prey to be hunted
. . . .

But of course, she wasn't old enough for that yet, not while she could still mate. She'd had a most satisfying round of sex with an eager and quick-witted little male just two quach ago. She didn't think the union had taken, but that didn't matter. It was the spirituality of the act that counted. Her
Kaa'la'schgha
—her Assurance Mating—had produced a viable embryo which she'd implanted in a host brooder on Zhanaach just before she embarked on this expedition. If she died in battle, she was assured of progeny, the highest honor she could hope to attain; only if she disgraced herself with cowardice or stupidity or some other antisurvival trait would her offspring be eaten by the Guardian Priests of Sha'gnaasht as they emerged still bloody from the brooder's carcass.

Schaagrasch let that thought steady her. She had to cling to the reality of the moment. Fear was acceptable, if she could turn it to evolutionary advantage, drawing strength and ferocity from it. Cowardice—yielding to the blind survival urges of ancient ancestral forms far down the evolutionary ladder from the highly evolved Malach—would end her line, and her contribution to the Malach gene pool.

With a savage thump, the pod disintegrated around her, freeing her Hunter's lander in a cloud of radar-masking shrapnel. Light—to her eyes, harsh and actinic and shifted toward violet-white—briefly flared around her, until her computer adjusted the electronic optics to more comfortable settings. Her altitude was twenty-one hundred
tairucht,
high above the day side of the prey world. Swiftly she oriented herself. She was over ocean at the moment, but gray-purple mountains rose ahead and to her left, beyond a rugged and fjord-bitten coastline. Patchy clouds obscured much of the landing zone, but her computer highlighted the proper area and approach vectors despite the cloud cover.

As on Lach'br'zghis
,
the last human-infested world she'd seen, this place was virtually untouched by modern mining and processing. Radar detected numerous settlements, but small and isolated things. On Zhanaach there was now but a single city—
Da'a-Zhanaach
, Zhanaach's Greatness—which, together with its satellite sub-cities and industrial complexes covered most of the continent of Aghla.

All of the rest of the Brooder-world was given over to the strip mines and ore extraction facilities, the rock eaters and tunnel chewers and ocean drinkers used by the Malach to extract and concentrate every last
klaatch
of useful metal from the accessible reaches of the planet's upper crust. Schaagrasch could scarcely conceive of life apart from the teeming millions of a world's one city, though she imagined it must be something like the hardship of living with only a few thousand of her own kind aboard ship. The fact that the autochthons of these empty, almost unpopulated worlds lived in small and isolated settlements was one more indication that they were primitive evolutionary forms, doomed to extinction when forced to compete with a more highly developed species.

Once, ages ago, the Malach had inhabited separate and widely scattered cities, each its own clan and kingdom, but the ruthless logic of
Zsho
, the philosophical-religious belief structure that embodied the Malach concept of survival of the fittest, had inevitably led to a single survivor city-state, and that had eventually grown into Zhanaach's Greatness. As the Malach assimilated Zsha'h'lach and Lach'br'zghis and the other empty, human worlds, they would one by one be subjected to the Malach's efficiency in recovering vital metals.

Schaagrasch hoped that some pieces, at least, of the conquered worlds would be set aside for
g'raaszh
, a concept that translated very loosely as "living space," room to range with the pack, hunting in the old way of the Mothers. Efficiency in exploiting Zhanaach's scarce metal reserves had been the means by which the Malach had developed first an industrial civilization, then space flight, and finally the ability to utilize the inexhaustible metal riches of other worlds and systems, but that efficiency had also resulted in the loss of the open plains and savannas that had given rise to the Race in the first place, a few million
qui'ur
or so ago. She and her kind hungered for open country in which to hunt. That instinctive drive was at least partially responsible for the need to physically subdue other worlds, when asteroids and lifeless moons could provide heavy elements enough to sate even the Malach's relentless metal-hunger.

Nuclear fire flashed and stabbed from below, focusing Schaagrasch's full attention once again on the needs of the moment. Resistance, this time, was heavy, and she could tell that losses already were high. Most of the fire, she noted, was rising from two separate locations, one of them quite close to her assigned landing zone, the other not far from the spaceport that was Strike-Hunter Cha'rissch's primary target.

Active radar sites infested the target area heavily. Fusion beams continued to burn from the surface intermittently, each shot obliterating another incoming Malach pod or assault boat even when they were fired through the thickening overcast below. The ground batteries had an advantage there, of course, in that the incoming boats, those clear of their chaff covers, at any rate, would be easily tracked by radar, while Malach radar had to sort unfamiliar targets from the clutter of the ground.

Schaagrasch had been lucky thus far, a single target among hundreds. She flashed over the coastline, still descending, skimming low above a surface of blinding, violet-white clouds, their glare only just contained by the optical system's electronics.

A warning buzzer sounded; she was being painted by enemy radar . . . painted hard, with a target lock. Schaagrasch twitched her left hind-arm, firing attitude jets to swing her craft sharply right. As she heeled over, a dazzling glare of light erupted from the clouds, illuminating the cloud deck from within and beneath, the beam searing past her pod like a lightning stroke.

She twitched again, bringing the fast-falling probe back onto course, angling in toward the assigned landing zone. An instant later, clouds surrounded her in gray-bright fog . . . and then she was below the cloud deck, hurtling above a confused tangle of colorful shelters or tents of some kind. A lake gleamed to the right, mountains to the left. Then she was over thick and unexploded forest, her jets firing one last time to kill her forward velocity.

Trees blurred beneath her pod as she triggered her air-breathing engines, decelerating with a ten-G jolt that nearly robbed her of breath. A final sharp, hard shock . . . and she was down.

Her pod split open and she engaged the Hunter's servos, rising unsteadily on unfolding legs. She scanned her surroundings across 360 degrees; a second pod in her octet was down eighty
erucht
distant. She saw the other Hunter rising from the crater where the pod had come to rest and recognized the hull number and death-poem script of J'krarash'niz's Hunter.

"Form up! All Hunters, form up!" she barked. "Kill and eat!"

"Kill and eat" came the reply from five voices. She checked her map screen and saw that Ghaghr'risch and Asch'gniz were missing, unaccounted for. The enemy defensive fire had been fierce, relentless, and highly accurate. Perhaps they'd both been caught by battery fire from the ground coming in.

No matter. With resistance this fierce from the human prey, she would be able to bring her octet to full strength very soon by incorporating the blessed survivors of other shattered octets.

Fusion fire briefly lit the sky to the southwest, from the vicinity of that curious human tent-city. One of the autochthons' combat machines was known to be in that area, a center of resistance that would have to be neutralized at once. She rasped out another order, and the six Hunters began hurrying southwest on fast-scissoring, mechanical legs.

While Bolo 96876 of the Line has been engaging enemy forces at Simmstown, I have been guarding the approaches to Kinkaid, the Muir Military Command Headquarters, and the spaceport. With no Enemy ground forces within my sensory envelope, I have been free to engage Enemy spacecraft approaching Muir in my line of sight. Enemy fire from space is continuing, but so far only three shots have come closer than one hundred meters, and I have suffered no damage.

Two point seven three minutes ago, however, a new threat appeared. Bursting out of an obscuring cloud of chaff, a large number of Enemy craft have entered my sensory envelope.

Judging these nearby vessels, which exhibit mass and maneuvering characteristics approximately equivalent to those of Concordiat Dragon's Tooth pods or Echo-class landing barges, to be the major threat, I have shifted my targeting priorities to them and commenced firing. Several flare and vanish with suspicious ease. They are dummies, target drones designed to attract both my attention and my fire.