Bolo Brigade (34 page)

Within .22 second, however, three new targets appear above the horizon at 341 degrees, and these show signs of intelligent hands at the controls, rather than remote teleoperation. I acquire a targeting lock on the first one, even while running a vector solution on all three . . . noting as I do that I will be able to destroy two of the incoming pods, but not the third. They are passing from my left to my right on a path that will bring them down to the east of and within ten kilometers of the spaceport. This is almost certainly a force detailed to capture the port.

The pods are similar to tapered cylinders with moderate armor, no weapons, and numerous thrusters. Each could hold a large number of troops, several vehicles, or a combat machine equivalent to a Mark XXIV Bolo. Swinging my 90cm Hellbore to bear on the lead target, I fire.

My aim is good, and the bolt of fusion plasma strikes the lead pod squarely in the center, burning through the thin hull metal and ripping it open. In an instant, the pod has been shredded as its aerodynamic integrity is lost, spilling a large number of objects into the air. There is no time, however, for a detailed analysis. I immediately shift my tracking lock to the second pod and, as soon as my Hellbore power inductors have cycled up to full readiness 1.27 seconds after the first shot, I fire again.

The two surviving pods are attempting to avoid ground fire by jinking as far as their maneuvering systems will permit, but the pods clearly are bulky and underpowered craft, and sophisticated maneuvers are impossible for them. My second shot hits the target five meters from its nose, sheering off the forward part of the hull and sending the craft into an uncontrollable spin.

As expected, by the time I slew my turret to track the final pod, it has passed behind a line of trees to the east and is beyond my targeting envelope.

With no other targets in view, I turn to 095 degrees, aiming for the landing area of the surviving pod, and engage my drive.

I should arrive at the landing site within five minutes.

At my Commander's suggestion, I am traveling east through the forest north of the refugee camp, advancing through the woods at the maximum speed possible, splintering trees and plowing them down. My radar scan of the Enemy landing pattern suggests that this patch of forest could well be infested with Malach war machines, so I deploy all sensors at maximum, watching for the possibility of ambush. My immediate target is the general area of the Enemy's landings.

I have ceased firing at the lake. Within the past twenty minutes, a considerable cloud cover has gathered over the entire Simmstown area, and a light rain is falling. The Enemy bombardment from space has ceased, at least in this area, though plasma bolts continue to strike other areas, in particular the region around Kinkaid. Bolo 96875, so far, is unhurt. He reports a landing by Malach forces near the starport and is advancing to investigate.

I wish him well.

Large numbers of Malach forces have landed in my Combat Area as well, though they do not appear to be well organized as yet. My mission is to block their movements and, if necessary, attract their fire, to give the refugees time to escape.

Movement catches my attention, a thrashing among the trees at a range of 120 meters, bearing 273. I pivot my Hellbore turret to cover the threat. An instant later, an Enemy combat walker emerges from the trees.

It appears identical to the machines recorded on Wide Sky, a flat, roughly saucer-shaped main body, thicker in the mid-section than toward the oval, knife-edged wingtips, which at the moment have been folded down to form sheltering armor skirts for the leg mechanism and ventral hull.

I trigger a round from my Hellbore, the bolt slashing into the Malach walker's left side, ripping up armor plating and hurling debris into the forest at the machine's back. It returns fire in the same instant, a particle beam that strikes my forward left-side skirt, detonating a line of reactive armor plate in a sharp, crackling blast, and fusing the armor beneath into glassy, glowing-hot slag. The damage is minimal, however, and easily repaired. I track my Hellbore lower and trigger a second shot, aiming for what I judge to be the walker's weak point, its legs. Vents on the walker's belly flare bright-hot in my infrared scanners as air intakes topside gulp down vast quantities of atmosphere, superheat it, and jet it out the belly. The machine lifts, its legs folding. My shot grazes one leg, doing no serious damage.

My infinite repeaters are firing now as I track with every weapon I can bring to bear. Sparks snap and flash from its hull; one solid hit staggers it, knocking one wing low, and a Hellbore shot smashes in an instant later, shearing off the right wingtip and sending the Malach machine into a pancaking spin. It hits the trees with a shattering impact, toppling two in a thunder of wildly splintering wood and falling boughs.

My sensors detect other Malach walkers closing in fast. . . .

* * *

Alexie climbed out of her speedster and hurried toward the knot of adults and older children who were gathered around a smoldering pile of wreckage. One of the plasma beams from the sky had fallen here, incinerating a dozen makeshift shelters and tents, and toppling one large shelter, which by chance had stood at the edge of the blast zone, into a tumble-down heap of melted plastic and scrap. Rain drizzled from the overcast, a thin, hot mist. The workers were busily pulling bodies—
small
bodies—from the debris.

It all seemed so blindly wasteful, so random and vicious. Children always suffered in war, but for the Malach to simply fire into these tents like this, without even realizing what they were doing . . .

Or did they? War by terror was nothing new or alien to human ideas of warfare. "What's going on?" she demanded.

"We have some survivors in there," one of the adults, a young woman, said. Her face was haggard and white, with blue-black circles beneath the eyes. "But the stuff on top is too heavy."

Alexie took a look. The ruin was close by the edge of the forest, a clutter of bright orange sections, some partly melted by the intense heat of the beam, which had gouged a twenty-meter crater into the earth nearby. When she stooped to look under the wreckage, she could hear someone crying, while another young face with large, dark eyes regarded her steadily from the shadows. "Hang on!" she called. "We'll get you out!"

"The wall fell!" the face called back. Alexie thought it was a boy of ten or twelve. "We can't get out!"

"Are you hurt?"

"I think Demi's leg is stuck."

"How about you?"

"I'm okay. Arm's hurt a little. There's not enough room to crawl out!"

The speedster had a towpoint, and someone produced a length of high-strength cable which they secured around a jagged piece of fallen wall. It took a few moments for her to use the vehicle to partly lift the wreckage clear of the ground, so that the workers could drag the two children, mercifully still alive and not badly injured, to safety.

"Okay," she told the group, as the vehicle settled back to the ground with a dwindling whine. "You have to get out of here. Don't stop for possessions. Don't stop for anything. The Malach are coming, and they're coming fast!" She pointed south. "We have transports taking people on down there, but save them for the real little ones, or those who can't walk, okay? The rest of you have legs. Use them! There'll be people to guide you out. It'll be a long walk, but if you don't get too scared and if you listen to what people tell you, you'll make it okay."

"Where are we going?" one of the rescued kids cried. She looked like she was about eight, with a smudged face and a dirty holiday-best red dress. A rescue worker was bandaging her leg, which didn't seem to be broken but which had a nasty cut. "Ow-ow! I want my mom and dad!"

"Right now, we just have to get away from the Malach, honey," Alexie said. "We'll find your parents later." Too late, she remembered that, more than likely, the girl's parents were still back on Wide Sky. She had a most unpolitician-like aversion to making promises that she was not going to be able to keep.

The kids started moving off, shepherded by the adults, one of whom carried the injured girl in her arms.

Alexie heard something, a thrashing among the trees at her back. With fear mounting in her breast and throat, she turned, freezing in place as the bushes parted and an armed Malach warrior strode into the clearing. Two more Malach appeared behind the first . . . and then trees were thrust aside as one of the nine-meter-tall walkers stepped out of the forest and into the light. More of the creatures appeared to the right and left, clad in leather straps and equipment harnesses only, with their scaly hides gleaming wetly in the drizzle like faceted red and green jewels.

The children at her back screamed, and she could hear them scattering behind her. With lightning quick motions, the Malach raised weapons clutched in various confusing combinations of arms and clawed hands, taking aim.

"No!" she shouted, stepping forward into the path of the first Malach that had appeared, looking up into the creature's four emotionless, expressionless ruby and ebon eyes. She deliberately assumed a defiant stance, shoulders back, chin held high and as firm as she could manage, staring into that alien, four-eyed visage less than five meters away,
daring
it to shoot her. She fully expected to be dead in the next second. . . .

The lead Malach took three swift steps forward, a strangely shaped weapon of some sort clutched in its massive lower arms, but with one of its smaller, upper arms upraised, a black and glittering, razor-edged claw extended as though to slash her exposed throat. She didn't move, didn't back down. If these monsters were going to kill her, they would have to do it here and now . . . and maybe the kids could escape in the time she bought them.

The claw wavered a moment, as though the Malach were considering her and her defiance. Suddenly, the claw slid back noiselessly into a sheath of wrinkled, scaly skin, and the huge jaws gaped a little. "
Shgh'ragh!
" the Malach said, more a rasping snarl than anything like a word. One of the other Malach approached, unfolding something like a lightweight net, which it flung over her. In an instant, she was pinned and helpless, the soft mesh snaring her arms and legs as the Malach lifted her effortlessly from the ground and slung her across its broad back like a bag of flour.

A prisoner now, she was carried back into the woods.

The kids, thank God, had run while the Malach had been distracted by her and were safely away. She wondered, though, what was going to happen. In her experience, the Malach rarely took prisoners.

And when they did, those prisoners were never heard from again.

Aghrracht looked out the viewport of the
Xa'ha'xur
shuttle as it dropped from the sky on flaring landing thrusters, descending toward the landing pad atop the stone castle that grew from the mountainside like an artificially shaped and reworked cliff. Built for strength above the cold and narrowly bounded waters of the fjord, the structure looked curiously like some of the great clanhold castles of ancient Zhanaach, a convergence of culture and design that reinforced Aghrracht's firm and reasoned opinion that the humans, while they possessed a level of technological development at least equivalent to that of the Malach, were far more primitive in terms of social, governmental, and psychological evolution.

Save for an occasional longing for the open plains and veldts on which their species had evolved social organization and sentience millions of
qui'ur
ago, the Malach did not experience any emotion equivalent to human nostalgia and did not attach value to cultural icons, symbols, or memorials of the past. Any given point in the past, after all, was a place they'd already been, a previous clawhold that, once achieved, was nothing more than one more step along the way in a long and on-going evolutionary journey. The last Malach clanhold castle had been demolished millennia ago, not long after the last of the inter-clan genocides, its building materials recycled into the foundations of Da'a-Zhanaach.

Still, this clanhold structure would be useful. Although Malach units had managed, despite heavy losses, to land in force at several widely scattered points on the target world, they'd as yet captured no major installations, buildings, or facilities, and the defenders were resisting with vigor enough that it might well be necessary to obliterate them stronghold by stronghold.

The cliffside castle, though, had been seized almost as an afterthought. A Malach troopship, off-course after dodging heavy fire over the landing zone beyond the mountains to the south, had picked up the structure on radar and moved in to investigate. During her approach, the troopship commander had reported receiving numerous radio transmissions in the principal human language, as though the defenders wanted to talk with her. Prepared to fight, she'd approached cautiously, but no fire had greeted her from those towering gray ramparts. Instead, a delegation of twelve humans had been waiting on the aircraft landing pad atop the castle walls, waving a curious artifact—a colorless sheet of cloth fabric tied to an aluminum rod.

The bodies of those humans had been collected as trophies and placed on display chin-high in the castle's main hall, while the aluminum rod had been taken as a symbolic gift-metal of victory.

The
Xa'ha'xur
shuttle settled to the landing pad in a swirling cloud of steam. Aghrracht strode down the landing ramp, claws clicking on steel, then on ferrocrete. The garrison commander met her with upraised chin. "Welcome, Supreme Deathgiver! Ch'chesk'cheh the Fast-Slasher, the hunting is good."

"We will establish our command center here, Ch'chesk'cheh," she said. "What is the local situation?"

The garrison leader gestured with a foreclaw at the mountains bulking high behind the castle. "We have reports of continued fighting to the south, Deathgiver. Beyond the mountains. This area was secured without fighting, and there have been no threats or threat-displays by the prey at all."