Bolo Brigade (40 page)

The glower on Phalbin's face faded a little. "It won't help if we destroy the city trying to save it."

"He'll wreck the main street, General, that's for sure, and probably take out a few buildings along the way. But I promise you that the Malach are going to wreck a whole lot more."

Phalbin looked uncertain. "I should consult with the Governor—"

"Fine. Consult. I'm going to kill those ROEs."

"How?"

Wood pursed his lips. "A patch ought to do it. Something simple. A code word to make him disregard all ROEs. Or we weight 'em, give 'em priority numbers, and give him a higher priority command. We'll see what we have time for."

Phalbin sighed. "If you're sure . . ." He shook his head. "If this backfires . . ."

"There's no other way, General. Believe me."

Phalbin started to turn away, then stopped himself. "What about the other Bolo?"

"What do you mean?"

"Should we get rid of its Rules of Engagement too?"

"I probably don't need to."

"Why not? If they're hamstringing
one
Bolo—"

Wood grinned. "The ROEs include injunctions against attacking private property, right?" Phalbin nodded. "I have a feeling I know where Ragnor is going, and if I'm right, he's already done something about your ROEs. He'd have to, if Freddy was going to follow his orders."

Phalbin started to purple. "You mean he already took them out?
Against orders?
"

"He's a soldier, General. He did what he had to do to carry out his mission. Whatever the consequences to himself. Or to his command."

"If this goes wrong," Phalbin pointed out, "he won't just be looking at a note in his record. He'll be looking at prison!"

"Assuming, General, that there are prisons left, or officers to sit on his court martial board . . . and that he is still alive to face them."

"Harrumph," Phalbin said, but without any real feeling, as he turned away again.

Wood began looking for a programmer tech to help him with the Bolo ROE deletion patch.

They'd slowed when they entered the fjord, moving along at only a few kilometers per hour lest their speed create a wake visible on the calm surface of the water overhead. Donal wasn't quite sure how Freddy was finding his way through the murk. Though it was still daylight above, little sunlight penetrated the dark, chilly waters of the fjord, and there was considerable sediment suspended in the water near the bottom. The Bolo was navigating by inertial guidance, knowing that if it had proceeded at a heading of 055 degrees for 29.945 kilometers after rounding Tanhausser Point, it was time to swing hard right to 140 for the approach to the castle.

The fjord, like all such ice-carved, water-filled troughs slicing into the mountains ashore, was extremely deep in the center, with swiftly shoaling, steep-sloped sides and a U-shaped bottom. Donal didn't need to look at the flicker of orientation and navigation data on the main screen to feel the sharp tilt of the Bolo to the left as it ground slowly along the fjord's bottom.

Suddenly, though, it turned right and he felt the deck rising from the front. They were moving up a steepening slope toward the surface.

The screens were still murky with dark and mud-clouded water, but he could see it lightening gradually as they climbed toward the surface. The prow of the Bolo dropped forward suddenly as the lead tread assemblies gripped solid, friction-grooved ferrocrete.

The launching ramp! Freddy's navigation had been perfect!

In another second, murk gave way to white foam, then daylight as the top of the Bolo's turret emerged dripping from the dark waters of the fjord. The sky was clear, the sun low on the western horizon, with none of the rain that had been drizzling above the refugee encampment on the other side of the mountains.

"Commander," Freddy said. "I must inform you that we are trespassing on private property now and should notify—"

"Freddy! Eclipse!"

"Code word Eclipse accepted." There was a pause, and then Donal could almost swear he heard excitement creeping into the Bolo's electronic voice. "Proceeding with the attack."

The Bolo emerged from the fjord, a vast, black, wet monster rising from the sea. . . .

"She
is
female anatomically," Kha'laa'sht the Meat Finder said. "At least outwardly, she is identical to other human females. We would have to open her up, of course, to be certain. . . ."

"Not now," Aghrracht decided. She was examining several of the fabric artifacts the human had been wearing. Why did they carry these on their bodies? They were not strong enough to serve as armor, and they were inefficient as carrying harnesses. "Perhaps later, when we have learned all we can from her while she is living."

It was puzzling. The human was female, yet she had surrendered on the field of battle without putting up even a token fight. Aghrracht was willing to grant that the humans had different symbologies, different customs, even a different way of looking at things . . . but females were supposed to fight. How else to determine the hierarchy of submission and deference necessary to a properly ordered culture? Aghrracht had
won
her right to be Supreme Deathgiver in a thousand brutal engagements in the arena, beginning with her
Ga'krascht
Coming-of Blood ceremony. Could it be that this human was simply very low-caste? A human Nameless, perhaps?

Except that Cho said she'd been defending human young. That made no sense at all. She'd defended them by
surrendering
. . . .

Kha'laa'sht held up one of the outer garments taken from the prisoner, a black artifact apparently made from the skin of a lesser animal.

"She requests that she be allowed to keep this. Apparently, these artifacts keep them warm."

Aghrracht closed an upper hand in assent. Was that what the cloth things were for? Was it possible the humans' internal temperature regulation was deficient, somehow?

Her communicator buzzed. Sighing, she pulled it from her harness and squeezed the receive key. "Yes."

"Deathgiver! The alien
gr'raa
machine—"

"Who is this? Identify yourself!"

"Urrr . . . Gnasetherach the Brutal Killer, at Sentry Post Seven! Deathgiver, an alien combat machine is rising from the water!"

Aghrracht blinked. A human Bolo? Here? "You are sure?" If Gnasetherach was on guard duty, she was an ordinary soldier, not a warrior. Her perceptions might not be up to—

The Deathgiver's thoughts were chopped short by a burst of noise from the receiver. It sounded like high-speed gunfire.

"Cho!" she snapped at the interrogator. "Ask the human what one of her Bolos is doing here!"

On the screen, Donal could see a number of watercraft moored by the ramp, including the civilian submarine he'd noticed the other night. Several Malach soldiers were visible, some by the water, more at the top of the ramp, others on the ramparts of the stone walls rising above the Bolo. One shouted, a snarling bark; an instant later, laser beams were playing harmlessly across Freddy's outer hull, accompanied by the spang of magnetically accelerated gauss slugs.

"Objective in sight, Commander," Freddy said. "We are taking ineffective small-arms fire from Enemy infantry."

"Okay, Freddy. Let's take 'em down!"

Freddy's infinite repeaters erupted in stuttering sprays and streams of blue-green stars, the salvos sweeping the boat ramp like a broom, then reaching up and across the ramparts, splintering stone, shattering walls, exploding flesh, hurling six-limbed bodies and body parts over the crenelations of the wall. A shoulder-launched missile streaked in a meter above the ferrocrete, but Freddy detonated it with an antimissile laser at a range of less than five meters, the explosion fireballing into the sky in a mushroom of orange flame and oily black smoke.

All of Freddy was clear of the water now, his long, dark gray form dripping as it moved slowly up the sloping ramp and into the late afternoon sun. Fire erupted from a window high up on one tower; a stream of infinite repeater ion bolts seared through the window with pinpoint accuracy, and the sniping ceased instantly.

"I am launching drones, Commander," Freddy said. "We need to see the entire battlefield."

"Do it."

A pair of GalTech KV-20 recon drones hissed skyward from Freddy's vertical-launch tubes, then leveled off, airfoils and sensors unfolding. Running on low-power hydrogen cells and possessing an almost invisibly small radar cross-section, the KV-20s could loiter over a battlefield for hours, passing sensor and visual feeds back to the Bolo that commanded them.

"Let's see IR, Freddy," Donal said, watching the side screens that showed both recon drone sensor feeds in parallel. The landscape outside transformed, darkening to the eerie green cast of infrared, with heat sources glowing in whites and shimmering yellows. The walls of the castle were stone, a meter thick in some places, and impossibly opaque. The ceilings, though, were another matter, thinner and more transparent to certain wavelengths of infrared.

Freddy highlighted a group of moving yellow blobs indistinctly visible against the green-gray sweep of the castle's main roof. "These are almost certainly Malach soldiers," he said. "Close analysis of the heat imagery suggests body temperatures in the range of thirty-two to thirty-four degrees Celsius, and the size of individual images is suggestive of Malach."

"Do you see any human images there?"

"Negative, Commander. Of course, the image is of troops only on the upper floor, and we cannot obtain IR imagery from lower floors. However, the prisoners will have been moved to a place of relative safety at our first appearance, if they were not there already. The Enemy likely will want to protect them, both for the information they possess and for their possible value as hostages."

"There aren't going to be any hostages, Freddy." Donal said with a growl. "That wall, over there. Take it down!"

Freddy didn't bother with weapons to carry out the order. Tracks shrieking, he swung hard to the left and rammed the wall, bringing half of it down in a clattering, dust-billowing avalanche of stone.

Thunder rolled just beyond the stone walls of the castle, and Alexie's heart leaped.

Her interrogator apparently thought she'd not understood her last question. "You . . . Bolo . . . here . . . why."

"I don't know," she said. "But I suggest that you surrender . . . that you
submit
as quickly as you can."

The interrogator was speaking rapidly to the boss, a catfight of snarls and hisses. Alexie took a careful look around. There were eight Malach in the hall with her, but most were nervously looking in the direction of the rumbling sounds and cracking gunfire, or at one another with troubled-looking quartets of winking, ruby-red eyes.

She wanted to believe that the Bolo was smashing right in to rescue her, but she knew better. This part of whathisname's castle, as she recalled, was three stories tall, plus a basement—the place where she and the kids had been kept—below that. A Bolo was bigger than the building, damned near as big as the entire fortress complex, and if it came through a wall, it would bring the entire structure down in one, great, crashing heap. In any case, the Bolo couldn't know that she and the kids were being held here.

Whatever was happening, though, it was making the entire building shake.

The boss Malach sprang to her feet, snarling instructions. Four Malach started moving toward a door, while a fifth approached Alexie, hands reaching out. . . .

The far wall bulged inward alarmingly. The pillars lining both sides of the hall trembled, and pieces of ceiling plaster and beams cracked loose, raining down on the room. The bodies of the massacred humans danced and twisted on their chains like grotesque puppets; one tore free and collapsed in a heap.

Alexie fell to her hands and knees as the floor jolted and lurched in an earthquake's dance. A massive block of stone dropped from a crumbling ceiling, smashing into the back of the Malach approaching her and knocking her flat and shrieking. One of the huge, ornamental pillars at the near end of the room suddenly toppled, breaking free of its ceiling supports and crashing sideways into the stairway going up that Alexie and Donal had followed a few nights before. More stone fell, an avalanche of great, flat slabs that made up the floor of the room above.

Alexie saw a chance. The fallen pillar was held part way up by the crushed remnants of the stairway and banister. There was a space underneath, less than a meter tall, wide enough for a human to scramble into, but not a Malach. The injured monster's strangely shaped and heavy sidearm had skittered across bare stone. Alexie rose unsteadily to her feet, then dived after it, falling again, rolling, snatching up the weapon, turning to aim it at her captors. One Malach screamed, pointing a savage claw at the human prisoner; she found something like a squeeze lever awkwardly placed for her in the weapon's stock and clamped down on it as hard as she could. Laser light speared the gesticulating Malach, slicing through her throat in a spray of blue-green blood. She fired again and missed, then threw herself flat on the floor, scrambling ahead and beneath the overhang of the fallen pillar.

The quaking had ceased, though pieces of stone continued to shower down on the room, and Alexie didn't know whether or not the entire pile of tumbled-down rock was going to collapse the rest of the way to the floor at any second and crush her underneath like a bug.

But the crevice of a cave gave her cover, of a sort. When the light at the end of the tunnel she'd crawled into was blocked—as if by a Malach bending over to look inside, she fired the alien laser back down the passageway.

She only had to do that twice.

Now
, she thought, breathing hard. The air was gritty with dust.
Will they try to get me, or give up and go attend to more urgent business?

From the snarls and snuffling, rasping noises outside her hidey-hole, it didn't sound as though they were leaving.

Donal surveyed the damage through the circular view screen. Freddy had smashed completely through the outer wall of the castle and entered the bailey, the open area enclosed by the main walls, then driven straight ahead and into the west wall of the castle's main residence. With a surgeon's skill, the Bolo had pierced the three-story building's wall with one forward corner of its massively armored glacis, then backed gently away; at twenty meters tall from ground to Hellbore turret top, the Bolo actually loomed above the residence's peaked and turreted roof and could easily have brought the entire structure down in an avalanche of broken stone.