Bolo Brigade (7 page)

This was awful . . .
awful
, eight times worse than any training exercise she had ever endured. She could
feel
her sanity shredding away, like the ablative outer hull ceramics. In a moment, she would lose all control, and her berserker's rage would demolish the Hunter's control center and end her life.

Schaagrasch wondered how the rest of her Hunter Pack was faring. . . .

They were walking along the old stone mole above Galloway Harbor. Stars filled one half of the sky, the blaze of color that was Strathan Cluster; the emptiness of the Gulf filled the other. Alexie Turner still wore the formal gown and holo accessories demanded by the dinner she'd been attending, her blond hair piled high beneath a sparkling tiara projecting a cloud of stars above her head. Frank Kirkpatrick, smooth, oily, and slick, was handsome enough in a greasy way in his dinner jacket and formal kilt, but with a face reddened by anger and too much alcohol. They made an unlikely couple.

"But surely you see how important this project is to our people," Legislator Kirkpatrick told her.

"No, Mr. Kirkpatrick," Alexie replied. "I do not. I see how it will profit you and your friends, but I don't see how it will help Wide Sky."

He stiffened, scowling. "That is most uncharitable of you, Alexie.
Most
uncharitable. Why, in new business and engineering contracts alone—"

"Most of which are being handled by Sky Development, I believe?" She was pretty sure that Frank Kirkpatrick was squarely in the hip pocket of Sky Development, the engineering and construction contracting firm that wanted to build a brand new spaceport smack in the middle of the Tall Trees District. Not that Wide Sky
needed
another port. Hell, they had trouble keeping the one they had busy and in good repair; but the landowners along Highway 60 stood to make a lot of money when the warehouses, bars, and joy houses started going up along the new port access strip.

"You still haven't learned how to do it, Alexie, have you?"

"Do what?"

"How to play the game. Enjoy the give and take. The quid pro quo. You help me, I help you—"

"I can't imagine anything that you have, Mr. Kirkpatrick, that I could possibly want."

"I assure you, Miss Turner," Kirkpatrick said, suddenly coldly formal, "that if you could see your way clear to side with us—a friendly word in the right ear, you know—it would be very much worth your while."

"I don't believe your friends could meet my price."

His eyebrows went up, as though he'd just seen a glimmer of hope in an otherwise dark prospect. "Then you have a price? And just what might your price be?"

"My personal integrity as Deputy Director of this colony," she said. He frowned, baffled, and she laughed. "You see, Mr. Kirkpatrick, if I sell out to you, I won't have it anymore. Integrity is like virginity. Once gone, gone forever."

"I . . . don't understand."

"No, sir. I didn't think you would."

He shook his head. "Look, never mind all that. If I can convince you that a new port would be good for Wide Sky, for our economy, for our industry, would you—"

"Mr. Kirkpatrick," she said, suddenly feeling very tired. "I really do have other things on my mind, just now. We haven't heard from Endatheline for almost two weeks now, and in view of those fragmentary messages . . ."

He shrugged. "Communications difficulties, no doubt. You know how often the relays go down for one reason or another."

"They
said
they were being attacked, and then something about their Bolo. That doesn't sound like communications difficulties to me."

"Major Fitzsimmons—"

"I
know
what Fitzsimmons says, Mr. Kirkpatrick. He never has liked Bolos. Or trusted them."

"Who does? Outdated Concordiat junk, if you ask me. Dangerous things that should have been retired years ago. The thought of ours going nuts, going rogue in downtown Galloway . . ." He shuddered.

"We don't know that that was what happened on Endatheline," she said firmly.

He chuckled. "You don't think it was mysterious invaders from the Gulf, do you? Like Sam Carver and his crowd of yokels?"

"It doesn't seem likely," she conceded. Carver headed up a delegation of citizens from the Sea Cliffs District, who'd demanded a government investigation into the mysterious sightings and disappearances along the east coast in the past few months. A full-fledged invasion scare had been spreading throughout the outlying districts.

"Well, then, you see?" Kirkpatrick favored her with a broad and condescending grin. "There's nothing to worry about after all! Likely, Endatheline's Bolo blew a circuit board and went on a rampage. Once they get the thing shut down and repair the damage, we'll hear the full story, I'd bet. And when we do, you can bet we'll have a measure passed in the House like that," he snapped his fingers, "calling for dismantling our own Bolo before the same thing happens here!"

"Maybe," she said. "But if Sam and his neighbors turn out to be right, I think we're going to want to bring a few more of the things out here, not shut them down. Any invading force that could take out a Bolo, even old ones like the one we have . . ." She let the uncomfortable thought trail off.

"Well, we'll just have to wait and see, won't we? Now, to get back to what I was saying, you
must
see—"

"Oh, honestly, Mr. Kirkpatrick! I will not stand out here and have you badger me about your damned friends' plans to pave over the Tall Trees District!"

Turning abruptly, she stalked away, leaving him standing on the mole.

Alexie had never wanted to be a politician, even though she'd been raised in an environment that fairly reeked of smoke-filled rooms and power-brokering, behind-the-scenes deals. Her father had been Alexander Jefferson Turner, a five-term legislator and three times elected Director General of the Wide Sky colony. Sometimes she thought it was precisely
because
her father had been the colony's DG that she'd decided not to go into politics. She knew first-hand how rough—and how dirty—that game could be.

Her father had been an honest man, at least so far as she could tell, but the Mannheim banking affair had broken just before the conclusion of his third term as Director, and the ensuing scandal had swept quite a few prominent politicians out of office besides A. J. Turner. The strain of that battle, coupled with an ailing heart, had killed him in the end. When the Reform Party had started running mud spots on all of the vid channels, though, attacking not only her father's policies but his character as well, Alexie had weighed in as the Common Sense Party's legislative representative from the Mount Golden District and fought back. Somewhat to her surprise, she'd found support for her father and his name still strong across all of Wide Sky; a backlash against the vid muddies had swept her into office, and five years later, she'd accepted her party's nomination as Deputy Director General of Wide Sky. When Vince Stanfeld was elected DG, she found herself—as her critics liked to say—one heart beat away from the directorship of the planet.

She was still angry, angry at Kirkpatrick and angry at herself for allowing him to get under her skin. She reached the stony beach at the head of the mole, jumped down onto the wave-rounded pebbles, and walked out a few meters, breathing deeply, trying to think.

Footing was uncertain here, and she stooped to remove her dress shoes. Smooth, wet stones clacked beneath her bare feet with each step, and she waded out until silk-warm water swirled past her ankles with the surf.

Alexie loved Wide Sky. The beauty of the place was haunting . . . and during the summer months in the southern hemisphere, like now, the night sky was stunning, the reason for the world's name obvious. Unlike the McNair-Muir system, snuggled away within its beehive swarm of suns, Wide Sky was located just outside the Strathan Cluster proper, precariously balanced, as some locals liked to say, between the glory of the cluster and the emptiness of the Great Gulf.

To the east, the Strathan Cluster glowed in somber red, orange, and yellow hues, stretching from the horizon three quarters of the way to the zenith, with the Galaxy's trailing spiral arm a mist-silver tumble of stars and frosty light beyond, the whole casting a gleaming shimmer across the waves of the bay as they rolled gently in with the slow-rising tide. West, though, only a handful of stars were visible, and those were mingled with soft, unfocused smudges of light, other galaxies, inconceivably distant.

There were those who said that Wide Skyers tended toward melancholy, that living on the thin, cold edge of the Gulf made them solitary and just a little strange.

She snorted at the thought. Strange they might be in their independence and in their disdain for the norms of socially mandated convention, but most Wide Skyers she knew tended to be a gregarious lot, as though huddling together helped to hold out the chill of the Ultimate Night. There was a piece by the Strathan poet Sharon Kimberly that she quite liked.

Balanced, we

On cusp of night

Between stark glory of the stars

And darkened folds that swallow light

That show how small our lives.

There was a lot more, committed once to memory, but she couldn't remember it all now. Wide Sky's spell at once reminded its inhabitants of just how small they were . . . and reaffirmed the importance of friends, of neighbors, of family, of all the good human values that kept you warm and held the Night at bay.

Her eyes picked out one bright, orange-hued pinpoint of light, all alone in the emptiness, the sun of Endatheline, just eight light years distant. Endatheline hung even a bit further out into the Gulf than did Wide Sky, on the outermost frontier of the Strathan Confederation. It had been settled a hundred years earlier by colonists from Wide Sky and Thule, and its people had that same hard-headed practicality, the same stubbornness, the same love of independence and self-reliance that most Wide Skyers did.

What's going on there?
she wondered, staring at the lonely star. If she couldn't quite believe Sam Carver's stories of alien invaders, neither could she believe the story about a Bolo running amuck. She'd seen Bolo Unit 76235—"Algy," they called it—often enough at the Galloway military base. The machine was an immense assembly of metal and ceramic armor atop four sets of tracks, guided by a sophisticated computer. Bolos—at least the older Mark XVIIIs, like Algy—were not self-aware, could not be considered intelligent in any but the vaguest and most artificial sense, and certainly did not "go nuts," as Kirkpatrick had suggested. As impressive as the thing might be, she could not imagine a Mark XVIII suddenly turning against its human masters any more than she could imagine the same act by an toaster, or some other automated piece of kitchen hardware.

The first meteor streaked in from high in the west, a brilliant speck of yellow-orange light trailing white fire. In utter silence, it flashed almost directly overhead, traveling southeast, vanishing in seconds behind the Granger Hills. The second followed almost in the glowing wake of the first, and it was flanked by two more. Long seconds later, she heard something like a roll of thunder, following the apparitions from one side of the sky to the other.

"My God," Kirkpatrick said. She started. She hadn't realized he'd followed her down onto the beach. "It's like fireworks."

Three more meteors followed, dazzling, tiny flares of arc-burning light that dazzled the eye and momentarily robbed the Strathan Cluster of its glory.

"What is it," Kirkpatrick asked. "A meteor storm?"

"Those weren't meteors," Alexie said. Three more blossomed alight, following the rest in perfect V-formation. "Those are spacecraft!"

"They can't be! We're not expecting that kind of traffic at Skyport!"

She arched one perfect eyebrow. "Oh, really? Then maybe we won't be needing that new spaceport facility after all."

"But what
are
they?" he demanded.

"Military maneuvers of some kind, I imagine. Goodnight, Mr. Kirkpatrick."

She walked away over faintly clacking stones, leaving him on the beach. She really wanted to be rid of the man and disliked the fact that he seemed to be pursuing her. Had her opposition to the new spaceport project really hampered Kirkpatrick's friends that much?

Another train of meteors—or atmosphere-entering spacecraft—blazed overhead, followed seconds later by the rumble of distant thunder.

Explosive panels blew free with a spine-rattling thump and the winged entry pod disintegrated in a radar-obscuring cloud of burning fragments, giving Schaagrasch the Blood Taster her first decent view of the target world. Her altitude was now twenty-five
tairucht,
still well above the few scraps of cloud, high enough that the far horizon showed just a hint of a curve against the glow of the sky. The Pack had descended on the planet's night side, but ocean and rolling hill country and forested mountain alike were softly illuminated by the sphere-swarm of blood-tinted stars hanging above the eastern horizon.

With her vision restored, her claustrophobic panic subsided, giving way to the hot, pulsing eagerness of pre-battle lust. Schaagrasch's eyes were best equipped to handle light at the red end of the spectrum, her vision extending well into the infrared, so to her the landscape below was bathed in the pearly light of a shimmering, golden sunset, where a human would have seen a bloody, late evening dusk. The Hunterpod's computer helped her, painting geometric symbols and the twisting worm characters of the Malach alphabet across her viewscreens. Most of the landscape below was wilderness and ocean, a shocking waste of valuable resources; radar and more subtle electronic senses identified the sprawl of a population center, the glow of industrial heat spillage from a factory complex, the bright, hard pulse of ground-based search and traffic-control radars. Something that might be a spaceport lay north of the city, inland from the sea. Something else—a military base of some sort—was sandwiched between spaceport and coastline. A dozen of the phoneme symbols meaning "active radar site" winked in that area; someone down there was quite interested in the objects screaming down out of the thin, cold reaches of the planet's upper atmosphere. There'd been no hostile fire yet, however. Surprise, evidently, had been complete. Hunters were at their most vulnerable during the transit from orbit to ground.