Bolo Brigade (16 page)

For the next half hour or so, Donal described what he'd seen and experienced, including his up-close, almost
too
close encounter with the two walkers on the beach. Fitzsimmons and his staff were particularly interested in the Lightning's approach to Wide Sky, and in how Kathy had managed to slip in past the invader blockade.

"I'm really not sure," he said for at least the fifth time, when one of the aides asked for the probable upper speed of the blockaders' maneuvering envelope. "You'd have to ask Commander Ross about that."

"We have," Fitzsimmons replied glumly. He gestured at the computer terminal on his desk where, evidently, he had access to Kathy's debriefing, elsewhere in the building. "But the more points of view we can round up the better. We're going to need that information."

Donal frowned. Wide Sky had no navy to speak of; the entire Strathan Cluster couldn't muster much more than a handful of gunboats and frigates. Knowing invader ship capabilities wouldn't—

Then the reason for their interest struck him. "You're planning on an evacuation," he said. "You need to know how to get past the orbital blockade."

"A partial evacuation, anyway," Fitzsimmons agreed. "We can't hope to get everyone off, of course."

"Wide Sky has a population of, what?" Donal asked. "A hundred million?"

"Too many to cram aboard a handful of transports and passenger liners, that's for damned sure. Alexie wants to get as many of the kids and young people off as we can."

"Alexie?"

"Alexie Turner. She was the DDG." He shook his head. "Our Director General was here, as a matter of fact, when the Dinos hit. Pure bad luck. He was flying back. Caught in the air by Dino flyers. So I guess she must've inherited."

"I see. And where is she now, Major? I'd like to pay my respects."

He nodded toward a spot on the floor. "Down on the main level, at the moment. In the Assembly Hall dealing with God knows how many different civilian delegations, refugee groups, camp organizers, you name it. They're talking about who should get evacuated, and for me, I'd just as soon stay here and face the Dinos as mix it up with
that
crowd."

Donal smiled. "I know what you mean, sir."

"Anyone else have any questions of this young man?" Fitzsimmons said, looking at his aides. There was a general shaking of heads and muttered "no, sirs" for response, and the major waved Donal off. "If you hurry, you can probably catch her act, or part of it. Tell the elevator to take you to the Assembly Hall."

"Thank you, sir." Donal saluted, then turned and left the office.

Fitzsimmons, he thought, seemed to be a bit more solidly grounded in reality than the brass back on Muir. He wondered if that was a reflection of the man's basic nature, or if it had more to do with his proximity to the alien invaders.

The Assembly Hall was an enormous public arena on the ground floor of the central tower, an enclosed stadium beneath a blue-tinted transplas dome that let the morning sun spill into the auditorium but robbed it of glare and heat. The seats, he estimated, could hold several thousand people, and most were already filled by the time he entered the room.

At the auditorium's central stage, there was a round, raised platform with a table and holographic display apparatus. An older, white-haired man was addressing the crowd with all of the passion of a somewhat bored university professor giving a lecture.

"We know pathetically little about this species as yet," he was saying as Donal squeezed into the room. The man's voice, amplified by the room's electronics, was perfectly clear but somewhat on the frail side. A curved, two-story wall screen set up behind the speaker's podium magnified the man's image to titanic proportions; his name and title—Dr. Ulysee Goldman, Professor of Xenosophontology, University of Wide Sky at Galloway—was spelled out at the bottom of the screen in letters half a meter tall.

"Everything we know about them so far, in fact," Goldman continued, "has been gleaned from a handful of bodies recovered from what were probably scout machines destroyed by Skyan military aircraft, and from radio transmissions between the surface and their fleet that we were partially able to translate with the AI at the university before the invaders overran Galloway. We know that they call themselves 'Malach,' and that they organize themselves in what appears to be a strict, military hierarchy. Whether, of course, that hierarchy is a direct reflection of their entire culture, or of the fact that we are so far dealing only with their military, is unknown."

So, the invaders called themselves
Malach
. The speaker had pronounced the name with a German "ch" that turned the end of the word into a soft-palate gargle. It helped, somehow, making them less faceless and impersonal, to know their name for themselves. Fitzsimmons's "Dino" seemed calculated to deflate the enemy, to make the threat feel smaller and more manageable.

But Donal wanted to know them as they really were. The Cluster's survival might depend upon stark and uncoated truths.

"We have some graphics here," Goldman said, placing his hand on the podium's control screen, "that may give you an idea of what we are facing."

The blue-tinted transplas overhead darkened sharply, plunging the room into near darkness as a nervous titter ran though the crowd. After a moment, however, a shaft of blue light flicked on above the table as Goldman engaged the holoprojector. Donal leaned forward in his seat, studying the figure repeated on the big screen behind the speaker. It was . . . disturbing.

The being, evidently, had followed the same line of evolutionary descent as had certain carnivorous dinosaurs on old Earth, a hundred million years before. According to the scale showing in the three-dimensional image, the thing stood at just over two meters tall . . . indeed, its flat, dragonish head would have looked down on Donal in a face-to-face confrontation. It was bipedal, with the digitigrade stance of a large bird, but the body was canted forward, level with the ground, rather than carried erect, with a whiplike tail serving for balance. The jaws were those of a predator, with razor-keen, back-curved teeth that protruded in a blood-hungry grin even when the scaly jaws were shut. A bristling of red-pink tendrils, each the size of Donal's forefinger, sprouted across its lipless upper jaw like an obscene mustache. The bone-knobbed head behind the four large and vertically slitted, gleaming red cat's eyes, however, was large and deep, plenty roomy enough for a sizable brain. Not two, but four arms were suspended from a complex shoulder girdle arrangement beneath the wrinkled neck, two small arms above with delicate, four-fingered hands, two larger ones below, more massively turned and muscled and with hands more adapted to ripping or grasping than fine manipulation. The claws were impressive, both on hands and feet; sickle-shaped slashing claws curved from loose-skinned pouches on wrists and ankles, designed, perhaps, for tearing at prey to cripple it on the run. The color was startling, overall a deep forest green above and pale gold below, but with bright ruby-red stripes picked out in scales that flashed and gleamed like jewels in the light. The creature was astonishingly beautiful, for all that evolution had crafted every muscle, every curve to the single-minded need for pursuit and slaughter.

"We put this image together," Goldman said, standing next to the glowing holo, "from the bodies we managed to recover from those few walker machines we've been able to take out. It looks more or less reptilian, though we have reason to believe that it's warm-blooded, like a bird or mammal. Dr. Duchenny, at the Wide Sky Institute, has suggested that they are evolved from paradinosaurian pack-hunters, creatures that have evolved in parallel from creatures similar to the deinonychus and velociraptor that roamed Earth during the Cretaceous era, some sixty-five to one hundred million years ago. Obviously, too, they evolved from hexapodal stock, as opposed to the quadrupeds of higher terrestrial life. We should keep in mind that the similarities to extinct terrestrial life are no doubt the result of parallel evolution . . . of organisms shaped to familiar form by similar evolutionary and environmental forces."

"Excuse me, Doctor," someone down in the front called out. "We can all see what these beasts look like. What I want to know, what I think everyone here wants to know, is where the hell do they come from?"

"If you mean have we identified a homeworld yet," Goldman replied, "we have not. However, it seems fairly clear that this is a new species, unknown as yet to humanity. This far out along the Eastern Arm, the only place they could have come from is one of the worlds of the Gulf."

A stir ran through the audience at that, and a low-whispered murmur of many voices. Goldman had their full attention now.

"Their curious . . . habit," the professor continued, "of dismantling captured ruins, buildings, vehicle wreckage, and so on in order to strip them of useful metal appears to be one predictable aspect of such an evolution. The Gulf stars tend, on the whole, to be metal poor, at least compared to those that formed within the Galactic disk. Most, of course, are ancient Population II stars, possessing no elements heavier than hydrogen or helium at all and, therefore, no terrestrial planets. A few, however, a small percentage, are either Population I suns accreted from areas enriched by rare supernovae within the Gulf, or they are Population I stars ejected from our Galaxy at some point eons in the past. In the latter case, of course, the star and any attendant planets would be identical to those we know within the Galaxy. In the former, however, planets will tend to be heavy-element poor. Elements such as carbon and aluminum will be relatively common, but iron will be comparatively rare, since the planet's iron core will tend to be smaller and buried within a thicker silicate crust. Extremely heavy elements, such as radioactives, will be scarce or even non-existent.

"We expect that this scarcity has dramatically affected their culture and their outlook on the universe, as well as their attitude toward other intelligent species . . . such as ourselves."

"They woke up cranky, you mean," someone called out from the audience, and there was an answering patter of nervous laughter.

"It may be that the Malach perceive their entire universe as raw materials for their use," Goldman went on, ignoring the comment. "They may be unable to recognize a viewpoint other than their own. At the university, we have been speculating that the Malach see
all
other species, whether intelligent or not, as prey animals of some kind, as sources of raw material for them to exploit. That, certainly, is the upshot of what seems to be happening here on Wide Sky. We are to them nothing more or less than a source of already mined, purified, and sequestered metals."

"We're not gonna let these lizards take away what we've built here!" someone in the first row shouted. He was echoed by another voice, then by another ten, then by fifty more. In a moment, everyone in the auditorium it seemed, was on their feet, shouting.

At the podium, Dr. Goldman tried to continue with his presentation, but the sound system was drowned out by the commotion. A moment later, an attractive, blond-haired woman in a severe gray business suit stepped up to the podium, took Goldman's arm, and whispered quietly to him. The professor nodded and walked away, leaving the woman next to the glowing holograph of the green-and-red-striped Malach. As she touched the podium controls, the image of the invader faded out and the windows depolarized, flooding the huge room with light once more. She then waited patiently as the commotion in the chamber dwindled to the point where she could address the crowd. From the cool detachment with which she surveyed the audience, he assumed she was Alexie Turner.

"Thank you, Professor Goldman," she said. "That information was hard won and cost us dearly. We appreciate your coming here today to brief us. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is all that we have for you today—"

The crowd noise rose again, an angry thunder as most of the people leaped to their feet, shouting down at the small, lone figure at the podium.

"What about the evacuation?" someone yelled. "What about getting people off this rock?"

"Hell, no!" another voice echoed back. "We're gonna stay and fight these monsters!"

"We came here all the way from Galloway! What's the government going to do about these Malach things?"

"Yeah! We want to know what's being
done
!"

The room exploded in noise and shouting. Men wearing the light blue uniforms of Wide Sky security appeared, standing in front of the stage in an attempt to block it off, but there were too few to stop the surging crowd. The mood in the room was fast turning ugly. Desperate people, feeding off the atmosphere of panic, might do almost anything. It looked to Donal as though the most immediate danger to the survivors on Fortrose wasn't the Malach . . . but the very real threat of mob violence. Something was going to have to be done, and fast, or that riot would kill more people than a Malach attack.

Donal took a deep breath and started forward.

It took him only a moment to assess the situation. Half of the people in the auditorium, it seemed, were trying to move up the passageways between the rows of seats to the doors and the outside; the other half were moving down toward the center stage in a blind, stumbling rush, and the surging collision of the two had completely blocked the aisles.

There was only one way to get to the podium with any reasonable speed. Donal vaulted onto the back of an empty seat in the top row, took a big, unsteady step to the back of the seat ahead in the next row down, and swiftly made his way down the slope of the auditorium's bowl, stepping from seat back to seat back, sometimes moving over people still trying to get out into the jam-packed aisles.

At the front row, he shouldered his way through the mob; his uniform won him admittance past the struggling line of security officers, and he made it at last to the podium.

A dozen men had made it past the security line and were crowding their way up onto the stage. More were crowding in behind them, closing on the lone woman at the podium. "We want our questions answered!" a hard-faced man was demanding, shouting into Alexie Turner's face.