Bolo Brigade (22 page)

No problem. She had plenty of time, so long as she held this vector. She'd already engaged a weapons lock with radar. They knew she was coming and knew she was gunning for them.

"Weapons," she said, addressing her computer. "Hellstreak one, engage." Her hand closed on the firing switch in her control stick. She felt a thump as the missile, mounted beneath her Starhawk's left wing outboard, detached from the hardpoint. Two seconds after it cleared the wing, the engine switched on, hurling the 200-kilo mininuke forward at nearly ninety gravities. The missile's exhaust flared in her cockpit, a dazzling, fast-receding star. "Hellstreak two, engage," she said, and the second missile followed the first. All told, the Starhawk carried four of the deadly, point-eight-kiloton shipkillers, and in the space of ten seconds, all four were hurtling through space, a quartet of dazzlingly bright stars swiftly dwindling as they accelerated toward Big Mama.

She waited a long second, then rammed her own throttle full forward, boosting hard in her missiles' wake as her Starhawk's Avery-McKinley fusion drive kicked in at full output. Her only chance, as she saw it, was to kill that big sucker, and vanish into the fireball while it was still expanding in a vast, fast-cooling cloud. The radiation might toast her a bit more, but there were drugs for that sort of thing. If she didn't collide with any debris larger than a few flecks of paint, she might survive, and the radiation and debris cloud would shield her from her pursuers' radar.

It gave her a fair chance . . . assuming, of course, that at least one and preferably several of her Hellstreak missiles made it to the target.

With an almost detached and casual interest, she wondered what kind of antimissile defenses Big Mama carried.

On board the Malach Command Carrier
Cha'Zhanaach
, the Slasher claw of Zhanaach, Aghrracht the Swift-Slayer stood on a broad plain wide enough to allay her innate claustrophobia. The sky overhead was a comforting blue-green, the walls shrouded in an illusory mist. The only immediate sign that she was standing at the command center of the
Cha'Zhanaach
was the white, slanted pedestal rising from the deck before her, supporting a large computer viewscreen. The screen displayed a graphic representation of local space, including the four rapidly extending lines—colored in the warning green-blue hue of fresh blood—of the incoming missiles. A window open in the lower left showed a telephoto image of the enemy ship itself, a jet-black dart with triangular wings, accelerating against a jet of fusion-heated plasma.

Aghrracht felt a sudden stirring, a thrill rippling up her spine from the base of her tail.
Urrgh'ah'Chaak
, the thrill of the Blood-Chase, was always strongest when the prey could strike back.

"Antimissile defenses," she said quietly. Her words, picked up by the microphone in the podium, were relayed to the ship's command center. "Engage and kill."

Beams of hellfire stretched across space, touching each missile in turn and annihilating it long before it could pose a threat to the command carrier.

"Main batteries to the prey," she added quietly after the last missile had flashed into nothingness. "Kill!"

Kathy Ross had only a few brief moments for the realization to sink in. Yeah, she should have known. Big Mama was as heavily armed as an old Concordiat superdreadnought, with primary weapons that outclassed even the Navy's big capital ship Hellbores. With a hard-bitten curse, she hit her Starhawk's maneuvering thrusters, flipping the craft through three axes to bring her main thrusters into play ninety degrees off her vector toward the Malach ship. At her current range and speed, there was no way she could stop. She might, just maybe, be able to avoid a collision.

Then the Malach carrier's Hellbore-sized weapons were turned on her, and for an instant she stared into a golden light more intense than any sun.

"She's gone," Arkin said. On the overhead screen, the blip representing Kathy Ross's Starhawk flared white, expanded into a fuzzy sphere, and vanished. Donal felt a sharp, inner wrench, a stab of pain and loss. It was impossible to spend a week cooped up in a tiny life-support capsule with someone and not get to know her pretty well . . . better, in fact, than you really cared to. At that, he hadn't really felt close to her, hadn't even thought of her particularly as a friend, but watching her die on a computer graphic display left him wretchedly depressed, as though he'd just endured the death of a close member of his family.

A tragic waste.

"All hands," Arkin said, depressing an intercom switch. "We're clear of Wide Sky, and no enemy forces are in range. It looks like the decoy worked. Stand by for hyper-L translation."

The refugee fleet had certainly appeared on the Malach screens by this time. The red dots that had swirled around Kathy's Starhawk were streaming back toward the planet again, hungry for more blood. The refugee fleet, however, by that time had too much of a lead. On Arkin's command, the three Conestogas and some twenty smaller craft of various types and descriptions slipped into hyper-L, like submarines vanishing beneath the waves.

It was a one-week passage to Muir.

Aghrracht Swift-Slayer stared at the screen for several long moments. "This human ship," she said after a long moment. "It was not a robot? Like their Bolos?"

She stood with the other seven members of the Council in the broad, open conference room aboard the
Cha'Zhanaach
. A screen rising on a pedestal before the Eight still showed the dissipating cloud of debris representing all that was left of the lone fighter that had come so close to striking the carrier.

"We scanned the ship carefully, Deathgiver," her Second replied. "There was one life form on board."

"Cramped quarters," Kha'laa'sht Meat Finder observed. "Uncomfortable thought, that, facing death in so tiny a metal and ceramic box."

"But an impressive display of warrior skill," Aghrracht said. Briefly, she lowered her head, feeding tendrils splayed in the gesture of ritual honor for a valiant prey. "We've not seen such dedication in one of their combatant classes before. Nothing better, in fact, than the war machines they call Bolos."

"We should tread carefully, Deathgiver," Sh'graat'na Prey Wounder said. "These humans show surprising adaptability. That attack was almost worthy of Malach tactics."

"Mmm. Save, of course, that the warrior launched the attack by herself, without support from the rest of her pack. For that reason alone, it was doomed from the beginning. I don't understand why she even tried."

"If I may remind the Deathgiver," Kha'laa'sht said, her head lowered in a deliberate, if properly subdued, challenge, "human social organization is nothing like ours. They have nothing that answers to a disciplined pack. Many of their activities seem to be organized in isolation. Indeed, some seem to seek seclusion."

Aghrracht suppressed a shudder. Her feeding tendrils rippled her agitation, the tips changing from scarlet to yellow. "Astonishing concept. How can they get anything done at all?"

"They show some level of cooperation, surely, but no more than, say, a herd of
gna'shadath
defending their young."

"In a way," Jesch'kha'sht the Swift Treader said thoughtfully, "we have seen pack tactics here this watch. That single warrior, alone in her fighter, performed a valiant
k'klaj'sh'achk.
That she failed was through no fault of her own."

"Indeed, she might have succeeded had she been part of an Eight," Zhallet'llesch observed.

"And she accomplished something more than simply damaging this vessel," Jesch'kha'sht went on. "Our blockade of the planet was broken. Several eights of enemy vessels launched from those strange, floating complexes on the planet's largest ocean and escaped without taking a single shot from our orbital forces."

"You think
that
was their goal, Swift Treader?" Kha'laa'sht said. She sounded disdainful. "Merely to arrange for the escape of a few hands of ships?"

"I do," she replied, closing a hind-hand in assent. "The planning, the timing were perfect. As was their understanding of psychology. They knew we would be diverted by a bold and daring single strike against our command carrier. That fleet of theirs was ready to launch at a moment's notice. They must have made the decision when we raided the floating complex two rotations ago. As soon as their skies were clear of our ships, they fled."

"Cowards—"

"Can we say that, Meat Finder? Can we
truly
say that, knowing as little about these creatures as we do?"

Kha'laa'sht's jaw tendrils rippled sharply in a gesture signifying worthlessness . . . the rejection of a piece of rotted meat. "There is nothing to be known. They are
yasesch
. Meat animals, to be domesticated, herded, and slaughtered at our whim."

"I disagree. They showed resourcefulness in their attempted
k'klaj'sh'achk.
That they underestimated the strength of our defenses is quite beside the point. And that warrior, at least, showed courage as keen-toothed and as prey-gripping as that of any Malach warrior. I, for one, salute her bravery. And I would very much like to know where those twenty-three starships are bound."

"Their course was carrying them into the Void," Haresh'greshech the Flesh Render, the Council's most junior member, ventured. "Toward Zhanaach. You . . . you don't think that they—"

"Those ships pose no direct threat to Zhanaach," Aghrracht said. "Only three are large enough to be any danger at all, and they could not carry troops or weapons enough to threaten an entire world. Indirectly, however, it is another mouthful. I suspect that they plan to change course once they are clear of this star system, then carry warning to the other human worlds of this cluster. And information. About us."

The others snarled, hind-hands clenched in agreement. "Perhaps they have resigned themselves to losing this world and the others we have already taken," Zhallet'llesch said. "Those twenty-three may carry warning and particulars of our attack to their headquarters."

"It seems clear," Aghrracht said, "what our future hunt must be. We must strike immediately for the capital world of the human cluster.
Kklaj'sh'achk!
Crush the head, and the body dies for the feeding of the Pack."

"How can we find that world?" Haresh'greshech asked. "There are hundreds of billions within Sha'gnaasht's Spiral. Captives taken on Zsha'h'lach as well as on this world insist that their species comes from there."

"We needn't be concerned with the Spiral," Kha'laa'sht said. "This species is evolutionarily unsuited to survival. Their dominion over so many worlds of this cluster is an accident. Had they been
truly
survival-blessed on any of these worlds . . ."

"But for so many of the human captives to insist—"

"I think we can safely dismiss many of those rantings, Flesh Render," Kha'laa'sht said with the hiss that indicated amusement in Malach speech. "Evolution has not favored these creatures in any way that I see. I fail to see how they could rise to Sha'gnaasht-blessed dominance of a single world, much less all the habitable worlds of a star cluster."

"Perhaps," Aghrracht said. "But if, as does seem to be the case, the humans are the dominant species in this stretch of space, we must face them wherever they have put down roots. Our own dominance, our own
blessing
must be declared and proven within the sacred arena of survival of the fittest."

"We will continue with the invasion, then." Sh'graat'na's eyes were bright, the pattern of red scales masking her face flushed brighter with her excitement. "Kill and eat!"

"Kill and eat," Aghrracht agreed, and the others chorused the words in response.

"The difficulty, of course," Aghrracht continued, "is finding their central world. Fortunately, this is not an impossible task. We shall use
sh'whiss.
"

Sh'whiss were small Zhanaachan, sharp-toothed animals with keen senses of smell, movement, and blood-taste distantly related to the Malach themselves. Malach hunter groups bred and kept sh'whiss packs for traditional hunting sport, dispersing them in the bush to find the prey's scent, then calling in the hunters with their characteristic, high-pitched yelping bay. Aghrracht was referring not to the animal, however, but to a small, robotic probe named after it, a ten-meter, unmanned spacecraft with hyper-L capabilities that could enter the outskirts of a target star system, observe radio, commercial, and military traffic there, and report by FTL communications link to the command carrier.

"But even ignoring the Great Spiral," Haresh'greshech insisted, "the small star cluster alone contains tens of thousands of stars, far more than we could investigate with Sh'whiss probes."

"True. But note, if you will, that the three human-occupied star systems we have already investigated are all of a kind. Their stars are mid-range in evolutionary sequence, with luminosities in the yellow to orange range. They are also metal-rich stars, which is, of course, why we were interested in them in the first place. You will observe that the vast majority of stars in the cluster are of the metal-poor variety, ancient and primal suns spawned before the enrichment of the local interstellar medium. We have a few eights of stars to choose from, at the most."

"Your idea then," Zhallet'llesch said, "is to dispatch probes only to those stars that seem to be of interest to the humans."

"Exactly. We will program the probes to scan specifically for that fleet of twenty-three vessels . . . in particular the three large ones. That class of ship cannot be overly common in this part of space, and their drive signatures are unique. When we find those ships, we can reasonably conclude that we have found the administrative capital of the human empire. And then . . ."

"We will crush them!" Zhallet'llesch declared, clenching both hind-hands. "
Shch'kaa uroch!
Kill and eat!"

"It will be
UrrghChaak
," Aghrracht agreed. "Blood-chase! I can taste the blood now, sweet, rich, and hot! The Race will demonstrate again its superior blessings of survival in the sacred arena."