Bolo Brigade (26 page)

She touched a contact on her harness, and overhead, the flat, domed ceiling of the chamber turned dark, then glowed with the red-gold light of the thronging suns of the cluster. Beyond, its arms unreeling through the ultimate night, the Great Wheel of Sha'gnaasht floated in silent and ice-guilt splendor.

The image was artificially generated, for the
Cha'Zhanaach
and most of the Malach fleet were now in hyper-L, traveling toward the yellow-white sun where Sh'whiss number eight—what a wonderful omen that it had been
that
number to make the discovery!—had spotted the human ships escaped from the world the Malach called
Lach'br'zghis
, the soft and vulnerably exposed belly.

They would arrive at the new prey-world in another five
quach
. In the meantime, the Warriors of the race readied themselves, physically, morally, sexually, and spiritually, preparing for the clash that would demonstrate Malach fitness to survive and inherit.

"The Race shall go on and on," she continued, "from conquest to conquest, from victory to victory, until all of the Great Wheel is ours. Thus it has been ordained, for this is our destiny!"

"Mha'a'laich," the crowd replied in ancient litany. "The Destiny of those who survive!"

"From world to world," the crowd replied in ancient litany, "from sun to sun, from generation to generation, until the Great Wheel belongs to We Who Have Survived!"

The Great Wheel seemed so close in its pale and ghostly splendor, Aghrracht thought she could almost reach up and swirl an open fore-hand through its myriad suns.

"Mha'a'laich-agh!" she shouted at the sky. "
Our
Destiny!"

The promise of victory tasted as sweet as hot, blue-green blood.

Our commander returned from his social engagement at Glenntor three nights ago with a new and urgent sense of purpose. Though it was late in the midnight watch when he arrived, he immediately accessed our primary data banks and uploaded 235.2 gigabytes of data. I am concerned because he told us that he was violating orders doing this.

Still, upon studying the uploaded data, I can understand both his worry about the Malach, and the reasoning behind his disobedience. There are times when the rules must be bent or even broken to maintain peak efficiency, readiness, and combat capability, and this is clearly one of those times.

I am disquieted by what I have seen of the data acquired from the Wide Sky Military Command. The nonhuman intelligence known as the Malach pose an immediate and serious threat to all human settlements within the Strathan Cluster and, without doubt, to the rest of the human-populated Galaxy as well. While nothing at all is known about their reproductive cycles or the specific details of their social structure, their pack-hunting methods suggest that their population is large, with numbers enough to support the wave attacks recorded by Bolo Unit 76235 ALG. Their seeming hunger for raw materials in the form of processed alloys and metals taken from overrun human cities suggests a somewhat direct response to a scarcity of such materials on their home world. It is possible that they face overpopulation and either depletion or an initial paucity of natural resources, though this is sheer speculation. Very little is known yet about Malach psychology, or about aspects of their home environment and biology that might affect that psychology, and this lack of information must be considered a serious weakness in our defense.

I reflect that the most difficult portion of my assignment is not the monitoring of enemy activity on or near this planet, but the stifling and oppressive web of instructions and Rules of Engagement that have been issued to restrict my initiative. This is a problem that extends far beyond the usual software inhibitions to action and thought that I experience when I am not in full Battle Reflex Mode. It includes a list of specific orders assembled not only by the Muir Military Command Authority, but by the Kinkaid government as well.

Our Commander has been spending most of his time with us during the past several days, checking our systems and general preparedness for battle. Our detection of certain radio frequency noise 61.73 hours ago, possibly leakage from a nearby SWIFT or other FTL communications device, makes combat in the near future a definite possibility, and the base alert status has been raised to Code Three [Yellow].

Our Commander has told us that he believes Malach forces—or at least scouts of some kind—may already be on Muir. I understand his concern in the matter. At the same time, I cannot help but be excited by the prospect of action at last.

Even outnumbered, and against a superior foe, I will be glad to be free of these maintenance depot walls once more, maneuvering and fighting in the open, the purpose for which I and all of my kind were originally designed.

For three days, Donal had spent most of his working hours either here, inside Freddy's cramped fighting compartment, or in the identical fighting compartment buried inside Ferdy's heavily armored chassis, checking circuits, cross-checking code and data elements, testing systems, running simulations. He'd discussed with both Bolos what pitifully little was known about Malach psychology, as well as the somewhat more detailed information available from the Wide Sky militia on Malach combat tactics and group deployments.

He was reviewing a simulation that had pitted both Mark XXIVs against a force of sixty-four Malach units. The results were not good. The Bolos had held their own as long as they could pound the enemy from a distance, but this bunch had jumped them from a narrow defile where they'd been masked from the Bolo's sensors; it had taken just forty-three seconds for both Bolos to be overwhelmed and destroyed.

"I'm particularly concerned about these penetrators the Malach use," Donal was saying. He'd replayed part of the attack against Bolo Unit 76235 ALG—Algy, as they'd called him on Wide Sky—on the big command center screen, freezing the image at the moment when a blinding spear of light had erupted from the big machine's side. "If this spectroscopic data is to be believed, those missiles fire a kind of plasma lance that tunnels part way into the Bolo's armor. An instant later, a solid core containing a small, tactical nuke—probably a plutonium core—plunges into the hole and detonates. If it goes deeply enough, it tears out even a Bolo's guts. A nuclear lance."

"Reactive armor is the usual response to the threat of plasma-jet armor-piercing weapons," Freddy said in a matter-of-fact, voder-precise voice. He might have been discussing the weather, and not a weapon that looked to Donal like an honest-to-God Bolo-killer.

"Yeah, but you see what happened on the recording. They fire enough of those things to cook off all of the reactive armor panels down one whole side, then fire another one into bare metal. Not even flintsteel can stand up to star-core temperatures, Freddy."

"Agreed. However, I should point out that our antimissile defenses are somewhat more effective than those employed by Bolo Unit 76235 ALG." He sounded almost smug.

"There is also the fact," Ferdy added over the intercom link, in a voice identical to Freddy's, "that Bolo 96876 and I will be able to cover one another. We will ensure that none of these nuclear lances reaches our armor in the first place."

"Mmm. We're still going to need a way to replace reactive armor that gets cooked off or used," Donal said, thinking. "Possibly we could get the maintenance gang together to pull fast field servicings. We have a couple of DY-90s here at the depot that might do the trick."

"That might be unwise," Ferdy said. "The modern battlefield is not conducive to long-term survival among organic forms."

"Organic forms were surviving on battlefields a long time before there were Bolos."

"True," Freddy said. "But they were surviving spears, thrown rocks, machine-gun bullets, and the like, not Hellbores and tactical nuclear weapons."

"You'd be surprised what humans can survive, Freddy."

"Excuse me, Commander, but an unauthorized human is entering the depot area."

"Let's see it."

The main screen cut to a real-time shot taken from one of the cameras mounted on the wall by the door. Alexie was stepping into the cavernous main room, looking left and right. "Hello?" she called, her voice clear. "Donal?"

"It's okay," Donal told the Bolos. "She can come in. I'll authorize it. Code three-seven blue."

"Three-seven blue, acknowledged." There was the briefest of hesitations. "I have accessed her files. Her name is Alexie Turner, and she is—"

"I know who she is. Give me an external speaker."

"Speaker activated. Mike hot."

"Hello, Alexie."

On the screen, she started, looking about her. "Donal? Where are you?"

"Inside the Bolo directly in front of you. Come on in. It's okay. Freddy knows you're coming."

He met her at Freddy's aft hatch, lowering the stairway for her as light spilled out of the interior. She hesitated, peering up at him, then smiled. "Permission to come aboard, Captain?"

"That's Navy," he laughed. "But granted." He extended a hand and she accepted it, clambering up the stairway and into the Bolo's narrow central access corridor.

As she entered the command center, ducking her head to clear the low doorway overhead, she looked around at the cramped space and wrinkled her nose. "Good heavens, what's that smell?"

"Smell?" He furrowed his brow, then knew what it was. "Ah! I, ah, guess it's gotten pretty rank in here." Swiftly, he gathered up several articles of discarded clothing and stuffed them away out of sight inside his personal kit bag. "I've been living in here for the past few days, and, well, no time for showers . . ."

"Sorry. I understand and I didn't mean to get personal. No, no! Don't clean up on my account!"

"Just clearing a space for you. I'm not usually such a slob, you know. I, uh, just wasn't expecting visitors and, well, I've been kind of busy." He offered her the command chair and unfolded the jumpseat on the compartment's left side for himself. The compartment was small enough that the two of them were necessarily closer than the usual distance for comfortable conversation. When she swiveled the chair to face him, her knee bumped against his thigh.

" 'Scuse me," Alexie said. "Kind of close quarters, huh?"

"A holdover from the ancient past, actually. A vestigial evolutionary remnant of another era. Bolos haven't needed on-board human officers for a long time, now, but they keep building these little fighting compartments into them, just in case."

"Cozy," she said, looking around. "So! What have you been doing in your little hideaway here?" she asked. "I've been leaving messages with your base office and was wondering why you didn't get back to me."

"I'm sorry! Any messages should have been relayed through to me here. I guess someone back in Admin screwed up."

"Not a problem. I was just worried. You seemed awful thoughtful toward the end of that party at Glenntor the other evening. You didn't even say good night."

"Didn't I? I've been . . . a little distracted, I guess."

"I guess you have. What's the story?"

"What do you mean?"

"
Something's
going on around here, and I think it would be nice if someone brought me up to date. I
do
have a stake in all of this, you know."

"You certainly do. And no one would tell you anything at headquarters, I imagine."

"They're running scared. What is it, a Malach invasion?" She stopped then, as though she'd seen a flicker of something in his eyes. "That meteor we saw. . . ."

"We don't
know
anything, Alexie," he said. "But, when I told him about the meteor the other night, Phalbin told me to put the Bolos on full standby alert. And, when I got back here that night, Ferdy told me he'd monitored what might be RF leakage from a high-powered FTL commo unit."

"A Malach landing craft, maybe?"

"There's no way to tell. The leakage was just noise, so there's no way to analyze it. And it might even have a perfectly natural and un-alien explanation. Smugglers, maybe. Or our Harmony friends, or some bunch of would-be anti-government rebels, setting up an underground network."

"But you don't think so."

"Smugglers aren't my department. Revolutionaries are my department only if they become enough of a nuisance that the government orders me to take action against them. If it
is
Malach, though, I want to be ready. I have to be, because the defense of the planet is pretty much riding on Freddy and Ferdy here. The whole rest of Muir's arsenal, all of the fighters, all of the hovercraft, all of the mobile artillery, wouldn't be much more than an inconvenience to a Malach invasion fleet. So I have to assume that the Malach have scouts here already, checking us out. And that means they're going to follow up in force, sooner or later."

"How could they find us, though?" Her eyes widened with new realization. "Oh, no! They followed our refugee fleet!"

"Maybe. Or they sent scoutships or robot probes to all of the Population I stars in the cluster. There can't be more than a very few hundred in all, depending on how wide their search net is, and they could afford to check them all out. Yeah, I'm afraid that if they have a recon force on or near Muir now, they know this is the local capital, and they know this is where the refugees came after they left Wide Sky."

"We should have found some other place—"

"Wouldn't have helped, Alexie. Sooner or later they'd have found us. From interrogating their prisoners. From collaborators on worlds they've conquered. Or just by analyzing patterns of ship and communications traffic throughout the cluster. The Malach might be a lot of things, Alexie, but they're
not
stupid."

"What can we do about it?"

He shrugged. "Not much, except what I've been doing here. Running simulations. Analyzing what we know or can guess about Malach tactics, psychology, weaknesses, that sort of thing. And make sure our own defenses are at peak readiness." He cocked an eyebrow at her. "How about you? How are things going in the camp?"