Bolo Brigade (32 page)

"Well, do your best. Every one we nail out there is one less to deal with down here."

"That is self-evident." There was a pause. "Unit 96875 has destroyed another Malach vessel, one of approximately frigate size and mass."

"Good for him!"

"He is also engaging what may be Enemy landing or close-assault boats. The situation, I fear, is critical. Our survival in this battle depends on our destroying as many Malach landing craft as possible while they are still in space. But we cannot get them all."

"We'll do the best we can, Freddy," he told the Bolo. "If we go down, it's going to be while we're fighting."

"Affirmative, Commander." The Bolo fired its main battery once more, replying to nuclear fire with nuclear fire.

Alexie had just arrived at Town Hall and called together her chief aides when a crack of thunder rent the air, the shock wave slamming against the rickety sides of the prefab shelter and nearly knocking it over. Ears ringing, Alexie made her way to the transparency in one wall that served as a window and gasped as she saw the pillar of black smoke rising from the center of the tent city. "They're firing on the refugees!" she cried. "They're firing on us! Come on! We've got to get the kids out of here!"

They raced outside, into the chaos of screaming, squalling kids and wide-eyed adults trembling at the edge of panic. Fortunately, a good many of the other monitors had had the same idea as she had and were already herding their charges out of their tents and shelters and moving them west . . . west because it was clear that a pitched battle was being waged to the east, there were mountains and forest to the north, and Lake Simms itself blocked the way south. Using her personal communicator, she was able to make certain that everyone was on the move . . . and that the big government ground transports were coming around to the east side of the city to take on as many of the young, sick, and injured as they could.

Another beam fell out of the heavens, but this one appeared to be aimed at one of the big Conestogas moored out in the lake. Seconds after she saw the towering white plume of spray rise from behind the farthest ship, she heard the thunder, a crack and drawn-out rumble like the first bolt of a spring storm. The beam shimmered and wavered in the sudden, swirling haze of water vapor coming off the lake. An instant later, the beam carved into the space transport, punching clear through the thin hull and savaging the internal systems. Explosions racked the transport's interior; even from here, on shore, Alexie could see the dazzling flashes as power cells and instrumentation inside the big vessel exploded.

The beam winked out, then reappeared almost immediately. Clouds were swirling now above the docking area as the Malach concentrated their fire on the moored ships. It was insane . . . utterly senseless, but Alexie was glad of it. If those blood-thirsty lizards wanted to concentrate their fire on empty space transports while she got a few more of the kids out of the tent city, so much the better. Possibly the Malach were trying to prevent another escape; more likely they feared that the three transports were armed. Either way, they were wasting valuable time and energy in gutting the ships, while the population of Simmstown made good their escape.

A ground transport rumbled up, a behemoth nearly as big as Donal's Bolos with an articulated body and four sets of tracks. It was, in fact, a ConcordiArms Model C heavy transporter, a direct offshoot of Bolo technology. Envisioned as a carry-all for supplies and personnel in remote, frontier areas, it was several centuries obsolete now.

And Alexie was damned glad to see it.

A young-looking militia lieutenant appeared in an open side cargo loading entryway. "You called for a taxi, ma'am?"

"We certainly did! How many can you take?"

"Pack 'em in!" he called back. Turning, he pushed a button on the bulkhead next to the doorway, and a ramp extended from the vehicle's side all the way to the ground. "We can probably take two, maybe three hundred if they don't mind being friendly."

Three hundred. A pittance out of fifty thousand. But she was glad right now for any help she could get. And there were plenty of other transporters. She could hear their grumbling now as their drivers fired up their power plants and engaged their tracks. Hell, at this rate, they only needed another 165 transports to get everybody out.

The hell with that kind of thinking! Somehow, they would do this.
Somehow
.

Snapping off orders with the rapid-fire crispness of a machine gun, she soon had the youngest kids filing aboard, with one adult going along with every forty children. Others filed in with stretchers, taking aboard those who were sick or who'd been wounded in that vicious attack on the tent city. In all, they managed to squeeze 385 aboard, before the lieutenant signaled enough and pulled in the ramp.

As the transporter rumbled off toward the west, Alexie turned to see what else she could do. There was trouble, an aide had told her over her communicator a moment before, at Block 328, at the western edge of the camp.

She climbed into her speedster and switched it on, heading toward the west as fast as she could manage through the crowds. Another bolt of manufactured lightning fell from the sky, striking in the camp to the north.

The battle continues, but I can sense the shifting of the initiative from our defense to the Enemy's offense. The Enemy has dispatched an estimated 344 landing craft, approximately equivalent in mass, size, and maneuvering capabilities to a Concordiat Saber-class assault boat. Judging by analogy with known assault boat models, any one of the approaching craft could carry as many as a thousand troops, or a single Bolo . . . or between thirty and thirty-six of the characteristic Malach walkers—I conjecture, given their predilection for the number eight, that this number would be thirty-two.

Also detected are some thousands of smaller objects, of about the size and mass of a standard escape/survival pod. These, I believe, may be individual Malach walkers enclosed in atmospheric-entry vehicles of some kind. The records from Wide Sky suggest that many of the Enemy forces there landed as single units, descending over a wide area for landing, then joining together into teams of eight.

Exact numbers, however, are impossible to ascertain. The Enemy has also initiated the dispersal of large, expanding clouds of chaff, radar-reflective material that masks his deployment. More and more of the Enemy's vessels, both his capital ships and his landing and assault craft, are vanishing behind the homogenous and featureless fuzz of his chaff fields. I continue firing at available targets as long as I can, but before long my targets are limited only to those smaller vessels that have approached Muir more closely than the closest chaff clouds. Many of these—perhaps most—are obviously decoys, launched ahead of the main body to draw my fire.

I worry about what might be developing behind the fast-spreading clouds of chaff.

Donal had to find a way to block the enemy bombardment. At first glance, there wasn't a lot he could do about it, but the brief appearance of clouds above Freddy during his duel with the enemy ships had given rise to an idea.

He tried to think through the physics of the thing. A Bolo's Hellbore was a plasma-fusion weapon. A tiny sliver of frozen hydrogen, encased deep within a coolant sleeve with a fusion igniter and a steel accelerator jacket, was loaded automatically into the breech of the main weapon. When the Bolo fired the main battery, powerful mag accelerator coils in the walls of the gun tube snatched the jacket and hurled the casing toward the muzzle. Ten gigajoule lasers mounted inside the bore fired an instant before the igniter, evacuating the tube and clearing a path through the atmosphere to reduce drag and friction-induced "bloom."

Even before the projectile had reached the end of the tube, however, the igniter induced the temperatures and pressures necessary to trigger a small, thermonuclear conversion. The magfields accelerating the casing also served to contain and compress the fusing plasma, partly to focus it, mostly to keep the barrel of the Hellbore—not to mention most of the Bolo's main turret—from dissolving in the heat. By the time the Hellbore shot left the weapon's muzzle fifty nanoseconds after ignition, all of the original matter, hydrogen, sleeve, and all, had been reduced to a bolt of plasma with a core temperature of several million degrees Kelvin, traveling down range at a speed of seventy percent of the speed of light. Even though the mass of the original projectile amounted to just a few grams, the recoil—despite enormous recoil dampers and suppressers in the Bolo's turret mount assembly—was sufficient to rock the fourteen-thousand-ton behemoth with a hull-ringing thump.

The key point of the equation, however, was
energy
. A Mark XXIV Bolo employed the majority of the output of three Class VII fusion plants to manufacture the energy necessary to accelerate a few grams to low-relativistic speeds, and much of that energy entered the surrounding atmosphere as heat, which bled away from the accelerating projectile despite the near-vacuum created by the lasers. The lasers, too, added their quota of heat, as did the fiercely radiating bolt of the plasma lance itself. Firing a Hellbore was not unlike flinging a tiny piece dredged from a sun's core at near-light speeds; in the vicinity of a battle, the air temperature climbed, and quickly.

And all the while Freddy had been discharging his Hellbore, enemy plasma bolts had been falling across a broad area of the planet, their impacts more or less random but the energy of each greater than that of a single Hellbore shot. Analysis of the Malach weapons suggested that they were similar to human Hellbores, using more hydrogen to achieve higher temperatures, but with a much lower velocity. They somehow used magnetics to create true plasma beams lasting as much as two seconds. And each two-second shot dumped a very great deal of heat into the atmosphere.

Donal glanced at the readout showing the external environmental conditions. The local temperature was 31 degrees Celsius . . . a rise of nearly 12 degrees over the past twenty minutes. Barometric pressure . . . nearly 1.125 bar, and normal for Muir was closer to .95. The area around Lake Simms was in the center of an extreme high-pressure system as rapidly warming air expanded in a huge bubble hugging the planet.

Expanding air meant dropping vapor pressure. The air was becoming
dry
. "Freddy?"

"Yes, Commander?"

"Break off the action. I have a new target for you."

"Awaiting new targeting instructions."

"Aim at the lake. Five or six klicks out from the shore. Open fire at the water. Continue firing until I tell you otherwise."

Donal heard the turret whine as it pivoted somewhere meters above his head. On the main, circular viewing screen, the crosshair reticle indicating the Hellbore's aim point shifted right, coming to rest on the blue waters of the lake, with range figures alongside indicating a target lock at a range of 5.74 kilometers.

"Target lock," Freddy said. "Firing."

The fighting compartment rocked with the recoil.

Aghrracht Swift-Slayer turned at the report given by one of her aides. "The enemy war vehicle is doing what?"

"Firing deliberately and repeatedly into the lake, Deathgiver. We cannot ascertain why."

Aghrracht considered the matter. No units were on the planet as yet—the nearest were still over a
quor
from touching down—so the human war machine couldn't be firing at Malach forces. Besides, Malach rarely considered large bodies of water as anything more than an obstacle to combat. After millennia of mining and heavy industrial exploitation on Zhanaach, the planet's shallow seas were lifeless; worse, they tended to dissolve metal hulls, and quickly. Malach did not think in terms of moving on or under water, but only over or around, so the enemy machine's actions were puzzling.

"There must be some problem with it," Aghrracht decided at last. "If it is robotic, like the one we destroyed on Lach'br'zghis, there may be a fault in its circuitry or programming."

"A near hit by one of our plasma beams, perhaps," the aide suggested.

"A possibility . . . though it seems unlikely that such well-constructed machines would be so vulnerable to near hits." Her feeding tendrils rippled as she thought. "Continue the bombardment. The machine continues its random maneuverings?"

"It does, Deathgiver. It is not possible to target it at this range."

"Continue trying nonetheless. It may make a contra-survival mistake. Or Sha'gnaasht may bless us with survivor's luck. In any case, I don't trust it. This may be a
nagashni's
ruse."

The
nagashni
was a small, mucus-covered predator on Zhanaach, recently extinct, that would play dead until carrion fliers began approaching, attracted by its deathlike odor. When one of the big, winged creatures was about to alight on what it thought was a putrescently decaying body, one of the creature's legs, longer and more muscular than the other five, shot out with tremendous force, impaling the flier on a three-
taych
-long claw.

"Kill and eat, Deathgiver!" the aide said in salute.

"Kill and eat." But the response was automatic, the Deathgiver's thoughts still on the enemy machine's strange actions.
You fight well, machine,
she thought.
As well as a Malach warrior, perhaps, in the accuracy of your fire and your willingness to engage against large odds. How cunning are you, in fact?

The next few
quor
ought to provide the answer.

Bolt after white-hot bolt flashed into the lake, striking and extinguishing in savagely geysering fountains of steam and spray. Already, the shoreline of the lake, a full five and a half klicks from the target area, was growing hazy behind the gentle fall of a fine, hot mist, and the bolts were rendered starkly visible by the trails they carved through the wet air.

Each shot dumped gigajoules of energy, most of it as heat, into the water and the air above it. Tons of water had already been boiled away, turned to steam that rose swiftly above the tormented surface of the lake. Tons more were suspended as a fine mist in the atmosphere; as the air temperature rose, however, the warming air rose, carrying the water droplets with it.