Bolo Brigade (35 page)

Aghrracht's tendrils twitched curiosity. "None?"

"We do not believe they possess significant force north of the mountains. All that held this castle were the twelve that made the initial threat display, and a few eights of others that did not resist. They have been imprisoned in the underground chambers. We have been holding them in case you wished to question or vivisect them."

"Excellent. We have learned, I believe, all that is necessary to know about human anatomy, but their psychologies remain . . . obscure. They are difficult to understand."

"Indeed, Deathgiver." She opened her fore-hand claws slowly, a gesture of reluctant bafflement. "Their threat display with the colorless cloth is beyond comprehension. None of the humans was armed."

"The prisoners may be able to explain the action's symbolism." She turned, gesturing toward another Malach descending the ramp with a number of Aghrracht's aides and subcommanders. "We have one
tsurgh'ghah
with us, at least, who has begun acquiring the human language."

Ch'chesk'cheh's feeding tendrils curled back with distaste, and Aghrracht understood. It was a common reaction among Malach warriors, for the
tsurgh'ghah
were not high-ranking members of Malach society.

The word was drawn from the name of a Zhanaachan carrion eater and was synonymous with "scavenger." The Malach who'd acquired that epithet millennia ago had been outcasts from the proper female warrior hierarchy, a nameless underclass that had survived by scavenging bodies, body wastes, food scraps, garbage, and whatever else they could lay their claws to. Eventually, they'd been integrated into the Race's evolving social structure as providers of certain necessary, if unpleasant, services, though individuals still had neither names nor honorable standing.

Aghrracht and her aides followed the garrison commander into the castle, walking carefully down a set of too-short steps into a large and spartanly furnished hall. The heads of various prey animals were mounted on the wall, and for the first time Aghrracht wondered if these humans might have some of the social graces, skills, and arts after all. Prominently displayed on chin hooks hung in a line along one wall were the limp and red-splattered bodies of the castle's human defenders. Some were still struggling weakly, though the size of the puddles of odd-colored blood beneath each strung-up body suggested that they were almost ready for the next cycle of the Great Spiral.

As the garrison commander ordered a couch brought for Aghrracht—human furniture did not fit Malach anatomy, but couches with their backs and sides removed could be adapted for the purpose—she regarded her
tsurgh'ghah
with slit-narrowed pupils. The scavengers' services were more necessary than ever since Zhanaach had entered her industrial age. The interest the outcasts had for garbage and the leavings of others had allowed them to evolve as collectors and repositories of information, and nowadays, many of the Nameless were attached to specific warrior clans and worked under their direction, remembering histories, warrior's tales, Death-poems, names, and anything else that needed preservation for the future.

If most warriors cared little for things of the past, there'd always been a need to store histories, so that lessons learned once need not be learned again. Recollectors made a science of perfect recall, training themselves to record information of all types. Indeed, writing was a relatively recent development in Malach history, since books and records were rarely needed. Until Malach advances in technology had developed computers two thousand
qui'ur
ago, knowledge had been preserved solely on perishable book-scrolls and in the minds of
tsurgh'ghah
recollectors.

This one, who'd been given "Cho" as a nickname-of-convenience, was one of Aghrracht's personal recollectors, an old Malach with blackening scales who'd served Aghrracht's mother before her and had special expertise in remembering names. She'd proven her worth by being able to remember and repeat the words and phrases used by the human prisoners. Several prisoners, encouraged to cooperate through the vivisection of some of their pack-mates in their presence, had been used to generate a vocabulary of human speech; with only a single people and a single tongue for the past several thousand
qui'ur
, the Malach still found the concept of other languages strange and a bit difficult to think about, but once a recollector skilled in names heard a new word and its definition, she never forgot them.

Even so, though Cho by now possessed a vocabulary of several thousand human words and phrases, using them effectively was difficult. So much about the humans and the way they thought was still baffling to the Malach. More clearly than ever, humans had long been trapped in an evolutionary cul-de-sac, despite the momentary and intermittent skills they'd demonstrated in the defense of this planet. They'd lost any blessing Sha'gnaasht might once have bestowed upon them and now deserved only extinction.

The Malach would inherit the wealth of their worlds.

Aghrracht considered having Cho begin by questioning those of the display-prey that were still alive, but decided that it probably wouldn't be worth the effort. Humans appeared to be incapacitated by relatively small amounts of pain; it was possible that they
felt
pain more intensely than did Malach, though no one had been able to prove that hypothesis definitively. In any case, Aghrracht doubted that they would get anything more informative out of the trophies now than squeaks and mindless burblings, especially with the floors of their mouths pierced by display hooks.

Kha'laa'sht the Meat Finder entered the hall. "Deathgiver," she said. "We have set up the communications center in the next room, over there. We have channels to each of our pack-leaders in the field now."

"Excellent," Aghrracht replied. "Inform all leaders that human prisoners and submissives are to be brought here. See that transports are made available."

"The hunting is good, Deathgiver."

It was time, Aghrracht though, to begin learning how best to drive this particular prey, what weaknesses it had that could be exploited, what needs it possessed through which it might be domesticated. . . .

General Phalbin stood before the large map display, studying the fast-growing blotches of red that were scattered across the continent from Loch Haven and the Windypeak Mountains all the way south to Kinkaid. The situation was grim, and growing worse. The major landings appeared to be taking place north and northeast of Simmstown—further confirmation, Phalbin thought—that the damned Malach had come in on the heels of the Wide Sky refugees. Most of the refugee encampment had been overrun by now, though the latest reports put the bulk of the refugees, most on foot, some aboard transports, nearly fifty kilometers south of the area. Lieutenant Ragnor's rather dazzling display of footwork with Bolo 96876 of the Line seemed to have confounded the Malach. For a time, it had looked as though they were preparing for a drive south on Kinkaid, but Ragnor's maneuvers appeared to have made them pull back and consolidate. For the first time in his career, General Barnard Phalbin was glad for the Bolos under his command and wished he had more.

But he was also concerned. Bolo 96875 of the Line, left protecting Kinkaid in the south, was in a fair position to block Malach forces that had landed in the region from either the spaceport or the city, located across the bay. But Ragnor and the Bolo he was riding in, Bolo 96876, were now deep inside what had to be considered enemy territory and getting deeper all the time as more Malach landed. The original plan, to post the Bolos as semimobile fortresses close to the starport, had been junked when the Malach invasion caught Bolo 96876 out of position, up at the refugee camp,

It was time to give up on the area around Simmstown. Ragnor had done an excellent job of covering the evacuation of the refugees, but it was time to pull him back, to pull Bolo 96876 back. With two of those incredible machines guarding Kinkaid, Muir just might have a chance.

"Communications!" he called. "Get me a scrambled channel to the commander of Bolo 96876."

They were into the battle proper now, and all Donal could do was grip the armrests of his command seat and watch the panorama unfolding around him. Modern combat was too fast-paced by far for any human to comprehend it, much less reason out the moves or react to the enemy's thrusts and parries. He watched as Freddy engaged Malach walker after walker, flier after flier, watched as volleyed salvos from the ion cannons along both of the Bolo's flanks and the jolting thunder of the Hellbore main weapon carved through the enemy formations like lightning.

Tactics at this point were brutally simple—kill enemy war machines as quickly and as efficiently as possible, and try to keep them from ganging up on the lone Bolo with overwhelming force and firepower. Freddy was accomplishing this by identifying groups of Malach walkers as they began to come together, striking at them first with HE and tactical nuclear weapons at medium to long range, then closing to engage the survivors in flickering, rapid-fire contests of accuracy and hitting power.

So far, the Bolo had the edge—or at least was holding his own. Freddy clearly had the advantage in firepower and armor; the Malach possessed speed and maneuverability, but Freddy was deliberately allowing himself to be surrounded so that he could take advantage of shorter interior lines of movement. With a mathematical precision that truly transformed the art of battle to a science, he circled through the enemy formations, breaking up one after another. They were easier targets when they were airborne, and he knocked the fliers out of the sky every chance he got. Walkers were more accurate when they fired, and they tended to make use of ridges and folds in the terrain to maintain hard-to-hit hull-down positions.

Freddy absorbed the punishment and kept on fighting, relying on short, furious bursts of unexpected speed to avoid encirclement at close range. The worst danger was the Malach nuke-tipped missile penetrators, but so far the Bolo was swatting them out of the sky before they got close enough to hurt him.

Meanwhile, despite the running firefight, Donal and Freddy were analyzing Malach communications patterns.

"I have noted a 734 percent increase in radio messages originating at this point," Freddy was saying, highlighting a point on the map he was projecting on the main screen.

Donal leaned closer to the display, checking the map. "I'll be damned, " he said, half to himself. "Delacroix's castle. What's it called . . . uh, Glenntor."

"The structure is registered as belonging to the Delacroix family," Freddy replied. "Do you know of him?"

"I was there a few nights ago," Donal said. "That party. The guy is PGPH. I wonder if he's working with the Malach now."

The Bolo rocked suddenly as the main Hellbore fired. Donal glanced up at the compartment's ceiling, then looked at the display surrounding his head. No Malach walkers were close by at the moment, but Freddy had picked up several fliers at a range of nearly ten kilometers and was engaging them. It was raining harder now, and the ground was turning soft. The Bolo continued grinding ahead, however, without slowing at all, smashing through the splintered and charred remnants of the forest as it engaged any enemy unit that came close enough for a clear shot.

"The communications are coded and unintelligible," Freddy said, as though the conversation was the only thing on his mind at the moment, "but the frequencies are typical of those used routinely by the Malach." There was a hesitation, an almost embarrassed silence of a second or so. "It
feels
as though we are dealing with a command center."

The statement rocked Donal. Bolos, even self-aware Bolos, rarely had anything that you could point to and call a
feeling
 . . . or if they did, they didn't admit it.

"Can you explain that? What do you mean . . . 'it feels like'?"

The Bolo rocked again, and one of the fliers blossomed into an orange-white sunburst. "I have recorded the frequency of messages transmitted from the structure you call Glenntor. I have correlated those transmissions with other Malach transmissions, in particular those from their space fleet and those that appear to be command-related communications from the field, as opposed to radio chatter between separate units. The pattern is, in fact, similar to the pattern exhibited by human field command centers directing a battle from just behind the front lines."

Donal considered this. The explanation was straightforward and made perfect sense. But Freddy's mention of something that sounded eerily like intuition had jolted him.

"So we're not dealing with human traitors, you think."

"Almost certainly not, Commander. I have tracked two large Malach shuttles from orbit to the castle. In addition, I have noted over the past seventeen point three four minutes an increase in shuttle traffic from other parts of the battlefield."

The terrain visible on the screens blurred as Freddy accelerated hard, smashing through what was left of a burned-over forest at over one hundred klicks per hour. Two more fliers died in twin, silent detonations. Freddy was moving now to reach a ridgeline several kilometers ahead. According to the scrolling text on the display screen, he was tracking what was probably an octet of walkers.

"What kind of shuttle traffic?"

"Mostly small craft approximately similar in dimension and mass to our Skymaster-class transports or APCs. A large number arrived on-planet with the initial invasion wave. Many of these have begun traveling to the castle, apparently to deliver personnel."

"Where have they been coming from?"

Freddy added a scattering of points on the map. Most were concentrated in the region north of Lake Simms, within the ruin of Simmstown.

"Prisoners," Donal said.

"You believe the transports are carrying human prisoners?"

"It's a good possibility," Donal replied. "The Malach were showing a distinct interest in picking up prisoners on Wide Sky, and they used a transport like you've described. If they're not going to take them back to the fleet—and that would be risky if you're getting too free with your Hellbore bolts—they need to have some central place to take them for safekeeping."
And probably for interrogation
, he added to himself. His fists clenched on the armrest of his command chair. A lot of those prisoners must be children who hadn't made it out of Simmstown in time. It was impossible to simply gather up fifty thousand scared and confused kids and move them out at a moment's notice.