Bolo Brigade (42 page)

Alexie grimaced and then turned away. "Nasty way to find out that your notions of friendly, peace-loving aliens are—"

She clamped her mouth shut, and Donal wondered if she was going to be sick.

A door banged open on the far side of the room, and a trio of Malach forced their way through, crowding one another for the opportunity to bring down the humans. Donal spun, raising his powergun, then cursed at the steady red wink of the power drained light. Alexie, however, tucked her unfamiliar weapon up under her arm and squeezed off shot after shot, the laser pulses flashing with a blinding intensity as they struck harness leather or green and red scales. All three Malach were dead before they'd gotten more than halfway through the door. Donal snatched one of the concussion grenades from his vest and sprinted forward. The room beyond the open door, he saw, was filled with what looked like alien communications equipment. He armed the grenade and tossed it through in one smooth motion, turning and putting his back to the stone wall until the room beyond the door filled with thunder and roiling smoke.

"Let's get out of here, Donal," Alexie said. She shook the weapon she was holding. "I don't know how to tell if this thing is about to run out of juice."

"I'll go along with that. But just to be sure . . ." Holstering his dead powergun, he stooped to pick up two of the Malach weapons, and handed one to Alexie. She dropped her first weapon and accepted the second. "Let's go. I've got transportation waiting outside."

"Not—"

"For you, Alexie, only the best!"

"Freddy?"

"The same."

He led her out of the shattered castle and into the open air. Freddy was waiting there patiently, the black muzzles of his infinite repeaters twitching slightly as he tracked distant targets not yet close enough to be worth a shot. The sun was down now, and the sky was rapidly growing darker with a blaze of gold and red painting the western horizon. The submarine, Donal noted, was gone.

"The refugees departed in the submarine 8.11 minutes ago," Freddy said as they scrambled aboard up the rear ramp. "They are now under water and safely out into the fjord."

"Thank God," Alexie said.

"I am tracking multiple targets," Freddy continued as they entered the Fighting Compartment. "Numerous fliers and airborne APCs are on approach vectors. I suggest that we leave this area as quickly as possible."

"Freddy, sometimes you have simply magnificent ideas," Donal said. He was feeling an almost manic giddiness, an adrenaline-charged rush from the terror and excitement of close combat. His head hurt where a Malach laser had partly melted his helmet and blistered the skin over his right temple, but he scarcely noticed the pain. "Let's hit it!"

I have reached the southern end of Criton Pass. Ahead, lost in the darkness to optical sensors but quite clear on infrared, Criton Valley extends as a broad, flat, open stretch of terrain approximately four to six kilometers wide. To either side, the Grampian Mountains rise to a modest 950 meters at the highest, with most peaks averaging around 600 meters. The mountains are gently rounded and forest-covered. The valley itself is open field—what ancient tank commanders or cavalry officers would have considered perfect ground for fire and maneuver. A river, the Loman, flows south toward its confluence with the Kinkaid River fifty-two kilometers to the south, just outside the city of Kinkaid, before flowing jointly into Starbright Bay. Route 1 is visible on infrared as a warmly radiating strip of ferrocrete to my left.

Tech Master Sergeant Blandings and his team are here in a small fleet of DY-90 Firestorm hovercraft, escorting a cryo-H tanker. They have been working on me for the past 28.4 minutes, trying to increase my battle worthiness to minimum acceptable levels.

The task may be impossible, though they have managed to jury-rig a containment bladder inside my ruptured tank to hold a supply of cryogenic hydrogen slush. The maintenance crew perform their tasks admirably, however, despite the very real danger of incoming rounds, and the nearness of the Enemy. Unfortunately, they cannot repair my shattered track. With their help, I disengage the drive wheels in my right-forward track assembly. This will reduce both speed and maneuverability somewhat but will allow me to move without major impedance from the wrecked drive wheels.

With just 10.4 minutes remaining until contact with the Enemy, I receive one excellent piece of news. My direct satellite communications have been destroyed, but HQ reports that Bolo 96876 of the Line has reemerged north of the Windypeak Mountains, at the site known as Invasion Zone Delta. He seems to have dealt a crippling blow to the Enemy's command-control structure and is now moving south across the mountains.

It may be that we will be able to fight at least part of this final engagement together. I would like that. Multiple Bolo engagements are rare. More, however, the nature of the Enemy threat and the severity of damage I have suffered together suggest that I cannot hold them long on my own.

I cannot accurately estimate how long I will survive before I am overwhelmed.

"C'mon, c'mon. C'mon, you grease squirters!" Blandings stood in the open cockpit well of the Firestorm, hands on hips, staring into the night, toward the north. He wore light-amplifier visor that gave him an almost insect-like appearance, and his mouth, what was visible beneath the optic rig, was scowling with disapproval. "The stilters're almost here!"

Corporal Steve Dombrowski laughed, pulling his head back out of the Bolo's Number Five sensor suite access tunnel. "They'll wish the hell they'd stayed where they came from! Ol' Ferdy here's gonna land 'em, gut 'em, and hang 'em out to dry!"

"You said it!" Len Kemperer added. "Man, did you see those combat read-outs they pulled at HQ? Ferdy here's too much for 'em, I don't care how many of the critters there are! Ow!"

"What is it?" Corporal Debbie Hall asked.

Kemperer flopped his hand back and forth, cooling it. "Hull's still hot."

"It's
hot
some places in more ways than one, moron," Blandings snarled. "You oughta know better'n to work without gloves!"

"Before this is over, Sarge," Hall said, "we're gonna be wearing full rad decon gear. These guys play for keeps, huh?"

"S'okay, Deb," Dombrowski said, grinning as he closed the access panel, a hatch as thick and as heavy as a lead-lined walk-in safe's door. He had to lean hard to swing it shut with a satisfying clang. "So do we!"

Blandings continued to stare up the valley toward the north, straining for some sign of the oncoming enemy—a sign that he knew Ferdy would detect long before any human senses could possibly manage it. He was smiling now, the expression safely hidden in the darkness.
Gotta hand it to you, Lieutenant,
he thought.
You got yourself a
team
here.

He was worried, nonetheless. Ferdy would be going into combat with only three tracks working, half his armor scoured away, a hole in his flank big enough for a full-grown man to crawl down, and a jury-rigged cryo-H bladder that was never intended to stand up to the stress of combat. If one of those penetrators broke through . . .

Well, it wasn't like the defenders of Muir had a whole lot of choice. His maintenance crew, he thought, had worked miracles already.

He just hoped that those miracles would be enough.

The Bolo hit rugged ground at that moment, the violent lurch flinging Alexie against Donal. He managed to catch her before she hit the floor. "You okay?"

She nodded. Her face was smudged with grease, dirt, and soot, and her hair was a blond riot, but at that moment he thought she looked beautiful. She'd just completed putting burn ointment and a dressing over the blister on Donal's head, tying it in place with a length of gauze bandage roll.

"Okay. Better strap in," he told her, indicating the jump seat in the corner. "We're heading over the top of the mountains now, and it's going to get pretty rough going down the other side."

He could feel each time the Bolo encountered a tree—a slight tremor, an occasional rocking to one side or the other as the huge treads ground over a fallen forest giant. The fighting compartment's battle screens were all on, giving them a full, three-sixty view, a panorama in the pale yellows and whites-on-greens of infrared penetrating the night. Columns of data showing on forward, left, and right screens listed exterior readings on temperature, atmosphere, and radiation, noted the inclination of the terrain, ground pressure, surface speed, tracked motion or metallic targets, and registered a hundred other details, ranging from the insignificant to the critical. Donal was particularly interested in the terrain inclination just now, which was shifting between twenty-five and thirty-two degrees—a steep slope, though not impossible for a Bolo. The greatest danger was that too great a slope might cause the ground to give way beneath the Bolo's incredible ground pressure of fourteen thousand tons. If that happened, they might begin sliding back down the slope, could conceivably involve themselves in an outright avalanche, and at worst could slide badly enough that they ended up going over the edge of a drop steep enough to make them flip over. Even Bolos had their terrain limitations. . . .

The cabin rocked with a series of detonations. Alexie looked up toward the pipe-cluttered ceiling of the compartment, eyes wide. "What was that?"

Donal glanced at the status readouts, then at the screen showing the view toward the right. A flash appeared in the sky just above the treeline. Several white contrails edged past the blossoming flare in erratic scrawls, heat trails on IR.

"Company," he said. "Three Malach fliers, range about fifty kilometers. They're out over the ocean, but they're tracking us. They just locked on with six radar-homing missiles that Freddy took out with antimissile lasers. Now he's about to take out the fliers."

"Without orders from you?"

A shrill whine, muffled by thick hull plating, sounded, together with a buzzsaw rasp and a shudder felt through the steel deck. Strings of blue-white stars were flashing across the treeline, vanishing into the distance. Seconds later, however, an orange flash flared soundlessly and faded above the trees in the darkness, followed almost immediately by another . . . and finally, after a longer pause, a third. The sounds of the explosions came back seconds later, very faint and far away.

"Freddy's a hell of a lot better at this than I am," he told her. "Better reactions. Faster thinking. There is no way I or any human could directly run this machine in combat without getting us all killed. Yes, he does it without specific instructions from me. He's designed that way."

The deck suddenly leveled off, then began tipping back the other way as Freddy nosed over the top. If anything, the trip downhill was faster and more hair-raising than the trip up. Fourteen thousand tons traveling in excess of eighty kilometers per hour could build up one hell of a lot of momentum.

"Commander," Freddy announced. "I am receiving a Priority One radio transmission addressed to you. On scrambler."

"Put it through."

"Bolo 96876!" sounded over the speaker. "This is Phalbin. What the hell is going on up there?"

"General, this is Ragnor. We have successfully attacked the Malach command center at Glenntor." He glanced at Alexie and grinned, giving her a wink. "We were able to liberate a number of human prisoners there, and the word we have at the moment is that we did in a fair number of the enemy's high command. We're coming over the Windypeaks now, at or near Bollard's Notch. Our intent is to move on the Malach landing zone at . . . Map Three, Hotel-two-four by Juliet-five-niner. Over."

"Ah . . . negative on that, Lieutenant. Your orders are to proceed at all possible speed to Route 1 and Criton Pass. We want both Bolos in position north of the city to stop an expected Malach attack against the capital. Do you copy? Over!"

Donal killed the mike, then spoke to Freddy. "Let me have an area map, please. One to one hundred kay, with joystick."

A window opened on his forward viewscreen, showing the map in realistic terrain colors, several shades of green for the forest, browns and grays for the bare mountain peaks. A three-D effect gave a suggestion of elevation, backed by the glowing figures of altitudes, given in meters. A panel popped open on his right armrest, and a small joystick rose from the opening. Touching the control with his forefinger, he was able to zoom over the computer-generated terrain, looking for the best view to suit his needs.

That was it, looking from the west. The Bolo's course was clearly plotted in white, a line zigzagging up the steep slopes from the blip marking Glenntor, then over the top and down. A winking green pinpoint showed the Bolo's current position on the south slope of the Windypeaks, and another marked Ferdy's position south of Criton Pass. North of the thirty-klick-long valley a constellation of red lights glowed, slowly funneling together as they approached the northern end of the pass. Their intent was clear: bull through the pass and descend on Kinkaid. Only Ferdy stood in the way.

"Ragnor!" Phalbin barked. "You have already disobeyed direct orders to bring that Bolo south to Kinkaid. I'm giving you one more chance, and so help me, if you refuse this order you are down on your knees begging me for a court martial. Ragnor! Do you hear me?"

"Easy there, General," Donal said. "We're coming."

"Okay." Relief was evident in that single word. "Look, we're mustering every man, every vehicle we have. The Bolos have done a great job of breaking up the enemy attacks, and now it's all or nothing, you understand?"

"Understood, sir."

"I have ordered Bolo 96875 to assume a static defensive position south of the valley. I will deploy the troops up the east and west sides of the valley, in a position to take out the enemy as they pass through. I want you to reach the north end of the valley and likewise take up a static position. Your job will be to block enemy forces trying to escape to the north, and to serve as a reserve Bolo unit. If, ah, if the enemy gets past Bolo 96875, you'll have to try to stop them before they reach the capital."