Bolo Brigade (8 page)

The Hunter, freed now of the embrace of its entry packaging, was flattened enough to provide considerable aerodynamic lift at transonic speeds, a lozenge shape of ebon black ceramics and durasteel edged with down-curved, manta's wings. A twitch of Schaagrasch's right fore-arm fired small control jets, swinging the sleek shape left toward an expanse of wooded, hilly terrain north of the military site. A blur of trees and rugged ground swept past her field of vision; scant
erucht
above the rocks she fired her main air-breathing jets, decelerating sharply, as G piled upon G and her speed bled away in jets of superheated steam.

Then she struck the ground, bellying in with a grinding crunch and a geysering cascade of rock and earth. She felt the savage, flesh-ripping joy of completion, of success. She was down, safe, intact . . . and still as sane as she could be after her enforced confinement.

Battle-lust surged within her, hot and pounding and urgent. She began searching for an enemy against which she could turn it.

For a moment there was no sound save the sharp, intermittent
ping
of cooling metal and briefly, the sonic-boom rumble of another pod arrowing in overhead. The Hunter had excavated a small gully as it slid into the ground, blasting a crater into the spot where it had finally come to rest. With a whine, panels at the rear dilated wide, aerodyne pods split open, and the Hunter rose from the steaming pit on skeletal steel-and-ceramic legs that unfolded beneath it like jointed, telescoping stilts.

Fully combat-deployed, the Hunter stood perhaps five times the height of an adult Malach, the manta-body sleek, armor-plated, and wedge-prowed, a shape much, in fact, like a Malach's head, bristling with the spikes and needles of its main and secondary armament clusters. The legs were digitigrade, like those of organic Malach, the joints thrust backward, the feet splayed into durasteel-sheathed slasher claws. The paint scheme was a light-drinking black that eliminated shadows and made the machine's overall shape difficult to discern in daylight, and nearly invisible at night. That paint drank radar frequencies as easily as it drank light; Hunters were difficult to see, and even more difficult to track and target-lock.

The military base spotted from the air lay approximately twelve thousand
erucht
to the south, uncomfortably close by the standards of Malach mobile warfare . . . but if the Hunter Pack had truly achieved surprise, that closeness might translate into advantage if they could slash and gut the local defenders before they could organize a proper defense.

Pivoting on spindly legs, Schaagrasch scanned the immediate area. A number of autochthons were approaching from the southwest, and she moved swiftly to meet them.

For the Malach warrior, the Hunter was a kind of second body. Suspended inside a close-fitting harness, her body closely embraced by thousands of sensors and position feeds, she could walk, run, stoop, and leap, her movements in the harness translated into movements of her teleoperated steed. A striding gait against the enveloping pressure of her leggings became the ground-eating sprint of the Hunter; thrusts and movements of her arms and gestures of her hands and claws aimed, locked, and fired various of her weapons or triggered the bursts of superheated air that could send the Hunter sailing along in low, gliding leaps. Cameras and other sensors embedded in the heavily armored outer hull gave her very nearly all-round vision inside the control cell, and her computer gave constantly updated enhancements of the view, blended with identifying alphanumerics to help her sort rapidly through the torrent of battle information.

At the moment, light levels were low, though not uncomfortably so. There was more than enough light from the sky to navigate by, though Schaagrasch cut in full infrared imaging to provide the maximum informational input.

Smashing through a thick-growing wall of tangled vegetation, she emerged at the top of a low ridge, her legs angled sharply back to keep the Hunter's body just a couple of
erucht
above the ground. Movement snared her full attention, along with the flare of color signifying multiple heat sources. The autochthons were scrambling up the ridge from the opposite side, two eights of them, at least, so many that it was difficult to sort them out one from another, their body heat showing as strangely shaped blobs of color against the cooler background. Schaagrasch saw nothing she could distinguish as a weapon, but the capabilities of this species were still less than perfectly known. With a twist of her head and a double blink of her eyes, she targeted the group, now fifty
erucht
distant. A forward thrust of her left hand, third claw extended, triggered a single bolt from her
kaigho
.

The word translated as "fang-slash" and referred to the first, satisfying lunge-and-rip designed to disembowel or cut the leg tendons of large prey, rendering it helpless. A relatively short-ranged weapon, it discharged a dazzling pulse of electrons, a Malach-made bolt of lightning that scrambled unhardened electronics, melted armor, and charred flesh. The flash was dazzling, the thunderclap deafening as autochthons were scattered in every direction, some of them gloriously ablaze, some squeaking in terror or pain. In an instant, Schaagrasch was upon them, standing astride a tumble of charred and still-smoking corpses, lashing out with one clawed foot to slice one of the screaming wounded in two, bringing the foot down atop the writhing, partly burned body of another. Four of the autochthons not caught in the
kaigho
's killzone fled in panic down the slope. She turned and lowered the Hunter's snout; a movement of her second claw, right hind-arm, triggered her mag gun, flinging a buzzing swarm of flechettes through the screaming survivors and cutting them into bloody shreds.

Kill and eat!

Schaagrasch paused momentarily, among the torn and scattered bodies. Odd little creatures, with blood that was altogether the wrong color. Killing them was not quite as satisfying as she'd anticipated . . . a psychological effect, she knew, of the fact that the color red did not trigger the same urges and mental channelings as the color blue-green. It left her with the gnawing, hungry need to keep striking, keep slashing. She needed to find more autochthons to kill.

She had read the reports of these scout packs and watched vid records of the vivisection of several captives. They were oddly made, to be sure, erect and tailless, with too few limbs, with an omnivore's teeth, with only a single heart, and with digestive organs unprotected and easily opened. She gave a short, hard snort of derision. These had been unarmored and apparently unarmed. Had they been juveniles? Where were their Guardians? She turned in place, surveying the surrounding hills and forests. There must be more to sate her blood-hunger.

New movement to her right caught her attention; another ebon-hulled Hunter topped the ridge, flat, weapon-heavy hull bobbing in mechanical mimicry of an organic Malach's search-and-track body language. A second machine followed. Schaagrasch's electronic overlays identified both: Krakuscht the Never-Tiring and Ureskchagh the Sinews-Cutter. The sight thrilled Schaagrasch, kindling the sharp joy of
UrrghChaak
, the Blood-chase. In military operations like these, the hardest part might be the waiting, but the most dangerous in a tactical sense was those critical few moments after landing, when the Pack was scattered and unable to coordinate effectively. Now, though, two of Schaagrasch's companions had joined her. Both strode forward, tipping the prows of their machines high in a salute acknowledging Schaagrasch's greater rank and social status.

"You have killed," Krakuscht said over the Hunter Pack's radio link. "The first taste is to you!"

Contemptuously, Schaagrasch scattered wet body parts with a flick of one huge, clawed foot. "
Gnedissh
," she said. "Trash. There is nothing here worthy of the Pack."

"The military base is that way," Ureskchagh said, indicating the south with a twist of her Hunter's body. "There will be Guardians there."

"Then we will kill and eat," Schaagrasch said, the
UrrghChaak
pounding behind her eyes, bringing anticipatory blood-taste to her jaws.

"
Shch'kaa uroch!
" the others bayed. "
Kill and eat!
"

It was still night when Alexie reached downtown Galloway in her turbo-electric LaRouche, but the city center was lit more brightly than it usually was for the Grounding Day Festival, and there was a large crowd congregating at the Town Hall. Evidently, the Council had appropriated the old grange hall in Galloway and set it up as a temporary command center, a clearing house for information as well as a place where the citizens of outlying districts could come to make their reports and sound off about the government's incompetence.

Howard, her secretary, had called Alexie on her private comm while she was still driving home, to tell her that she was needed at the grange as the Director General's personal representative; Director General Stanfeld had been caught out of town by the emergency, at the antipodes, in fact, visiting the fishery cities at Scarba.

Alexie envied him.
He
didn't have to face this mob of screaming, shouting, frightened people. Theoretically, she didn't either—that's what undersecretaries and public relations spokespersons were for—but when she'd arrived and seen that crowd battling to get up the steps and squeeze into the main hall, she'd known that this was one task she couldn't delegate to anyone else. She just wished she'd had time to go home and change into more businesslike clothes first.

She'd gone in through the private entrance in the back; there was no way she'd have made it in through the front, that was certain. Inside, she'd found a harried-looking Major Streven Fitzsimmons in a heated debate with Sam Carver. "And furthermore," Fitzsimmons was bellowing as she walked in, "if you don't exercise your authority over these yahoos out front, I'll have you put under military arrest."

"What charge, Major?" Carver said in a low voice that carried plenty of unspoken menace.

"Obstruction of government business! Rioting! Disturbing the peace! Any charge I damn well feel—"

"That is
enough
, Major!" Alexie snapped.

Fitzsimmons jumped, whirling around, looking guilty. "Ah, why, Alexie! I didn't know—"

"Obviously." She looked at Sam, a tall, rangy, and ruggedly good-looking rancher with piercing blue eyes. She'd worked with him before, starting back when he'd been on her father's re-election committee, and liked both his refreshing directness and his honesty. "What's the word, Sam?"

"We're being invaded and this uniformed jackass wants
verification
."

"Well, it's standard procedure, Alexie," Fitzsimmons said with huffy dignity. "We can't simply accept every wild story that comes in here!"

"Looks to me like you have a fair amount of verification out front, Fitz," she told him. "Why don't you go out there and talk to them, maybe get them to start telling their stories one at a time. Instead of stonewalling them for a change."

Fitzsimmons opened his mouth to reply, caught a hard look from Alexie, then closed it again. "Very well, ma'am," he said. "But you know how these wild rumors get started. One drunken rancher thinks he sees something, and the next thing you know half the planet's seen Melconian invaders!"

"What do you think, Sam?" she asked the rancher as Fitzsimmons stalked off. "Is it a drunken story? Or Melconians?"

"Neither. I heard it first from Fred Noyes, and he's never touched a drop in his life. You remember Fred, don't you?"

"Yes. . . ."

"He called me two, two and a half hours ago and told me a space ship had landed in the Sea Cliffs District, and could I please bring some of the boys over to have a look-see. He told me he thought the thing had crashed, said he and a bunch of his neighbors were heading out to try to find it."

"Did they?"

Sam's jaw hardened. "More like something found them. I went out there with about twenty boys maybe an hour later and found Fred up above Dreyden's Gulch. At least, I
think
it was Fred. I thought I recognized his jacket."

"My God! What happened?"

"If I didn't know better, I'd say Fred and his neighbors ran head-on into a small army. Some of them were burned to a . . . well, it was pretty bad. Flamers, maybe. But it looked like a hit from a small-caliber Hellbore. And then there were the others . . ." He stopped, and shuddered.

"Go on. What did you see?"

"I can't really describe it. I've never seen the like. Some guys were just torn apart. I mean that literally. Some had been . . . I don't know. Run over. Stomped on. There was blood all over the place."

He looked shook . . . and for Sam Carver to be shook, it had to be bad. "So what did you do?"

"Some of the fellas wanted to track the things. I can't say I was all that eager to catch up with whatever had done that, but it looked like they were headed south, toward Camp Olson."

"Wait a minute. 'Things'?"

"We saw their tracks, Alexie. Big critters, too. From the looks of it, there were several ships that landed, and landed pretty hard. They must've dropped these things off and took off again, though, 'cause we didn't see any sign of them."

"How big, Sam?"

"We measured one print left in soft dirt. It was splayed, like this." He held his hand up, the first and second fingers held together and apart from the third and fourth, in a V-shape. "Measured better'n two meters from the back of the heel to the tip of the toe."

"An . . . an
animal
track?"

He shook his head. "I don't think so. The markings looked, well, artificial. Like the foot had been made of cast flintsteel with ridges, like on the bottom of a sports shoe. No, if I had to guess, Alexie, I'd guess that we're looking for something like a small Bolo on legs."

"Who? Melconians?" News from the Concordiat was slow to reach the Confederation and often was distorted along the way. Still, the Strathan News Network had been running stories on the trouble brewing with the Melconian Empire for months now.