Bolo Brigade (9 page)

"I don't think so," Sam replied. "We've got most of the Concordiat and half the Eastern Arm between us and where those guys are supposed to hang out. I can't believe the Empire'd swing all the way around, something like fifty thousand light years out of the way, to come stomp on
us
. Especially when their quarrel is with Terra. No, I think this is something else."

"We'll have to get our Guard unit mobilized right away," she said. "If this is the start of an invasion—"

"Fitzsimmons didn't sound all that eager to check it out."

"The Guard works for the government," Alexie said. "Not the other way around. I'd better get on out there, though, and talk to the people."

"It'll help, Alexie," Sam said quietly, "just knowing that
someone
in the government doesn't automatically assume that they're all drunk or idiots. I'll tag along, if I can."

"Ms. Turner!" Sally Vogel, her chief aide, hurried down the passageway behind her. "Ms. Turner!"

"What is it, Sally?"

"We've got a vidcast from Camp Olson. I think you'd better see this . . . and Major Fitzsimmons, too."

"What is it?"

"They say they're being attacked, ma'am. By
things
!"

Alexie felt a cold twist of dread in her gut. "Come on," she said. "Let's go see."

Schaagrasch emerged from the treeline high atop the ridge overlooking the enemy military base. All sixteen pack members had assembled by now, a pair of eights deployed in standard slash-and-feed formation. A million years before, on the sere and sun-baked veldts of Zhanaach, Malach hunter packs had deployed the same way when stalking herds of
grelssh
or the ponderous but dangerous
gr'raa'zhghavescht
. Two eights would make the approach. One, the senior pack, would hold back, observing, feinting, distracting, perhaps driving; the other was the
kaigho,
the fang-slash that cut tendons and crippled the prey. At the proper tactical moment, the senior eight became the
cha'igho
, the final, disemboweling slash with major claw that brought the prey down, gasping its last.

It was the same today, for all that the Malach now rode Hunters and battled prey far more deadly, intelligent, and tenacious than any lumbering
gr'raa'zhghavescht
. Schaagrasch had ordered Chaghna'kraa the Blade-Fanged to lead her eight down the slope, striking into the enemy compound from the west. Schaagrasch waited and watched with the others, as fires winked and flickered among shattered buildings, and smoke began staining the pearly glow of the predawn sky.

Schaagrasch was curious about whether or not one of the autochthons' mechanical
gr'raa'zhghavescht
—the things they called Bolos—was going to make an appearance. She'd read the Deathgiver's report of the preliminary Malach scouting raids on two other outlying worlds inhabited by these curiously weak and fragile creatures. On the world code-named
Zsha'h'lach
, the Warm and Soft One, a machine similar to the primitive tanks used by the Malach themselves centuries ago had destroyed several Hunters. According to reports, the war machines were heavily armored, operated on fusion power, and possessed a deadly and hard-hitting array of weaponry, including plasma and ion beam weapons, heavy-caliber howitzers, and vertically launched missiles. It had not yet been ascertained whether the things were piloted by crews, were teleoperated by remote control, or were autonomous robots operating according to programmed instructions.

The single specimen on Zsha'h'lach had been destroyed, unfortunately. Schaagrasch's orders included a level-four directive—low priority—to capture one of the machines if possible, in order to better ascertain the sophistication of the autochthons' military technology. She would not risk her Pack to fulfill those orders, but if she saw the opportunity . . .

She was, in fact, pretty sure that she saw a way that the thing might be done. Her pre-invasion briefing had included extensive vid and sound files on every aspect of the Zsha'h'lach operation, including a step-by-step, bolt-by-bolt account of the battle with the artificial
gr'raa
. The things were slow, like their namesakes, and ponderous, with poor maneuverability in tight quarters. The Pack that had brought down the machine on Zsha'h'lach had done so by moving in close, to claw-slashing range, in fact, and engaging the thing in battle at point-blank range, so close that the more powerful ion and plasma weapons couldn't be brought to bear.

The trick, of course, was in getting that close in the first place. She hoped that one of the machines was, in fact, operating in this region and that she would have the opportunity to test herself against the best they could throw at her Pack.

She was looking forward to the challenge.

"We're sending out the Bolo now!" Static fuzzed the big vidscreen, breaking up the army captain's face. When Alexie could see him again, he'd turned away from the camera and was shouting at someone out of its field of view. "Damn it, I don't
care
about authorization, Lew! Get that thing moving, stat!" He turned again to face Alexie. "Ms. Turner, we've been hit pretty hard. We'll hold 'em if we can, but frankly, things are not looking good."

Major Fitzsimmons crowded himself past Alexie's chair, leaning over to put his face into the vid pickup's field. "Captain Hemingway! What the devil's going on back there?"

"Oh, Major!" the captain said. "I already told the DDG. We're in deep trouble here. Enemy war machines of some kind. Stilters, big ones. Look, I'll patch in a view from one of our externals."

The captain's face winked off the screen and was replaced by a blurry shot of flat-bodied, jet-black stalkers entering the base compound. From the way they towered over the nearby buildings, each stood ten meters tall, with triangular bodies studded with wicked-looking spikes or muzzles that might have been weapons of some kind. Hemingway's descriptive word "stilters" was apt; they walked with a delicate, almost mincing grace, like enormous, ornamental flightless birds of some kind . . . save that these were the size of a house, and where they walked, they left utter and complete devastation in their steps. Alexie watched, wide-eyed, as several soldiers ran past the camera; a blue-violet beam lanced from the nearest machine, sparkling as it burned a thread of illumination through a drifting haze of smoke, and a one-story building exploded in flame and whirling splinters of wood.

"They hit us a few minutes ago," Captain Hemingway's voice continued, speaking over the vid scene of fiery devastation. "Eight of them, though we have reports of more moving around on the ridge above the camp. They came through the west fence, laying down a barrage of beams and missiles that—"

Another burst of static buzzed and hissed, dissolving the picture in a storm of crackling, electronic snow.

"What is that?" Fitzsimmons said. "Why is it doing that?"

"Particle beam," Sam Carver said at his back. "Either a proton cannon or an electron beam. It's like lightning. Puts out all kinds of electrical interference."

"
I
know that," Fitzsimmons said, a bit testily. "What is this civilian doing in here?"

"I asked him," Alexie said. "He might have some insights into what's happening that we would miss."

"We seem to have lost contact, ma'am," the communications tech said from his console. The screen continued to display an uninformative blanket of white noise and snow. "They're just . . . gone!"

"Did he say who the attackers were?" Fitzsimmons wanted to know.

"He didn't know, Major," Alexie told him. "I've never seen anything like that. Have you?"

"N-no," Fitzsimmons said.

"I think we know now what it was that knocked out Endatheline," Sam said.

Fitzsimmons turned sharply. "That's right! Their Bolo couldn't stop those things there. We should warn Hemingway right away!"

"I think we're too late, Major," Alexie told him. "If he's already deployed his Bolo, there's not much we can do."

"I don't think we're going to raise Camp Olson again," the commo tech said. "I've been trying, but they're off the air. No carrier wave, even. Either their transmission mast is down, or. . ."

"Or what?" Fitzsimmons demanded.

"Or that last particle bolt fried Captain Hemingway and his radio."

"I guess," Alexie said quietly, "it's up to their Bolo, now."

load slfdiag/level 3

elapstime: .04 sec

run slfdiag/level 3

power sys: 72.5%+

drvtrain: op

nav: online

track/sens: online

suspension: fnctnl

tac/comm: online

sysop: optml

magscrn: online

weapsys: online

end slfdiag/level 3

elapstime: .13 sec

>all systems on-line, functioning at optimal levels

load navprog

elapstime: .03 sec

run navprog

>moving

run threat assesmnt

multiple contacts/ir/vis/radar

initiate primtracseq, subrtn 76

>designating primary target alpha, bearing 311, range 71 meters

elapstime: 5.72 sec

arm weapons

Schaagrasch watched the enemy combat machine's approach with a keen and hungry interest. This was more like what she'd been waiting for, a challenge worthy of her Hunter Pack. Eight hundred
erucht
long at least, the thing must have massed thousands of
klaatch
. Emerging from a heavily armored and partly buried bunker of some sort, it moved clumsily on enormous, cleated tracks, making its own road as it ground along cracking, splintering, crumbling asphalt.

That datum alone was important. The asphalt surface of the compound had been poured
after
the
gr'raa
had been stored in the bunker. Did they never exercise with their equipment? Engage in sham wars and training? Yes. Very interesting indeed. . . .

Chaghna'kraa shrieked the order for attack, and her eight closed on the monster war machine. A small, flat turret spun rapidly, tracing, then spat flame, flinging a large-caliber howitzer shell into Hunter Fifteen with precisionist accuracy. The explosion all but engulfed the Malach Hunter's body, rocking it back on deeply flexing legs as it absorbed the concussion. The smoke cleared, and the Hunter continued its charge, main batteries flaring at wavelengths invisible to the Malach eye but picked up and superimposed on Schaagrasch's combat screen as dazzling white bolts of energy.

It was difficult at this range to see how effective Malach fire was against the alien armor, though spectroscopes mounted in Schaagrasch's sensor suite detected the glow of titanium, iron, carbon, and an eight or two of other elements, boiling away into the air in a superheated mist. The Hunters' weapons were striking home, and they were doing damage. The question was whether they would damage the armored
gr'raa
enough to incapacitate it before all of Schaagrasch's Hunters were dead.

As planned, four of Chaghna'kraa's Pack hung back, hurling bolt upon bolt of energy into the huge and slow-moving prey, while the other four rushed in from four different directions. The
gr'raa
's main armament turret, flat and fast-traversing, spun in the blink of an eye to loose a searing torrent of white-hot plasma, fusion-fired and star-hot. The blast stripped the outer armor from Hunter Ten's hull, leaving scoured, gray-streaked metal and a charred and smoking hole. Hunter Ten loosed a barrage of laser and particle beam fire in reply before a second plasma bolt penetrated the break in its armor, setting off a chain of internal detonations as stored munitions exploded.

The final blast was an eye-searing flash that volatized Ten almost completely, leveling nearby buildings and sending a black and roiling cloud mushrooming into the sky.

"Closer!" Schaagrasch commanded over the tactical channel. "Get closer! Use your
va'xachat
!"

The name was that of a Zhanaachan lifeform, an insect-like flyer respected for its fierce attack, high speed, and evolution-honed habit of laying eggs deep inside a parasitized host, a trait shared by many species on the Malach homeworld.

Flame spat from one of the Hunter's launch tubes, hurling a silvery penetrator on a burning rocket's trail. Triggered by proximity, the
va'xachat
's outer casing flared into white hot plasma, channeled and shaped by powerful magnetic fields into a dazzling lance of starfire, stabbing at the
gr'raa
's armored flank. A neat hexagon of the
gr'raa
's armor exploded violently, disrupting the plasma lance before it could strike the target, and the penetrator within detonated with a spectacular but harmless blast.

Reactive armor—plates of sandwiched high explosives designed to disrupt incoming beams of plasma, molten metal, or coherent radiation. Well, the briefing had mentioned that, and Schaagrasch had been expecting it. Reactive armor was only good for one strike, and then it was gone.

By now, scant seconds after the engagement had begun, the lumbering
gr'raa
was completely engulfed and surrounded by white flame. Nine ball-turret-mounted ion cannons along each side kept up a steady, sweeping barrage, hosing the circling Hunters with deadly accuracy; the single main plasma weapon in its flat, quick-shifting turret tracked and fired, tracked and fired, with a relentless precision that was at once machinelike and personal. The powerful magnetic shields and beam disrupters built into the Malach Hunter hull metal could shrug aside one, possibly two direct hits from those terrifying discharges of raw, lightning violence, but then defenses were overwhelmed, screens fell as field guides melted away or tripped out on overload, and the hardest, diamond-weave carbon shell could endure that hellish firepower for only the briefest of measurable instants. Two Hunters were gone . . . now three, and the enemy
gr'raa
seemed hardly to have been hurt at all. Still, Schaagrasch waited, studying the circling firefight with narrow-slitted eyes.