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Chapter Twenty-six

I have been seriously damaged, though not incapacitated. As I defended my position in the Kinkaid River Valley, one of the Enemy's nuclear penetrators struck me on my starboard side midway back along and just above my forward-right track assembly. The front-right skirt has been blown away, the track broken, and several of the right-forward road wheels rendered useless. Worse, the cooling unit for my number one fusion plant was badly damaged, forcing me to shut that power system down entirely to avoid meltdown. As a result, my available power is down to 66 percent, not counting charge plate and battery reserves. Perhaps most serious of all, the Enemy weapon ruptured my reserve cryo-hydrogen tank, destroying its coolant system and allowing most of the hydrogen slush to boil away. Not only is this fuel for my fusion power plants, it is the reserve from which I draw the frozen hydrogen-ice pellets that generate fusion in Hellbore ignition sequencing. Suddenly, fuel and ammunition have become urgent concerns. I will need field servicing, and quickly.

I try to raise headquarters on my radio.

"Bolo 96875 of the Line!" a voice crackles over my tactical net before I can make my report. "This is the Military Command Authority! What is your status?"

It is not the voice of my Commander, but the signal possesses the proper code authorizations. I tell them the extent of my damage. "I have held the Enemy," I conclude, wondering if I have put too much into the words of the emphasis humans call pride. "The Enemy threat in the Southern Sector appears to be neutralized."

"Okay," another voice says, and this one I recognize as that of Colonel Wood, the Brigade Commander. "You've done well. Very well. But there's another threat now. We don't have any Malach forces in your area. You've gotten them all. But there's more coming down from the north, and they're heading straight for Kinkaid. You're all we have to stop them!"

I feel a stab of alarm at that. What has happened to Bolo 96876 of the Line and our Commander? I attempt to reach them, without result. "What is the status of Bolo 96876 of the Line?" I ask.

"Damn, your guess is as good as ours. They entered the ocean almost an hour ago. We haven't heard from them since."

Which means Bolo 96876 may not be destroyed. I am . . . relieved.

"What are my orders?" I ask.

"You got Criton Pass on a map?"

I assume the question is rhetorical. I have extensive maps of all of Muir's surface terrain. Criton Pass is a major valley leading south through the Grampian Mountains. A surface-vehicle roadway, Route 1, traverses the pass about halfway between Kinkaid and Simmstown.

"Bolo? Do you copy?"

I realize that the question was not rhetorical after all. Can these officers be so unaware of Bolo operations and capabilities? "I copy. I have Criton Pass on my map display."

"The Malach are coming south, right down Route 1. We estimate approximately one hundred of their walkers, moving on foot. At their current speed, they'll reach the pass in three hours."

I already have the Enemy forces plotted, downloaded from HQ's intelligence web. "Two hours, fifty-eight minutes, fifteen seconds," I reply, "assuming no change in course or speed." I consider the situation for several seconds, as I cross-check calculations, run another series of diagnostics on my own systems, and calculate the evaporation loss of my remaining stores of hydrogen.

"I can reach the southern end of Criton Pass in 2.257 hours," I report. "In time to intercept the enemy. However, I need my service team to make field repairs and to patch and refuel my reserve cryo-H tank."

"Right." The voice is crisp, professional, and I am glad. At first, I thought I could hear panic there, and panic could interfere with the smooth operation of HQ's command and control responsibilities. Colonel Wood sounds like a competent officer, though I've not worked directly under him before. "Can you move?"

"Affirmative." I hesitate again, weighing variables. "However, I must point out that to reach Criton Pass in time, I will have to pass through Kinkaid, preferably on the main street through the center of town, which feeds directly into Route 1, but I am explicitly prohibited from doing this by ROE 10, and possibly also by ROEs—"

"It's okay! On my authority, I order you to disregard that ROE. If you have to come straight through town, you do it."

"Colonel Wood!" another voice says, and I compute a 78 percent probability that this is General Phalbin, the Confederation ground force CO. "What the devil are you doing?"

"This isn't a political issue any more, General," the Colonel replies. "It's a matter of survival!"

"Harrumph! You can't just—"

The communications link snaps off abruptly, and I am left wondering what is going on. It sounds as though there is still some confusion—not to mention dissension—within the HQ staff.

"Ah . . . Bolo," Colonel Wood's voice says a moment later. "You still there?"

"Affirmative, Commander." He is my Commander now, since Lieutenant Ragnor is out of communications and possibly MIA. "Bolo 96875 of the Line, awaiting orders."

"Look, there's no time to waste. You just start moving north, okay? We'll hash this thing out on our end, and get back to you. All right?"

"Affirmative."

The escaping super-cooled hydrogen has frozen the river around me. I am encased in a block of ice. By exerting myself—and putting a further drain on my power systems—I shatter the ice prison and lurch forward. Water flows again, carrying chunks of ice downstream, together with some of the corpses of the Enemy. I make my way out of the river and onto the bank, swinging onto the road leading northwest toward Kinkaid.

 

Wood turned to face Phalbin, his fists clenched tight as he fought to control his rising anger. "Sir," he said, his voice steady. "With all due respect . . . you are an idiot! Sir!"

"Harrumph! You can't talk to me like—"

"It's about time someone did, even if it costs him his career! Right now, General, that Bolo is the only damned thing on this planet that has a prayer of even slowing that Malach horde down. If we don't ditch those moronic ROEs you and Chard and the peace-puppies put together and ditch them fast, they're going to be our epitaphs!"

The glower on Phalbin's face faded a little. "It won't help if we destroy the city trying to save it."

"He'll wreck the main street, General, that's for sure, and probably take out a few buildings along the way. But I promise you that the Malach are going to wreck a whole lot more."

Phalbin looked uncertain. "I should consult with the Governor—"

"Fine. Consult. I'm going to kill those ROEs."

"How?"

Wood pursed his lips. "A patch ought to do it. Something simple. A code word to make him disregard all ROEs. Or we weight 'em, give 'em priority numbers, and give him a higher priority command. We'll see what we have time for."

Phalbin sighed. "If you're sure . . ." He shook his head. "If this backfires . . ."

"There's no other way, General. Believe me."

Phalbin started to turn away, then stopped himself. "What about the other Bolo?"

"What do you mean?"

"Should we get rid of its Rules of Engagement too?"

"I probably don't need to."

"Why not? If they're hamstringing one Bolo—"

Wood grinned. "The ROEs include injunctions against attacking private property, right?" Phalbin nodded. "I have a feeling I know where Ragnor is going, and if I'm right, he's already done something about your ROEs. He'd have to, if Freddy was going to follow his orders."

Phalbin started to purple. "You mean he already took them out? Against orders?"

"He's a soldier, General. He did what he had to do to carry out his mission. Whatever the consequences to himself. Or to his command."

"If this goes wrong," Phalbin pointed out, "he won't just be looking at a note in his record. He'll be looking at prison!"

"Assuming, General, that there are prisons left, or officers to sit on his court martial board . . . and that he is still alive to face them."

"Harrumph," Phalbin said, but without any real feeling, as he turned away again.

Wood began looking for a programmer tech to help him with the Bolo ROE deletion patch.

 

They'd slowed when they entered the fjord, moving along at only a few kilometers per hour lest their speed create a wake visible on the calm surface of the water overhead. Donal wasn't quite sure how Freddy was finding his way through the murk. Though it was still daylight above, little sunlight penetrated the dark, chilly waters of the fjord, and there was considerable sediment suspended in the water near the bottom. The Bolo was navigating by inertial guidance, knowing that if it had proceeded at a heading of 055 degrees for 29.945 kilometers after rounding Tanhausser Point, it was time to swing hard right to 140 for the approach to the castle.

The fjord, like all such ice-carved, water-filled troughs slicing into the mountains ashore, was extremely deep in the center, with swiftly shoaling, steep-sloped sides and a U-shaped bottom. Donal didn't need to look at the flicker of orientation and navigation data on the main screen to feel the sharp tilt of the Bolo to the left as it ground slowly along the fjord's bottom.

Suddenly, though, it turned right and he felt the deck rising from the front. They were moving up a steepening slope toward the surface.

The screens were still murky with dark and mud-clouded water, but he could see it lightening gradually as they climbed toward the surface. The prow of the Bolo dropped forward suddenly as the lead tread assemblies gripped solid, friction-grooved ferrocrete.

The launching ramp! Freddy's navigation had been perfect!

In another second, murk gave way to white foam, then daylight as the top of the Bolo's turret emerged dripping from the dark waters of the fjord. The sky was clear, the sun low on the western horizon, with none of the rain that had been drizzling above the refugee encampment on the other side of the mountains.

"Commander," Freddy said. "I must inform you that we are trespassing on private property now and should notify—"

"Freddy! Eclipse!"

"Code word Eclipse accepted." There was a pause, and then Donal could almost swear he heard excitement creeping into the Bolo's electronic voice. "Proceeding with the attack."

The Bolo emerged from the fjord, a vast, black, wet monster rising from the sea. . . .

 

"She is female anatomically," Kha'laa'sht the Meat Finder said. "At least outwardly, she is identical to other human females. We would have to open her up, of course, to be certain. . . ."

"Not now," Aghrracht decided. She was examining several of the fabric artifacts the human had been wearing. Why did they carry these on their bodies? They were not strong enough to serve as armor, and they were inefficient as carrying harnesses. "Perhaps later, when we have learned all we can from her while she is living."

It was puzzling. The human was female, yet she had surrendered on the field of battle without putting up even a token fight. Aghrracht was willing to grant that the humans had different symbologies, different customs, even a different way of looking at things . . . but females were supposed to fight. How else to determine the hierarchy of submission and deference necessary to a properly ordered culture? Aghrracht had won her right to be Supreme Deathgiver in a thousand brutal engagements in the arena, beginning with her Ga'krascht Coming-of Blood ceremony. Could it be that this human was simply very low-caste? A human Nameless, perhaps?

Except that Cho said she'd been defending human young. That made no sense at all. She'd defended them by surrendering. . . .

Kha'laa'sht held up one of the outer garments taken from the prisoner, a black artifact apparently made from the skin of a lesser animal.

"She requests that she be allowed to keep this. Apparently, these artifacts keep them warm."

Aghrracht closed an upper hand in assent. Was that what the cloth things were for? Was it possible the humans' internal temperature regulation was deficient, somehow?

Her communicator buzzed. Sighing, she pulled it from her harness and squeezed the receive key. "Yes."

"Deathgiver! The alien gr'raa machine—"

"Who is this? Identify yourself!"

"Urrr . . . Gnasetherach the Brutal Killer, at Sentry Post Seven! Deathgiver, an alien combat machine is rising from the water!"

Aghrracht blinked. A human Bolo? Here? "You are sure?" If Gnasetherach was on guard duty, she was an ordinary soldier, not a warrior. Her perceptions might not be up to—

The Deathgiver's thoughts were chopped short by a burst of noise from the receiver. It sounded like high-speed gunfire.

"Cho!" she snapped at the interrogator. "Ask the human what one of her Bolos is doing here!"

 

On the screen, Donal could see a number of watercraft moored by the ramp, including the civilian submarine he'd noticed the other night. Several Malach soldiers were visible, some by the water, more at the top of the ramp, others on the ramparts of the stone walls rising above the Bolo. One shouted, a snarling bark; an instant later, laser beams were playing harmlessly across Freddy's outer hull, accompanied by the spang of magnetically accelerated gauss slugs.

"Objective in sight, Commander," Freddy said. "We are taking ineffective small-arms fire from Enemy infantry."

"Okay, Freddy. Let's take 'em down!"

Freddy's infinite repeaters erupted in stuttering sprays and streams of blue-green stars, the salvos sweeping the boat ramp like a broom, then reaching up and across the ramparts, splintering stone, shattering walls, exploding flesh, hurling six-limbed bodies and body parts over the crenelations of the wall. A shoulder-launched missile streaked in a meter above the ferrocrete, but Freddy detonated it with an antimissile laser at a range of less than five meters, the explosion fireballing into the sky in a mushroom of orange flame and oily black smoke.

All of Freddy was clear of the water now, his long, dark gray form dripping as it moved slowly up the sloping ramp and into the late afternoon sun. Fire erupted from a window high up on one tower; a stream of infinite repeater ion bolts seared through the window with pinpoint accuracy, and the sniping ceased instantly.

"I am launching drones, Commander," Freddy said. "We need to see the entire battlefield."

"Do it."

A pair of GalTech KV-20 recon drones hissed skyward from Freddy's vertical-launch tubes, then leveled off, airfoils and sensors unfolding. Running on low-power hydrogen cells and possessing an almost invisibly small radar cross-section, the KV-20s could loiter over a battlefield for hours, passing sensor and visual feeds back to the Bolo that commanded them.

"Let's see IR, Freddy," Donal said, watching the side screens that showed both recon drone sensor feeds in parallel. The landscape outside transformed, darkening to the eerie green cast of infrared, with heat sources glowing in whites and shimmering yellows. The walls of the castle were stone, a meter thick in some places, and impossibly opaque. The ceilings, though, were another matter, thinner and more transparent to certain wavelengths of infrared.

Freddy highlighted a group of moving yellow blobs indistinctly visible against the green-gray sweep of the castle's main roof. "These are almost certainly Malach soldiers," he said. "Close analysis of the heat imagery suggests body temperatures in the range of thirty-two to thirty-four degrees Celsius, and the size of individual images is suggestive of Malach."

"Do you see any human images there?"

"Negative, Commander. Of course, the image is of troops only on the upper floor, and we cannot obtain IR imagery from lower floors. However, the prisoners will have been moved to a place of relative safety at our first appearance, if they were not there already. The Enemy likely will want to protect them, both for the information they possess and for their possible value as hostages."

"There aren't going to be any hostages, Freddy." Donal said with a growl. "That wall, over there. Take it down!"

Freddy didn't bother with weapons to carry out the order. Tracks shrieking, he swung hard to the left and rammed the wall, bringing half of it down in a clattering, dust-billowing avalanche of stone.

 

Thunder rolled just beyond the stone walls of the castle, and Alexie's heart leaped.

Her interrogator apparently thought she'd not understood her last question. "You . . . Bolo . . . here . . . why."

"I don't know," she said. "But I suggest that you surrender . . . that you submit as quickly as you can."

The interrogator was speaking rapidly to the boss, a catfight of snarls and hisses. Alexie took a careful look around. There were eight Malach in the hall with her, but most were nervously looking in the direction of the rumbling sounds and cracking gunfire, or at one another with troubled-looking quartets of winking, ruby-red eyes.

She wanted to believe that the Bolo was smashing right in to rescue her, but she knew better. This part of whathisname's castle, as she recalled, was three stories tall, plus a basement—the place where she and the kids had been kept—below that. A Bolo was bigger than the building, damned near as big as the entire fortress complex, and if it came through a wall, it would bring the entire structure down in one, great, crashing heap. In any case, the Bolo couldn't know that she and the kids were being held here.

Whatever was happening, though, it was making the entire building shake.

The boss Malach sprang to her feet, snarling instructions. Four Malach started moving toward a door, while a fifth approached Alexie, hands reaching out. . . .

The far wall bulged inward alarmingly. The pillars lining both sides of the hall trembled, and pieces of ceiling plaster and beams cracked loose, raining down on the room. The bodies of the massacred humans danced and twisted on their chains like grotesque puppets; one tore free and collapsed in a heap.

Alexie fell to her hands and knees as the floor jolted and lurched in an earthquake's dance. A massive block of stone dropped from a crumbling ceiling, smashing into the back of the Malach approaching her and knocking her flat and shrieking. One of the huge, ornamental pillars at the near end of the room suddenly toppled, breaking free of its ceiling supports and crashing sideways into the stairway going up that Alexie and Donal had followed a few nights before. More stone fell, an avalanche of great, flat slabs that made up the floor of the room above.

Alexie saw a chance. The fallen pillar was held part way up by the crushed remnants of the stairway and banister. There was a space underneath, less than a meter tall, wide enough for a human to scramble into, but not a Malach. The injured monster's strangely shaped and heavy sidearm had skittered across bare stone. Alexie rose unsteadily to her feet, then dived after it, falling again, rolling, snatching up the weapon, turning to aim it at her captors. One Malach screamed, pointing a savage claw at the human prisoner; she found something like a squeeze lever awkwardly placed for her in the weapon's stock and clamped down on it as hard as she could. Laser light speared the gesticulating Malach, slicing through her throat in a spray of blue-green blood. She fired again and missed, then threw herself flat on the floor, scrambling ahead and beneath the overhang of the fallen pillar.

The quaking had ceased, though pieces of stone continued to shower down on the room, and Alexie didn't know whether or not the entire pile of tumbled-down rock was going to collapse the rest of the way to the floor at any second and crush her underneath like a bug.

But the crevice of a cave gave her cover, of a sort. When the light at the end of the tunnel she'd crawled into was blocked—as if by a Malach bending over to look inside, she fired the alien laser back down the passageway.

She only had to do that twice.

Now, she thought, breathing hard. The air was gritty with dust. Will they try to get me, or give up and go attend to more urgent business?

From the snarls and snuffling, rasping noises outside her hidey-hole, it didn't sound as though they were leaving.

 

Donal surveyed the damage through the circular view screen. Freddy had smashed completely through the outer wall of the castle and entered the bailey, the open area enclosed by the main walls, then driven straight ahead and into the west wall of the castle's main residence. With a surgeon's skill, the Bolo had pierced the three-story building's wall with one forward corner of its massively armored glacis, then backed gently away; at twenty meters tall from ground to Hellbore turret top, the Bolo actually loomed above the residence's peaked and turreted roof and could easily have brought the entire structure down in an avalanche of broken stone.

But if there were human prisoners being held here, they would be in that building, and Freddy had tailored his destructiveness to punching an opening through the wall at the first-story level, and no more.

The Malach field command HQ, Donal recalled, would likely be in this building. He hoped Freddy's display had left them sufficiently shaken and disorganized.

For several moments, Freddy continued battling with Malach forces in the castle. There were no walkers here that Donal could see, just ordinary infantry, armed and on foot. Freddy burned them down with a ruthless, blunt efficiency as he backed carefully out of the hole he'd bulldozed into the residence wall.

"Okay, Freddy," he said. "Hold the fort." He winced at his own bad pun, then added, "Sorry." Moving to the back to the Fighting Compartment, he pressed a hand panel and opened a small arms locker. Inside was a Concordiat powergun, Mark XXX. He removed it, checked the power cell, and adjusted the beam to high-energy needle. He also paused to don a combat armor vest and a helmet with built-in commo suite and enhanced optics visor, and attached several concussion grenades to his harness.

"I am uncertain of the wisdom of your exposing yourself to the Enemy in this manner, Commander."

"Combined arms, Freddy. There are still a few things a man can do that a Bolo can't."

"I understand, Commander. Please remain in radio contact."

"Count on it! Open up!"

The military concept of combined arms was an old one, dating back at least to twentieth century warfare. The earliest combat fighting machines—tanks, they'd been called, weapons preceding the earliest Bolo marks—had been slow, poorly armored, haplessly vulnerable things. Toward the end of the twentieth century, in fact, there'd been serious doubt that tanks or similar large military vehicles would find a place in what then passed for modern warfare. When a single, poorly trained infantryman could carry and fire a shoulder-launched anti-armor missile that had a decent chance of destroying a vehicle costing many times as much as the launch system, then tanks were clearly on the verge of becoming obsolete.

Combined arms tactics had been evolved to counter this threat, deploying infantry in close joint operations with the tanks to protect them from missile-wielding enemy infantry. In fact, there were plenty of combat tasks that a tank simply couldn't perform—like clearing a house without demolishing it, or locating and clearing an enemy tunnel complex.

Hostage rescue was another. The aft hatchway dilated open and the rear ramp went down. Donal vaulted clear of the Bolo, striking the ground on his shoulder and rolling to the cover of some fallen stone blocks, weapon raised and ready. No one shot at him; the courtyard was empty of any save dead Malach. The opening Freddy had smashed into the wall of the castle residence gaped open, black and uninviting. Hurrying past the motionless Bolo, Donal plunged inside, his helmet visor automatically adjusting to feed him light enough to see by.

He picked his way over a spill of stone blocks, noting several dead Malach crushed by the rubble. One Malach advanced toward him, stumbling blindly; Donal aimed the powergun and squeezed the trigger, sending a hot, blue bolt searing into the alien's chest. Another Malach screamed, and in seconds, four . . . no, six of the aliens were rushing him, crowding through a flimsy door as he calmly took aim at one after another, drilling each before it could break free of the press and attack him. Freddy, he thought, would have appreciated his tactics, forcing the enemy to funnel through a narrow choke point where they blocked one another and could be taken down by surgically precise fire. The room was too cramped for him to use grenades, but so long as his handgun's power pack held . . .

An explosion demolished a nearby wall and he spun, firing wildly as yet more of the saurian invaders spilled through the smoking gap, trying to reach him.

Seconds later, the Malach were dead. Listening, he could hear snarls and rasps that might be Malachs shouting in the distance.

The first floor of the residence had been fitted as a series of comfortable, wood-paneled rooms, including a kitchen, sitting rooms, servants' quarters, and the like. The Great Hall, he was pretty sure, was upstairs, where it could be accessed directly from the towertop landing pad, and there was another level above that, with the family's sleeping quarters. These rooms, equipped for human comfort, were probably of little interest to the Malach, and he didn't have time or resources for a careful search. He moved toward the noises, picking his way over the mound of reptilian bodies.

As he came through a door into what looked like a large pantry or larder, a Malach soldier took a stance in front of a large and solid-looking wooden door. Donal shot it before the Malach could raise its own weapon, drilling it cleanly through that massive, scale-armored head.

Swiftly, he jogged across the stone-cluttered floor. If that Malach trooper had been standing there even with the castle falling in around it, it had to be because it was on guard . . . and probably guarding something pretty important. Donal tried the door. Locked. Stepping back, he dialed the Mark XXX down to a tight, hard, low-powered but very intense beam and sliced through the metal bar that locked the door shut.

The door sagged open. Beyond, more stairs led down into darkness.

And children.

"Who . . . who's there?" a young voice called.

"It's okay," he called down to them. "I'm human. Come on out!"

They came up the stone steps slowly and with some hesitation, blinking in the light. Most were younger, anywhere from six to twelve or so. One looked older, a teenage boy with black hair and an expression of grim determination. They must have been swept up in the refugee camp, he thought.

"Okay, everybody," Donal called. It looked like there were about twenty kids all together. "We're going to get you out of here. Is this everybody?"

"The deputy director!" the older boy said. "She's not here! They have her in here, somewhere!"

Donal felt a horrible, inner shock. "What . . . Alexie? Alexie Turner?"

The kid nodded. "They captured her down at Simmstown. They were questioning her upstairs someplace when the walls came down!"

"Okay." He took a deep breath, steadying himself, then clapped the boy reassuringly on the shoulder. "Okay. What's your name?"

"Johnny. Uh, John Sarlucci, sir. I'm from, I was from Wide Sky."

"Okay, Johnny. This is important. Can you take charge of everybody here? The younger ones need someone older to look after them, get them where we need them to go."

He nodded.

"Okay. Count them, so you'll know how many you have."

"Twenty-one, sir."

"Good." The kid was on the ball. "Take them up those stairs, go right, and look for a big hole in the wall. You can't miss it. You'll see a Bolo out there."

"A Bolo? Wow!"

"Yeah, but you stay away from it, and keep the kids away too." Freddy's hull was probably low-grade hot after that blasting he'd taken with the tactical nukes. "Go past the Bolo and out of the castle. Most of the wall there is down." He stopped. He needed a place for these kids to hide. Maybe . . . "You a pilot yet, Johnny? Personal flitters? Speedsters? Anything?"

The dirty face creased in a smile. "Heck, yeah! You name it, I fly it. I am fifteen."

"Standard? Or Skyan?"

"Skyan. That's sixteen standard."

"Well, actually I was wondering about how you were with boats."

"No problem! I worked for my dad, back on Wide Sky, y'know? Working the pinkjack schools out of Fortrose."

"Great! Go outside, and down the ramp toward the water. You'll see a submarine moored to the pier. Got that?" Another nod. "It's a civilian job, like a yacht. The hatch is standing open. Its controls will be just like a boat, and most have automatic defaults."

"Sure! I drove a Mod 20 Deepstar back on Wide Sky, for my dad!"

Of course. The Wide Sky fishing industries tended to be family affairs, and kids brought into the business would learn young. "You're in command, then, Captain Sarlucci. Get these kids aboard that sub. Make sure you get all of the lines cast off before you back into the fjord."

"I told you I know—"

"And I'm making sure you know. When you're clear of the fjord, submerge and let the automatics take you. Follow the coastline south. I don't think the lizards will be able to spot you, and even if they do they won't take any interest in you. They're going to have other things on their minds."

"Where should I go?"

"If you can find Kinkaid, head for the big bay there and find a marina. If not, well, just find any seaport or coastal ship facility you can. Just make sure it's at least fifty or sixty kilometers south of the fjord." He didn't want Johnny bringing his passengers to shore in the middle of enemy-held territory. "The sub'll have a good computer map that'll plot things for you."

"You can count on me, Lieutenant, uh . . ."

"Call me Donal."

"Where are you going to be, Donal?"

"Upstairs, looking for Alexie," he replied.

"I might be able to tell you something about the place," Johnny said. "They had me up there once, a few hours ago." He shuddered.

"Okay, Johnny, tell me. But make it fast."

He wanted these kids out of here.

Minutes later, he made his way to the foot of the stairway Johnny said led to the big stone room upstairs. An infinite repeater shrieked, and Donal heard explosions and falling masonry. After talking with Johnny, he'd raised Freddy on his comm unit, warning him the kids were coming through and telling the machine to provide cover for them if necessary. The kids would be safe enough until they got clear of the place. He hoped.

It was all he could do, working on his own. If Alexie was in the Great Hall, though, he wasn't going to leave her behind.

The Great Hall lay beyond the door at the top of the steps. Part of the north wall had tumbled down, and Donal saw three Malach lying motionless on the stone floor, dead or stunned. Others were still very much alive, clustered around a pile of debris as though trying to scramble underneath. A square-sided pillar had fallen across a stairway on the opposite side of the room, creating a low and cramped cave between the pillar's base and the partly collapsed stairs. The surviving Malach—there were five, he saw—appeared to be trying to get at something underneath the fallen pillar.

Dropping to one knee, Donal took aim with the powergun braced in both hands and squeezed off a shot . . . and another . . . and another. Two Malach were down before the others realized where the fire was coming from and turned to face him. A third went down trying to bring its curiously shaped weapon to bear.

Two were still standing. One fired, the beam snapping into the wooden door beside Donal's head and igniting it with a crack and a shower of glowing embers. He returned the fire, hitting the Malach in the chest just above a complex buckle holding its black leather harness in place. A red light winked on the back of the powergun. Charge drained! He might have enough juice for another low-power shot, but . . .

The last remaining Malach raised its weapon. . . .

 

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