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Chapter Twenty-one

I turn my full attention now on the Enemy fleet, which still is approaching Muir rapidly. I have relayed warnings to the Military Authority Headquarters in Kinkaid but am skeptical that they will be able to field any force powerful enough to slow the oncoming ships. I have also initiated a combat link between myself and Bolo 96875 of the Line. My brother unit tells me that he has left the depot area and is now deploying toward a point from which he can maintain a close watch over all approaches to the Kinkaid and Kinkaid Starport areas. We believe there is a significant chance, with a probability in excess of forty percent, that the Enemy will attempt to seize the starport in order to deploy his landing forces more swiftly.

His ROEs are still in effect and will be until our Commander specifically gives him the code phrase.

Several of the ships are close enough now that my EW satellites can distinguish general shape and hull features, confirming that these are, indeed, Malach ships, identical to several classes recorded at Wide Sky.

Particle beams lash out, touching my satellites, my remote eyes in orbit. No matter. I needed them as early warning sensors and to expand my sensor envelope in near-Muir space, but my ground-based sensors provide an adequate view of the enemy fleet.

They appear to be deploying for a direct assault on the planet. They will almost certainly commence with bombardment from space.

 

Donal had been running across open ground toward the Bolo when the firefight at the edge of the trees started. It had been over almost before it had begun—a brief set of flashes as Freddy's ion cannons had discharged, followed an instant later by a ground-shuddering concussion that tripped him as he ran and sent him sprawling on hands and knees.

The detonation sent a mushrooming, roiling pillar of smoke and dust thundering into the sky, washing across Freddy like a wave, the blast effect skittering out across the waters of the lake in a fast-expanding circle.

Robot probe, Donal thought, squinting into the sudden gust of dust-laden wind. With a self-destruct command. Had it damaged Freddy?

Rising unsteadily to his feet, he was about to try to raise Freddy on his communicator when something caught his attention, a flicker of light, a movement, something from almost directly overhead. He glanced up . . . and in the next instant he was flying through the air, smacked over by a titanic shock wave.

Blue fire, like the unchained heart of an exploding star, flicked down out of the sky, a radiant pencil of intolerable brilliance. . . .

To Donal, it was as though the sky had just cracked open, disgorging the light of a sun. The bolt—he was pretty sure it was a plasma discharge of some kind, something like a Hellbore, in fact—burned down from the zenith and struck the waters of the lake a few meters to the right of Freddy's position.

Thunder exploded, a deafening roar, as the beam slowly tracked toward the shore. At its touch, water exploded in steam, a geyser a hundred meters tall of spray and superheated vapor that cascaded across the surface of the lake in lazy slow-motion. When the beam swept onto the shore of the lake, it furrowed the ground, mud and topsoil dissolving in temperatures normally found on the surface of a star, converting into white-hot plasma in a flash. Within the space of a second or so, though it seemed much longer, the beam flicked toward Freddy. . . .

But Freddy was no longer in the same spot. At the first stab of blinding light, Freddy had engaged his drive and was now hurtling across the landscape at speeds in excess of 130 kilometers per hour. He plunged ahead into the forest, sending trees toppling left and right.

Donal was mildly surprised to find himself flat on his belly, hugging the loam as if trying to become a small and insignificant part of the ground. He didn't remember diving for cover or getting knocked down a second time, didn't even remember hitting the ground, but so long as he was here, it seemed like a good place to be. He could feel the earth shudder beneath his body, feel the palpable shocks in the air as the beam continued to dump gigajoules of energy into the planet's atmosphere.

The beam winked off after approximately two seconds, leaving a zigzag scar in the earth a meter deep and a meter wide, its bottom and sides still glowing a mottled orange, like the crusty surface of molten lava. Where the trench emerged from the lake, water continued to pour in and vanish in boiling, churning clouds of swirling white steam. In the sky overhead, clear a moment ago, clouds were forming and breaking up with a time-lapse camera's sense of hurried unreality. Some dazed portion of his mind provided explanation: water vapor jolted out of suspension in the atmosphere by the passage of that beam was being made briefly visible as a ragged whirlpool of rapidly condensing cloud.

The Bolo emerged from the forest, still moving at high speed, his upper works festooned with shredded vegetation. Rock and great, smoking clods of earth sprayed back from his fast-spinning tracks, and when he slewed suddenly, changing course in a seemingly random manner, he scraped up a divot that would have covered most of the playing surface of a football field, sending most of the loose earth and pulped vegetation out in a soaring, rooster's-tail of debris. Freddy's strategy was obvious—and sound. The nearest enemy ship must be a sizable fraction of a light second away; if they were targeting Freddy specifically, their view of his current location would lag that much of a second behind reality. If he moved, and especially if he moved randomly, they were going to have one hell of a time nailing him from space.

Donal pulled his legs under him, got to his feet, and started running. His knees felt weak, almost trembling, but he kept going, pulling out his communicator and clicking the transmit switch. "Freddy! This is Donal! Do you copy?"

"I copy, Commander," Freddy's voice came back calm, quiet, and collected as always. It was difficult, in fact, to associate that civilized, conversational voice with the enormous machine that was currently slewing about in a cloud of dust two hundred meters away, reducing a field to bare rock and steel-scraped raw earth in the process.

"I need to get aboard, Freddy. Can you pick me up?"

"I have you in sight, Commander. Maintain your current heading and speed. I will pass in front of you in twenty-three seconds, affording you an opportunity to come aboard."

"Right!"

He kept running. Freddy veered suddenly into a straight-line run toward the mountains, holding course for so long that Donal thought something was wrong, that he was deliberately tempting one of the Malach ships to pick him off, or that he'd forgotten his human companion and was running for the cover of the trees. Suddenly, though, Freddy threw both port-side tracks into full reverse, spinning like a grotesquely outsized top, and hurtling almost directly toward Donal. An instant later, the heavens opened again, a blue-white lance of sun-fire howling out of the zenith and striking a point behind the oncoming Bolo, at just about the point where Freddy would have been had he maintained that straight-line vector for much longer.

Thunder rolled again, the shock wave staggering Donal like a blow to the gut. He nearly stumbled and fell, but this time he kept his feet and kept moving. The Bolo moved toward him, a hurtling juggernaut, its broad, cleated tracks blurred by motion and by the cascade of dirt and dust flying from their whirling surfaces. At the last possible moment, it swung sharply to Donal's left, spraying him with hard-flung dirt and gravel.

Half blinded, he kept running, turning now to follow the big machine as it freight-trained past him. The belly cleared the ground by a good meter and a half, too high for him to simply step up and scramble aboard while the Bolo was moving. In the rear, however, between the massive sets of rear tracks, the outer hatch swung down, a ramp trailing behind in the dirt, while the inner access hatch dilated open.

For a moment, Donal thought the Bolo had miscalculated and was pulling away from him again, but as he began running harder, the Bolo slowed, ever so slightly, and he was able to leap onto the dragging ramp, grab the handholds to either side, and haul himself into the big machine's central access corridor.

The outer ramp whined as it closed up, and the inner hatch twisted shut. Donal slumped on the passageway deck for a moment, panting heavily. He'd not done this much exercise in a long time, he reflected, and it might be time to start thinking about some sort of regular work-out routine.

Otherwise, the next time this happened, he was going to be left panting in the dust.

"You'll find a better view of the battle if you come forward to the fighting compartment, Commander," Freddy's voice said from an overhead speaker.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm coming," he replied. "Just had to catch my breath."

"Are you injured, Commander?"

"Just my pride, Freddy. I'm getting too old for this sort of thing."

Pulling himself upright, he began making his way forward, bracing himself against the buck and sway of the vehicle as it kept moving.

 

With my Commander aboard, I feel new confidence. Together, we will be able to stop this threat to the planet, breaking the Malach attack before they can even get their troops down to the planet. I continue to study the developing tactical situation in space near the planet.

Eight of the Enemy ships, I note, are far larger than the others, and one of those is truly enormous, well over a kilometer long from prow to tail and possessing the mass of a small planetoid. I deduce that the largest vessel is the command vessel attacked by Commander Ross. Unfortunately, it is taking up an extremely distant orbit, nearly a million kilometers out from Muir, and it is well out of range. One of the other large vessels, however, almost certainly a supply ship and troop carrier of some kind, has ventured to within a quarter million kilometers. I engage my targeting radar and feel the thrill of a solid lock. My main turret pivots, the 90cm Hellbore elevating. Computing the target's velocity, I lead slightly with my aim in order to compensate for the time lag to target, and fire.

The searing, blue-white lightning bolt of the Hellbore fire stabs upward into the sky, ionizing the air as it passes, blasting a vacuum along its trail that fills instantly with a sensor-deadening peal of thunder. The target is point eight three three light seconds away. The Hellbore bolt travels at seventy percent of the speed of light. One point one nine seconds after firing, the bolt strikes the Enemy vessel amidships . . . though it is, of course, another point eight second before I can confirm the fact visually, through an extreme magnification that shows the hit in exquisite detail. The beam slashes through armor plating, carving deep into the ship's vitals and releasing a silent explosion of atmosphere, the cloud made visible as water droplets freeze instantly into particles of ice.

The Enemy vessel is yawing heavily to port, propelled by the gush of atmosphere from its starboard side. I recompute the firing angle and trigger a second burst. It has been noted that Hellbores are the equivalent in power, range, and accuracy of any naval-mounted gun, and the effect of the second shot bears that assessment out. Striking just behind and below the jagged, molten, orange-white line drawn by the first bolt, the second hits the ship's primary power plant, which explodes with a satisfying coruscation of strobing flashes and internal detonations, visible through the fragmenting hull. Every light on the ship winks out, and the huge Malach vessel is now illuminated only by the glow of partly melted hull metal, and by the fires raging inside as air escapes through rents with hurricane force.

The first target clearly crippled and adrift in space, I shift aim to a second, smaller vessel, a lean, dagger of a ship roughly equivalent in length and mass to a Concordiat light destroyer. I note the loosing of another Hellbore from a point one hundred twenty-eight point two kilometers to my south-southwest and know that Bolo 96875 has just joined the unequal fight. His shot strikes a Malach frigate and nearly cuts the hapless vessel in two. My shot hits the destroyer close by the bridge tower, shearing off a sponson-mounted laser turret and gouging a deep, molten crater in the vessel's spine. Frozen atmosphere and boiling metal, mingled with fragments of hull plating, internal structure, and kicking, six-limbed bodies, seethe into space.

So far, the battle is going remarkably well.

 

Aghrracht the Swift-Slayer, Supreme Deathgiver of the Fleet, raised one wickedly curved foreclaw in warning. "Destroy that vehicle!"

Cha'Zhanaach's command center, large, circular, and comfortably unenclosed, was filled with Malach packmembers, their mingled scents reassuring in their closeness, warmth, and numbers. She looked down into a large screen, on which the scaly green and red visage of the Deathgiver of the bombardment vessel A'chk'cha was displayed.

A'chk'cha's captain raised her head, exposing her throat in proper submissive form, though that throat was in fact a half-million kilometers away from Aghrracht's claw. "Deathgiver! The target is too fast to target from this range! The speed-of-light time delay means that we're shooting where the target was, not where it is now."

Aghrracht suppressed an instinctive, rising shriek of bloodlust rage at the underling's noncompliance. The Malach warrior was correct. She could order all ships to move in closer, of course, but losses—already higher than expected with the surprisingly effective and deadly plasma gun fire from the surface—were certain to be serious.

There was another way.

"Forget the combat machine," she said. "All packs! Fire at targets of opportunity, anywhere on the planet! Fire on the cities!"

"Yes, Deathgiver!" chorused the commanders of each of her ships. What could not be brought down by precise gunfire might well be toppled by simple, sheer terror.

"Use cloud cloaking to shield the approach of our assault boats!" she continued. "Now! Quickly, before the prey escapes!"

A world lay just within the grasp of her claws. . . .

 

Flame erupted from the refugee camp, a pillar of white light and roiling black smoke. "Oh, God, no . . ." Donal said, not believing what he was seeing. The Malach were firing randomly into the tent city.

"Starwasps are launching from Kinkaid Spaceport," Freddy announced. "Three squadrons, a total of thirty-six craft."

"Not enough, Freddy. Not enough by a factor of ten."

"Agreed, Commander. This world does not possess sufficient firepower to stop the Malach invasion fleet."

"Not even you and Ferdy?"

"Negative. We have destroyed three enemy ships so far, with four more kills probable. The enemy fire incoming now is probably intended to suppress surface batteries, and defensive units such as my brother and me. We are detecting large areas of intense radar interference, localized but spreading, positioned between Muir and the Enemy fleet. This suggests that they are launching assault boats and are attempting to screen them from our fire."

"Assault boats, huh?"

"We will, of course, attempt to destroy all Malach craft either before they reach atmosphere or while they are transiting the atmosphere. I should warn you, however, that it is exceedingly unlikely that we will be able to stop more than a small percentage of them. Malach tactics at Wide Sky were to launch large numbers of individual fliers. We will not have time to target all of them before the majority have made it safely to the ground."

"Well, do your best. Every one we nail out there is one less to deal with down here."

"That is self-evident." There was a pause. "Unit 96875 has destroyed another Malach vessel, one of approximately frigate size and mass."

"Good for him!"

"He is also engaging what may be Enemy landing or close-assault boats. The situation, I fear, is critical. Our survival in this battle depends on our destroying as many Malach landing craft as possible while they are still in space. But we cannot get them all."

"We'll do the best we can, Freddy," he told the Bolo. "If we go down, it's going to be while we're fighting."

"Affirmative, Commander." The Bolo fired its main battery once more, replying to nuclear fire with nuclear fire.

 

Alexie had just arrived at Town Hall and called together her chief aides when a crack of thunder rent the air, the shock wave slamming against the rickety sides of the prefab shelter and nearly knocking it over. Ears ringing, Alexie made her way to the transparency in one wall that served as a window and gasped as she saw the pillar of black smoke rising from the center of the tent city. "They're firing on the refugees!" she cried. "They're firing on us! Come on! We've got to get the kids out of here!"

They raced outside, into the chaos of screaming, squalling kids and wide-eyed adults trembling at the edge of panic. Fortunately, a good many of the other monitors had had the same idea as she had and were already herding their charges out of their tents and shelters and moving them west . . . west because it was clear that a pitched battle was being waged to the east, there were mountains and forest to the north, and Lake Simms itself blocked the way south. Using her personal communicator, she was able to make certain that everyone was on the move . . . and that the big government ground transports were coming around to the east side of the city to take on as many of the young, sick, and injured as they could.

Another beam fell out of the heavens, but this one appeared to be aimed at one of the big Conestogas moored out in the lake. Seconds after she saw the towering white plume of spray rise from behind the farthest ship, she heard the thunder, a crack and drawn-out rumble like the first bolt of a spring storm. The beam shimmered and wavered in the sudden, swirling haze of water vapor coming off the lake. An instant later, the beam carved into the space transport, punching clear through the thin hull and savaging the internal systems. Explosions racked the transport's interior; even from here, on shore, Alexie could see the dazzling flashes as power cells and instrumentation inside the big vessel exploded.

The beam winked out, then reappeared almost immediately. Clouds were swirling now above the docking area as the Malach concentrated their fire on the moored ships. It was insane . . . utterly senseless, but Alexie was glad of it. If those blood-thirsty lizards wanted to concentrate their fire on empty space transports while she got a few more of the kids out of the tent city, so much the better. Possibly the Malach were trying to prevent another escape; more likely they feared that the three transports were armed. Either way, they were wasting valuable time and energy in gutting the ships, while the population of Simmstown made good their escape.

A ground transport rumbled up, a behemoth nearly as big as Donal's Bolos with an articulated body and four sets of tracks. It was, in fact, a ConcordiArms Model C heavy transporter, a direct offshoot of Bolo technology. Envisioned as a carry-all for supplies and personnel in remote, frontier areas, it was several centuries obsolete now.

And Alexie was damned glad to see it.

A young-looking militia lieutenant appeared in an open side cargo loading entryway. "You called for a taxi, ma'am?"

"We certainly did! How many can you take?"

"Pack 'em in!" he called back. Turning, he pushed a button on the bulkhead next to the doorway, and a ramp extended from the vehicle's side all the way to the ground. "We can probably take two, maybe three hundred if they don't mind being friendly."

Three hundred. A pittance out of fifty thousand. But she was glad right now for any help she could get. And there were plenty of other transporters. She could hear their grumbling now as their drivers fired up their power plants and engaged their tracks. Hell, at this rate, they only needed another 165 transports to get everybody out.

The hell with that kind of thinking! Somehow, they would do this. Somehow.

Snapping off orders with the rapid-fire crispness of a machine gun, she soon had the youngest kids filing aboard, with one adult going along with every forty children. Others filed in with stretchers, taking aboard those who were sick or who'd been wounded in that vicious attack on the tent city. In all, they managed to squeeze 385 aboard, before the lieutenant signaled enough and pulled in the ramp.

As the transporter rumbled off toward the west, Alexie turned to see what else she could do. There was trouble, an aide had told her over her communicator a moment before, at Block 328, at the western edge of the camp.

She climbed into her speedster and switched it on, heading toward the west as fast as she could manage through the crowds. Another bolt of manufactured lightning fell from the sky, striking in the camp to the north.

 

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