The battle continues, but I can sense the shifting of the initiative from our defense to the Enemy's offense. The Enemy has dispatched an estimated 344 landing craft, approximately equivalent in mass, size, and maneuvering capabilities to a Concordiat Saber-class assault boat. Judging by analogy with known assault boat models, any one of the approaching craft could carry as many as a thousand troops, or a single Bolo . . . or between thirty and thirty-six of the characteristic Malach walkers—I conjecture, given their predilection for the number eight, that this number would be thirty-two.
Also detected are some thousands of smaller objects, of about the size and mass of a standard escape/survival pod. These, I believe, may be individual Malach walkers enclosed in atmospheric-entry vehicles of some kind. The records from Wide Sky suggest that many of the Enemy forces there landed as single units, descending over a wide area for landing, then joining together into teams of eight.
Exact numbers, however, are impossible to ascertain. The Enemy has also initiated the dispersal of large, expanding clouds of chaff, radar-reflective material that masks his deployment. More and more of the Enemy's vessels, both his capital ships and his landing and assault craft, are vanishing behind the homogenous and featureless fuzz of his chaff fields. I continue firing at available targets as long as I can, but before long my targets are limited only to those smaller vessels that have approached Muir more closely than the closest chaff clouds. Many of these—perhaps most—are obviously decoys, launched ahead of the main body to draw my fire.
I worry about what might be developing behind the fast-spreading clouds of chaff.
Donal had to find a way to block the enemy bombardment. At first glance, there wasn't a lot he could do about it, but the brief appearance of clouds above Freddy during his duel with the enemy ships had given rise to an idea.
He tried to think through the physics of the thing. A Bolo's Hellbore was a plasma-fusion weapon. A tiny sliver of frozen hydrogen, encased deep within a coolant sleeve with a fusion igniter and a steel accelerator jacket, was loaded automatically into the breech of the main weapon. When the Bolo fired the main battery, powerful mag accelerator coils in the walls of the gun tube snatched the jacket and hurled the casing toward the muzzle. Ten gigajoule lasers mounted inside the bore fired an instant before the igniter, evacuating the tube and clearing a path through the atmosphere to reduce drag and friction-induced "bloom."
Even before the projectile had reached the end of the tube, however, the igniter induced the temperatures and pressures necessary to trigger a small, thermonuclear conversion. The magfields accelerating the casing also served to contain and compress the fusing plasma, partly to focus it, mostly to keep the barrel of the Hellbore—not to mention most of the Bolo's main turret—from dissolving in the heat. By the time the Hellbore shot left the weapon's muzzle fifty nanoseconds after ignition, all of the original matter, hydrogen, sleeve, and all, had been reduced to a bolt of plasma with a core temperature of several million degrees Kelvin, traveling down range at a speed of seventy percent of the speed of light. Even though the mass of the original projectile amounted to just a few grams, the recoil—despite enormous recoil dampers and suppressers in the Bolo's turret mount assembly—was sufficient to rock the fourteen-thousand-ton behemoth with a hull-ringing thump.
The key point of the equation, however, was energy. A Mark XXIV Bolo employed the majority of the output of three Class VII fusion plants to manufacture the energy necessary to accelerate a few grams to low-relativistic speeds, and much of that energy entered the surrounding atmosphere as heat, which bled away from the accelerating projectile despite the near-vacuum created by the lasers. The lasers, too, added their quota of heat, as did the fiercely radiating bolt of the plasma lance itself. Firing a Hellbore was not unlike flinging a tiny piece dredged from a sun's core at near-light speeds; in the vicinity of a battle, the air temperature climbed, and quickly.
And all the while Freddy had been discharging his Hellbore, enemy plasma bolts had been falling across a broad area of the planet, their impacts more or less random but the energy of each greater than that of a single Hellbore shot. Analysis of the Malach weapons suggested that they were similar to human Hellbores, using more hydrogen to achieve higher temperatures, but with a much lower velocity. They somehow used magnetics to create true plasma beams lasting as much as two seconds. And each two-second shot dumped a very great deal of heat into the atmosphere.
Donal glanced at the readout showing the external environmental conditions. The local temperature was 31 degrees Celsius . . . a rise of nearly 12 degrees over the past twenty minutes. Barometric pressure . . . nearly 1.125 bar, and normal for Muir was closer to .95. The area around Lake Simms was in the center of an extreme high-pressure system as rapidly warming air expanded in a huge bubble hugging the planet.
Expanding air meant dropping vapor pressure. The air was becoming dry. "Freddy?"
"Yes, Commander?"
"Break off the action. I have a new target for you."
"Awaiting new targeting instructions."
"Aim at the lake. Five or six klicks out from the shore. Open fire at the water. Continue firing until I tell you otherwise."
Donal heard the turret whine as it pivoted somewhere meters above his head. On the main, circular viewing screen, the crosshair reticle indicating the Hellbore's aim point shifted right, coming to rest on the blue waters of the lake, with range figures alongside indicating a target lock at a range of 5.74 kilometers.
"Target lock," Freddy said. "Firing."
The fighting compartment rocked with the recoil.
Aghrracht Swift-Slayer turned at the report given by one of her aides. "The enemy war vehicle is doing what?"
"Firing deliberately and repeatedly into the lake, Deathgiver. We cannot ascertain why."
Aghrracht considered the matter. No units were on the planet as yet—the nearest were still over a quor from touching down—so the human war machine couldn't be firing at Malach forces. Besides, Malach rarely considered large bodies of water as anything more than an obstacle to combat. After millennia of mining and heavy industrial exploitation on Zhanaach, the planet's shallow seas were lifeless; worse, they tended to dissolve metal hulls, and quickly. Malach did not think in terms of moving on or under water, but only over or around, so the enemy machine's actions were puzzling.
"There must be some problem with it," Aghrracht decided at last. "If it is robotic, like the one we destroyed on Lach'br'zghis, there may be a fault in its circuitry or programming."
"A near hit by one of our plasma beams, perhaps," the aide suggested.
"A possibility . . . though it seems unlikely that such well-constructed machines would be so vulnerable to near hits." Her feeding tendrils rippled as she thought. "Continue the bombardment. The machine continues its random maneuverings?"
"It does, Deathgiver. It is not possible to target it at this range."
"Continue trying nonetheless. It may make a contra-survival mistake. Or Sha'gnaasht may bless us with survivor's luck. In any case, I don't trust it. This may be a nagashni's ruse."
The nagashni was a small, mucus-covered predator on Zhanaach, recently extinct, that would play dead until carrion fliers began approaching, attracted by its deathlike odor. When one of the big, winged creatures was about to alight on what it thought was a putrescently decaying body, one of the creature's legs, longer and more muscular than the other five, shot out with tremendous force, impaling the flier on a three-taych-long claw.
"Kill and eat, Deathgiver!" the aide said in salute.
"Kill and eat." But the response was automatic, the Deathgiver's thoughts still on the enemy machine's strange actions. You fight well, machine, she thought. As well as a Malach warrior, perhaps, in the accuracy of your fire and your willingness to engage against large odds. How cunning are you, in fact?
The next few quor ought to provide the answer.
Bolt after white-hot bolt flashed into the lake, striking and extinguishing in savagely geysering fountains of steam and spray. Already, the shoreline of the lake, a full five and a half klicks from the target area, was growing hazy behind the gentle fall of a fine, hot mist, and the bolts were rendered starkly visible by the trails they carved through the wet air.
Each shot dumped gigajoules of energy, most of it as heat, into the water and the air above it. Tons of water had already been boiled away, turned to steam that rose swiftly above the tormented surface of the lake. Tons more were suspended as a fine mist in the atmosphere; as the air temperature rose, however, the warming air rose, carrying the water droplets with it.
From his vantage point inside Freddy, Donal activated a viewscreen that gave a view of the sky above the battlefield. Clouds were growing there, ragged tatters of white vapor that expanded, minute by minute, lumping together into a larger, high-piled mass of fleecy white visibly twisted by the high pressure system into a clockwise spiral.
Plasma bolts continued to fall from the zenith, fired by the Malach ships still positioned eight-tenths of a light second beyond Muir's atmosphere, but the strikes were growing more and more infrequent. Already, McNair—Muir's intensely bright, white sun—was fading somewhat behind a high, thin layer of gathering haze; in another few minutes, an arm of the growing cloud layer drifted between the ground and the sun. In minutes more, the haze had thickened into overcast and the crystalline blue sky had become a leaden gray. In the distance, over the mountains to the north, over the ocean to the west, sunlight still gleamed from a clear, blue sky, but the tent city was now almost completely masked by clouds.
The Malach gunners were firing blind now.
"We can still track the giant combat vehicle with radar," the gunnery officer on Aghrracht's screen reported. "But it continues to move erratically and we cannot target it from this distance. The strange collection of shelters at that site does not offer a solid lock, however, and we have had to break off firing at it. The ships in the lake have been hit several times and we have lost our locks on them. They may have sunk, or their returns may be lost in the reflections from the water. It is difficult to distinguish targets at this range."
"Then shift to other targets," Aghrracht said. "The large city in the south, close to the spaceport, is not cloud-covered."
The officer raised her chin on the screen, exposing her throat in submission. "The hunting is good, Deathgiver." Her image faded from the screen, replaced a moment later by a long-range view of the planet. The cloud cover over the target area was thickening and growing, moment by moment.
Aghrracht considered this. Clouds alone could not shield the planet's surface from plasma bolts, but they could block optical observation of the target area, and they could block the laser beams used to guide the plasma bolts to the target and prevent bloom when they struck dense atmosphere. Beings who could control the weather in this manner, who could summon a shield of clouds at such short notice, were beings to be respected.
She thought again of the machine firing repeatedly into the waters of the lake. Had that been how they did this? Vaporize water and the vapor would rise with the rising column of hot air. When that vapor hit a layer of colder air at high altitude . . .
Yes. These humans were worthy of respect indeed, clever in battle.
Their defeat would glorify them, as well as the clan of Aghrracht.
"Second!" she snapped.
Zhallet'llesch Scent Finder hurried to Aghrracht's side, lifting her chin in salute. "Here, Deathgiver!"
"We will transfer our operations to the planet's surface."
Zhallet'llesch's feeding tendrils twitched confusion. "But . . . we do not yet have a secure claw's grasp on the planet, Deathgiver. It will be almost a quor before our first units land."
"And you and I can do nothing from this perch," Aghrracht replied. She gestured at her screen. "We can see nothing, and time delay makes targeting next to useless. We should be on the surface, directing the attack from close at hand."
"It will be done, Deathgiver."
The tip of Aghrracht's tail twitched with a decisive flutter, an indication of determination and will.
"Prepare the command shuttle for immediate launch. Kill and eat!"
She would face the humans herself, on their own ground, fang and claw against fang and claw. . . .
Schaagrasch the Blood-Taster found herself once again entrapped in the narrow, stinking confines of her Hunter, hurtling toward an alien and unknown world. The intelligence briefing had suggested that this time the enemy would be expecting them; a robot probe inserted onto the surface had recorded and transmitted mechanized forces digging some sort of defensive position on the smaller of the two major north continents, close by the body of water where the escaped enemy ships had landed.
Use your fear. . . .
She felt the entry capsule bump and shudder, subjected to the searing temperatures and unimaginable stresses of high-speed atmospheric entry. She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again. Both hearts were pounding in a staggered, jackhammer beat, one behind the complex four-jointed shoulder girdle in her upper torso, the other farther down, a muffled throb just above her hips. Not much longer. Hold tight with all six . . . and direct your fear into slashing, blood-spilling hatred of the enemy!
This time, the Deathgivers had ordered a far more massive assault, one designed to crush the prey's resistance from the start and guarantee immediate superiority.
Why do I keep doing this to myself? Schaagrasch thought with a hot-blooded, single-minded intensity. I hate being alone, I hate being shut in. Maybe it's time to celebrate the Final Kill, then return to Zhanaach where I can care for males or pre-warrior young. I would prefer the young, of course. I've never cared for animals, save as prey to be hunted. . . .
But of course, she wasn't old enough for that yet, not while she could still mate. She'd had a most satisfying round of sex with an eager and quick-witted little male just two quach ago. She didn't think the union had taken, but that didn't matter. It was the spirituality of the act that counted. Her Kaa'la'schgha—her Assurance Mating—had produced a viable embryo which she'd implanted in a host brooder on Zhanaach just before she embarked on this expedition. If she died in battle, she was assured of progeny, the highest honor she could hope to attain; only if she disgraced herself with cowardice or stupidity or some other antisurvival trait would her offspring be eaten by the Guardian Priests of Sha'gnaasht as they emerged still bloody from the brooder's carcass.
Schaagrasch let that thought steady her. She had to cling to the reality of the moment. Fear was acceptable, if she could turn it to evolutionary advantage, drawing strength and ferocity from it. Cowardice—yielding to the blind survival urges of ancient ancestral forms far down the evolutionary ladder from the highly evolved Malach—would end her line, and her contribution to the Malach gene pool.
With a savage thump, the pod disintegrated around her, freeing her Hunter's lander in a cloud of radar-masking shrapnel. Light—to her eyes, harsh and actinic and shifted toward violet-white—briefly flared around her, until her computer adjusted the electronic optics to more comfortable settings. Her altitude was twenty-one hundred tairucht, high above the day side of the prey world. Swiftly she oriented herself. She was over ocean at the moment, but gray-purple mountains rose ahead and to her left, beyond a rugged and fjord-bitten coastline. Patchy clouds obscured much of the landing zone, but her computer highlighted the proper area and approach vectors despite the cloud cover.
As on Lach'br'zghis, the last human-infested world she'd seen, this place was virtually untouched by modern mining and processing. Radar detected numerous settlements, but small and isolated things. On Zhanaach there was now but a single city—Da'a-Zhanaach, Zhanaach's Greatness—which, together with its satellite sub-cities and industrial complexes covered most of the continent of Aghla.
All of the rest of the Brooder-world was given over to the strip mines and ore extraction facilities, the rock eaters and tunnel chewers and ocean drinkers used by the Malach to extract and concentrate every last klaatch of useful metal from the accessible reaches of the planet's upper crust. Schaagrasch could scarcely conceive of life apart from the teeming millions of a world's one city, though she imagined it must be something like the hardship of living with only a few thousand of her own kind aboard ship. The fact that the autochthons of these empty, almost unpopulated worlds lived in small and isolated settlements was one more indication that they were primitive evolutionary forms, doomed to extinction when forced to compete with a more highly developed species.
Once, ages ago, the Malach had inhabited separate and widely scattered cities, each its own clan and kingdom, but the ruthless logic of Zsho, the philosophical-religious belief structure that embodied the Malach concept of survival of the fittest, had inevitably led to a single survivor city-state, and that had eventually grown into Zhanaach's Greatness. As the Malach assimilated Zsha'h'lach and Lach'br'zghis and the other empty, human worlds, they would one by one be subjected to the Malach's efficiency in recovering vital metals.
Schaagrasch hoped that some pieces, at least, of the conquered worlds would be set aside for g'raaszh, a concept that translated very loosely as "living space," room to range with the pack, hunting in the old way of the Mothers. Efficiency in exploiting Zhanaach's scarce metal reserves had been the means by which the Malach had developed first an industrial civilization, then space flight, and finally the ability to utilize the inexhaustible metal riches of other worlds and systems, but that efficiency had also resulted in the loss of the open plains and savannas that had given rise to the Race in the first place, a few million qui'ur or so ago. She and her kind hungered for open country in which to hunt. That instinctive drive was at least partially responsible for the need to physically subdue other worlds, when asteroids and lifeless moons could provide heavy elements enough to sate even the Malach's relentless metal-hunger.
Nuclear fire flashed and stabbed from below, focusing Schaagrasch's full attention once again on the needs of the moment. Resistance, this time, was heavy, and she could tell that losses already were high. Most of the fire, she noted, was rising from two separate locations, one of them quite close to her assigned landing zone, the other not far from the spaceport that was Strike-Hunter Cha'rissch's primary target.
Active radar sites infested the target area heavily. Fusion beams continued to burn from the surface intermittently, each shot obliterating another incoming Malach pod or assault boat even when they were fired through the thickening overcast below. The ground batteries had an advantage there, of course, in that the incoming boats, those clear of their chaff covers, at any rate, would be easily tracked by radar, while Malach radar had to sort unfamiliar targets from the clutter of the ground.
Schaagrasch had been lucky thus far, a single target among hundreds. She flashed over the coastline, still descending, skimming low above a surface of blinding, violet-white clouds, their glare only just contained by the optical system's electronics.
A warning buzzer sounded; she was being painted by enemy radar . . . painted hard, with a target lock. Schaagrasch twitched her left hind-arm, firing attitude jets to swing her craft sharply right. As she heeled over, a dazzling glare of light erupted from the clouds, illuminating the cloud deck from within and beneath, the beam searing past her pod like a lightning stroke.
She twitched again, bringing the fast-falling probe back onto course, angling in toward the assigned landing zone. An instant later, clouds surrounded her in gray-bright fog . . . and then she was below the cloud deck, hurtling above a confused tangle of colorful shelters or tents of some kind. A lake gleamed to the right, mountains to the left. Then she was over thick and unexploded forest, her jets firing one last time to kill her forward velocity.
Trees blurred beneath her pod as she triggered her air-breathing engines, decelerating with a ten-G jolt that nearly robbed her of breath. A final sharp, hard shock . . . and she was down.
Her pod split open and she engaged the Hunter's servos, rising unsteadily on unfolding legs. She scanned her surroundings across 360 degrees; a second pod in her octet was down eighty erucht distant. She saw the other Hunter rising from the crater where the pod had come to rest and recognized the hull number and death-poem script of J'krarash'niz's Hunter.
"Form up! All Hunters, form up!" she barked. "Kill and eat!"
"Kill and eat" came the reply from five voices. She checked her map screen and saw that Ghaghr'risch and Asch'gniz were missing, unaccounted for. The enemy defensive fire had been fierce, relentless, and highly accurate. Perhaps they'd both been caught by battery fire from the ground coming in.
No matter. With resistance this fierce from the human prey, she would be able to bring her octet to full strength very soon by incorporating the blessed survivors of other shattered octets.
Fusion fire briefly lit the sky to the southwest, from the vicinity of that curious human tent-city. One of the autochthons' combat machines was known to be in that area, a center of resistance that would have to be neutralized at once. She rasped out another order, and the six Hunters began hurrying southwest on fast-scissoring, mechanical legs.
While Bolo 96876 of the Line has been engaging enemy forces at Simmstown, I have been guarding the approaches to Kinkaid, the Muir Military Command Headquarters, and the spaceport. With no Enemy ground forces within my sensory envelope, I have been free to engage Enemy spacecraft approaching Muir in my line of sight. Enemy fire from space is continuing, but so far only three shots have come closer than one hundred meters, and I have suffered no damage.
Two point seven three minutes ago, however, a new threat appeared. Bursting out of an obscuring cloud of chaff, a large number of Enemy craft have entered my sensory envelope.
Judging these nearby vessels, which exhibit mass and maneuvering characteristics approximately equivalent to those of Concordiat Dragon's Tooth pods or Echo-class landing barges, to be the major threat, I have shifted my targeting priorities to them and commenced firing. Several flare and vanish with suspicious ease. They are dummies, target drones designed to attract both my attention and my fire.
Within .22 second, however, three new targets appear above the horizon at 341 degrees, and these show signs of intelligent hands at the controls, rather than remote teleoperation. I acquire a targeting lock on the first one, even while running a vector solution on all three . . . noting as I do that I will be able to destroy two of the incoming pods, but not the third. They are passing from my left to my right on a path that will bring them down to the east of and within ten kilometers of the spaceport. This is almost certainly a force detailed to capture the port.
The pods are similar to tapered cylinders with moderate armor, no weapons, and numerous thrusters. Each could hold a large number of troops, several vehicles, or a combat machine equivalent to a Mark XXIV Bolo. Swinging my 90cm Hellbore to bear on the lead target, I fire.
My aim is good, and the bolt of fusion plasma strikes the lead pod squarely in the center, burning through the thin hull metal and ripping it open. In an instant, the pod has been shredded as its aerodynamic integrity is lost, spilling a large number of objects into the air. There is no time, however, for a detailed analysis. I immediately shift my tracking lock to the second pod and, as soon as my Hellbore power inductors have cycled up to full readiness 1.27 seconds after the first shot, I fire again.
The two surviving pods are attempting to avoid ground fire by jinking as far as their maneuvering systems will permit, but the pods clearly are bulky and underpowered craft, and sophisticated maneuvers are impossible for them. My second shot hits the target five meters from its nose, sheering off the forward part of the hull and sending the craft into an uncontrollable spin.
As expected, by the time I slew my turret to track the final pod, it has passed behind a line of trees to the east and is beyond my targeting envelope.
With no other targets in view, I turn to 095 degrees, aiming for the landing area of the surviving pod, and engage my drive.
I should arrive at the landing site within five minutes.