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Chapter Twenty-eight

I am monitoring the course of the battle over the Muir Command Intelligence Web, and I estimate that Bolo 96875 of the Line will not be able to survive this fight for more than another 4.5 minutes. I have increased my velocity to full sprint speed and am traveling now at 150 kilometers per hour, an improvement of 1.3 percent over my original estimated maximum-speed performance.

The northern mouth of the Criton Valley is just ahead, clearly visible on radar and infrared. This is the point at which my orders from Kinkaid direct me to take up a static position in order to block retreating enemy forces or to serve as a reserve in case Unit 96875's position is overrun.

My Commander's directive in response to headquarters' orders is succinct, vulgar, and graphic, a word of, I believe, ancient Anglo-Saxon origins. I do not employ such language myself, but the feeling behind it is something that even Bolos can appreciate.

At least self-aware Mark XXIV Bolos under full Battle Reflex Mode.

At my Commander's order then, I race past the blocking position and enter the valley. In another moment, I am closing with the tail end of the Malach column, smashing into ground-effect APCs and troop carriers with deadly effect.

It is fully dark now, under overcast skies, and the Malach soldiers, those not inside their walkers, are nearly blind. As their vehicles flame under each burst from my infinite repeaters, they scatter in a wild and unseeing panic, blundering into one another, or even running wildly into the path of my oncoming tracks.

I have noted a distinct confusion in the Enemy tactics during the past hour. His attacks are poorly coordinated and poorly executed. It is possible that by destroying his command and control center at Glenntor, we have contributed to the battle more than we could have expected.

I detect a large concentration of Malach war machines ahead and inform my Commander. There is no longer time for finesse, for careful maneuvers designed to break up Enemy formations before they can grow too strong. The Enemy has assembled his entire strength in one massive formation, and we will either annihilate it now or be overwhelmed ourselves.

It won't be much longer now before we know which.

 

Donal clung to the armrests of his command chair as the Bolo raced south through the valley, its tracks slashing into the ferrocrete of Route 1 and reducing it to scattered rubble and eroded roadbed. Malach walkers tried to block the way, firing massed beam and missile weapons as they stood their ground, but Freddy either burned them down or, once, smashed into the alien machine at full speed, the massive, fast-spinning left-forward track grinding over and shredding the Malach walker, flattening the wreckage beneath the incredible ground pressure of ten tons per square meter. There were lots of Malach troops skittering about in their skins as well, and they stood no chance at all as the Bolo thundered down on them with violently spinning tracks. Freddy smashed south at a thundering sprint, leaving a trail of twisted, splintered wreckage and smeared bodies in his path. His Hellbore hurled fusion bolts at relativistic velocities through unresisting metal and flesh; his infinite repeaters slashed down incoming missiles in dazzling flicks of green lightning.

Neither Donal nor Alexie said anything. The battle now was far beyond their control, even their comprehension, as Freddy thought, acted, and reacted with superhuman speed and concentration. The Bolo had released its last recon flier some minutes before, and the drone was transmitting infrared imagery now of close-packed Malach walkers, moving south in the valley ahead.

"I am detecting a major concentration of the Enemy at a range of 11.5 kilometers," Freddy told Donal. "I have five tactical nuclear missiles remaining in my inventory."

"Use 'em as you think best, Freddy."

"This is an excellent opportunity, save for one potential problem. General Phalbin has deployed a large number of lightly armored troops along the tops of the hills to east and west just ahead. If I detonate nuclear weapons in the valley—"

"Gotcha. Gimme a channel . . . uh, make it combat tactical five." That would let him talk to all field officers and NCOs, and possibly any of the soldiers themselves who possessed helmet radios. Chain of command and standard Rules of Engagement demanded he call headquarters first and clear a nukes release with them.

Screw that. He was in trouble already. He'd ditched the Bolo's ROEs. He could ditch the human ones as well.

"Channel open. Mike hot."

"Attention, all personnel in the Criton Valley area! This is Lieutenant Ragnor, aboard Bolo 96876 of the Line. We are about to release tactical nuclear weapons inside the valley, with individual yields of between one fiftieth and one twentieth of a kiloton. You have about forty-five seconds until launch. I suggest you move back up the hill and over the top of the ridge. If you can't manage that, get behind a boulder, a tree, anything that will give you cover, and for God's sake, don't look! Now move! Move! Move! Fast as you can!" He released the transmit key. "Okay, Freddy. Give 'em one minute."

"One minute, Commander. That will require that we slow first, to avoid closing with the target."

"Go ahead and slow down, then. We have to give our people a chance to find cover."

"Affirmative."

The Bolo slewed suddenly to the left, turret pivoting as it tracked a group of eight Malach walkers that had just abruptly changed course and were moving north. Penetrator lances flashed through the night, detonating in savage flashes as Freddy's laser antimissile fire sliced the weapons to pieces. For thirty seconds or so, the Bolo was at the focus of a devastating play of laser fire and electron beams, a concentration of high-energy fury that exploded reactive armor, clawed at flickering mag screens, and in places left soft, bubbling craters of half-molten metal, glowing cherry-red with yellow, black-crusted centers in the darkness.

Freddy returned fire, each Hellbore blast finding its target. The Mark XXIV was designed to learn from combat experience. Its earliest encounters with Malach walkers had been fumbling, sometimes uncertain affairs, but the Bolo now had a much better working database on how walkers and fliers moved, how they jinked, what attack patterns they were likely to run. As the surviving walkers attempted to break right and circle behind the Bolo, the armored behemoth suddenly reversed its turn, coming hard right, pivoting so sharply that the last walker in line was caught by surprise and plowed under, the ten-meter-tall machine crumbling beneath the onslaught of tracks reaching over five meters high.

For a few more seconds, Malach walkers and Bolo slugged it out at point-blank range, with the Malach trying to work their way close enough to get inside the reach of those awesomely powerful energy weapons.

They failed. Scattering before the Bolo's wild charge, many kicked off and went airborne, skimming above the ground on flaring ventral jets, but the Bolo's IR ion cannons speared them in one-two-three succession, ripping them apart in mid-air. When the Hellbore spoke, the night dissolved in white hell's-fury, and Malach hunters, in the air or on foot, simply evaporated.

"One minute has elapsed, Commander. Request permission to fire nuclear weapons."

"Granted." If the human troops hadn't made it to cover by now, there was nothing that could be done for them. "Fire!"

A sleek, Mark LXII Sunfire missile climbed out of Freddy's Number Three vertical launch tube, balanced on a shaft of flickering white flame. An instant later, a second missile followed . . . and then a third. The missiles, each three meters long and massing nearly nine hundred kilograms, rocketed high into the night sky, trailing glowing white contrails that arced rapidly toward the south. Moments passed . . . and then the night turned day-brilliant, a false sunrise to the south that grew rapidly brighter . . . then brighter still with the triple detonation. More seconds passed, and then the shock and blast waves passed, a gentle rolling of the ground, accompanied by a hurricane of wind clawing at the outer hull.

Ferdy had coordinated his nuclear attack as well. The central reaches of the Criton Valley had been transformed into a hell's cauldron, the ground still partly molten in places or covered with liquid pools of molten glass from the sand and metal from the hundreds of wrecked alien vehicles. Freddy slowed down somewhat, picking his way past the deadliest hotspots, then accelerated once more.

"Did . . . did that get them all?" Alexie wanted to know.

"Negative, Deputy Director Turner," Freddy told her. "A large number of Malach walkers are still mobile, many of them in the hills to either side. It is unlikely that they will assemble in large groups again, in light of the lesson we just taught them. They will no doubt seek to concentrate quickly at close range in an effort to trap and overwhelm either Unit 96875 or me."

"Smash on through," Donal told him. "I want to link up with Ferdy."

"That was my thought as well, Commander."

Past the radioactive slag and glowing pools of the nuclear killing ground, they began encountering enemy troops and vehicles once more. Ten kilometers from Ferdy's position, Freddy sent a microsecond-burst ID transmission, and Ferdy picked it up, returning a curt acknowledgment. He was under short-range attack and had suffered numerous hits. In another millisecond, the two Bolos were in line-of-sight electronic Battle Coordination Mode, the two fighting, thinking as one, their thoughts joined by a tight-beamed maser link.

Five kilometers north of Ferdy's position, a Malach walker leaped, belly jets flaring, drifting through a hail of wildly slashing infinite repeater fire and coming to rest safely on Freddy's upper deck, just behind the turret. Diacarb claws on mechanical arms slashed out, embedding themselves in ordinary carbon-steel outer skin. Lasers and electron guns flared, burning down into Freddy's dorsal armor at point-blank range.

Ferdy, sighting in on the hitchhiker with pinpoint accuracy, triggered a plasma bolt from his Hellbore, the blue core of hellfire passing centimeters above Freddy's turret, smashing into and through the unwanted rider, scattering its body in a million flaming, molten fragments.

Alexie let out a small gasp when she got her first look at Ferdy, and Donal groaned. The Bolo had been almost entirely stripped of its heaviest armor in places, and all four track systems had been wrecked. Ferdy was truly in a static defense mode now, immobilized by the horde of leaping, racing, legged manta shapes around him. Several had mounted his top deck, and Freddy swept them away with a sustained burst from several infinite repeaters. As Freddy spun around his brother Bolo in a tight, dust-spewing circle, the Malach walkers scattered, most taking to the air like great, flapping carrion birds.

"Hit 'em!" Donal cried. "You got 'em on the run!"

"Negative, Commander," Freddy replied. "I am detecting at least forty-seven more enemy walkers, supported by at least five fliers, inbound at this time. Exact numbers are difficult to ascertain, due to chaff and radioactive interference in the atmosphere." He paused, as though considering the problem. "I fear they may have just assembled one final thrust in an effort to overrun this position."

Nuclear penetrators were flashing in toward the Bolos. Donal flinched as one detonated less than a meter from Freddy's side, the white-hot jet of plasma searing into the Bolo's side. Reactive armor exploded outward, disrupting the jet; the Bolo's mag screens flared, scattering it.

But other lances were rocketing in, each trailing a thin streak of white flame and smoke. Antimissile lasers set into Freddy's flanks fired repeatedly, joined at times by the rattling shriek of the infinite repeaters. They were exploding in threes and fours and fives at a time, each kill marked by a dazzling pop of harsh white, night-scattering light.

The night was alive with fire, with the flickering, needle-thin beams of lasers, with tightly packed streams of blue-green flares, the ion bolts from the red-hot muzzles of hard-pressed infinite repeaters. From time to time, light geysered high above one or the other of the Bolos, as nuclear-tipped rockets slid off the vertical launch tube rails, kicked into the sky, and arrowed toward some distant target.

And the incoming fire fell like a waterfall of living flame, beams, flares, rockets, and the unceasing pounding of heavy artillery.

From his vantage point, Donal could follow only a fraction of everything that was going on, so fast were events unfolding, so savage and unrelenting was the fighting. He tried shifting the display to infrared, but the ghostly white and yellow against blue and green was even more confusing, especially when so much of the ground around both Bolos was glowing now with a fervent, radiant heat.

Malach fliers circled like black, ungainly birds, skimming the burned-over ground with a curious skipping motion, riding ground-effect as much as actually flying. When they got too close, they lowered their legs and walked. Donal wasn't sure, but he suspected that walking saved them power, let them channel more energy to their weapons. Both Bolos took them out while they were airborne when possible, but more and more, the big combat vehicles were being forced to conserve their power, saving their shots to keep the walkers at a safe distance.

Donal remembered the statistics he'd seen, the estimates that said that one Bolo was equivalent to about twelve of the Malach walkers. They'd proven this night just how wrong statistics could be. The ground now was littered with crushed, smashed, and burned-out walkers. In places, the wreckage was strewn so thickly it would have been impossible to walk that ground without stepping on pieces of metallic debris.

The bombardment intensified as Malach forces flung missile after missile, beam after beam at the two Bolos, the one crippled and motionless, the other circling tightly as it tried to shelter and protect its companion.

Ferdy died in the last few minutes of the assault, as a nuclear-tipped lance arrowed past the defensive fire, struck through failing mag screens, and burned its way through armor already slagged in places until the Bolo's flintsteel skeleton was showing through, and detonated deep inside with a flash and an electromagnetic pulse savage enough to serve as a Bolo's death scream. Ferdy's Hellbore turret was flung up and back, its weapon fingering the sky in final, silent challenge. The nuclear fireball climbed skyward, shedding a baleful, hell-borne light on the field of high-tech death.

For several seconds more, the Malach kept coming . . . but if they'd thought to overwhelm a defensive force now reduced by fifty percent, they were mistaken. Freddy accelerated abruptly, free now of any need to stick with his dead brother. Hellbore fire seared the night, slashing through Malach combat machines and scattering the fragments in a savage whirling firestorm. Malach numbers were already so depleted that even the destruction of one of the two Bolos could not change an outcome now as inevitable as death.

The surviving Malach were retreating now . . . were in full flight. Freddy pursued them, lashing out, killing . . . killing . . . and killing again. . . .

And then, the fighting compartment was quiet for a long time.

"Commander," Freddy said.

Donal blinked into silence and the dim light spilling from consoles and displays. How long had it been? Sometime during that final, savage pounding, Donal had left his command seat—his presence there was certainly not necessary from the Bolo's point of view—and slumped down on the steel deck aft, with Alexie curled up small and close in his arms.

"What? What's happening?" He was only now beginning to realize that it was quiet. For hours . . . for days, it seemed like, even deep within the Bolo's acoustically shielded fighting compartment, the hammering thunder of the incessant concussions of enemy ordnance had rung and pealed, a deafening, ear-pounding cacophony that now was blessedly, amazingly silent.

"The Enemy has broken," Freddy said simply. "He appears to be in full retreat toward the north. Muir troops and light armor are approaching from the south.

"I believe the battle has ended."

"We're . . . we're still here. . . ." It didn't seem possible.

"Commander, I regret to inform you that Bolo 96875 of the Line has been destroyed."

Donal felt a stab of pain at that. "I'm . . . sorry." He wondered if Freddy felt the same sort of loss, of pain, as he did.

"He was destroyed in performance of his duty," the Bolo said. The voice carried no inflection . . . no emotion that Donal could read.

The first of the DY-90 Firestorm hovercraft howled up moments later, dust billowing from beneath its skirts, illuminated by the funeral pyres of burning Malach walkers. It was swiftly followed by three more. Sergeant Blandings, physically unrecognizable in his radiation suit and helmet, stood in the lead vehicle, waving.

"Did we win?" Alexie asked.

Donal understood. Sometimes it was hard to grasp the outcome of a major battle, when you were a very tiny part of it all to begin with. And sometimes the losses . . .

Ferdy was still burning.

"Yeah. Yeah, I guess we did."

Shakily, he stood up and began looking for a radsuit.

 

As my Commander steps outside, I consider the burning wreckage that once was Bolo of the Line 96875. It happened so quickly, even for a Bolo, that it is difficult to convince myself purely through logical processes that he is destroyed.

Humans would say dead.

The question of whether Bolos are alive in the first place has long been argued by human philosophers, technicians, and combat veterans, though it is a question that Bolos rarely address. We simply are, and for most purposes, that is sufficient.

Humans question whether Bolos can feel. That, too, is rarely discussed among Bolos. We experience emotions because we were designed that way, and those humans who insist that we only think we feel because we were made that way should consider the same question in relation to themselves. We do not experience emotions as humans do, with the same intensity, nor are we incapacitated by them, nor do we know feelings such as boredom, which are counter-productive.

But we can experience a sense of loss.

And of loneliness.

And something that might very well be similar to what humans call sadness, though in fact I cannot know what it is when humans experience such emotions.

I will miss our camaraderie. Our discussions. Our games of chess.

I spend the next .085 seconds scanning all relevant data in my storage banks concerning human military traditions related to honoring fallen comrades and helping solidify morale among those who survive. There are numerous rituals and traditions that might apply—I spend a full .023 second considering just the Heroes' Remembrance ceremony once invoked by the Terra Legion, a ritual extending back to the Battle of Shalmarin in 2210, almost a thousand years ago.

But such would require human intervention in established rules and procedures and might not be convenient for the Confederation Military Command Authority. I search for other rituals that might be fitting.

I decide on one.

Technically, I am violating established fire-control procedures doing this but have no trouble overriding the guards. Fortunately, the ROEs have not been reactivated. I pivot seven of the nine ion-bolt infinite repeaters on my left side—one has been disabled in any case—to aim at a piece of night sky above Bolo 96875's burning wreckage. I pause for .01 second as I download and replay records of several of our past conversations.

I set the IRs to single-shot, then fire all seven weapons once . . . twice . . . a third time. Twenty-one bolts of blue-white light sear through the smoke and into the night sky, burning brilliantly as they streak higher and higher, then slow . . . and fade from sight.

On the ground, my Commander turns sharply at the sudden barrage. I watch as he stares at the departing rounds . . . then draws himself to attention, and salutes, the gesture clumsy in his radiation suit.

He understands. . . .

 

Badly burned, bleeding heavily, Schaagrasch dragged herself clear of the wreckage. For a time, the pain had been agonizing, a searing, blinding, incapacitating fire eating at bones and muscles, but that had receded now. Malach Zsho philosophy frowned on the use of drugs to relieve pain, which, after all, was a part of any organism's survival mechanism. After a time, if you accepted the pain, allowed it to fill you and wash over you, it became . . . bearable.

She stared around the night-shrouded field, the pupils of her two remaining eyes opening wide to drink in the light. Everywhere she looked, Hunters lay strewn like smashed and broken g'shin, the stuffing-filled images of prey animals given to juvenile Malach females for them to tear and worry. Her comrades all lay there, strewn about in bloody, blue-green death. The very ground here was beaten and scorched, every living thing seared from the earth. The only light was the guttering flicker from a small fire in the eggshell-smashed ruin of G'rasak'nzhi the Careful Circler's Hunter.

Where was evolution now? she wondered. The survival of the fittest.

What hope was there for the creature beaten on the field of survival?

Extinction . . .

Schaagrasch rolled onto her side and stared up into the crystalline-black night sky and the golden glory of the cluster's thronging swarms. Staring into those stars made her feel just a little less alone.

She had a final duty to perform, one that many Malach this day would not have been able to complete. Indeed, duty was a misnomer, since no particular consequence befell a Malach who failed to carry it out. A Malach who was killed instantly in the course of combat was no more remiss in her responsibilities than the one who died slowly enough to recite her Ghaava'naa'ach-zshleh, the Death Poem.

Every Malach warrior wrote her own during her Ga'krascht Coming-of-Blood ceremony. The name, Ghaava'naa'ach-zshleh, meant "I embrace death," which was the first line of all Death Poems. The rest was different for each warrior, emblazoned in silver script on the curved black surface of her Hunter, though the sentiment was usually familiar. Schaagrasch's was no exception.

"Ghaava'naa'ach-zshleh," she began, voice rasping.

I embrace Death,

Death given by Life.

Culling the Pack,

Hunting the weak,

That the Race might grow strong and survive

As Blessed Sha'gnaasht Skilled Tracker revealed.

The race lives, adapts, and survives, and there lies immortality.

After she'd finished reciting the poem, the pain was almost gone. She lay there on the burning ground, staring up at the stars for a long time until she died.

 

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