At my Commander's suggestion, I am traveling east through the forest north of the refugee camp, advancing through the woods at the maximum speed possible, splintering trees and plowing them down. My radar scan of the Enemy landing pattern suggests that this patch of forest could well be infested with Malach war machines, so I deploy all sensors at maximum, watching for the possibility of ambush. My immediate target is the general area of the Enemy's landings.
I have ceased firing at the lake. Within the past twenty minutes, a considerable cloud cover has gathered over the entire Simmstown area, and a light rain is falling. The Enemy bombardment from space has ceased, at least in this area, though plasma bolts continue to strike other areas, in particular the region around Kinkaid. Bolo 96875, so far, is unhurt. He reports a landing by Malach forces near the starport and is advancing to investigate.
I wish him well.
Large numbers of Malach forces have landed in my Combat Area as well, though they do not appear to be well organized as yet. My mission is to block their movements and, if necessary, attract their fire, to give the refugees time to escape.
Movement catches my attention, a thrashing among the trees at a range of 120 meters, bearing 273. I pivot my Hellbore turret to cover the threat. An instant later, an Enemy combat walker emerges from the trees.
It appears identical to the machines recorded on Wide Sky, a flat, roughly saucer-shaped main body, thicker in the mid-section than toward the oval, knife-edged wingtips, which at the moment have been folded down to form sheltering armor skirts for the leg mechanism and ventral hull.
I trigger a round from my Hellbore, the bolt slashing into the Malach walker's left side, ripping up armor plating and hurling debris into the forest at the machine's back. It returns fire in the same instant, a particle beam that strikes my forward left-side skirt, detonating a line of reactive armor plate in a sharp, crackling blast, and fusing the armor beneath into glassy, glowing-hot slag. The damage is minimal, however, and easily repaired. I track my Hellbore lower and trigger a second shot, aiming for what I judge to be the walker's weak point, its legs. Vents on the walker's belly flare bright-hot in my infrared scanners as air intakes topside gulp down vast quantities of atmosphere, superheat it, and jet it out the belly. The machine lifts, its legs folding. My shot grazes one leg, doing no serious damage.
My infinite repeaters are firing now as I track with every weapon I can bring to bear. Sparks snap and flash from its hull; one solid hit staggers it, knocking one wing low, and a Hellbore shot smashes in an instant later, shearing off the right wingtip and sending the Malach machine into a pancaking spin. It hits the trees with a shattering impact, toppling two in a thunder of wildly splintering wood and falling boughs.
My sensors detect other Malach walkers closing in fast. . . .
* * *
Alexie climbed out of her speedster and hurried toward the knot of adults and older children who were gathered around a smoldering pile of wreckage. One of the plasma beams from the sky had fallen here, incinerating a dozen makeshift shelters and tents, and toppling one large shelter, which by chance had stood at the edge of the blast zone, into a tumble-down heap of melted plastic and scrap. Rain drizzled from the overcast, a thin, hot mist. The workers were busily pulling bodies—small bodies—from the debris.
It all seemed so blindly wasteful, so random and vicious. Children always suffered in war, but for the Malach to simply fire into these tents like this, without even realizing what they were doing . . .
Or did they? War by terror was nothing new or alien to human ideas of warfare. "What's going on?" she demanded.
"We have some survivors in there," one of the adults, a young woman, said. Her face was haggard and white, with blue-black circles beneath the eyes. "But the stuff on top is too heavy."
Alexie took a look. The ruin was close by the edge of the forest, a clutter of bright orange sections, some partly melted by the intense heat of the beam, which had gouged a twenty-meter crater into the earth nearby. When she stooped to look under the wreckage, she could hear someone crying, while another young face with large, dark eyes regarded her steadily from the shadows. "Hang on!" she called. "We'll get you out!"
"The wall fell!" the face called back. Alexie thought it was a boy of ten or twelve. "We can't get out!"
"Are you hurt?"
"I think Demi's leg is stuck."
"How about you?"
"I'm okay. Arm's hurt a little. There's not enough room to crawl out!"
The speedster had a towpoint, and someone produced a length of high-strength cable which they secured around a jagged piece of fallen wall. It took a few moments for her to use the vehicle to partly lift the wreckage clear of the ground, so that the workers could drag the two children, mercifully still alive and not badly injured, to safety.
"Okay," she told the group, as the vehicle settled back to the ground with a dwindling whine. "You have to get out of here. Don't stop for possessions. Don't stop for anything. The Malach are coming, and they're coming fast!" She pointed south. "We have transports taking people on down there, but save them for the real little ones, or those who can't walk, okay? The rest of you have legs. Use them! There'll be people to guide you out. It'll be a long walk, but if you don't get too scared and if you listen to what people tell you, you'll make it okay."
"Where are we going?" one of the rescued kids cried. She looked like she was about eight, with a smudged face and a dirty holiday-best red dress. A rescue worker was bandaging her leg, which didn't seem to be broken but which had a nasty cut. "Ow-ow! I want my mom and dad!"
"Right now, we just have to get away from the Malach, honey," Alexie said. "We'll find your parents later." Too late, she remembered that, more than likely, the girl's parents were still back on Wide Sky. She had a most unpolitician-like aversion to making promises that she was not going to be able to keep.
The kids started moving off, shepherded by the adults, one of whom carried the injured girl in her arms.
Alexie heard something, a thrashing among the trees at her back. With fear mounting in her breast and throat, she turned, freezing in place as the bushes parted and an armed Malach warrior strode into the clearing. Two more Malach appeared behind the first . . . and then trees were thrust aside as one of the nine-meter-tall walkers stepped out of the forest and into the light. More of the creatures appeared to the right and left, clad in leather straps and equipment harnesses only, with their scaly hides gleaming wetly in the drizzle like faceted red and green jewels.
The children at her back screamed, and she could hear them scattering behind her. With lightning quick motions, the Malach raised weapons clutched in various confusing combinations of arms and clawed hands, taking aim.
"No!" she shouted, stepping forward into the path of the first Malach that had appeared, looking up into the creature's four emotionless, expressionless ruby and ebon eyes. She deliberately assumed a defiant stance, shoulders back, chin held high and as firm as she could manage, staring into that alien, four-eyed visage less than five meters away, daring it to shoot her. She fully expected to be dead in the next second. . . .
The lead Malach took three swift steps forward, a strangely shaped weapon of some sort clutched in its massive lower arms, but with one of its smaller, upper arms upraised, a black and glittering, razor-edged claw extended as though to slash her exposed throat. She didn't move, didn't back down. If these monsters were going to kill her, they would have to do it here and now . . . and maybe the kids could escape in the time she bought them.
The claw wavered a moment, as though the Malach were considering her and her defiance. Suddenly, the claw slid back noiselessly into a sheath of wrinkled, scaly skin, and the huge jaws gaped a little. "Shgh'ragh!" the Malach said, more a rasping snarl than anything like a word. One of the other Malach approached, unfolding something like a lightweight net, which it flung over her. In an instant, she was pinned and helpless, the soft mesh snaring her arms and legs as the Malach lifted her effortlessly from the ground and slung her across its broad back like a bag of flour.
A prisoner now, she was carried back into the woods.
The kids, thank God, had run while the Malach had been distracted by her and were safely away. She wondered, though, what was going to happen. In her experience, the Malach rarely took prisoners.
And when they did, those prisoners were never heard from again.
Aghrracht looked out the viewport of the Xa'ha'xur shuttle as it dropped from the sky on flaring landing thrusters, descending toward the landing pad atop the stone castle that grew from the mountainside like an artificially shaped and reworked cliff. Built for strength above the cold and narrowly bounded waters of the fjord, the structure looked curiously like some of the great clanhold castles of ancient Zhanaach, a convergence of culture and design that reinforced Aghrracht's firm and reasoned opinion that the humans, while they possessed a level of technological development at least equivalent to that of the Malach, were far more primitive in terms of social, governmental, and psychological evolution.
Save for an occasional longing for the open plains and veldts on which their species had evolved social organization and sentience millions of qui'ur ago, the Malach did not experience any emotion equivalent to human nostalgia and did not attach value to cultural icons, symbols, or memorials of the past. Any given point in the past, after all, was a place they'd already been, a previous clawhold that, once achieved, was nothing more than one more step along the way in a long and on-going evolutionary journey. The last Malach clanhold castle had been demolished millennia ago, not long after the last of the inter-clan genocides, its building materials recycled into the foundations of Da'a-Zhanaach.
Still, this clanhold structure would be useful. Although Malach units had managed, despite heavy losses, to land in force at several widely scattered points on the target world, they'd as yet captured no major installations, buildings, or facilities, and the defenders were resisting with vigor enough that it might well be necessary to obliterate them stronghold by stronghold.
The cliffside castle, though, had been seized almost as an afterthought. A Malach troopship, off-course after dodging heavy fire over the landing zone beyond the mountains to the south, had picked up the structure on radar and moved in to investigate. During her approach, the troopship commander had reported receiving numerous radio transmissions in the principal human language, as though the defenders wanted to talk with her. Prepared to fight, she'd approached cautiously, but no fire had greeted her from those towering gray ramparts. Instead, a delegation of twelve humans had been waiting on the aircraft landing pad atop the castle walls, waving a curious artifact—a colorless sheet of cloth fabric tied to an aluminum rod.
The bodies of those humans had been collected as trophies and placed on display chin-high in the castle's main hall, while the aluminum rod had been taken as a symbolic gift-metal of victory.
The Xa'ha'xur shuttle settled to the landing pad in a swirling cloud of steam. Aghrracht strode down the landing ramp, claws clicking on steel, then on ferrocrete. The garrison commander met her with upraised chin. "Welcome, Supreme Deathgiver! Ch'chesk'cheh the Fast-Slasher, the hunting is good."
"We will establish our command center here, Ch'chesk'cheh," she said. "What is the local situation?"
The garrison leader gestured with a foreclaw at the mountains bulking high behind the castle. "We have reports of continued fighting to the south, Deathgiver. Beyond the mountains. This area was secured without fighting, and there have been no threats or threat-displays by the prey at all."
Aghrracht's tendrils twitched curiosity. "None?"
"We do not believe they possess significant force north of the mountains. All that held this castle were the twelve that made the initial threat display, and a few eights of others that did not resist. They have been imprisoned in the underground chambers. We have been holding them in case you wished to question or vivisect them."
"Excellent. We have learned, I believe, all that is necessary to know about human anatomy, but their psychologies remain . . . obscure. They are difficult to understand."
"Indeed, Deathgiver." She opened her fore-hand claws slowly, a gesture of reluctant bafflement. "Their threat display with the colorless cloth is beyond comprehension. None of the humans was armed."
"The prisoners may be able to explain the action's symbolism." She turned, gesturing toward another Malach descending the ramp with a number of Aghrracht's aides and subcommanders. "We have one tsurgh'ghah with us, at least, who has begun acquiring the human language."
Ch'chesk'cheh's feeding tendrils curled back with distaste, and Aghrracht understood. It was a common reaction among Malach warriors, for the tsurgh'ghah were not high-ranking members of Malach society.
The word was drawn from the name of a Zhanaachan carrion eater and was synonymous with "scavenger." The Malach who'd acquired that epithet millennia ago had been outcasts from the proper female warrior hierarchy, a nameless underclass that had survived by scavenging bodies, body wastes, food scraps, garbage, and whatever else they could lay their claws to. Eventually, they'd been integrated into the Race's evolving social structure as providers of certain necessary, if unpleasant, services, though individuals still had neither names nor honorable standing.
Aghrracht and her aides followed the garrison commander into the castle, walking carefully down a set of too-short steps into a large and spartanly furnished hall. The heads of various prey animals were mounted on the wall, and for the first time Aghrracht wondered if these humans might have some of the social graces, skills, and arts after all. Prominently displayed on chin hooks hung in a line along one wall were the limp and red-splattered bodies of the castle's human defenders. Some were still struggling weakly, though the size of the puddles of odd-colored blood beneath each strung-up body suggested that they were almost ready for the next cycle of the Great Spiral.
As the garrison commander ordered a couch brought for Aghrracht—human furniture did not fit Malach anatomy, but couches with their backs and sides removed could be adapted for the purpose—she regarded her tsurgh'ghah with slit-narrowed pupils. The scavengers' services were more necessary than ever since Zhanaach had entered her industrial age. The interest the outcasts had for garbage and the leavings of others had allowed them to evolve as collectors and repositories of information, and nowadays, many of the Nameless were attached to specific warrior clans and worked under their direction, remembering histories, warrior's tales, Death-poems, names, and anything else that needed preservation for the future.
If most warriors cared little for things of the past, there'd always been a need to store histories, so that lessons learned once need not be learned again. Recollectors made a science of perfect recall, training themselves to record information of all types. Indeed, writing was a relatively recent development in Malach history, since books and records were rarely needed. Until Malach advances in technology had developed computers two thousand qui'ur ago, knowledge had been preserved solely on perishable book-scrolls and in the minds of tsurgh'ghah recollectors.
This one, who'd been given "Cho" as a nickname-of-convenience, was one of Aghrracht's personal recollectors, an old Malach with blackening scales who'd served Aghrracht's mother before her and had special expertise in remembering names. She'd proven her worth by being able to remember and repeat the words and phrases used by the human prisoners. Several prisoners, encouraged to cooperate through the vivisection of some of their pack-mates in their presence, had been used to generate a vocabulary of human speech; with only a single people and a single tongue for the past several thousand qui'ur, the Malach still found the concept of other languages strange and a bit difficult to think about, but once a recollector skilled in names heard a new word and its definition, she never forgot them.
Even so, though Cho by now possessed a vocabulary of several thousand human words and phrases, using them effectively was difficult. So much about the humans and the way they thought was still baffling to the Malach. More clearly than ever, humans had long been trapped in an evolutionary cul-de-sac, despite the momentary and intermittent skills they'd demonstrated in the defense of this planet. They'd lost any blessing Sha'gnaasht might once have bestowed upon them and now deserved only extinction.
The Malach would inherit the wealth of their worlds.
Aghrracht considered having Cho begin by questioning those of the display-prey that were still alive, but decided that it probably wouldn't be worth the effort. Humans appeared to be incapacitated by relatively small amounts of pain; it was possible that they felt pain more intensely than did Malach, though no one had been able to prove that hypothesis definitively. In any case, Aghrracht doubted that they would get anything more informative out of the trophies now than squeaks and mindless burblings, especially with the floors of their mouths pierced by display hooks.
Kha'laa'sht the Meat Finder entered the hall. "Deathgiver," she said. "We have set up the communications center in the next room, over there. We have channels to each of our pack-leaders in the field now."
"Excellent," Aghrracht replied. "Inform all leaders that human prisoners and submissives are to be brought here. See that transports are made available."
"The hunting is good, Deathgiver."
It was time, Aghrracht though, to begin learning how best to drive this particular prey, what weaknesses it had that could be exploited, what needs it possessed through which it might be domesticated. . . .
General Phalbin stood before the large map display, studying the fast-growing blotches of red that were scattered across the continent from Loch Haven and the Windypeak Mountains all the way south to Kinkaid. The situation was grim, and growing worse. The major landings appeared to be taking place north and northeast of Simmstown—further confirmation, Phalbin thought—that the damned Malach had come in on the heels of the Wide Sky refugees. Most of the refugee encampment had been overrun by now, though the latest reports put the bulk of the refugees, most on foot, some aboard transports, nearly fifty kilometers south of the area. Lieutenant Ragnor's rather dazzling display of footwork with Bolo 96876 of the Line seemed to have confounded the Malach. For a time, it had looked as though they were preparing for a drive south on Kinkaid, but Ragnor's maneuvers appeared to have made them pull back and consolidate. For the first time in his career, General Barnard Phalbin was glad for the Bolos under his command and wished he had more.
But he was also concerned. Bolo 96875 of the Line, left protecting Kinkaid in the south, was in a fair position to block Malach forces that had landed in the region from either the spaceport or the city, located across the bay. But Ragnor and the Bolo he was riding in, Bolo 96876, were now deep inside what had to be considered enemy territory and getting deeper all the time as more Malach landed. The original plan, to post the Bolos as semimobile fortresses close to the starport, had been junked when the Malach invasion caught Bolo 96876 out of position, up at the refugee camp,
It was time to give up on the area around Simmstown. Ragnor had done an excellent job of covering the evacuation of the refugees, but it was time to pull him back, to pull Bolo 96876 back. With two of those incredible machines guarding Kinkaid, Muir just might have a chance.
"Communications!" he called. "Get me a scrambled channel to the commander of Bolo 96876."
They were into the battle proper now, and all Donal could do was grip the armrests of his command seat and watch the panorama unfolding around him. Modern combat was too fast-paced by far for any human to comprehend it, much less reason out the moves or react to the enemy's thrusts and parries. He watched as Freddy engaged Malach walker after walker, flier after flier, watched as volleyed salvos from the ion cannons along both of the Bolo's flanks and the jolting thunder of the Hellbore main weapon carved through the enemy formations like lightning.
Tactics at this point were brutally simple—kill enemy war machines as quickly and as efficiently as possible, and try to keep them from ganging up on the lone Bolo with overwhelming force and firepower. Freddy was accomplishing this by identifying groups of Malach walkers as they began to come together, striking at them first with HE and tactical nuclear weapons at medium to long range, then closing to engage the survivors in flickering, rapid-fire contests of accuracy and hitting power.
So far, the Bolo had the edge—or at least was holding his own. Freddy clearly had the advantage in firepower and armor; the Malach possessed speed and maneuverability, but Freddy was deliberately allowing himself to be surrounded so that he could take advantage of shorter interior lines of movement. With a mathematical precision that truly transformed the art of battle to a science, he circled through the enemy formations, breaking up one after another. They were easier targets when they were airborne, and he knocked the fliers out of the sky every chance he got. Walkers were more accurate when they fired, and they tended to make use of ridges and folds in the terrain to maintain hard-to-hit hull-down positions.
Freddy absorbed the punishment and kept on fighting, relying on short, furious bursts of unexpected speed to avoid encirclement at close range. The worst danger was the Malach nuke-tipped missile penetrators, but so far the Bolo was swatting them out of the sky before they got close enough to hurt him.
Meanwhile, despite the running firefight, Donal and Freddy were analyzing Malach communications patterns.
"I have noted a 734 percent increase in radio messages originating at this point," Freddy was saying, highlighting a point on the map he was projecting on the main screen.
Donal leaned closer to the display, checking the map. "I'll be damned, " he said, half to himself. "Delacroix's castle. What's it called . . . uh, Glenntor."
"The structure is registered as belonging to the Delacroix family," Freddy replied. "Do you know of him?"
"I was there a few nights ago," Donal said. "That party. The guy is PGPH. I wonder if he's working with the Malach now."
The Bolo rocked suddenly as the main Hellbore fired. Donal glanced up at the compartment's ceiling, then looked at the display surrounding his head. No Malach walkers were close by at the moment, but Freddy had picked up several fliers at a range of nearly ten kilometers and was engaging them. It was raining harder now, and the ground was turning soft. The Bolo continued grinding ahead, however, without slowing at all, smashing through the splintered and charred remnants of the forest as it engaged any enemy unit that came close enough for a clear shot.
"The communications are coded and unintelligible," Freddy said, as though the conversation was the only thing on his mind at the moment, "but the frequencies are typical of those used routinely by the Malach." There was a hesitation, an almost embarrassed silence of a second or so. "It feels as though we are dealing with a command center."
The statement rocked Donal. Bolos, even self-aware Bolos, rarely had anything that you could point to and call a feeling . . . or if they did, they didn't admit it.
"Can you explain that? What do you mean . . . 'it feels like'?"
The Bolo rocked again, and one of the fliers blossomed into an orange-white sunburst. "I have recorded the frequency of messages transmitted from the structure you call Glenntor. I have correlated those transmissions with other Malach transmissions, in particular those from their space fleet and those that appear to be command-related communications from the field, as opposed to radio chatter between separate units. The pattern is, in fact, similar to the pattern exhibited by human field command centers directing a battle from just behind the front lines."
Donal considered this. The explanation was straightforward and made perfect sense. But Freddy's mention of something that sounded eerily like intuition had jolted him.
"So we're not dealing with human traitors, you think."
"Almost certainly not, Commander. I have tracked two large Malach shuttles from orbit to the castle. In addition, I have noted over the past seventeen point three four minutes an increase in shuttle traffic from other parts of the battlefield."
The terrain visible on the screens blurred as Freddy accelerated hard, smashing through what was left of a burned-over forest at over one hundred klicks per hour. Two more fliers died in twin, silent detonations. Freddy was moving now to reach a ridgeline several kilometers ahead. According to the scrolling text on the display screen, he was tracking what was probably an octet of walkers.
"What kind of shuttle traffic?"
"Mostly small craft approximately similar in dimension and mass to our Skymaster-class transports or APCs. A large number arrived on-planet with the initial invasion wave. Many of these have begun traveling to the castle, apparently to deliver personnel."
"Where have they been coming from?"
Freddy added a scattering of points on the map. Most were concentrated in the region north of Lake Simms, within the ruin of Simmstown.
"Prisoners," Donal said.
"You believe the transports are carrying human prisoners?"
"It's a good possibility," Donal replied. "The Malach were showing a distinct interest in picking up prisoners on Wide Sky, and they used a transport like you've described. If they're not going to take them back to the fleet—and that would be risky if you're getting too free with your Hellbore bolts—they need to have some central place to take them for safekeeping." And probably for interrogation, he added to himself. His fists clenched on the armrest of his command chair. A lot of those prisoners must be children who hadn't made it out of Simmstown in time. It was impossible to simply gather up fifty thousand scared and confused kids and move them out at a moment's notice.
He remembered Alexie's fear for the refugees and wondered where she was now. South, with the main body, he supposed. She was going to just plain go ballistic when she heard the Malach had grabbed some of her kids.
"Commander," Freddy's voice said. "I have an incoming communication, command circuit, channel three."
"Audio."
". . . tenant Ragnor!" Colonel Wood's voice said. "Come in, Lieutenant Ragnor! Please respond!"
"This is Ragnor," he said. "Go ahead."
"Colonel Wood, at CMAHQ. We have new orders for you."
Donal was already beginning to formulate a plan of his own, and he somehow doubted that Wood's new orders were going to fit in with his plans at all. Reaching over to the console, he killed his mike. "Freddy."
"Yes, Commander?"
"I want to develop some radio trouble. I don't think we're going to want to hear these orders."
There was an uncomfortable hesitation. "Commander, I cannot distort or conceal information. By extension, I cannot lie about the condition of my equipment."
"Sure you can. I order you to . . ."
Donal's voice trailed off. Something was happening . . . and it wasn't good. The small repeater screens along the top of his console that showed a steady stream of selected status messages from Freddy's operating system had just gone blank. The map had frozen in place on the circular screen, too, and a new window had just opened in the middle of it. He read the message on the screen with a dawning horror.
critical error
emergency conflict resolution logic error
level one conflict
error in instruction to delete roes
no rules of engagement to delete
One by one, Freddy's higher mind functions were going off-line, shutting down, and Donal knew that he was in very serious trouble indeed.