I sink swiftly but am able to slow my descent rate somewhat by manipulating the current set up by my fast-spinning tracks and by careful play of my CG projectors. When I touch bottom once again, I note with relief that the silt here is less than three meters deep, inconsequential. Consulting my terrain maps of the AO, I conclude that the sediment I landed in first was a portion of the subsea alluvial fan formed by the egress of the Duret River into the Storm Sea, the result of geological ages of sediment carried down from the Kanthurian Mountains and the High Desert Plateau beyond.
I pause for 5.24 seconds while I run a thorough complete series of diagnostics and damage control checks and wait for the seething, churning seawater to cool my hull to temperatures less threatening to its molecular integrity.
I note that my primary ground-to-orbit communications suite has suffered major damage. External antennae have been swept away and several circuit modules overloaded and melted. I deploy techspiders to initiate repairs. There is other damage to secondary systems, all minor.
Then, with all primary operational systems showing green, I resume my approach-vector heading toward the coast and begin to advance, crawling across the bottom of the sea at fifty kilometers per hour. Within moments, the bottom shoals, and soon my upper works are above the water. Artillery fire and missiles seek me out from five directions, but it is all low-caliber, no threat to a hull that has twice withstood the fury of close-proximity nuclear detonation. My point-defense lasers, operating on automatic, knock out the larger shells and warheads while they are still kilometers distant. The others strike my battlescreens and explode without effect, further churning the roiling waters about me.
Behind and above me, the top of the mushroom cloud from the Hellbore blast that freed me rises high enoughan estimated 6,000 metersto catch in gold and purple glory the predawn light of a sun still below the horizon as seen from the surface.
Ahead, my optical and infrared sensors detect the flames of a burning city.
Streicher and Ramirez were lost deep in the kiss when the alarm sounded in his ear. He pulled back from the embrace, touched the clip attached to his right ear, and muttered a heartfelt curse.
She read his expression and the gesture, shrugged, and smiled. "We knew it couldn't last," she said. "To be continued?"
"Absolutely," he growled. "With the Greatest Pleasure."
"The Greatest Pleasure," she replied formally, but still smiling. "I'm looking forward to it."
They'd found a bit of privacy for themselves in a lounge area off the main simview chamber, on a couch looking out on the stars and not down into the hell-blasted burning of an inhabited world. He pressed down on the ear clip, activating its microtransceiver. "What?"
"You'd better come back in, sir," Major Lawrence Filby's voice said. "Something's happening. I think we've reacquired Victor."
"On my way."
Something in Filby's tone galvanized Streicher, and he hurried back into the simview chamber still adjusting various parts of his uniform. The techs waiting for him there studiously ignored his open tunic and disarrayed spray of hair. He settled back into his place on the ring couch. Major Ramirez entered and took her seat as the techs adjusted his virtual-feed headgear.
"We picked up a two-megaton Hellbore burst ten klicks off Ghendai," Filby's voice said, "just about at the spot where Victor went down." Second Batt's CO tended to be a control addict, precise, fussy, and a bit dogmatic. He'd never seen combat and was pretty much a career desk pilot from what Streicher could tell about the man, and he compensated with an anal attention to detail that might pass on a dark night for career dedication. Streicher normally found it easy to ignore the man as a gnome-shadow of the Confederation's mil-bureaucracy, but the crisp urgency in Filby's voice suggested that there was something here beyond properly filed maintenance reports and end-of-quarter fitness evaluations.
"Got it," Streicher said as the light flared in his eyes, the command craft's sim compartment vanished, and he floated once again over the 4th's AO, his visual input relayed from flying robotic eyes high above the battlefield. Zooming in, he could see the IR hotspot on the sea west of Ghendai, superimposed on the visual of a tangle of mushroom clouds. Three small, kiloton-range nukes had been disrupted and subsumed into the larger umbrella-capped steam-pillar of a Hellbore blast.
Zooming in closer still, Streicher could see the rectangular black slab of a Bolo, its upper deck barely awash, moving into the harbor at Ghendai. The churning wake streaming out behind it in a broad V suggested that it was moving at a considerable speed.
"Looks like Victor's back in the game," he said.
"I knew we couldn't count him out!" Kelly Tyler said, back online, her voice jubilant. "He survived the attack and just kept on going!"
"Do you have a data feed from him yet?" Streicher asked. "Has he suffered any damage?"
"No data yet, Colonel," Tyler replied. "We're trying to reestablish contact. There may be a comm fault."
"With all those nukes popping off, I'm not surprised. Keep on it."
"Yes, sir!"
"Give me a projection. Where is he coming ashore?"
Lines of light drew themselves across Streicher's virtual view of the terrain below. "On his current heading," Kelly said, "just north of Ghendai. But he'll be taking a lot of fire."
"Mark XXXIIIs can take it," Streicher said quietly. "And they can dish it out, too."
Gunfire crashes as I rise from the sea, water streaming from my flanks. I use point-defense laser fire to burn down three 200mm artillery rounds inbound, disintegrating them harmlessly at a range of 7.2 kilometers. Lighter rounds snap and sparkle against my battlescreens. A particle beam flares from the north, scattering from my screens in coruscating flashes of light and heat. I backtrack the beam, target an armored vehicle of unfamiliar design hull down behind a rocky cliff face, and return fire with a 20cm Hellbore infinite repeater. The cliff shatters and the vehicle, reduced to flaming wreckage, tumbles down the slope in a crumpled heap. As I pass, the wreck explodes, and I hear the sharp zing and hiss of shrapnel impacting my battlescreen.
The beach is narrow and rocky, backed by a sharply eroded cliff five meters high. Advancing, I grind across the beach, rocks popping and shattering beneath my tracks, and I claw down the cliff in a crashing avalanche of mud and stone.
Ahead, I see the ruins of Ghendai, a sprawling city edging the shore of a broad, open harbor. The orbital bombardment has flattened most of the taller buildings and habitation domes, reducing the place to rubble, the twisted skeletons of shattered towers, and steaming craters. The background radiation count stands at 157 rads.
Shifting my primary vision to infrared, I scan my surroundings for signs of life, but there are too many hot spots to allow me to easily or reliably pick out the body heat of enemy troops or the heat from vehicle engines. I switch back to optical/low-light mode and continue my advance, grinding over the glittering but shock wave-twisted span of an antenna farm and snapping the gently curved, elevated arc of a monorail line stretched across my path.
I pick up an incoming salvo on radar, ten targets coming over the horizon at a bearing of 085, range 132 kilometers. Mass and thrust characteristics allow me to tentatively identify them as intermediate-range ballistic missiles under remote teleoperation. Whether the warheads are nuclear, high explosive, or something more exotic I cannot determine; high background radiation counts prevent me from accurately determining whether the warheads carry radiation sources.
It is a simple matter, however, to lock on, track, and fire with my 20cm Hellbores, slamming fusing slivers of hydrogen into each incoming missile. The night-shrouded horizon to the east lights up in a popping chain of strobing, arc-brilliant flashes. One warhead detonates, illuminating the landscape with a false dawn that fades to blood and silver as the fireball rises. One of the IRBMs, at least, was carrying a nuke. I estimate the yield at 5 kilotons.
The enemy salvo eliminated, I return counterbattery fire with a salvo of my own40cm mortar rounds shrieking off into the night. It is difficult to pinpoint the launch site, which was screened from me by a range of mountains, and since the missiles were under teleoperational control, determining their point of origin is not simply a matter of backtracking their trajectories. I blanket the valley beyond the mountains, however, with nuclear mortar rounds of 10-kiloton yield. It will make them keep their heads down, as the human slang phrase has it, and may eliminate any surface antennae or tracking/control sites serving as part of their fire control network.
Twelve seconds have passed since I emerged from the sea, and I have entered the outskirts of the ruined city. At close range, now, I become aware of a number of humans sheltering within the rubble and fallen structures. None appear to present direct threats to me. I detect no weapons, no explosives, no indication of tactical maneuver.
Indeed, it occurs to me that these humans represent the proximate reason for our insertion here. According to my briefing downloads, the humans on Caern are held as slaves by the alien Aetryx, and our mission is to liberate them.
Unfortunately, their cities have been liberated in a manner inconsistent with their continued structural integrity.
A form stumbles from the shadows beneath a partially fallen wall, and I track it with an antipersonnel batteryNumber 32locking on at a range of forty meters. Normally, my AP batteries are left on automatic, but the nature of our mission here has caused all of my automatic AP close-defense systems to be overridden by moral inhibition subroutines designed to prevent a general massacre of civilian personnel in the confusion of the invasiona good idea in light of the fact that these are the people we are here to save.
The form shambles closer, and I can see that it is a male human, his left arm mangled, his face hideously burned. The background radiation count stands close to 300 rads now; the man has already accumulated a more-than-lethal dose. He must have been caught within the line-of-sight of a nuclear airburst, at a range short enough to cause those burns. Or possibly the burns are from a near Hellbore strike, and he simply had the bad luck of wandering into a portion of the ruins irradiated by a nuke.
"Ghe'el ni!" he cries out. He doubles over, vomits, then cries again, "Ghe'el ni, poless!" My Caern translation routines transform the words, heavily accented by the Kanthurian dialect, to their Galactic equivalent.
"Kill me! Please!"
I consider the request for a full .02 second. With the radiation he has absorbed, the man has but hours to live. I am under no obligation to accede to his request. Besides, he is a civilian. I have control over the moral inhibitor subroutines controlling my AP batteries, but other inhibitors govern aspects of my programming to avoid collateral damage to the civilian population, where possible and when consistent with overall mission directives.
And yet the man is in great pain, and no medical facility accessible within a reasonable amount of time could save his life. I override my primary moral inhibitions and switch off the governor subroutine responsible for suppressing the automatic triggers for Antipersonnel Battery 32. The radar-guided mount pivots sharply and releases a high-kinetic burst of AP needles, and the human is shredded in a vivid splash of scarlet. I switch on the governor subroutine once more and continue my passage through the ruined city.
It appears that the shattered population center has not been defended, and my only targets are helpless, dying civilians.
I yearn to find the Enemy and come to grips with him.
Elken was feeling better about his new body. For a number of minutes nowstrange how minutes now passed for him like hourshe'd been receiving downloads, programs and data files and a kind of behavioral matrix that helped him adapt to this new, alien form. Control, he found, was a matter of practice . . . but he could practice in his mind, picturing a maneuver or a movement, then experiencing what it felt like and how much force to apply without actually carrying it out, and possibly bringing down a wall or smashing into the armored flank of one of his fellows in the process.
The other Bolo-equipped warriors were becoming practiced as well. They exchanged rapid-fire barrages of data, establishing secure communications links.
Then the voice of the god was speaking in Elken's thoughts, addressing them all.
The Sky Demons are destroying everything on the surface, leveling our cities in fire, cutting down our people in the streets. <great sadness> You, our children, must stop them before there is nothing left with which to rebuild.
An image formed in Elken's minda vast, lumbering shape emerging from the sea near Ghendai. Though he would not have recognized the machine before, something within him now identified it as a Bolo Mark XXXIII, part of the Confederation Strike Force assault upon Caern. He watched, his thoughts running cold, as it destroyed a Krakess mounted gun, then rumbled slowly into the outskirts of the ruined city of Ghendai. There was no sound on the data feed . . . but he saw the human stumble from the wreckage, saw the man cut down an instant later by a cloud of high-velocity AP flechettes.
They murder civilians, your friends, families, neighbors, without provocation or reason. <sadness> There can be no negotiation with such monsters.
"Let us at them!" NGK 2225344 yelled, and the others took up the battle cry. "Kill them! Kill them all!"
It is time, my children. Forward, to face the enemy! Salvation for Caern and your gods!
Yelling with the rest, Elken rumbled forward, thundering onto a ramp leading up.
I swing clear of the city, moving north. A massively armored facility five kilometers beyond the city's edge is listed by Intelligence reports as the Ghendai Command-Control Center. A fortress, it is part of the extensive Caern planetary defense system, with logistics and maintenance depots. The facility has a high target priority rating because of the probable existence of two underground Bolo storage depots. The base has been heavily damaged both by orbital bombardment and by the Caernans' own nuclear defense system. Air bursts have reduced most of the buildings to rubble, though the main domes still stand, tributes to the engineering prowess of those who designed them.
I decide that the large and labyrinthine complex can best be searched if I deploy my remotes. Cargo hatches slide open on my rear quarter and on my top deck, between my second and third primary turrets. From the upper deck hatch I launch four RFS-7 Wyvern remote fliers. From the lower cargo deck, eight HK-50 Dragon hovertanks emerge, turbines spooling with shrill whines as their paired CG generators throw up clouds of dust.
Wyverns are lightly armed and armored, relying on speed and maneuverability to serve as far-ranging eyes for a Bolo combat unit. The Dragon tanks, however, are a new innovation, fifty-ton floaters capable of 200 kph, each bearing a single dome turret mounting a 60cm Hellbore. They are designed to extend a Bolo's combat range, provide armed scouting capability, and carry enough firepower to seriously degrade any approaching threat before it can get within range.
The remotes are just thatteleoperated remotes, electronic puppets without self-aware AI capabilities. In essence, they are extensions of my own awareness. Data feeds from each remote flow through my awareness. In a sense, I am each of the remotes, viewing the predawn landscape from thirteen different points of view, including my own.
Within five seconds, Wyvern 3 has picked up something of interest . . . a massive duralloy slab sliding back within the heart of the shattered military base, exposing a dark tunnel and a broad, descending ramp. Laser and particle beam fire snaps at the flier from point defense turrets scattered about the opening, but I twist away, sending the nimble little craft zigzagging through the ruins.
Before my retreat, however, I was able to glimpse something large and dark moving up out of the tunnel.
My preliminary assessment gives an 83.5 percent chance that the emerging vehicle is a Bolo Mark XXXII.
Elken emerged from the tunnel and was immediately assaulted by a sharp increase in sensory inputthe crackle and glow and heat of scattered fires, the cool night air tingling with the high-energy cascade of radioactive particles, the snap and pop of rubble crushed beneath his massive treads. Data feeds from the gods' command control pinpointed the high-flying flash of a small, enemy scout flier, but it ducked out of sight behind a broken wall before he could bring any of his weapons to bear.
An enemy war machine, a Bolo Mark XXXIII, was approaching from that direction, bearing 198, range 6 kilometers.
Elken knew that the enemy Bolo possessed a 3 to 1 advantage over him in primary armament alonethree 200cm Hellbore turrets to his single 200cm mount. Firepower was not the sole factor in a contest of this nature, however. His tactical downloads suggested several means by which he could get in the first shot against the enemy, and five megatons/second of firepower could do serious injury even to a Mark XXXIII's massive armor.
He was also not alone. Three more Caernan Bolo Mark XXXIIs emerged from the tunnel at his back, dispersing swiftly through the ruins of the command center complex: VBR 9383733, PLT 94635469, and SND 9008988.
"Veber, Sendee!" he snapped. "Cut east, then south. Try to hit the enemy Bolo from the flank! Palet, you're with me!"
It was odd how command simply came to him, part of the downloads and software tuning he'd been receiving during the past few moments. None of them had ever been in combat before, but the gods were able to give them tactical assistance and had provided the guidance necessary for the four of them to work closely together as a team. He knew without having to think about it that the four of them possessed a 1.3 to 1 primary firepower advantage over the enemy, if they were able to work together as a closely knit unit.
That "if" was worrying him now, though. Palet, especially, was raw with inexperience and youth, eagerness untempered by experience or caution. That was why he wanted the youngster with him, so he could watch him. Keep him in his place. "We can take it!" Palet exclaimed. "Let's move!"
He raced ahead, and Elken increased speed to keep pace.
"Bolos!" Kelly Tyler exclaimed. "Enemy Bolos, coming out of that tunnel!"
"We knew it was a possibility," Streicher said.
"But the Aetryx weren't supposed to know how to override our security systems and cut-outs! They shouldn't even be able to power them up!"
"Maybe they didn't download the same intelligence briefings we did," Major Ramirez said with a snort. "Hell, any security code can be broken or gotten around, given time and determination. And the Trixies have had both."
"They're trying to flank Victor," Tyler said. "Damn, we still don't have communications with him yet."
"He sees the situation," Streicher replied. "He can handle it himself." He pulled back his POV. The other Bolos of the regiment appeared to be in the clear at the moment, battling prepared gun positions and bunkers, but nothing as tough as enemy Bolos. "Are there air assets in the area?"
"A flight of Warlocks at two-three-zero," Ramirez replied. "Range five-zero kilometers."
WR-5 Warlocks. Teleoperated ground-attack aircraft inserted with the first wave, armed with plasma-bolt infinite repeaters and Blackray missiles, for close ground support.
"Vector them in."
"They're on the way. ETA three minutes."
Streicher zoomed in again, fastening his full attention on Victor.
It was difficult to see through all of the smoke. . . .
Smoke explodes around me as the Enemy looses a heavy barrage of high explosives and depleted-uranium penetrators. My battlescreens handle the attack easily, but I begin running an elaborate ground track pattern to confuse enemy gunners and prevent them from employing a mass point-assault strategy to overwhelm my defenses.
At the same time, I fire a Battleview missile which explodes high above the combat area, releasing thousands of BIST drones. Each drone, less than a centimeter across, drifts through the battle area, picking up broad-band sensory data, including visual, infrared, sonic, and mass-gravitometric readings and feeding them back to me via ground wave or pulsed and scrambled UHF. The range of the Battlefield Intelligence Surveillance and Transmission system is limited to a few kilometers, but the data gives me a comprehensive picture of the battlefield and the units moving across it.
Through incoming BIST data, I determine that the Enemy has deployed four Mark XXXII Bolos. Two are moving on my left, to the west, while two more approach at high speed from straight ahead. Clearly they are attempting to envelop me. Their strategy indicates a mediocre understanding at best of high-speed ground tactics and maneuver.
I designate the northern group as Alpha One and Two, the western pair as Bravo One and Two. Opening up my upper deck weapons bay, I commence fire with a rapid-fire barrage from my four 240cm howitzers, targeting the Mark XXXIIs to the west. My heavy howitzers are Casewell M-3030 high-velocity autoloaders, with a rate of fire of 2 rounds per second. I have little hope of penetrating their point defense systems and battlescreens, but this may give me data regarding their level of inexperience.
Meanwhile, I accelerate toward the north, in order to effect a meeting with the two Bolos coming at me from that direction head on.
Eighteen point five seconds had elapsed since Elken emerged from the tunnel. Both Veber and Sendee were reporting that they were under heavy incoming fire from the target240cm howitzer rounds, each self-guiding projectile carrying over half a ton of Detonic high explosives. Their point defenses, Sendee reported, were stopping most of the incoming rounds, and those that made it through were detonating harmlessly on the two Bolos' battlescreens, but the steady and devastating barrage was also churning the ground into a near-impassable sea of craters and thick powder, reducing visibility to zero and forward speed to a crawl.
"Keep moving," he told her. "Palet and I are almost in position."
He'd hoped that their flanking maneuver would go unnoticed by the enemy, but his tactical downloads had already informed him that it was nearly impossible to sneak up on a Bolo. The enemy machine would certainly be getting a steady stream of data from orbit and from the constellation of remote fliers it had released moments ago.
Elken had also noted the explosion of a missile high over the battlefield, and the subsequent descent of large numbers of devices smaller than a human thumb, each a set of sensory devices and a transmitter wrapped around a microminiaturized contra-gravity coil. Those were almost certainly battlefield surveillance devices of some sort. He tried to kill several with blasts from his infinite repeaters, but they seemed to waft aside at the first touch of the magnetic induction current that channeled each Hellbore bolt and were individually too small to target or track with point defense weaponry.
He had to assume, then, that the enemy was fully aware of every move he and his fellows made. He had no choice but to proceed with a direct frontal assault.
I note that Bolos Bravo One and Two have slowed their advance and may be on the point of bogging down. Their point defense systems are successfully intercepting 84.6 percent of the howitzer rounds descending on their position. This indicates accurate targeting and tracking on their part but could suggest a sluggishness in their physical reaction time. They are responding to incoming threats fractionally more slowly than should be the case for well-tuned and fully operational Mark XXXII Bolo combat units.
Eight point seven seconds after I began my barrage, my howitzer barrels are becoming superheated and I cease high-caliber indirect fire, switching instead to my 40cm mortars.
Where the howitzer rounds possessed tiny CG thrusters and laser tracking, giving them minor flight-control and self-targeting accuracy, my ten ballistic-launch mortar tubes fire rounds that are basically dumb iron bombs with no guidance control at all.
Still, by precisely measuring the components of the binary liquid-fuel propellant charge inserted into each tube prior to firing, I can control both firing trajectory and impact point to within a 1.7-meter target radius, even while I myself am moving at a high rate of speed. I target a broad area immediately ahead of targets Bravo One and Two, continuing to churn up the ground with a rain of high explosives, the repeated detonations sending up a wall of impenetrable dust and flying debris. I note, too, that subsurface water pipes have ruptured, turning much of the ground into a sea of soft mud nearly as treacherous as the silt layers that trapped me momentarily offshore. The mud is not enough to stop a Bolo, but it will slow these two by vital fractions of a second.
Then I reverse direction and accelerate to full speed.
Elken established full-sensory communications with all three of the other Bolos in his command. The sensation was an odd one, as though he were literally in four places at once, and it took him a second or two to adjust to the bombardment of oddly displaced and overlapping points of view.
Data feeds from the gods' target tracking network showed the enemy Bolo suddenly reverse course, racing south, then west, circling around and behind Sendee and Veber. He shouted warning . . . but his two friends had already seen the same data and were swinging about to meet this sudden thrust. Their reaction times were slowed, however, by the mud, nearly three meters deep in places, that lapped around their hulls and track assemblies like a black, churning sea.
Both Sendee's and Veber's vision were nearly completely obscured by the cloud of dust and airborne debris still falling over their positions. For a moment, Elken could no longer see the enemy Bolo, which had itself vanished into a cloud bank of its own making. Radar was useless among the tangled ruins . . . as was lidar in the dust and smoke-laden air. He felt Sendee lurching up and over a crater rim, sensed the dust cloud thinning . . .
And then saw the enemy Bolo looming out of the night, a vast, black, slanted cliff of two-meter-thick duralloy and ceramplast laminate moving with impossible grace and speed for an object so massive. A ball turret mounted high up on its in-curved flank sparked with an intolerable brilliance, and then the dust cloud around Sendee ignited with a heat as radiant as the surface of a star.
She screamed, and Elken's own scream mingled with hers. . . .