The Greater Machine

Bolos 06 – Cold Steel

(2002)*

J. Steven York & Dean Wesley Smith

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Prologue

It wasn’t anywhere you went for a vacation. Thule’s eccentric orbit hinted the planet was not native to its sun, but had been captured from a passing star. That same orbit made for an agonizingly hot, wet, and short summer followed by a winter where a good day was merely unbearable. Both seasons shared only one thing: storms featuring winds over 100 KPH. To which was added the joy of a thin crust and constant volcanic activity.

The star system was crowded with debris; Thule itself had seventeen moons and the beginnings of at least one ring. It was generally a good place to avoid when there were so many more hospitable worlds to colonize. But that wasn’t an option. Thule was unique for more than being the virtual poster world for being barely habitable. Wherever the planet originated, it had gathered into itself the largest concentration of the rare earth element saganium ever found by humans among the over 40,000 explored worlds—saganium was the vital trace ingredient in a newly developed and amazingly resistant duralloy armor. With the Deng Incursion reaching its destructive climax, mining colonies were en route before the survey team’s preliminary report was even finished printing out. There were just a few details they had missed.

Chapter One

For the moment it wasn’t pouring rain. Jennifer Harom dropped off the last rung of the ladder onto the damp sand and stretched, glad to be out of the massive pulverizer that towered fifty meters into the air above her. Her overalls were damp from the sweat and the light breeze felt good against her skin, cooling her and clearing her head. The jungle greenery pulped by the big machine had a chlorophyll and vinegar smell, like a Caesar salad.

The ground under her feet shook as the grinder tore into the earth, ultrasonic cannon aimed downward, tearing sand and gravel apart at a molecular level, turning it into the uniform, black ore-sand that crunched under her boots. Despite the violence and power of the pulverizer, active noise dampeners shielded the machine from its own power, reducing the sound to a low rumble, and incidentally keeping the crew from going deaf. She could have even heard the noises from the jungle around her, if the machine hadn’t frightened away every animal within five kilometers.

Confident that she was safe from the local predators, she scrambled up a nearby bank and looked back at the big machine, floating on its contra-gravs a few meters above the ground, a duralloy thundercloud lost down from heaven and pretty damned pissed about it. Behind it a two-hundred-meter swath of freshly created ore-sand stretched back up the valley, waiting for the processing machines that followed a kilometer behind. Keeping the beast running, keeping it from ripping itself apart, was a big job, but her three co-workers were more than capable of covering for her while she got a little fresh air. Getting out of the control cabin in the middle of a shift was against the rules, especially while the grinder was in operation, but they all did it. Staying cramped into that small control cabin for ten hours straight would drive anyone nuts. Besides, who cared as long as the pulverizer kept tearing up the ground on this godforsaken planet.

She stepped toward the edge of the jungle. The wide-leafed plants and tall trees towered over her like a wall. At the moment the grinder was tearing a wide path up a sandbar beside a small river. When they reached the end of the valley they would turn around and come back down, cutting another swath beside the one they were working on now, passing the processing machines somewhere along the way. The pulverizer’s downward-pointing sound cannon dug the ground to a depth of twenty meters and could chew up rocks as if they were cotton candy.

Eventually all the jungle would be gone from this valley as they mined the saganium, but that would take at least a year and she planned on being gone, headed back into civilized space, long before then. Ten years from now this valley would be twice as deep and wide as it was now, a scar big enough to see from orbit. There were ten colonies and more than double that number of mining sites spread around the planet. This planet, with its smells and heat was barely worth inhabiting now. She had no doubt that in ten years the place would be nothing more than a large pile of rock orbiting a weak sun.

She dropped down onto the ground and rested her back against a boulder. As the machine slowly moved away from her, the Caesar salad smell was already fading, replaced by a stench like mildew, old socks and rotting garbage. Now, after two weeks, she was starting to get used to the smells of this ugly planet. Not all the way yet, but enough that they didn’t make her choke anymore. It was ironic that the only way to get a good smell out of the jungle was to blast it to hell, and even that didn’t last.

She took a deep breath and let the solidness of the ground ease the tension of a long morning inside the pulverizer. She would take a few minutes, then get back to work. They were pushing the grinder as fast as it would go, and she had every intention of getting the bonus promised them if they made the cliff at the head of the valley in two weeks. The more money she made, the quicker she could head out of here, get

back to school, finish the degree in architecture. Then all this labor would just become a bad memory, laughed at over drinks and a good meal.

Suddenly the smell of rot engulfed her even more strongly, and a branch cracked just behind her.

“What—?”

She sprang to her feet and spun around.

For a moment her mind didn’t register what she was seeing. Along the edge of the jungle were at least twenty massive alien creatures. For a moment she thought that they were predators of some kind, that she’d been wrong about the sound scaring them away. The things were vaguely humanoid, small heads mounted on massive, fur-covered bodies. The fur was black and scattered with bold, irregular white spots. The things hunched slightly as they spotted her, their heads shifting nervously as they looked at her, first with one side-mounted eye, then the other, like massive birds. The lips on their wide mouths looked hard, beaklike, adding to the impression that these things were somehow in the bird family.

At first, she didn’t realize they wore clothes, their black loincloths and harnesses blended so well with their fur. It was only when she saw the primitive hand weapons, curved knives, long blades mounted on shafts to create something like a cross between a spear and a broadsword, that she was sure she was dealing with intelligent creatures. The biggest of them also carried a long, heavy-looking, leather bag over his shoulder, though he lacked the spear/sword that the others carried.

Natives? The damned survey hadn’t said anything about natives.She tried to remember something, anything that she’d been taught about first contact in school, but it was all gone, vanished down the same mental sinkhole as hyperspatial geometry and most of her Earth history. She held up her hands, trying to indicate she was unarmed. “Where did you come from?” she asked, managing to choke down the fear. That was stupid. Like they could understand her. Why had she left her side arm back in the pulverizer? It was regulation that she always carry it, just as it was regulation that they stay inside their machine for the entire shift. But there weren’t supposed to be any aliens on this planet, especially aliens as big as these beasts.

The creature closest to her just turned its head from side to side, its birdlike black eyes staring down at her with great intensity, even if she couldn’t read the emotion behind it. The creature showed no sign that it understood her. Of course, it wouldn’t.

She eased a step back, trying not to move too suddenly. The smallest of the creatures, still a good three heads taller than she was, stepped forward, lowered his spear-weapon, and casually jabbed it at her. She cursed and jumped back, feeling the dull impact of the weapon against her side, just below the rib cage.

She cursed again, more angry than afraid. Her side hurt, and without thinking she touched herself, feeling something hot and wet on her fingers. She looked at her bloody fingers in shock. “You cut me, you bastards!”

The alien watched her intently, still utterly unreadable to her. Then it made a noise, a hissy, rasping noise, punctuated by clicks of those hard lips. It was talking.

The others joined in, all chattering at once.

She knew without a doubt she was going to have to make a break for it, and while they were talking

seemed as good a time as any. She just hoped the others up in the grinder control cabin could see what was happening out here and have the door open when she came up the ladder.

She bolted, skittering back down the slope toward the waiting ladder. After twenty steps, she dared to glance back, and was surprised to see that the aliens weren’t following. Instead, the big one had lowered his bag to the ground, and the others gathered around as he opened it and pulled out a large, cylindrical object made of metal. She had no idea what the object was, only that it clearly hadn’t been made by a bunch of savages in loincloths. She stopped and clutched her injured side, trying to figure out what they were doing.

The big creature hoisted the cylinder up onto his shoulder, one eye pressing awkwardly against a rearward-facing eyepiece that seemed totally out of position for its anatomy. Then he turned toward the pulverizer. The other natives chattered excitedly.

If she didn’t know any better, she’d think it was some kind of energy weapon. But that couldn’t be. The rest of these creatures looked primitive, and none of them were carrying anything but swords and knives. Maybe they’d just found the weapon somehow, didn’t even know what it did. Maybe they just wanted to see the pretty colors in the sighting system.

“Hey!” she shouted, stepping back slowly. “Don’t be aiming that thing at my machine!”

The small alien barked something. From the tone, it might have been an expletive, then started moving towards her, stafflike sword raised. The big one snapped something else at the little one, but was ignored.

The large alien again lifted the energy weapon. For a moment she hesitated between running and trying to watch. Then it was decided for her. The flash nearly blinded her.

She felt the shock wave in her rib cage and staggered back. It was a plasma cannon.

The small alien paused, looking, as she was, at the pulverizer.

The cannon had been powerful, but the big mining machine was built to take punishment—Then she saw the smoke coming from the emitters over the sonic cannon. They’d taken out the active noise cancellation. She felt it first through her feet, like a pipe organ hitting a low note, building in intensity. Instinctively she covered her ears, knowing how little good it would do. The pulverizer was shaking now, ripples running through its metal sides. Shut down, shut down! What was wrong with her crew?

Then she saw someone on one of the catwalks near the control room. She squinted against the sky. Not one of her people. Another alien, and it carried something in one hand. It tossed the object down to the others. It was round. It bounced in the sand and rolled to a stop at the big one’s taloned feet.

It was a head. She caught a glimpse of Vanderhaven’s blonde hair, and felt her last meal fighting to come back up.

Then the sound came, full blown, like needles in her eardrums, distracting her even from the horror of what she had just seen. She fell to her knees in pain.

The pulverizer was tearing itself apart from the inside, shedding hull plating and external fittings in a gentle rain as it continued its blind way down the valley. The aliens watched, seemingly unbothered by the sound. The big one raised the weapon again, aiming at the midsection where the power core now stood

revealed by peeling hull. She couldn’t believe they knew what they were doing, but they clearly did.

He fired again. The power core exploded, not in a single blast, but like a string of huge firecrackers angling down through the hull toward the sonic cannon. She watched the machine, her friends, and every hope she had of earning her way off this rock, plow into the riverbank, sending up a shower of sand, smaller explosions sending shudders through its flame-engulfed hull.

Her friends were dead, and if she didn’t run, she was going to be as well. While the aliens were still occupied watching the machine burn, she bolted, staggering as she slipped in the loose sand.

She never saw how the small one noticed her, never heard him as he made pursuit. She didn’t even know the alien was there until the talons closed around the back of her neck, smashing her face down into the ore-sand.

She struggled weakly, called out, barely able to hear her own voice. The creature rolled her over effortlessly, the point of the alien’s blade centimeters from her face.

She fought, but the talons on the creature’s feet held her while it reached down to grab her hair and yank it back hard.

Her hearing started to come back, just in time as the alien screamed and flashed toward her neck. And this time—this time she understood the alien’s meaning completely.

Victory.

Tyrus Ogden stood on a catwalk that crossed the roof of the vast vehicle hangar. On the floor below, a space big enough to park a Concordiat cruiser of the line with room to spare, a half dozen huge mining machines were being assembled or repaired. Voices echoed through the vast space, sometimes shouted instructions, sometimes, eerily, a whisper relayed, as though by some acoustic wormhole, from a hundred meters away. Power tools chattered, buzzed, and roared. Brilliant flashes from a dozen different exotic welding methods cast colorful shadows on the walls. The place smelled of ozone, hot metal, machine lubricant, and just a little of sweat.

For Tyrus it should have been just another job. It could have been any world, literally. Big as the building was, it was a standard prefab that he’d seen on a dozen planets. But he hadn’t asked to come here, hadn’t planned to drag his family to this jungle hellhole of a mining colony. And most of all, he hadn’t planned on the machine whose superstructure towered up from the floor, ending only a few meters below the catwalk. It was the machine beneath his feet that made the job different. He looked down at the gleaming durachrome hull, the ranks of two-meter-wide treads, the main turrets, each bigger than any house he’d ever lived in.

“Mr. Ogden,” a man’s voice, high and nasal, called from behind him.

Tyrus turned at the sound of dress shoes clattering on metal grate. The man walking towards him was thin, dark, average height, dressed in an executive suit wholly inappropriate to the environment. Tyrus recognized him from previous holo conversations. “Dyson, isn’t it?”

Dyson shoved out his hand, and Tyrus shook it without enthusiasm. Company man.

“I see you’re settling right in.” He made a sweeping gesture to the machine below. “Like our new mining

machine?”

“It’s a Bolo, Dyson.” He looked down, but not at the machine. “You shouldn’t be wearing shoes like that up here. You slip, it’s a long way down.”

Dyson looked nervously down at his own feet. “I didn’t know.”

“I’m sure.”

Dyson stepped cautiously up to the railing and looked over. “I do know about that, though. I signed the purchase order. It’s a Prescott 4800 surface excavator, the first of its kind.”

“It’s a Bolo, Dyson.”

Dyson looked uncomfortable. “Well—it’s that too. A converted Bolo actually, an old Mark XX … I think, maybe a XXI. I don’t know about those things. I hear Prescott found a whole regiment of them rusting in a scrap yard on some moon somewhere.”

Tyrus looked at the shining sweep of the hull and felt his mind slipping back to another place and time, a place of fire, a time of war. “Bolos don’t rust. After a few centuries on a planet like this, they might develop a surface patina. But they don’t rust, and they don’t bleed, and they don’t ever, ever die.”

“Excuse me?”

He looked at Dyson. “That’s why they diverted me here, isn’t it? Why they dragged me and my family into what amounts to a combat zone. I’ve had combat experience.”

Dyson nodded. “This situation has developed very quickly and unexpectedly. The 4800’s were already ordered as part of a trial program. You were already in the sector. You have the skills we needed. And you—know about Bolos.”

“I’ve fought on the same side as Bolos, Dyson. That’s a whole different thing. Maybe Bolo commanders are comfortable with those things, but I was infantry, and I never served with a man who wasn’t rattled by them, who didn’t spend as much time looking over his shoulder at his own Bolos as he did looking at the enemy line. What in heaven’s name made you want to convert one into a blasted tractor ?”

Dyson was starting to look annoyed. “I told you, we bought it, we didn’t think it up. You’ve heard the losses we’ve experienced here. Three machines just last month. Out away from the colonies and the fixed defenses, they’re essentially vulnerable against even light weapons. We’ve taken to issuing pulse rifles to all our crews, welded some makeshift armor to the control cabs, but the losses continue. These aliens—natives—whatever they are, somehow didn’t show up on our surveys, so we never imagined it would be an issue. But this,” he waved at the Bolo again, “was marketed as a solution for mining on ‘hostile worlds.’ They simply don’t get much more hostile than this. The rest of our machines are vulnerable, but the Prescott 4800—”

“The Bolo.”

“Whatever … It can take the kind of attacks we’ve been experiencing. We can send it into the most isolated and dangerous areas with impunity. They won’t be able to hurt it, and maybe we can learn something. Learn how to protect the rest of our equipment.”

Tyrus cursed under his breath. “You have no idea of the trouble you’ve caused me personally, bringing me here. I suppose you want me to work this beast into the maintenance rotation here?”

Dyson looked away. “Actually, we already have a pretty good maintenance chief at the colony. We were hoping that you’d run the 4800 for us.”

Tyrus blinked his eyes in disbelief. “You want me to command a Bolo?”

Whitestar shifted the hand-forged blade in his hand, feeling the comfortable way his clawlike fingers held the grip, the natural way that the handle cradled against the long bones of his hand. It was a good blade, good balance, a weapon he understood, one that became an extension of his arm. The knife pleased him, made him glad to be alive. The weapons provided by the Ones Above were powerful, but clumsy and unnatural. Only with a blade in his hand did he feel like a fresh-hatched warrior again.

The afternoon breeze ruffled his fur and carried the smell of wood smoke from a nearby burrow. He was dimly aware of his fellow clansmen gathering around the circle, clicking their jaws in rhythm, the ancient ceremony of challenge. Some part of his mind dimly registered all this, cataloged it, filtered it for any undetected threat, but his focus, his combat-eye , was entirely on the smaller Tersae across the circle. His name was Warrior Twostone, and he was trying with all his might to kill Whitestar, his clan-lord.

Twostone lunged, his long, curved blade flashing in the dappled sunlight that filtered through the trees.

Agile for his greater size, Whitestar turned away from the thrust, hooked Twostone’s blade with his own and pulled, throwing the warrior off balance. He brought his foot around and kicked Twostone in the back, his talons drawing blood.

Twostone staggered for a moment, but quickly caught himself, turning, knife held high in a gesture of defiance. He turned his head at right angles to Whitestar, focusing one eye on the lord, and a sound came from his throat, a low chattering that in the Tersae was an expression of amusement. In context it was a sign of continued calm and reason, despite his wounds. The Tersae blood ran hot. A warrior could too easily lose themselves in that heat, forget the mission, forget their clan-brothers, and waste their lives on the battlefield. A good warrior knew how to maintain the balance, even when their own blood painted the enemy’s blade.

You are truly a fine warrior, Twostone. It will be a shame to lose you.

The two circled, each looking for some weakness in their opponent. Finally, Whitestar simply grew tired of looking. He feinted an attack causing Twostone to step backwards, then again, and again, never letting the warrior find balance, focusing his attention on Whitestar’s blade. Then Whitestar struck, not with his blade, but with a flying kick, his talons digging into Twostone’s blade-arm, pushing it aside. He squeezed , feeling skin tear beneath his claws, until the blade clattered to the forest floor, then released, twisted in midair to strike with his blade, bringing it against Twostone’s throat. He held the blade there and he grabbed Twostone’s arm and spun him around.

Twostone ended up with his back against Whitestar’s left shoulder, the knife tight against his skin. “My life is my lord’s,” he gasped, “my blood is my lord’s. Take them, in the name of the Ones Above.”

“I take your life,” responded Whitestar, “I take your blood. I give you back your blood. I give you back your life, Sacred Warrior Twostone, to serve the Ones Above.” He lowered the knife, stepped in front of Twostone, and held it across his own chest in salute.

Twostone bowed, folding his arms behind his back like a new hatchling, a gesture of extreme supplication and humility. “How may my unworthy life serve the Ones Above?”

“Rise, Twostone. You have been bested by your lord, but you fought honorably, and well. You are worthy. Tonight we strike the devils in their nests. Tonight you will carry the Fist of the Ones Above. We will barter your life for a thousand and twenty-four of the enemy’s lives.”

Twostone nodded his head sharply in gratitude.

“Go to your fire, and we will speak later.” He turned to the circle of observers. “Make way for the Sacred Warrior!” The circle parted and Twostone stepped through, and with that, the ceremony was ended. The crowd immediately began to disperse. A few looked disappointed that no more blood had been spilled, a few others paused to compliment Whitestar’s skill and prowess.

Only old Scarbeak lingered at his side as Whitestar headed back to the Lord’s Burrow. “You should take a new name, my lord. ‘Bloodtalon’ would suit you well.”

“Such a name would only fire the young warriors, old one. I fight too many challenges as it is. Tonight our Great War begins. I should be reviewing our plans, not holding a knife to my own warrior’s throat.”

“So speaks the lord. I forgot for a moment the recent challenge of your eldest hatchling. It was thoughtless of me. It pains one to take blood from one’s own brood, or one’s own clan.”

Whitestar dismissed him with a click of his jaw. “You meant only to compliment me, old one. I did what had to be done, and with luck, Blackspike will yet recover and take my place as lord of the clan.”

They walked past the stream, where young females soaked weaver-vines and beat them between rocks to extract the useful fibers. A few young males crouched, watching them cautiously from a distance.

“You don’t know these young ones, elder. The fire burns strong in them. They have no wisdom at the fight.” He was not speaking of his son, but he could have been.

“Wisdom comes with age.”

“Then it is not a lord’s destiny to be wise, elder. One day I will be too slow at a challenge, and—” he hissed and made the motion of a slicing blade with his hand—“that will be the end of me.”

“Wisdom is relative, lord. You are wise enough for what you do.”

“And you, elder? Is the Fist of the Ones Above ready?”

“The sacred connections are made, the sacred modules all show the light-of-function. The Ones Above promise that it will cut deep into the belly of the human devils. The explosion should be spectacular.”

“Let’s hope so, Scarbeak. Twostone is a fine warrior. I wouldn’t like to waste his life on a fool’s mission.”

The first sign of real trouble came when the hangar lights flickered, followed by the sound of a distant boom. Tyrus looked up from where he was crouched, inspecting one of the Bolo’s two-meter-wide

treads, and wondered if the area was prone to thunderstorms. At the same moment, a quiver seemed to go through the huge machine, as though all of its secondary systems were being cycled through their test cycles at once.

Tyrus shook his head and went back to his inspection, knowing as he did that it was pointless make-work. It was late. He should be home, helping the boys unpack. Fact was, he didn’t want to see Lee, and he strongly suspected that she didn’t want to see him. They’d had a fight that afternoon. She’d never wanted him to take the transfer to the Taft Colonies, even though it was the only way to keep his job with the company. When they were diverted to mining colonies on Thule, she’d blamed him. Taft at least had alien ruins for her to explore, some chance for her to continue her often-interrupted career as an archeologist. Taft had an established family environment for the kids. Thule was one step up from a shanty camp, a sprawling, walled, cluster of prefabs, brothels and miner bars. A cold feeling of dread knotted in his gut. He was going to lose them. He knew it.

The lights flickered again. More thunder. Or something.

“Unit DRK moving to status two alert mode. Awaiting instructions.”

Tyrus looked up and blinked. A hundred meters away, a small crew was overhauling a sonic pulverizer cannon. Nobody else was close. Another one of those acoustic tricks the hangar was famous for?

“Unit DRK awaiting instructions.”

The sound seemed almost to be coming from inside his head. Beamed sonics? He looked at the gleaming curve of the Bolo’s hull, and spotted an emitter rod aimed straight at him. He shivered, somehow suddenly feeling like a rabbit in the hunter’s crosshairs. “You can talk?” Of course it could talk. All Bolos could. But the book said this one had been lobotomized or something, placed into a standby mode that made it as passive and stupid as a ground-car. There were recorded voice responses, but it certainly shouldn’t have been initiating speech.

“You are Tyrus Ogden. I am keyed to respond to your biometric profile. Awaiting orders, commander.”

He frowned. “I’m not your commander, I’m your operator. You’re a mining machine, a tractor.”

“I am Bolo, Mark XXIV of the line, activated 2970 at the Fifield Armorworks, New Prescott Colony. My hull designation is DRK. I am commonly addressed by my commanding officers as ‘Dirk.’”

More thunder. The overhaul crew stopped their work and began to talk rapidly among themselves. “Go back to sleep, Dirk.”

“I cannot. Threat level is increasing. Moving to status one alert mode. Full Combat Reflex Mode is now on standby.”

He dropped his tools and stood. “What threat? The thunder?” This was just the sort of thing he was afraid of. You can’t make a house pet out of a trained attack dog, and you can’t turn a Bolo into a mining machine. This thing could go on a rampage if he didn’t get it calmed down. “It’s just thunder. Natural, atmospheric, electrical discharges. It’s no threat to us.”

On the hull behind him the pilot’s hatch, as thick and heavy as a vault door, swung smoothly open with a whir. “Commander, I suggest you enter the control room and prepare for combat.”

“It’s thunder , I tell you. Power down now! That’s an order!”

“Negative.”

Tyrus cursed. He had to talk to Dyson. Maybe he had an override code or something that would shut this beast down. He could use his wristcom, but the Bolo would be listening, and somehow, that didn’t seem like a good idea. He was suddenly aware that he was standing on the tracks. If the machine decided to move, he could be pulped before he had time to scream.

He scrambled down from the side of the mining machine and headed toward the side door of the maintenance area, wiping grease off his hands as he ran. He reached the shops at the edge of the hangar just as an explosion rocked the far end of the hangar. Mechanics and operators were suddenly shouting, running everywhere.

“Full Combat Reflex Mode activat—” the Bolo’s beamed voice was suddenly cut off. His first instinct was that the Bolo had gone rogue and fired off one of its weapons. But the big machine seemed inert, and he couldn’t imagine that they’d left it with functional weapons. He realized he could still hear distant gunfire and explosions. They were under attack! The aliens he’d been told about must have somehow taken out the colony defenses without a shot, without setting off the general alarm. But how could a bunch of jungle savages know how to sabotage screen generators and autoturrets?

He spotted a rack of pulse rifles on an office wall and grabbed one of them. Just in time, as a furry, goggle-eyed humanoid giant rounded the corner and swung some kind of sword at him. Instinctively he swung the barrel around, his finger squeezing on the trigger into full auto mode. The first shot took the sword weapon off at the handle. The second tore a hunk out of the side of the alien’s neck, the third ripped a hole in its right shoulder, sending a spray of something dark, wet, and hot across his face.

It fell, but two more appeared behind it shouting and clicking loudly. He took them down almost as easily as the first.

Another one. This one had something small and metal held awkwardly in its hand. A violet laser flash sent him scrambling behind a desk. A hole appeared in the plastic kick panel a few inches from his head, as the alien fired blindly.

Tyrus tightened his grip on the rifle, tried to imagine where the alien might have gone since he last saw it, and sprang from behind the desk already firing. The alien was standing no more than a meter from him. They were both caught by surprise, but the alien was dead, his chest exploding like a ripe melon.

Tyrus retched at the smell of burned hair and sweet smell of roasted alien flesh. He spotted the hand weapon on the floor where the alien had dropped it. Hoping he didn’t accidentally activate it, he shoved the weapon in his pocket.

He put his back against the office wall, watching the door, and tried his wristcom. It didn’t work. Maybe they were jamming, or had disabled the relay towers. He had to figure some way to get home, defend the kids. His own ground-car was parked at the far end of the hangar, but he spotted a man-door in the office wall behind him that probably led outside. There might be company vehicles there that would respond to his employee unikey. He scooted to the door, opened it a crack to make sure things were clear, and stepped outside. What he saw nearly tore him apart.

The colony was located in a small valley, with the hangar on high ground at the south end. He could look down on at least half the structures there. Everywhere he looked there were flames, explosions, and laser

flashes.

He could see the defense turrets along the ridgelines surrounding the valley, all pointed outwards, intact, and inert. At the far end of the valley hundreds of white-on-black aliens boiled out of the jungle like ants. The family apartments were to his left, near the shuttle port. For a moment, he held out some hope. The buildings were still intact, away from the main thrust of the aliens’ charge. Then a plasma cannon began firing from a rooftop to the west, blasting the buildings one by one. Behind them, an atmospheric shuttle lifted off, slowly, as though it were heavily loaded. At least somebody was getting away. The shuttle might be able to make it to one of the other colonies. Maybe his kids were on it. Please.

He hoped they had gotten away, but he couldn’t take the chance. He had to find out for himself. He looked frantically around. A line of company utility vans were parked a dozen yards down the building. He could take one of them.

The missile streaked across his vision so quickly that he almost didn’t see it, and ripped into the side of the hanger next to the vans. The force of the explosion ripped outwards throwing the vans around like a child’s blocks, while leaving him relatively unscathed. He could see a line of aliens running up the hill towards him. He ducked back into the office.

“You need to return to my command compartment,” said the voice in his head. The Bolo was back. “My exact status is unknown, but I am unable to actively protect you at this time. You must return to me.”

The Bolo! If he could get the damned thing working, the small arms he’d seen wouldn’t touch it. He could make his way across the colony, rescue his wife and kids. If they were still alive. He ran back into the hanger, only to see dozens of aliens running through the hangar.

He lifted the rifle and started squeezing off shots, taking an extra instant each time to line up an alien and make the shot count. It felt more like murder than a battle. He’d fire and one alien would drop. He’d fire again and another alien would drop. Most of them had swords. He didn’t see any other advanced weapons, but they had to be out there somewhere.

“Quickly,” said the Bolo.

The aliens just kept coming as fast as Tyrus could shoot them, wave after wave. He moved slowly towards the Bolo, careful not to let the aliens sneak behind him. Then, abruptly, his rhythm was broken. There were no targets. He could hear them moving away.

Something was very wrong.

He stepped out from behind a welding machine onto the hangar floor. Twenty meters away, a metal cylinder sat on the floor, gleaming in the hangar’s still functional emergency lights. He’d never seen anything like it before, but he had a pretty good guess. Bomb.

He sprinted towards the Bolo. Halfway there he tossed down the rifle. He could see the Bolo ahead, an emergency hatch opening in its flank, down between two of the giant boogie wheels. He gave it his last burst of speed and dived for the opening.

The rest happened in slow motion, as the shock wave caught him and hurled him through the hatch.

He could see the bulkhead coming at him, every weld and bolt of it, in sickening detail, but he could do nothing to stop it.

There should have been an impact, but there was only nothing.

Chapter Two

It has been three minutes and sixteen seconds since I was ejected from the cargo bay of the Lexington. I will see combat sooner than I had ever expected. My commander and I, along with two other Bolos and their commanders were diverted from our original mission to the Tilla M outpost by a distress message from the recently established mining colonies on Thule. The settlements are under attack by a force or forces unknown. Due to the circumstances, we have been deployed from the Lexington in a non-optimal trajectory, while the ship hurriedly makes another jump with the rest of our unit to complete its original mission.

It is an exciting time. My first assignment was to a purely defensive post at the Depoe Shipyards, far from the lines of the Deng conflict, and while Tilla M has seen intermittent raids by well-armed pirates, any conflict would doubtless consisted of brief defense against space-based hit-and-run attacks. This is the kind of conflict for which I was designed and constructed, engaging a powerful enemy on a battlefield of planetary scope.

Our “hot” insertion and the limited intelligence available to us add to the challenge of the assignment, but I am unconcerned. I am unit VCK, a Bolo of the Line, Mark XXV, bearer of the proud tradition of the Dinochrome Brigade. I am proud be the first of our forces to land on Thule. I am confident that I will do my duty, and do it well.

It has been four minutes and three seconds since ejection. Broken transmissions indicate that any ship attempting to land may come under ground attack, therefore our individual assignment is to deploy and clear a landing zone. My commander will monitor the situation from my assault pod, which will wait in orbit, along with the other Bolos in their pods, and a trio of shuttles loaded with emergency gear. Instead of my usual deployment, I am strapped to a sandwiched pair of contra-grav cargo sleds and mats of ablative material forming a makeshift, but completely expendable, landing craft.

I fire the guidance thrusters on the cargo sleds, to roll my makeshift heat shield to face the atmosphere, and adjust the upper sleds contra-gravs to conserve power for the final braking. The contra-gravs on the lower sled are set to full output, as there will be no opportunity to utilize unused power later.

Five minutes and eighteen seconds since ejection. A faint vibration through my treads tells me that I am encountering the edge of Thule’s atmosphere. I take the opportunity to make a long-range scan of the planet below me. I immediately detect the various colony installations in the expected locations, but the central installation shows none of the energy output I would expect of a functioning colony. Instead, I detect only the heat of residual fires, plus a chemical signature consistent with large-scale combustion and the early decay stage of biological matter. The damage is even worse than we had been led to believe. I also detect flames and weapons signatures from the most northern colony. It too is under attack.

I adjust my trajectory to move my landing site as far north as possible. I maintain communications silence, but there are distress calls coming from the Rustenberg Colony on several bands, some live, some via automated beacon. I monitor, trying to get some sense of our enemy, but other than descriptions of large humanoids, there is little else of strategic value, intelligence about their mounted and airborne weapons platforms, descriptions of their armored and mechanized divisions.

I am entering the planet’s atmosphere now, and ionization is making my sensors unreliable. It must be, as I can detect none of the signatures I would associate with the enemy. I find no bases or roads, no radiation sources consistent with fusion power plants, no towns or bases, no armored columns or spaceports. The situation is most puzzling. It is almost as though the enemy does not exist.

The buffeting is quite heavy now. I am surrounded by an ionized curtain of superheated air, and flaming chunks of ablative mat are breaking off and flying past like fireworks. I must be putting on a spectacular show for anyone watching on the ground, but my signature will not be consistent with a Bolo assault pod. The enemy will doubtless hesitate before firing on me, consulting with their specialists to determine if I am an attack craft or a natural meteor. By the time they come to a decision, I should be safely near the ground.

Or not. I am emerging from the ionization blackout, and I detect, three—now five—now seven missile traces arching up from diverse points across the continent. They seem to be light nuclear interceptors, unlikely to do me serious damage, but they could destroy the contra-grav sled I need to make my landing. My first duty, however, is to secure the landing zone. I begin cycling my main Hellbores from launch point to launch point, targeting them with a multikiloton blast. Though I can detect no fixed installation at any of these points, someone there will pay the price for the folly of firing on a Bolo of the Dinochrome Brigade. I am hardly a defenseless drop ship.

There is a sudden lurch, and then I am in near freefall. The first sled has given out, either its power cells depleted, or damaged by a reentry burn-through. No matter. There is one last use I can make of it. I remotely fire the links holding the lower sled to the upper. My audio detectors pick up the rending of metal even in the thin air. Then the sled slides out from under me, a metal mattress the size of a schoolyard, its bottom charred and still glowing white hot in places. I transverse one of my secondary batteries, lock onto the sled, and fire a half-second pulse.

The sled explodes into flaming chunks just as the first missile closes on my position. I watch as the missile, and two of its companions, alter course to home in on the false target I have provided for them, their nuclear fireballs blossoming a safe kilometer above me. That still leaves four missiles closing on my position. I increase my battle screens to full power, and compute firing solutions for the remaining missiles. I begin to transverse my secondary batteries. I have four point three seven seconds until the first missile is in blast radius. Plenty of time.

Suddenly the missiles begin to take high-G evasive maneuvers. I detect a pattern to their movements, but this requires a critical one point-three seconds of observation and analysis. I am able to bring my batteries to bear on three of them. I begin a roll program, placing my own hull between the missile and the sled, selectively reinforce my battle screens, and shutter my more sensitive sensors against the blast.

The explosion rattles my structure, subjecting me to a momentary peak acceleration of 19 G’s. It is fortunate that my commander remained safely in orbit, but I am unharmed. The energy from the explosion sizzles against my battle screens, and in a moment I can feel the converted energy surging into my storage cells. There has been a one point two percent degradation of my upper

turret armor, but I am otherwise unharmed. The critical question now is, did the explosion damage the second contra-grav sled?

My visual sensors unshutter, and I see the horizon growing less curved by the second. I have been in freefall too long. Even with full sled function, I am in danger.

I tentatively apply power to the sled, alert for any problem, but the contra-gravs engage smoothly. I am slowing, but not quickly enough. I increase power to one hundred percent, then into overload, one hundred and ten, one hundred and twenty, one hundred and thirty.

The cells are draining at an alarming rate, and I am detecting an overheat condition in the contra-grav accelerator coils. The situation is critical, but there is little I can do. I must trust that the contra-grav sled is flawless in its manufacture and maintenance, that it was not damaged by the missile, reentry, or by the separation of the first-stage sled.

I take one last opportunity to do aerial deep scans with my sensors, focusing on the dead central colony, looking for any sign of my elusive enemy. I detect the remains of many ground vehicles, several shuttles trapped on the ground, large mining and construction machinery, and one other trace, an armored durachrome war hull—

Two point three four seconds to impact. I am still falling too fast. Below me, I see a green carpet of jungle canopy, a silver thread of river slicing through the trees. I retune my battle screens. In theory, they can absorb some of the kinetic energy of my landing, acting as a last-resort shock absorber, but to the best of my knowledge this has never been tested.

My last thought before I hit the ground is of those final sensor readings. No matter what happens, they give me hope. I do not know how, but the readings were unmistakable. There is already a Bolo on Thule.

Lord Whitestar moved through the night jungle by instinct, navigating by the smell of certain plants, by the echoes of his own footfalls off the trunks of trees, and the occasional flashes of starlight through the canopy above. The Ones Above had warned them that they must show no light to the sky above, no fire, no torch, as the devils would be watching. Even the wonderful weapons that the Ones Above had given them had to be taken into the nests for repair. The lights-of-function that showed when a given part was functional or should be replaced, even showing one of those to the sky could give them away.

He could hear quiet chants of victory all through the jungle, and he knew that chanting just like this spread through the jungle for several days’ walk, to wherever the men of his widely dispersed clan made camp. They had cut deep into the enemy’s vitals today, raided one of his nests, killed all his warriors, all his hatchlings.

Whitestar’s fur bristled with satisfaction and pride. The Ones Above would be pleased, and would favor their blessings on his clan above all others. It had been promised that, when the time came, they would be shown where even more powerful weapons were hidden, shown how to use the ones they had in even more deadly ways.

He stopped, taking a deep breath. He smelled her before he heard her voice. She carried the brooding smell, the smell of one caring for eggs. It made his blood burn, but did not excite him. Instead it brought out instinctive, protective urges. It made him want to kill the human devils even more, to sweep the world clean of them to protect his eggs. “Are you there, Whitestar?”

“This way,” he said. Her senses would be tuned for the eggs now, for the hatchlings. She could hear their cries of help across a raging river, or smell an illness before they would even feel it, but it made it more difficult to travel in the jungle at night.

She stepped closer, the smell of her stronger, the outline of her smaller form just visible in the starlight. “What are you doing here, Sweetwater? The eggs—”

“The second-wife warms them, my lord. As first-wife, it is my right to take a rest occasionally. I came looking for you.”

“I was returning to the nest.”

“Then I will follow you. I hear your victory was great today.”

Whitestar clicked his bill in affirmation, and returned to walking, slower this time so she could keep up.

“Then Twostone is dead?”

“He took the Fist of the Ones Above to a place where it would disable their defenses. Take away their machines. They are soft and weak. Not like us. By nightfall, we had returned them all to their foul maker. Twostone died well. He did not die for nothing.”

“Did he have to die at all, Whitestar?”

“Not this again, woman. The devils we have been raised to fight are finally here. This is the time of destiny. We are lucky to be alive to see it.”

“Your eldest hatchling is lucky to be alive to see it. I watched you from afar when you fought Twostone. You showed him mercy. Could you not do as much to your own hatchling, your eldest?”

“Blackspike would not yield, woman. He would have killed me. Only my skill saved me from killing him. I saved him from spilling his own blood in battle, like Twostone. I saved him to take my mantle as lord when I am gone.”

“He is hot-blooded, Whitestar. All the young ones are, as the old women say your generation is hotter blooded than your fathers. It is like a creeping madness.”

“It is our strength. It is what helps us kill the devil humans.” This was a very sore subject between them. The old women remembered too much, talked too much, caused too much trouble. Some days he thought he should just have his warriors kill them. But there was truth to it, especially among the highborn who were blessed with the teachings of the Ones Above. It was the duty of the lowborn fodder to spill their blood against the devils. It was the duty of the highborn not to die without using their teachings, and without passing those teachings on.

They had to deny the heat of their own blood. He stopped outside the nest and turned to her. “Have you placed the eggs in the blessing chamber yet?” The blessing chambers were among their most sacred artifacts. Each new clutch of eggs was to spend two days in its warm, shuttered interior. It was there that the blessing of the Ones Above was delivered onto the clan.

She hesitated. “No, my lord, I have not. The old women say that is where the blood of our males

becomes poisoned. The eggs are returned with tiny punctures in the skins. The old women say that is where it goes in, like venom from a sting-lizard’s tongue.”

“The old women make up stories to frighten the likes of you, first-wife. Forget what they tell you, and deliver our eggs for their blessing before it is too late.”

“I speak these things because the lord should know what the females think. It is not just the old women. They tire of seeing their family males driven to madness by the fire within. They tire of losing their mates, their sons and brothers to duels, to challenges, and now to war. They fear that we will only anger the devils and that they will come and kill us all.”

“If it’s the will of the Ones Above that we die in our war against the devils, then so be it. But we are taught that one clan will rise above the others and show the Ones Above where the human devils are weak, where they can most easily be destroyed. That is why the clans must not mingle, why we must be different of custom and of form, so that we may demonstrate which is best. And once that clan has the devils on the run, then the Ones Above will sweep down from the skies and finish the job. The clan that shows the way will be our clan, and honored will be our place in the heavens at the side of the Ones Above.”

“Who will be left to sit at their side, lord? You? Will your sons live to see that day? Remember that you have another one. Will you spill his blood too?”

“Is that what you really came to talk about? Sharpwing is barely out of the egg.”

“Sharpwing is old enough at least to think he can fight, and he is younger, his blood burns hotter yet than his brother’s. He is furious at what you have done. He longs to die for the Ones Above. I think he will challenge you. Perhaps soon.”

“Then I will do what I must do. Blackspike will heal. He must become lord of the clan, for the good of all. Sharpwing is my chick, but he is no leader. I will do what I must.”

There was silence for a time. “Do not kill Sharpwing, husband. If you kill him, Whitestar, I will never forgive you. You will still be lord, but I will be sure that your time is never happy again.”

Then she turned and left him alone in the darkness.

Alone with his own thoughts. “As though my time is happy now,” he said quietly.

Tyrus awoke in darkness, head pounding, his face against cold, smooth, metal.

“Remain still and silent.”

The words seemed to fill Tyrus Ogden’s head, making the pain even worse. It took him a moment to remember what had happened. The explosion, the massive maintenance building trembling and collapsing around him. He had tried to get in the Bolo. Had he made it? The agonizing voice in his head suggested that he had.

“Do you wish me to turn on the lights?”

“Please,” he whispered, knowing the Bolo would hear him. Then thinking about it, “dim lights.”

A faint, red light bathed the area. He was in some sort of narrow machine space. A drive shaft as big around as his body punched through the compartment. Behind him was the closed hatch. Ahead was a tube with a sloping ladder that led up into darkness. “Where am I?”

“My number two ventral maintenance access. My internal sensors are fully intact, and indicate that you have a mild concussion. I do not believe that you will die.”

“Thanks for that happy bit of news.” He reached up to feel the large knot on top of his head, and winced. It least he didn’t seem to be bleeding much. He tried to move his arm under his body to push himself up into a sitting position. He had to get to his wife and children, to make sure they were all right.

“If you must move,” the Bolo’s voice said, “do so quietly. The enemy is near, scanning the debris for survivors. There have been a number of patrols since the attack.”

“How long was I unconscious?”

“Twelve hours, fourteen minutes, and either nineteen or thirty-eight seconds, depending on your definition of conscious.”

Tyrus considered for a moment, and decided that lying on the floor for a while longer was a pretty damned good idea. He felt nauseous, weak, from even trying to move. “What am I supposed to call you?”

“I am Bolo Mark XXIV, designation DRK. I believe that my previous commanders used to refer to me as ‘Dirk.’”

He suddenly remembered that Dirk had already given his name, before the attack. He wondered how much damage the bump on the head had done, and why Dirk didn’t seem to remember it either.

“Okay, Dirk, I’m in pretty bad shape. How about you?”

“I have been seriously sabotaged in a means I do not yet understand. My weapons systems have largely been removed or disabled, my sensors and battle screens extensively modified from their original configurations, new equipment of unknown purpose welded to my hull, and most seriously, my psychotronics and memory have been seriously compromised. I attempted to engage Full Combat Reflex Mode during the attack, and internal feedback nearly destroyed my higher mental functions. It appears that I will require orders from a human commander before taking direct combat action.”

“They probably hardwired some sort of inhibitor into your combat reflex circuits. They were as worried about your going berserk as I was. Dirk, you haven’t exactly been sabotaged, though the word ‘butchery’ might apply. You’ve been turned into a mining machine.”

The machine was uncharacteristically silent for a time.

“That is illogical.”

“Damn straight, but they did it anyway.”

More silence.

“That at least clarifies my situation. It explains why my sensors have been modified to detect seismic disturbances and mineral concentrations rather than targeting data, why my screens have been optimized for low-velocity kinetic impacts, and why my combat communications array has been replaced with one for civilian wavelengths. I will need to analyze my new capabilities, and attempt to compensate for my loss of combat readiness.”

“You mean, you think you can still fight?”

“I can move. I have awareness. I have power. With your help, I will fight to the best of my capabilities.”

“Listen, Dirk, I’d love to help out and all, but my soldiering days are over. I just want to find my family.”

“Your family were in the colony outside the hangar?”

“Yes.”

“Then they are no longer there, or they are dead. I cannot determine which.”

That was the thing he’d been trying not to think about. He vaguely remembered seeing the colony in flames, the apartments exploding. But there could be survivors out there somewhere, and he’d seen an air shuttle getting away. There was hope. There had to be hope. There were so many things he had yet to say. He had to apologize for bringing them to this place, for failing to have the simple courage to say “no” to his superiors when the time was right. The last time with his wife, they had been fighting. It couldn’t end like that.

There had to be hope.

Besides, this crippled Bolo freely admitted that its sensors weren’t working right. “Dirk, how can you be so sure that there are no survivors out there? Do you have visual?”

“Negative. When the explosion went off, a section of the hillside above the hangar collapsed. We are buried under eight to ten meters of loose rock.”

That stopped him for a moment. “Then how do you know anything about what is happening outside?”

“I seem to be equipped with a suite of sensitive seismic detectors. I can detect any surface movements in the area. The patrols I have detected are too heavy, their stride wrong, for them to be human. I have detected no movement, either by foot or vehicle, that I can identify as potentially human. In fact, I have detected no vehicles at all.”

That didn’t make sense either. An attacking force should have lots of vehicles. All those alien soldiers he’d seen certainly hadn’t walked here through a thousand kilometers of jungle.

Feeling a little better, he pulled himself up to a sitting position. His arm hurt, his head throbbed, there were little dark flecks in his vision when he moved, but he thought he would live. “You don’t seem concerned that we’re buried. Can you get us out?”

“Affirmative. Despite the so-called ‘butchery’ of my systems, I am still a Bolo of the Line. When you are ready, I can begin extracting us from the rubble.”

He sighed. Despite Dirk’s claim, he wouldn’t be satisfied until they made a visual inspection of the

colony. Failing that, the shuttle had been headed north. There was another colony off that way if he remembered correctly. He might find his family there, and this Bolo was his best chance of making the trip. “Start digging.”

“I would recommend that you strap yourself into my command crash couch first. It is also equipped with a field autodoc that can treat your injuries. Can you climb up to my control room?”

He looked at the ladder. “I think so. Which way?”

“Up the ladder, right at the horizontal passage, around my main turret bearing, through the fore circuitry room, right on until the end of the passage.” He started climbing the ladder, careful not to hit his bump on the low, metal ceiling. “I should warn you,” said Dirk, “that as soon as I bring my systems up to full power, there is a good possibility we will be detected.”

“We’ll deal with it when we have to. See what you can do about getting us some functioning weapons, and I’ll have a quick look at your circuitry room as I pass through.”

“I will begin bringing power systems on-line.”

“Not while I’m touching an exposed buss bar, please.” He reached the central passage and started crawling forward. “Get ready to dig us out. I want to see some sunlight.”

Around him the massive mining machine came to life.

Chapter Three

The heat smothered them like a blanket, making the already thick atmosphere blur any long range visuals. The shimmering of the air, combined with the black and white markings of the aliens’ fur, worked like a natural camouflage, letting them blend with the shadows at the edge of the jungle. Acting Militia Commander Jerry Donning let go of the binocs with disgust, letting them drop back into place on his vest. He could do better without them. He knew the aliens were out there. They had attacked twice already since the fall of the Odinberg Colony. There was no doubt they were coming again.

He stood on the top of a slight rise just to the south of the northern colony, staring into the scattered jungle below them. He felt lost, outmanned, outgunned and underqualified. It had only been a month since the first shipments of pulse rifles, body armor, and light weaponry had come in, along with orders from company headquarters, “able-bodied adults, especially those with military experience, are urged to form a militia for emergency defense.”

“Urged” was just the company’s way of saying “must,” and so processing foreman Jerry Donning, who had once done a tour with the New Brazil Marines suddenly found himself prime officer material, in fact, found himself in charge of the colony’s defenses. Never mind that in his three terrestrial years in the service he’d never gotten within a parsec of combat, never fired a shot outside a range or a training simulation. But there he was, in charge.

He’d figured it would be easy. Round up some volunteers, go shoot some daybats at the jungle’s edge, lob off some practice mortar rounds at rock formations. Hell, it would be fun. It wasn’t like they’d ever

have to fire a shot in anger.

Then it happened. A hundred and eighty clicks to the south, the remains of the southern colony probably still smoldered, every man, woman, and child dead, or so it seemed. They’d sent out a flyer when the distress call had come in, and it had reported no sign of life, just before it too was taken down by a missile.

The Concordiat promised that help was on the way, but he had no idea when it was getting here. Not soon enough, that was for sure. He swatted away a hovering blood-bee that was going for his nose, and growled at nothing in particular.

Hell, if he was the best they had, then he’d have to do. He wasn’t going to let what happened to the Odinberg Colony happen here. He had plasma cannons in fortifications, turret-mounted antimissile auto-batteries, over a hundred handheld missile launchers and mortars in ready positions, and the entire hillside in front of him had been mined. Sure, his men were undertrained, but they were learning fast. God knows, the aliens were giving them plenty of targets to practice on. If they were going to try to attack this front again, and all sensors showed they were massing to do just that, they were going to pay a very heavy price.

“Sir,” Lieutenant Sinkler shouted from a hundred paces behind him. Sinkler, before the destruction of the southern colony, had been a communications clerk.

Donning glanced around. The main colony compound had been built on a hillside leading down into what had been a beautiful meadow bordering a wide river. The main area of mining was down a shallow valley to the west of the colony. The colony had not been built with the idea that it would be need to be defended. After the first alien attacks, he had had the jungle cleared back away from all sides of the main colony, and fortifications prepared, including massive amounts of land moving to build bunkers. Days of mining equipment time had been used, and the colony executive had given him all kinds of flack over it, but after the destruction of the Odinberg Colony no one was objecting at all.

Donning waved to Lieutenant Sinkler that he had heard the call and was coming. Suddenly the edge of the jungle below seemed to come alive. Thousands of aliens were flowing from the trees and brush, appearing where there hadn’t seemed to be anything before.

He could see along their line that dozens of them carried plasma cannons and rifles that didn’t seem to fit in their hands, but there was little doubt they could use them. Most of the rest carried swords or large knifes of some sort. The cannons and rifles held back while the mass of the force charged ahead.

The first shot from below exploded the mound to his right, sending dirt and dust into the air.

Some of his men were already shooting when he shouted, “Return fire!” He dropped back into a duracrete bunker just as a plasma blast slammed into the wall with a force that rattled his teeth.

“Sir!” Sinkler shouted again, coming up beside him. He pointed to the communications unit he was carrying, then at the sky over the jungle. “Help is coming!”

Donning could feel a flash of hope, but he didn’t dare let it cloud anything they were doing. He’d known all along that help was coming, but it could be here in five minutes, or five weeks. They could all be dead by the time their would-be rescuers showed up.

“Great!” he shouted back at Sinkler, trying to sound encouraging. “Keep it to yourself for now.

Understand? We’re on our own here.”

Sinkler nodded. Poor guy looked like he was going to cry, like he would happily gnaw off his own arm to go back to a nice, quiet desk job.

I know how you feel, buddy.Donning turned away and brought his plasma rifle up to a slot, using the telescopic scope to check out the horde of massive aliens rushing upslope at them. His troops were cutting most of them down almost as fast as they came, but not completely. It seemed these creatures had no fear of death at all. What the hell did we ever do to them? All this for knocking over a few trees?

The first line of mines took out at least fifty of the aliens right below him, but it barely slowed them down. Again, the aliens mounting high-tech weapons held back, as wave after wave of aliens threw themselves down across the minefield, till their bleeding, blasted bodies formed an organic bridge that the rest could cross.

Around the colony the mines were going off now in a continuous roar, filling the air with smoke and dust and the blood of the aliens. Mortars and plasma blasts cleared momentary circles in their ranks, but it was like trying to dig a hole in the water. Still they came.

This was impossible.

This was madness.

Inch by inch, the aliens were advancing against their defenses. It was at this moment that he knew this wasn’t just another skirmish. This time the aliens were fighting to win, and they were going to crush the colony if they didn’t run out of warm bodies first.

Once, when he was a boy back on New Brazil, he’d gone hiking on a bluff overlooking the ocean. He’d stood too near the edge of a cliff, and the crumbly clay had collapsed under his feet. He’d slid down the slope on his face, his bloody fingers clawing at every crack and pebble that might have given him some kind of purchase, knowing that the slope turned into a sheer drop-off just a few meters down. Yet despite anything he could do, he’d just kept sliding. That was how he felt now, and he knew from bitter experience that the rocks were sharp, hard, and a long, long way down.

He felt it first in the soles of his feet. The ground itself seemed to be shaking, not from explosions, but from something that rumbled like a building earthquake. What now? He scanned the killing field in front of him as best he could. All he could see were aliens. Screaming, bloodthirsty aliens.

Sinkler scampered over in a half squat, his head down. “What’s that sound?” he shouted over the plasma shots and exploding mines.

Donning could now hear a roar, a gaseous bubbling thunder unlike anything he’d ever heard, filling the air above everything. It grew louder in matchstep with the ground’s rumbling.

Below him even the relentless aliens seemed to pause, look around, then up at the sky, searching for the source of the rumbling and shaking.

The defenders did the same and there was a noticeable downturn in the sounds of the battle.

“Keep firing!” Donning shouted into his wristcom, cutting down three massive aliens with his own rifle as

he shouted. This was their only chance to turn the battle, or at least delay the inevitable.

Around him the pace of the barrage picked back up. The aliens renewed their attack, still seemingly distracted by the sounds behind them. Donning looked up from the battle for just a moment and blinked in disbelief. The normally placid river that crossed the meadows was boiling!

Or at least it looked like it was boiling. Great domes of muddy water were churning man-high above the surface, waves slopped a dozen meters up either bank, slicks of foam forming just in time to be swept slowly downstream with the current. Then something long and glistening, like the horn of some submerged monster poked out of the water close to the near bank, then another, and another, followed by a mounded shape that towered out of the water, shedding cascading sheets of mud, sediment, and muck.

It reared itself up onto the bank and Donning somehow expected it to stop, beached like a whale, but it did not. It advanced across the meadows, churning a path of destruction through the grass and wildflowers, and its horn began to spit fire. Plasma fire.

Even as Donning dived for cover the shock waves began to slam into them, and he knew what had crawled out of the river. He’d never seen a Bolo in person before, but there was no mistaking it for any other fighting machine in the galaxy.

Help had finally come.

I signal my commander, Colonel Houchen, as soon as I emerge from the river and break communications silence. As I had hoped, my fortuitous landing in the river not only cushioned my landing, but provided cover for my approach to the northern colony. Even as I identify targets and open fire with my secondary batteries, I am puzzled by the situation. I am witnessing what could be, in many respects, a siege from pre-atomic Earth’s medieval period. The colony’s fortifications are surrounded not by armor, not assailed by aircraft, but rather by a vast army equipped primarily with hand weapons, mounting not so much as a draft animal. This defies any rational analysis, through it is consistent with my inability to identify enemy convoys or installations.

I slowly move closer to the colony, pinning the enemy between my own weapons and those of the fortifications. The toll on them is terrible, yet they are slow to disperse. I take sporadic return fire from low to medium power plasma weapons and assorted missiles, but all of it is stopped by my battle screens. I am perhaps growing overconfident when my deep scanners pick up the signature of a nuclear device moving slowly through the enemy throngs in front of me. I take point oh two seconds to analyze the device. It is a tactical fusion device with an antimatter trigger, small but highly sophisticated, more a puzzlement than a threat. I detect it visually, a cylinder half a meter long, carried by a lone alien who wades through his fellows like a swimmer going upstream. The image lingers in my memory as I destroy the device with a controlled secondary pulse.

There is a small explosion and a gamma pulse from the trigger. Perhaps fifty of the aliens are immediately killed. Hundreds more will doubtless die later from radiation exposure, but the colony, for which the weapon was doubtless intended, will be spared.

My destruction of the fusion device seems finally to have taken the fight from the attackers. I continue to bombard them as they scatter in all directions, disappearing into the jungle, diving into the river. I signal my commander that the landing zone is nearly secure, but that he make a

rapid combat descent, and should be prepared for missile attacks.

I am hailed by the defending forces, a Commander Donning of the local militia. I relay the message to my commander, and he patches his own voice through my short-range transmitters.

Donning had the transmission patched through his wristcom.

“Commander, this is Colonel Houchen of the Dinochrome Brigade.”

“Thank you for the timely assist, Colonel. You got here just in time.”

“Actually, Commander, I’m not there yet, but I hope to be shortly. Until then, I believe you’ve already met Bolo KNN. Khan, say hello to Commander Donning. You two probably have things to talk about until I get there.”

“Hello, Commander,” said a second voice, one that sounded as human as any of his men.

It took Donning a moment to find his voice. “Hello back,” he finally said.

Chapter Four

It had taken Dirk almost six hours to dig itself out from under the collapsed hillside and the debris from the fallen hangar. The problem was not lack of power or traction, but the loose nature of the rubble and the unstable hillside above, which threatened to completely collapse on top of them. Add to this the fact that Dirk was unfamiliar with his own new capabilities and limitations. Much of the equipment that had been welded to his duralloy hull was constructed of more fragile materials and threatened to wrench off with each movement. It would have been easy just to order Dirk to sheer it all off, but lacking proper weapons and sensors, there was no telling what of it they might need.

After a while, Tyrus became impatient. He felt well enough to disconnect himself from the autodoc and climb down into Dirk’s electronic bays for a closer inspection. Butchery was still his assessment. He found whole banks of molecular circuitry ripped out, probably for salvage, and bridged or bypassed with primitive optical circuitry a hundred years out of date. It was no wonder Dirk had memory and operational problems. If this reflected the overall quality of Dirk’s “conversion” into a mining machine, they were bound to discover other problems as they went on. Well, there was nothing he could do about it now. The Bolo was still his best hope of finding his family.

Twice Dirk had to stop and back up to loosen debris threatening to rip away a sensor, or disable a sonic cannon. After five hours the screens inside the main cabin started to show some light, and an hour later Dirk was completely free. It was the longest five hours Tyrus could ever remember.

It was midday when Tyrus opened the top hatch and stared at the sight that surrounded him. He could see both human and alien bodies, burnt and scattered in the rubble. The sun was hot on his face, and the wind was light and humid, blowing a sickening smell of death and burning plastic past him. He was forced to retreat to the cabin and find a breathing mask in one of the emergency lockers.

He emerged again and climbed down the Bolo’s rock-scarred flank. Where the day before there had been a freshly built colony of homes, public buildings, and a full-fledged mining and processing operation, now only debris remained.

He did a slow turn, forcing himself to study everything. The jungle edges were leveled below the colony, and nothing over five feet high was left standing within a thousand meters of his position in all directions.

He pulled the Bolo command headset from his pocket and clipped it behind his ear. “Dirk, what type of weapon was used to cause this type of destruction?”

“From the readings I received during the time of the destruction, and the evidence now, it was a small fusion explosion, low residual radiation, limited yield. You should take an anti-radiation tab when you return to the cabin, but the current danger is slight, especially with the breathing mask.”

“They carried it by hand?” Tyrus asked, remembering the aliens carrying weapons that ranged from spears to plasma cannons.

“From playback of my sensor logs before the event, this seems probable,” Dirk said.

Tyrus looked down the hill at where his family’s apartment had been in a three-story building. There was nothing left of the entire complex but debris. The bomb must have killed thousands of aliens at the same time. Why would they do that? And why had they attacked? None of this made any sense at all to him. He climbed back up onto the Bolo and ordered Dirk to move towards the residential section.

“Do you detect anyone left alive in the colony?”

“No,” Dirk said.

“Can you trust your sensors?”

“My ability to detect biological signs has been severely compromised, however I am quite seismically aware. If there were anyone moving or talking in the area, I believe I could detect it.”

He moved carefully over the Bolo’s massive hull, from handhold to handhold, until he could look down over the machine’s flank, down at one of its mighty treads. Once they got away from the area of the hangar, most of the human bodies he passed hadn’t died from the explosions or weapon fire. They had been stabbed, hacked, their throats slit, or in many cases, beheaded. The damned aliens had taken the time to kill them one by one, men, women and children alike.

Tyrus just stared at the pile of rubble that had once held his home and his family, and maybe still did. There were hundreds of bodies visible, probably countless more buried in the collapsed buildings. He didn’t recognize anyone. He hadn’t had time to get to know any of his neighbors yet. There had been over thirty thousand people in this colony.

Now he might be the only survivor.

But there was still that shuttle he’d seen leaving. Still a little hope that his family, that someone , had survived.

He stared at the destroyed colony around him, ignoring the smell of burnt and rotting flesh. The images of his family flashed through his mind, how just a few days ago he had taken the kids out to a special

dinner, an apology for bringing them here. His wife, angry, had stayed home. Now the restaurant, even the street they had walked down talking and laughing, was gone.

He fought the tears back and forced himself to take a deep breath. With the breath came a stench of death that gagged him. He desperately wanted to dig, search for his family’s bodies, and give them the burial they deserved. But they might not be there, and right now he didn’t dare take the time. There were other things to be done. The dead would wait.

“Dirk, can you contact any of the other colonies?”

“No,” Dirk said. “My long-range communications capabilities appear to be limited, and were further damaged while digging out of the landslide. I am unable to contact anyone. If we move closer, or if we contact a station with relay capability, that could change.”

Tyrus nodded. Though he’d hoped otherwise, he’d half expected it. A functional Bolo could communicate over interstellar distances, but that transceiver had probably been sold as salvage decades ago. Dirk wasn’t much of a Bolo any more. It was just lucky the machine still had armor or he would be dead.

The conversion had left some of the old Bolo intact though, something he could resist the enemy with, maybe even something that could fight back. What had Dirk said? “I have power, I can move, I can think,” something like that. It would have to be enough.

He climbed down again and found a laser rifle still clutched in a headless woman’s hand. He found himself checking the rings on that hand. Not his wife’s. Who was she, he wondered? Had she died defending her children? Avenging her lover? No way to know.

He shouldered the rifle, aimed it at an uptilted slab of duracrete, and pulled the trigger. With some difficulty he managed to laser the date into the top of the slab. Then he began to form letters.

Here Lie The People Of Ellerbey Mining’s Thule Central Colony, Killed in a Sneak Attack.

He hesitated, then raised the rifle again and added:

They Will Be Avenged.

He looked at the charge reading on the rifle, almost empty, and tossed it aside. He climbed back up to the Bolo’s hatch, staggered inside, heard it slam shut behind him.

“Get going,” he said. “We’re headed north.”

Simulations are one thing, Colonel Bud Houchen observed, it’s quite another when somebody is really trying to blow your ass out of the sky. It had been quite a ride down to the planet in his Bolo’s assault pod, dodging missiles all the way. Fortunately, without the Bolo’s 14,000 tons of dead weight the pod turned into a surprisingly agile brute, able to power itself through most any maneuver that its relatively fragile human cargo could stand.

With that, Khan’s considerable remote piloting skills, the pod’s own defensive countermeasures, and supporting fire from the Bolo, he’d been able to set down on the landing strip of Rustenberg without a scratch.

The pod had paused only long enough to drop off Houchen and its load of arms and relief supplies before Khan sent the craft back to the relative safety of orbit. At the same time, it would provide a decoy while the other two Bolos landed in their assault pods.

Once on the ground, he found a situation as difficult as anything he could imagine.

There were no standing military forces on the planet, only a lightly armed militia of terrified colonists, most with little or no military experience. As he stood on the defensive ramparts of the colony with Militia Commander Donning, he observed that it is one thing to have someone trying to kill you when you’re trained and mentally prepared for the job. It is quite another when you’re a civilian cloaked in your typical civilian illusion of safety.

“I want you to know that your people did well here today, Donning. You got them organized and held your lines.”

Donning smiled grimly. “We did what we had to do, Colonel. It’s not like we had much choice. Now, when is the Concordiat going to get us off the rock? When do the rest of our reinforcements arrive?”

This, thought Houchen, is where it gets dicey. “Commander, I’ve received no word of any planned evacuation. The mining colonies here are seen as vital to Concordiat security, and our superiors don’t seem inclined to release our toe-hold here.”

“Duck,” said Khan’s voice in his command headset.

Houchen shoved Donning down behind the ramparts just as an explosion rocked the air beyond the wall. Though he didn’t see it, he knew that Khan’s secondary batteries had picked off the missile before it could strike the colony.

“Clear,” said Khan. It had become routine. The harassment missile attacks went on and on.

Houchen stood and brushed himself off. “We have two more Bolos in orbit, but as soon as they land we’re going to have to dispatch them to patrol other hot spots. You aren’t the only colony on the planet, and all of them are being at least harassed by the aliens. Another full-scale attack could come at any point, and at any time.”

Donning’s smile had faded, replaced by a glare of anger. “So, you’re saying we’re drafted because some bureaucrat twenty light-years away has decided this ball of jungle rot is somehow important?”

Houchen looked grimly out at the ocean of trees dotted with mountaintop islands, that stretched off to the horizon. “I don’t make those decisions, Donning, I’m just reporting what I’ve been told. I have my duty here, and so do you. I know that we can expect a greater show of military force here, in fact whatever it takes to keep the mining operations going, but I don’t know the time frame. Concordiat forces in this sector are stretched rather thin at the moment. For the moment these three Bolos, and your own resources, are all we’ve got.”

Donning was almost shaking, clearly from the weight that Houchen had suddenly put on his shoulders.

Houchen could imagine what Donning had been thinking, that they’d just hold the line until rescue, jump on a shuttle and head back to civilization. He could sympathize. He’d spent too many years in a headquarters office, and hadn’t been under fire himself since he was a young man. He had a much keener

sense of his own mortality these days.

“I’m a civilian,” said Donning, “a volunteer. You can’t hold me.”

“As I said, I’mnot doing anything, just passing down the word from above.” He looked out at the vast sea of trees. “From where I stand, you don’t have any place to go. We’ve got a few shuttles in orbit to extract the severely wounded, but I can’t even get them down at the moment without risking lives.”

Donning just frowned.

“Now, nobody can make you fight, much less command this outfit, but there doesn’t seem to be anyone else better qualified to do the job. You rounded this crew up and organized this defense, and without what I saw today, you might have ended up like the Odinberg Colony.”

Houchen wasn’t even sure Donning was listening, but he went on anyway. “You could step down, go sit in your apartment, and wait for the place to be overrun, but somehow, I don’t think you’re the kind of person who would do that.”

Donning chewed the inside of his lip. Then he nodded, hard and firm, as if making a sudden decision. “I don’t have to like this, but I’ll do what I can.”

“Good,” Houchen said. “We’ll need you to keep your forces alert and ready. I’m sure command thought that three Bolos would have more than enough to handle the situation, but I have more colonies to defend than I have Bolos. That means that you can’t count on Khan to be here full time.”

“Wonderful,” Donning said, looking out at the jungle.

“I understand,” Houchen said. “But we might have to redeploy forces at any moment in response to a new attack, and that means you have to be prepared to defend yourselves until we get back.”

“I don’t understand. With all this firepower, why don’t you just go after the hairy bastards? Wipe them out before they can attack again.”

Houchen shook his head. “This isn’t the kind of war Bolos are designed to fight, Donning. As far as we can tell, these aliens have no supply lines to cut, no factories to disrupt, no bases to destroy, and they seem utterly immune to fear and intimidation.”

“True,” Donning said. “All too true.”

“Very little about this situation makes sense,” Houchen said, “and that bothers me more than what we’ve seen so far on the battlefield. These aliens shouldn’t be able to put together a muzzle-loader musket, much less a plasma cannon. From the looks of it, they don’t even make their own steel for their knives and swords. They were probably still using bronze before somebody started giving them weapons.”

“You’re kidding?” Donning asked, staring at him. “Who would give creatures like these monsters weapons?”

“No one knows yet,” Houchen said, “Moreover, there appear to be distinct subgroups of aliens. The group that attacked here and at the Odinberg Colony seems to be the same, but other colonies have reported aliens with completely different markings, completely different ways of fighting. All of them seem to have technology from the same source, and at about the same technical level, but there are differences

in the types and distribution of individual weapons, as well as how they’re used.”

“You sound worried.”

“I just keep wondering, who gives a plasma cannon to people living in mud huts? What could they possibly have to trade? Or failing that, what do their mysterious benefactors really want?”

“To kill us,” Donning said. “Clearly.”

Houchen knew Donning was right.

Lord Whitestar was in an especially foul mood. He walked the trails of their encampment in darkness, headed nowhere and going there fast. Nightbats and glow wings fluttered out of his way as he crashed, much louder than necessary, though the brush.

His first-wife rebelled, his second eldest son wished to kill him, and as the Ones Above had warned, the devils had brought their metal ogres into the battle. Countless warriors had died, not just fodder, but highborn too, and precious weapons were lost or destroyed.

It was easy to assume that the Ones Above would always provide more weapons, but Whitestar could not bring himself to rely on it. He knew that the Ones Above came down from the sky only infrequently, hiding their weapons, only later telling his people, through their oracles, where the weapons could be found.

Around him, men huddled in groups, sharpening their weapons, telling tales of battle. He could smell them, the damp, earthy smell of satisfaction and contentment. Their losses this day had been huge, and yet the mood among his men was high. They had seen glorious battle this day, battle that they had lived all their lives only dreaming of. So, they died? Wasn’t that what they were born to do?

Whitestar hissed quietly in anger. No. They were not born to die , they were born to kill.

The rivers ran with the juices of his people, and still the devils lived, their nest still stood, their hatchlings still slept safe. This was insufferable. They had to be made to die, and the ogres stood in his way.

He turned right at the next branch in the trail, walked on a log that crossed a rapidly flowing stream, and reached the large burrow that was Scarbeak’s. The opening was curtained with several layers of fiber mats to keep in the light. Whitestar blinked and averted his eyes as he first stepped inside. Scarbeak worked using the magic torches that the Ones Above had provided him. Their light was pure and unflickering, white like daylight, and yet cool to the touch.

Except for a corner where a rumpled sleepmat lay spread, the room was full of the sacred modules of the Ones Above. On each module, a light glowed to show that it was functional, and color-coded connections showed how it was to be connected to its fellows to make a weapon.

All of the highborn were taught to repair and maintain the sacred weapons, but only old Scarbeak was their master. He was their weapons master, repairing weapons, and assembling new ones from salvaged parts. It was said that Scarbeak had even assembled modules against their sacred color coding, and made them do things that the Ones Above had not intended.

But Whitestar liked and trusted the oldster and would not listen to such lies. Scarbeak was of the faithful,

a Speaker to the Oracle, and would never do such things. He was very old, and might not last more than

another season or two. Whitestar would miss him.

For the moment, Scarbeak crouched on the floor, piecing together one plasma cannon from the parts of several damaged ones. He looked up. “My lord, I did not hear you coming. What brings you here this night?”

“You have to talk to the oracle, Scarbeak. We need a weapon, more powerful than any we’ve had so far, one that can kill the ogres.”

“Ah,” said Scarbeak, “yes. I’ve heard of the metal beast that killed so many of our warriors.”

“Tell the oracle that we must kill it. Show us how.”

“I cannot tell the oracles what to do, my lord.”

“Of course not, but you can ask. You can plead. The ogres must die.”

Scarbeak looked thoughtful for a moment. “A missile would not work. The ogre destroys our missiles in flight. Perhaps a mine.”

“It would have to be a thousand and twenty-four mines, or a hundred and twenty-eight times that many.

We cannot wait a lifetime for the ogre to be lured across a single mine.”

“Then the weapon would have to be carried, my lord. Perhaps placed right under the ogre’s belly. Who will do that?”

“I have no shortage of highborn willing to take that honor, Scarbeak.”

Scarbeak clucked his disapproval. “A waste of a good highborn, my lord. Perhaps it is time you considered training the fodder to—”

“I will take the weapon to the ogre.” They both turned to the new voice in the room. It was Sharpwing, his second eldest.

Whitestar hissed in anger. “How long have you been there?”

“Listening, my sire? Eavesdropping? Long enough. I claim the honor as mine.”

“No,” said Whitestar firmly. “It would be a waste of a young warrior.”

“It was not a request, sire, it was a challenge. You heard me, Scarbeak. You are my witness. I challenge

you on tomorrow’s moon for the right to take the new weapon to the ogre.”

“You have no right.”

“I have every right! I wish to die as my blood commands me. I tire of being called a coward, the

hatchling of a coward.” Sharpwing studied his father’s face. “Oh, yes, that is what the young warriors say of you, that you fight from your burrow, that you hide from battle like an old woman.”

Scarbeak looked first at one, then the other, seemingly trying to find some way out of the situation.

Finally he spoke. “There will be no weapon for a time, young lord-son. Even if the oracles answer my request, it will be a span of nights.”

Sharpwing looked at the old man. “Time enough till we die then. I challenge you in a span of nights for the right to carry the weapon.”

He pulled his curved knife from his belt and brandished it at Whitestar. “And I promise you, sire, that I will strike you with my brother’s blade, and that I will strike to free my mother of your unworthy hold on her. Our ways are ever parted.”

Then he stepped back through the curtains and was gone.

Whitestar looked down at Scarbeak, who looked back.

Finally Whitestar said, “I have too many wars to fight, and too many ogres to face. I hunger for an ending.”

Chapter Five

Colonel Houchen watched as Donning climbed into the observer’s seat on the far side of Khan’s control compartment and strapped himself in. Houchen could tell he was impressed, that the power the Bolo represented was helping to strengthen the man’s resolve, and his confidence that they hadn’t been abandoned by the Concordiat.

This he knew was the third great mission of the Bolo. The first was to intimidate the enemy. The second was to strike the enemy with devastating power that could not be stopped. The third was to express the will of the Concordiat. Like the battleships, and later aircraft carriers of old Earth, a Bolo was a tangible, undeniable expression of its government’s interest and concern in a situation.

It was the nature of Bolos that those who fought in more conventional forces often weren’t comfortable with them, they could never forget them, ignore them, or deny them. The net result was that when a Bolo arrived, morale went up, because if the soldier was nervous about his own Bolo, how must the enemy feel?

The air conditioning in the cabin was finally starting to make some headway against the heat, humidity, and persistent jungle stench they’d brought with them from outside. Here, for a few minutes at least, they could feel comfortable, safe, and not completely helpless against their alien attackers.

“Khan, let’s give our guest a little demonstration. But lay off full combat speed. I don’t want to send him home in pieces.” Houchen wasn’t kidding about that. A Bolo’s crash couch was a precision piece of equipment, vital if a human were ever to serve as an on-board commander during combat. A Mark XXV Bolo had a normal combat speed of 95 KPH over almost any kind of terrain, but when conditions allowed, it was capable of short sprints of 150 KPH. At that speed, a Bolo was a near unstoppable force. With its battle screens at full power, it could almost literally ram through small mountains.

The Bolo was capable of surviving the forces involved in such maneuvers, but a human commander was not, at least, not without a great deal of help. The crash couch acted as a vital three-dimensional shock

absorber system for the more delicate human body. The observer seats had much more crude two-dimensional shock absorbers built in. Someone riding in one might survive full combat speed in rough terrain, but they wouldn’t enjoy it, and they might not walk away under their own power.

“Aye, sir,” replied Khan, and at once the growl of the drive system intensified around them and they were pushed back in their seats. The cabin was buffeted enough to give Donning an exciting ride. Nothing more.

“Let’s clear back ten yards of jungle around the perimeter, just to keep the aliens awake out there.”

Khan changed course, his multiple tread systems adjusting speed just enough to smoothly bring them in parallel to the jungle line, and then finally, overlapping two sets of treads into the trees like a giant lawn mower. The din was terrible as the treads knocked down trees by the hundreds, chewed them into splinters, then spit them out the back in a rooster tail of destruction. Houchen had intentionally detuned the active noise cancellation systems in the cabin for just that effect.

“Khan, let’s pick the pace up. You’re free to fire.” There was an aggressive whir as the secondary gunports opened, and an almost machine-gunlike chatter as the ion-bolt infinite repeaters shot off short bursts in rapid succession. Suddenly, while mowing down trees on one side of the perimeter, Khan was simultaneously blasting them on two others. Houchen wished he could show off the Bolo’s main armament, a 90mm super-Hellbore, but firing it at any visible target this close to the colony could do them more damage than the enemy already had done. If the aliens simply offered them a significant target worthy of that mighty weapon, this battle might already be over.

At last they finished their sweep around the perimeter. Khan slowed and resumed his patrol midway between the defenses and the tree line. “We could keep knocking down trees I suppose,” said Houchen, “but it just keeps getting harder, and it takes Khan farther and farther away from the colony, giving them an opportunity to attack on another flank.”

There was a loud thump as Khan fired off another secondary, a longer pulse, to take down an incoming missile.

“They’re building for another attack, aren’t they?”

Houchen nodded. Donning was green, but he was no fool. “We’re pretty sure they’re gathering out there. To be honest, our intelligence on this is limited. We occasionally pick up something from orbit that might be a cook-fire, but no concentrations of them, nothing that’s consistent from night to night. Last night, while on their way to the New Marikana, Lieutenant Winter and his Bolo stumbled on an abandoned encampment. More of a nest really. Tunnels, seemingly dug with hand tools, aboveground huts and passages made from native plant materials.”

“Any sign of technology?” Donning asked.

“Amazingly primitive,” Houchen said, “not at all consistent with the weapons we’ve been seeing. I wish he’d had time to find and excavate one of their trash dumps. It might have told us something. The camp was stripped almost completely clean.”

Donning only nodded, so Houchen went on. “But it explains why we can’t find them from orbit. They don’t clear land, they don’t build roads, they don’t seem to use reactors or power cells or anything we can pick up from orbit. To make things worse, they have a number of close relatives out there in the jungle, large, flightless, birdlike creatures, probably only a little farther from them than chimps and gorillas

are from humans. Until one of them powers up his weapon, he could be just another part of the local wildlife as far as we’re concerned.”

“Then you don’t know what they’re going to do.” Donning looked over at Houchen.

“I think my gut is telling me the same thing your gut is telling you,” Houchen said. “The harassment attacks continue for a reason, to keep us off guard, to keep our people on alert until they’re exhausted. When the aliens are ready, they’ll try again.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. Finally, Houchen said, “You know, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you about. Khan swears that, just before his landing, he picked up sensor readings consistent with a Bolo hull in or near the Odinberg Colony. But that couldn’t be. We show no record of a Bolo ever being dispatched to this planet. Do you know anything about it?”

Donning nodded. “That would be the Prescott machine.”

Houchen shook his head. He had no idea what a Prescott machine was.

“An armored mining machine,” Donning said, “built on a converted Bolo chassis? I heard they were bringing one in, but I don’t think they had time to deploy it.”

Now Houchen felt really puzzled. What had they done to the old Bolo brain, and all the firepower? “Your aircraft didn’t report seeing it when they scouted the Odinberg Colony after the attack?”

“They saw the hangar where it would have been parked flattened by some kind of bomb,” Donning said, “half a mountain dropped down on it. That’s all I know. Like we told you, they didn’t have much time to report back before they were shot down. But that thing is gone, like the rest of Odinberg. Write it off. It’s no use to us now.”

Houchen rubbed his chin thoughtfully. He wasn’t going to believe that. Bolos did not die easily. “I don’t know—”

Another thump as a missile was destroyed.

“You know,” said Donning, “they’ve been hitting us with these harassment attacks, maybe we should do the same to them.”

“Fire off random shots into the jungle?” Houchen asked, staring at the commander. “As long as the aliens remain dispersed we are unlikely to do them significant damage, and they don’t seem in any way inclined to be discouraged by such tactics.”

Donning nodded, thinking.

Houchen knew exactly what Donning was trying to do. He was trying to take a role in defending his colony, and it wasn’t like the Bolo’s energy weapons were going to run out of ammo. “I suppose we could try it for a day or two and see what happens.”

“Maybe you should have the Bolos do preventative strikes against the moving groups,” Donning said. “The aliens aren’t staying anywhere close to out of range. We might be able to disrupt their gathering for attack.”

Suddenly an alarm filled the room. It was the sound Houchen had been dreading.

“Too late,” Donning said.

“Colonel,” said Khan, “I have alien forces massing just beyond the tree line. Another attack appears imminent.”

“Damn,” said Donning, unbuckling his harness and grabbing for his rifle.

“Where are you going?” said Houchen, trying to keep one eye on the external view and tactical screens.

Donning pulled on his helmet and fastened the strap. “Back to my men. It’s only about a hundred meters

back to the wall. Comm my people to cover me, and you do the same. I used to be pretty good at the hundred meter in my day.”

“You can send orders from here.”

“I can send orders, but I can’t give orders from here, Colonel.” He slapped the hatch release.

“Khan, get him in as close as you can, stop just long enough for him to jump clear of the tracks, then turn to place us between him and the enemy lines.”

Donning paused inside the hatch and looked back at Houchen as Khan came around. “You think that other Bolo machine might still be active out there somehow?”

“One thing I’ve learned, Commander. Never write a Bolo off.”

Donning nodded. It was time. “Good luck, Colonel.”

“To you too, Commander.”

Then Donning was out, and the hatch slammed closed.

Houchen looked up at the screens, one showing thousands of alien warriors flooding out of the trees, another showing Donning sprinting for the wall. No matter what else, the man had guts.

Donning hit the ground running. The rifle slowed him down, but he was going to need it if things turned

bad. Behind him he could hear the churning roar of the turning Bolo, and the shrill cries of countless charging alien warriors.

A plasma bolt shattered a divot out of the wall to his right, and he turned sharply, zigzagging to offer a poorer target. He felt the concussion as the Bolo’s batteries opened fire on the aliens, followed by a different kind of thump as the Bolo mortars started lobbing rounds over the colony to disrupt the advance there.

A missile screamed past in the confusion, meters over his head, missing the wall entirely and heading back out over the jungle. Perhaps the Bolo had known it would miss, and simply chose not to waste a shot. Above him, the rapid crackling of pulse rifles was comforting. The aliens were gaining on him fast. They’d clocked some of the big monsters hitting 50 KPH in short sprints.

Just ahead, a line with a rescue loop dropped down the face of the wall. He grabbed the loop and hooked it under his armpits, then jerked the line to signal the hoist operators. The line immediately became taut and yanked his feet off the ground. He managed to get his feet between him and the wall, literally running up the duracrete surface.

Another plasma bolt struck a dozen yards away, and he was very aware of what a choice target he made. He started leaping from side to side as best he could. A smaller bolt, probably from a rifle, came from below him. He jumped, twisted his body, tried to keep his head forward, and slammed his back into the wall. Below him, a handful of aliens had somehow made it past the Bolo.

Gasping for breath, his ribs on fire, he sighted down his own rifle and opened fire, full auto. The dirt churned around the aliens, then one of them fell, another’s head exploded. A blast from the Bolo, vast overkill, finished the rest of them.

As he reached the top of the wall, a dozen hands grabbed him and hauled him over. He shrugged off a woman wearing a medical armband and headed for his command post higher on the wall. Later, after the fighting was over, after he’d had a chance to think about it, his face would whiten, his knees would quake, his stomach would knot and threaten to send his breakfast into full retreat. But just that second, Donning had never felt more alive.

“What do you mean it isn’t supposed to be this way?” Tyrus wasn’t sure he was going to survive the trip. The mining machine called Dirk didn’t seem to be designed for the comfort of the operator under the best of circumstances, but plowing as they were through the jungle at best possible speed, bowling over trees as it went, was a nightmare.

“My crash couch is designed to cushion the commander against momentary accelerations of up to thirty standard gravities in any axis.”

“Ow!” Tyrus slapped his hand to his mouth. “Then why did I just bite my tongue for the third time?”

“I believe that most of my active shock absorbers have been replaced,” Dirk said, “either with passive gas cylinders of some kind, or rigid struts, perhaps with the idea of making it easier to maintain. I do not believe that they intended me to travel more than a dozen kilometers per hour in my modified form.”

“How fast are we going now?”

“Forty KPH, about half my old cruise speed.”

“Good lord. You mean I could be hurting more ?”

“Would you like me to reduce speed?”

“No. We’ve got to get to Rustenberg, warn them to be on the lookout for bombs, see if there’s anything we can do to help. They could attack there at any time.”

“The attack has already begun,” Dirk said.

Tyrus blinked in surprise. “Excuse me? How would you know that?”

“While I am unable to transmit a signal that they can receive, I am detecting strategic communications

between three Bolos, including one at the northern colony.”

“Bolos? Bolos like you? I mean, like you before your conversion.”

“Not exactly. I am Mark XXIV, they are Mark XXV. I am unfamiliar with the designation. It seems to have been introduced after I was put into mothballs and placed on standby.”

So, the Concordiat had sent help, even if it was too late for the Odinberg Colony. “They should be okay there then, with a Bolo on station?”

“I believe there is still a danger, especially if they are unaware of the possibility of suicide bomb attacks such as destroyed our hangar. That weapon was one of the smallest such weapons that can be constructed. It is only logical that the enemy may possess bigger ones.”

“Big enough to destroy an entire colony, Bolo or no Bolo?”

“Quite possibly.”

“How long until we reach Rustenberg?”

“At this speed, five hours and fifty minutes.”

Tyrus felt something wet on his chest. He looked down and saw that the left shoulder strap had opened a cut there, a raw stinging mess that slowly oozed blood into his shirt. “Go faster,” he said to Dirk.

One of the “gifts” the drop pod had delivered was a full-fledged modular fire control system for the colony’s defenses. The self-contained control center had stations for himself and two other officers, plus room for observers. No longer did Donning have to watch from the ramparts and shout his orders into a wristcom. He could watch any part of the defenses through multiple screens around his command chair, call up status displays on any of the fixed weapons systems, track the status of each and every mine, and even monitor the Bolo’s sensory systems.

An integrated communication system allowed orders to be issued through headsets to his troops, either individually or en masse. A lot of the center’s capabilities were either irrelevant to their situation (they were in no apparent danger of attack from space, or other than missiles, from the air), or simply beyond their limited technical skills to employ, but the equipment had immensely improved their ability to defend themselves.

During their first attack, Donning had barely felt in control, and unaware of what was happening outside his direct line of view. Now he was instantly aware of any trouble spot and able to issue detailed orders to hundreds of troops with a single voice command.

As Donning rushed into the command control center, he found Lieutenant Peak manning one of the stations. He was a young electronics expert who had served a three-year stint in combat training. The other seat was empty, probably for lack of a trained officer, but given their limited use of the equipment, the second station really wasn’t needed anyway.

Donning sat down in the command chair and ordered up a strategic overview. The five main screens showed the different defense positions around the colony. The Bolo had moved a kilometer or so away from the colony to the north, to give it a clearer field of fire.

Since the last attack Donning had had his people plant new, reprogrammed mines. Now they were equipped with time delay fuses that kept all the mines in a given area from being triggered at once. A supposedly “clear” area of the field could now suddenly spring to life, killing masses of unsuspecting aliens. Already, hundreds of alien bodies were scattered throughout the minefield, and the edges of the jungle seemed to be moving, alive as the massive aliens ran into the opening, beaklike mouths open.

He checked to make sure that all families and noncombatants were headed into the new underground shelters that they had built. Building those shelters and the defensive fortifications had been top priority since the destruction of the Odinberg Colony. No matter what level weapon those ugly bastards threw at this colony, most of the civilians were going to survive if he had anything to say about it.

He tried to take it all in at once. Clearly this attack was much more fierce than the last, but the colony was better prepared, better armed, and had a Bolo guarding them. For the moment at least, things in the command center felt in control. But Donning knew that wouldn’t last.

“Peak, keep an eye out for trouble spots. I’m going to take some time to study the enemy, see if I can learn anything we can use against them.”

“Got it,” Peak said.

The aliens had also modified their tactics since the last attack. Rather than just storming the walls, the aliens moved in smaller, more dispersed groups that were a less tempting target for the Bolo’s big guns. Rather than directly attacking, groups would move out of the trees, transverse the perimeter to draw fire, then fade back into the jungle.

Small missiles swarmed in almost constantly, seemingly more to occupy the Bolo’s guns than to do any real damage. Most of the missiles seemed to be coming from just within the jungle, but one nearby hilltop had been the source of several shots. As Donning watched, Khan’s main gun transversed and locked on the hill. A blinding beam of energy lanced out, and the hilltop instantly vaporized into an expanding ball of flame and debris.

Donning heard the Bolo commander laugh through the comm link. “That may not have been strategically effective, but it sure felt good to unlimber the Hellbore for a change. This place is cramping Khan’s style.”

“Looked good from here as well,” Donning said.

Another new development was that single aliens would break from groups, sprint towards the colony, and set satchel charges against the base of the fortifications. Each charge took a bite out of the big wall. While each one did little damage, if they could plant enough of these in one area, that might eventually create a breach. Donning instructed his subordinates on the wall to monitor this situation closely and position their best snipers to protect vulnerable areas.

Donning zoomed one of the cameras in on a particular alien and set it to automatically track the creature. The alien was huge, muscular, covered with white on black fir in patterns that reminded him of a panda or orca from Old Earth. Though they were generally humanoid, there were just enough avian characteristics to suggest that they really had evolved from predatory flightless birds. They had powerful, talon-equipped feet, hard ridges around their mouths that might have been beaks or bills, and large, round eyes mounted on the sides of their heads.

Donning started to notice a pattern in how it moved. They were fast sprinters, and strong, but their peak

activity seemed to come in bursts, almost as though their metabolism had trouble sustaining their full energy output.

He noticed another significant thing. The weapons not only didn’t seem to be designed by the aliens, they didn’t seem to be designed for them. Sites and eyepieces seemed shaped for users with eyes on the front of their heads, not the sides, and the grips and controls poorly fit the natives’ hands, which, perhaps because they were evolved from wings, not paws, were long and strangely jointed.

Peak waved at one of the big screens. “What kind of weapon is that?” he asked, indicating three aliens leading one attack wave.

“That’s new,” Donning said, looking closer. The metal cylinder was big enough that three of the aliens were required to carry it on their huge shoulders.

He hesitated. The safest thing to do would be to focus fire on the unknown weapon, but if he did, they wouldn’t know its capabilities. One of the unknowns could get past them at a weaker moment and turn the battle, unless they learned to defend against it. In the end, he decided to let the battle run its course. If his people took the three out, so be it, but if they did get to fire, he’d be watching.

In fact, as Donning watched, a rifle shot took down one of the three. As he fell, a half dozen more aliens suddenly converged to take his place, actually getting into a shoving contest over who would take the honor. Then, a moment later, another alien appeared and took the dead one’s place, not after a fight, but what seemed somehow like a servile surrender.

Donning nodded to himself. So, the enemy did have some sort of ranking or caste system. That meant that despite the seeming chaos out there, there might be officers that could be targeted, some kind of command and control structure that could be disrupted.

“There are more of them,” said Peak. He pointed to where another trio was lugging their cylinder out of the jungle, and another one on the far side of the compound.

“Damn.” Donning thumbed a communications toggle. “Houchen, there’s a new weapon showing up out there, a cylinder, takes three aliens to carry it.”

“We’re on it,” replied Houchen over the comm.

But it was too late. The cylinders were aimed at their target, not the colony, but the Bolo itself, and all of them fired in rapid succession. The rear of the device Donning was watching literally exploded, injuring several aliens unlucky enough to be standing within a yard or so behind it. And as it exploded a single, brief beam was emitted from the other end.

“We’re hit!” shouted Houchen. “Never seen anything like those before. They’re like pocket Hellbores. Actually put a dent in our battle screens and our armor. If they were lucky enough to find a vital spot at close range, they might actually be able to do us some significant damage.”

Donning was about to order his men to open fire on the cylinders when he saw the three operators toss one aside and run to join their unarmed fellows. “I think it’s only good for one shot, Colonel. Now that we know what we’re dealing with, we can take them out before they can get close. Good thing too. Our fortifications wouldn’t hold up long against those.”

“Tell your people to break out their breathers and antirad pills,” Houchen said. “The radiation levels just

peaked down here. I wonder if the aliens know that they’re slow-cooking themselves every time they fire off one of those things?”

Donning shifted his view to another attacker, firing one of the smaller plasma cannon that they’d seen before. As he watched, the alien went down. Two of the aliens behind him scrambled for the cannon he had been carrying. The one who ended up with it dropped his spear and seemed to growl or snarl at the other in celebration, then turn back to the attack.

Donning suddenly made the connection. Armed with spears and swords, the individual aliens weren’t the threat. Knock down one, and a dozen would instantly replace him. It was the weapons themselves, obviously still in limited supply, that were the threat.

He opened a command channel. “All snipers and gunners, save your shots for aliens carrying high technology weapons. Do not target the operator. Repeat, do not target the operator. Go for the weapon itself.”

Tyrus winced as a sudden bump slammed him against the roof of the narrow service passage. If the defective crash couch had been a problem, this was just a little slice of hell. Still, he observed, if he survived the experience, the results might be worth it. They had discovered that unlike his primary Hellbore, Dirk’s secondary batteries were still intact.

Perhaps the Prescott folks had decided they were too difficult to remove. Instead, they had removed the power busses and data couplings, dogged the gunports from the inside, then welded them from outside. He couldn’t do anything about the welds, but he could certainly unbolt the dogs, try to rig a power bypass, reconnect the data links, and hope for the best.

Dirk seemed hopeful that, if enough power were restored, he might be able to shatter the welds by overloading his port actuators. Of course, he might not be able to close the ports again, but that was a problem for another time.

“You reading me, Dirk?”

“Yes, Commander.”

“I wish you wouldn’t keep calling me that, Dirk. I just replaced your buss bar. I’m gonna move back beyond the safety gate, and then I want you to apply trickle power and see what happens.”

Tyrus crawled back past all the “danger” and “high voltage” placards and latched the insulated gate that protected the power circuits. “Go for it, Dirk.”

There was a pause. “I can feel my secondary mechanisms! Of course, I am as yet unable to apply enough power to the actuators to take up the slack in the port mechanicals.”

“Well, let’s take this slow. The bundle of superconducting rod I used in place of the original bar probably won’t hold for long, and I don’t have anything to replace it with. My luck, you’ll get the ports open, only to find there’s no power left for the weapons.”

“I have a great deal of confidence in you, Tyrus.”

He laughed grimly. “Based on what?”

“You’ve acquitted yourself well. I know enough about human psychology to know this situation must be very difficult for you to cope with.”

“I’m not coping at all. That’s the trick. You try to cope, you can fail. I’m saving that for later.”

“Tyrus.”

There was something in the Bolo’s voice.

“We are being hailed. A Concordiat spacecraft in orbit has evidently spotted us.”

“Can you respond?”

“I am trying, but I do not believe they will be able to receive me. Tyrus, I am receiving instructions that we are to proceed to the northern colony if possible and assist with the defense there.”

“That’s where we were headed anyway. I’ve done all I can here. I’m headed back up to the control

compartment. Get your busted crash couch ready.”

He packed up the emergency tool kit as best he could. Several of the tools had simply disappeared, probably bounced away by the Bolo’s constant motion and vibration. Then he crawled back through the service passages towards the control room. He was halfway there when Dirk spoke again.

“Tyrus, the jungle ahead shows signs of a recent fire. I am detecting metallic traces that I believe to be wreckage.”

Tyrus felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck. “Is it human?”

“The alloys are consistent with human construction.”

“Are there aliens in the area?”

“Given my scrambled sensors, impossible to say. I see no obvious signs.”

“Slow down, and stop just short of the wreckage. I’m going to get out and investigate.” He crawled back to the service hatch where he’d first entered the Bolo, picking up the rifle and side arm that he’d stashed there earlier.

He sat, his back against a cool bulkhead, his heart pounding as he contemplated the inside of the hatch.

Finally the Bolo stopped. “Open the hatch, Dirk.”

There was a hiss, followed by a whir, and a brilliant ring of morning sunlight appeared around the hatch, which then slid up into the body of the machine. The combination of heat, humidity, and smell hit him like a wave after so long in the beast’s air-conditioned belly. Outside he could hear only the buzzing of insects, the rustling of foliage in the slight breeze, and the cries of jungle animals, hopefully none too big or too close.

He duck walked up to the hatch and climbed down a massive boogie wheel to the ground. Something he never saw buzzed down to take a bite out of his neck, didn’t like the taste, and rapidly buzzed away.

The jungle wasn’t as thick here as most he’d seen. There were large spaces between the higher trees,

large patches of blue visible above the underbrush. Ten meters in front of the Bolo, the burn started. As he crossed into the blackened area and stooped down to inspect, he could see that Dirk was right about the fire being recent. Not even a few green shoots had emerged from the blackened soil, though doubtlessly within a few days the forest would already be healing itself.

He stood. “Dirk, which way to the wreckage?”

“I read a large concentration of metal behind those trees to your right, about fifteen meters.” He stepped carefully, moving around the charred pillars that had once been stately trees. Something

glinted in the sun ahead, and he picked up his pace.

He found nothing that he could have identified definitely as an air shuttle, only a four-meter-long, flattened, twisted hunk of alloy sheet, carbon composite, and superconducting cable. “The total mass of metal that I am reading,” said Dirk, “is only about eighty percent of what I would

expect from the shuttle’s wreckage. Possibly this is some other craft.” Tyrus didn’t think so. “Or the rest of the wreckage was lost well before they hit the ground. I think a missile hit this thing, whatever it is.” Then he looked up. Somehow, an entire skin panel, at least four meters across and two meters long had somehow survived almost intact, cradled in the burned tree limbs almost like an intentionally placed signpost. On the left edge, half of the seal of the Concordiat could be seen, along with most of the mining

company’s logo. And below that, a number. His stomach knotted. “Dirk, does the number ‘TN-1045’ mean anything to you?”

“That was the call sign used by the departing shuttle in its distress call, Tyrus. I am sorry.” He heard a small, mournful noise, and realized only a moment later that it had come from his own throat. “It is possible your family was not on the shuttle, Tyrus.” It took him a minute to swallow, get his voice working again. “They were here, or back at the colony. It

really doesn’t matter if they died here or not. This is where hope died, Dirk. This is where they died in my heart.”

“I am sorry, Tyrus.” He started scanning the ground, looking for he didn’t know what, some scrap of clothing, some personal artifact, some scrap of bone, something to tell him about the people that died here.

“Tyrus.”

He spotted a superconducting impeller coil, a porthole and its surrounding chunk of bulkhead, completely intact. “Tyrus! Behind you!”

Old reflexes cut in and he was raising the rifle even as he turned. The dozen aliens that stood at the edge of the jungle had only knives and spears. He saw them with almost superhuman clarity, a flood of adrenaline pushing aside the grief for the moment. Their colors were different from the ones he’d seen: white, with mottled spots of yellow, brown, and black on gray stripes. They wore what looked like green togas, belted at the waist. They were different than the ones that destroyed the colony. Had they fired the missile that brought down the plane? He didn’t know. Didn’t care. They would do.

Ignoring his gun, two of them lowered their sword-tipped spears and charged at him, howling as they did so. He pulled the trigger to full auto, cutting one charging alien in half, his misses shooting into the others waiting behind.

He swept the gun back and forth, mowing them all down.

Suddenly there were more, seemingly charging from every side.

He fanned the gun back and forth, waist high, trying to take them down before they got too close.

More aliens fell, more aliens appeared.

He ducked aside as a thrown spear sailed past his head, so close that he could feel the wind on his hair.

The aliens screamed.

He screamed back.

He fired the gun until it overheated, and forced him to go back to choosing his targets and squeezing off

shots one by one.

The aliens came closer and closer until he was forced to use his rifle barrel as a club to fend off a stabbing spear, forced to throw the gun aside, grab the pistol from his belt and fire into the charging

alien’s chest.

One.

Two.

Three.

Four times.

Then a knife sliced between his ribs and the dead weight of the alien’s body fell on him like a side of

beef. He braced himself for the spear that would finish the job, the knife that would take his head like so many

he’d seen back at the colony.

Then the world exploded. Over and over again.

Behind him, in front of him, to his left, to his right.

He heard the growl of the slowly advancing Bolo, the rain of dust and debris, the whir of the opening hatch.

Then it was very, very quiet. After a few moments, he braced himself, and in a supreme effort, managed to roll the dead alien off the top of him. As the alien fell, he saw a splinter of shattered tree trunk as long as his forearm buried in its neck.

“That was some risk,” Tyrus said, staggering to his feet and looking around, “firing your secondaries that

close to me.”

“I waited until there was no other choice,” Dirk said, “and I hoped your attacker’s body would shield you.”

“It worked,” he said, staggered slowly towards the hatch, clutching his bleeding chest. Something under his palm made a little sucking sound.

“You are injured,” said Dirk, as Tyrus staggered and fell through the hatch. “Very,” he gasped. He lay on the compartment floor, the metal decking cool and smooth against his cheek.

“If you can get to the control cabin, my autodoc may be able to help.”

“No can do.”

“You must try.”

“You just go on your way. I’ll ride down here.”

“You must try.”

“Can’t. Can’t,” Tyrus said, staring at the wall, wondering why he was even still talking to the machine that

had just saved his life. “Got no hope left, big buddy. If you have some, it will have to be enough for both of us.” He felt the Bolo start to move. “We will be at the Rustenberg Colony in a few hours. There will be medical help there.”

“If you say so,” Tyrus said, not really caring. “I will try not to jostle you, but it may be a difficult journey.”

“I can’t stop you.” Tyrus figured he passed out for a moment, or an hour, the nightmare of the room jerking around him keeping him just barely aware.

“Tyrus.”

“What?”

“There is a protected place in every Bolo’s memory where we store remembrances of our past commanders. My service history goes back more than two hundred years, and though my memory has been damaged, that part is still intact. I can remember my first commander with complete clarity, and each officer I have served with since. I have been privileged with an excellent run of commanders. I have

been most fortunate.”

“That’s good, Dirk.”

“I have created a place for you there, Tyrus, not in anticipation of any given event, but in honor of what

we’re been through in our brief time together.”

“I’m honored, Dirk.”

“The honor is mine, Commander Tyrus.”

It was getting very hard to stay awake.

“Dirk.”

“Yes, Commander.”

“Be sure to warn them about the bombs.”

“Yes, Commander.”

He felt himself sinking into a very dark place, and he didn’t want to talk any more.

Chapter Six

Donning reclined in his command chair, which fortunately had been designed with the possibility of sleep in mind. The alien attack had lost its intensity after they’d expended their one-shot weapons against the Bolo, then finally ended without incident about dusk. Casualties were minimal. Donning felt that next time he’d know even better how to fight the aliens.

He could have gone back to his bed when the fighting ended, but surprisingly, he felt more comfortable here. He watched the sun come up on the big screen, ordered his breakfast brought up, then dozed for a while. It was midmorning when the call came from Houchen, the call he’d been anticipating, and dreading.

“Commander, I just got word that New Marikana is under intense attack. They’ve got their own brand of aliens, orange stripes and cruise missiles, and they’re just not ready. They haven’t had a bit of trouble until now. In fact, they were still running mining missions until yesterday.”

“You need to go.”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Then go.” He racked his chair upright, rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, and checked his status screens. “We both knew this was coming.”

“I think we’ve got a handle on it, Colonel. We can hold out until reinforcements come. The autoturrets

are finally completely integrated with the new command and control system, so we should be able to handle our own antimissile defense. Go.”

“Thanks for taking this so well, Donning. You’re a fine officer.”

“I’m a man doing what he has to do,” Donning said. “I think that describes all of us here.” He watched the Bolo on his screen. Already it was making maximum speed and headed away.

“With luck, Khan and I or one of the other Bolos will be back here in a couple days. Signal if you get trouble.”

“Will do.”

“One more thing, Donning,” Houchen said, “you might have some help here sooner than you think. Our ships are picking up that Bolo mining machine from Odinberg, and it’s on the move.”

“You’re kidding?” Donning asked.

“Nope,” Houchen said. “It stopped for a while, but now it’s moving again, toward you. We haven’t been able to contact it though, so we don’t know what sort of fighting shape it’s in, or who’s on board. It could

be something to help with your defense, or just more survivors to take care of.”

“We’ll take care of it.”

“Good luck, Commander.”

“I just hope we won’t need it,” Donning said. But he knew better. They were going to need all the luck

they could get very, very shortly.

A blip sailed across one of his screens, an incoming harassment missile. As he watched, the west autoturret snapped around and blew it out of the sky.

Donning chuckled. “Open for business.”

Lord Whitestar paced from one end of Scarbeak’s chamber to another. “What do you mean, the ogre has gone?” Scarbeak looked up from the new weapon he had been studying so intently. “Just that, lord. A runner returned from the meadow’s edge just moments ago with the news. The ogre has left the area of the human nest and is moving northwest. Perhaps the new weapons we used hurt it more than we believed, or perhaps one of the other clans is attacking a nest in that direction, and the ogre is responding to their calls of distress.”

Whitestar kicked over a stack of modules in anger, before he realized the sacrilege of what he had done. He quickly inspected the modules to be sure their lights-of-function were still lit, and stacked them neatly. “Forgive me, Scarbeak. My blood runs as hot as a new chick’s. I have spent these days preparing myself to kill the ogre, and now it is snatched from me.”

“The ogre is gone. Is that not what we wanted?”

“This nest has proven to be far more difficult to destroy than the first, old one,” Whitestar said. ” Thatis what we want, but even without the ogre there, I am not sure that we can do it, and if we do not do it quickly, the ogre may return. And I still must meet Sharpwing in challenge.”

Scarbeak looked surprised. “Surely he will not want to press challenge, now that the ogre is gone.”

“The ogre is his key to a place of the honored dead,” Whitestar said, “but it is my blood that he truly wishes to spill. He will not care that the ogre is gone, and I will have to kill him. If I do that, neither my eldest nor my first-wife will forgive me, and the disgrace will cripple my ability to lead.”

“Then let your eldest lead. That was what you planned anyway. Refuse to fight Sharpwing. Dishonor is not such a terrible thing to live with. It might be your only hope to live as long as I have.”

“He has only begun to recover from the wounds I gave him. If I give Sharpwing honor by refusing to fight, the hatchling will try to take control. Before his brother is recovered, he may have already led our clan to ruin, that we may taste death and defeat at the same meal.”

Scarbeak put down his tools and looked up at his lord, gazing at him intently with the right eye of truth. “What if there is no future for our clan, my lord?”

“What foolishness are you talking about now, old man?” Whitestar demanded, staring at the old one.

“The warriors that carried the new weapons,” Scarbeak said, not backing down, “indeed, even those warriors that were close when the weapons fired, they sicken, my lord. Their fur falls out in clumps, and they cannot keep down their food.”

“We can make more eggs quickly,” Whitestar said. He did not like what Scarbeak was getting at.

“True,” Scarbeak said, nodding, “but the losses are staggering, far faster than even we can make eggs. So many die from the devil’s weapons, and now more and more die from our own as well. Sharpwing’s generation, or perhaps a few after him, could be the last.”

“First my wife, now you. If that is the plan that the Ones Above have for us, so be it. But consider this, which of my sons should be leader, if our people are to live longest?”

Whitestar didn’t wait for an answer, but instead kneeled next to the new weapon, a flattened disk half as wide as he was tall, with straps to hold it to a warrior’s back for carrying. “How powerful is this weapon, Scarbeak?”

“Powerful enough to pierce the skin of the ogre and strike his heart, if you can place it underneath, or perhaps just close to his body at any point.”

Scarbeak moved over and touched the weapon reverently. “Unlike the other Fists we have been given, this one strikes in one direction only, and the oracles tell me that it acts as a shield against the devil’s

weapons.”

Whitestar stared at the object. It did have the appearance of a shield, but he didn’t see how it would stop the great firebolts that came from the ogre. Still, he had to trust the oracles, trust the Ones Above. Many things were still in their control. “Scarbeak, could this thing pierce the walls of the devil’s nest?”

“It might, my lord. In fact, I am almost certain it would. We have been able to damage those walls repeatedly, while we have barely scratched the hide of the ogre.”

“And if I could break open their nest so that our warriors could slaughter them, it would shorten this war, save countless of our people’s lives, and still serve the will of the Ones Above. Wouldn’t that be worth the life of a lord?”

Scarbeak said nothing for a while. Then, “I’m old, my friend. I had always imagined that you would outlive me.”

Chapter Seven

Donning could have had the new command and control center installed anywhere in the colony. It was self-contained, weatherproof, and could have communicated over an area many times larger than the colony. But he had chosen to have it set up just behind the southern ramparts, where it was still well protected, but close enough to the walls that he could easily climb up and visit the troops there. He knew that, as the siege dragged on, and a siege is what this was, the morale of the people manning the walls and defenses would be everything. So each morning he tried to make the circuit of those walls, to let everyone see him, to stop occasionally, ask people how they were doing, and offer a few words of encouragement.

The perimeter was too long to comfortably walk, and staying well behind the walls in a ground-car would have defeated the purpose, so he’d had a small electric scooter hauled up. Each morning found him on that scooter, zipping along the catwalks and weapons platforms built into its top and rear, making his rounds. It wasn’t terribly dignified or impressive, but he somehow thought that the people serving under him appreciated the effort.

This morning, his first stop was at a sniper platform a few hundred meters counter-clockwise from the C&C. Manning the post this day was Private Vetta Rampling. Donning had been keeping an eye on her. She had no military experience, but she’d lived on frontier worlds most of her life. She knew how to handle a weapon, and wasn’t afraid to use them with deadly intent. Given how many of his troops had started out as file clerks and machine operators, as afraid of their own weapons as the enemy, he wished he had a couple dozen more like her.

He rolled up and stepped off the scooter. “Good morning, Private.”

She gave him a sloppy salute. Rampling wasn’t much on military protocol, but that described a lot of the people under his command. Actually it wasn’t that, so much as that she seemed distracted, concerned with something out beyond the wall.

“Problem, Private?” He stepped up and looked out the gun slit. He wasn’t overly cautious, a shimmer

field built into the opening made it almost impossible for an enemy sniper to target anyone behind the wall.

Things looked quiet outside. Below them, a remote-controlled construction machine was repairing wall damage from the last attack, a boom moving back and fourth spraying fast-hardening duracrete into the openings. Beyond that, a bit of low fog hung to the meadows, and the tree line seemed quiet.

“They’re out there, Commander, getting ready to attack again.”

Overactive imagination? But she seemed to be suggesting fact, and not just speculation. “Are your eyes better than mine, Private?”

“Maybe, but that’s not it.” She looked at him, as though wondering if he’d think her crazy. “I don’t suppose you can smell them, can you, sir?”

He chuckled in spite himself. “I don’t much want to smell them, Private.”

“No, sir, really. I can smell them out there, smell their mood, I think. It could be part of how they communicate, or how they coordinate their attacks. And what I’m smelling today, I smelled before the last two attacks started. I think they’re massing out there.”

Donning considered for a moment. He’d read somewhere that women had much more sensitive noses than men. Maybe she was onto something. He touched his earpiece. “Peak.”

“Yes, sir,” the voice came back.

“Are you reading anything unusual on the perimeter?”

“I was just about to call you, sir. We’ve got a lot of movement beyond the tree line. Not as much as the last attack, but I think things could be heating up.”

“I’m on my way.” He put the headset on standby and climbed back on his scooter, turning it back towards the C&C. “Private, when you get a chance, see if any of the other women have been smelling what you’ve been smelling, and if you get any other insights into what’s about to happen, you send them up to C&C immediately.”

“Yes, sir!”

Despite his concern about the impending attack, Donning smiled as he rode back to the C&C. Every clue, every insight they got into the aliens, how they thought, how they operated, made them easier to fight. For the longest time it had been difficult for Donning to think beyond the next hour, the next day, the next attack. But now he could finally start to project beyond that.

The Concordiat wasn’t trying to keep them here to cower behind their walls forever. They were keeping them here to mine, and that meant leaving the relative safety of the compound. Houchen had told him about the Bolo mining machine on its way from the Odinberg Colony. Even if it wasn’t any use to them as a combat vehicle, they might be able to use it for its mining capabilities. Maybe they could be back in the mining business faster than anyone imagined.

Yet even as he was thinking these things, some part of his mind was reminding him that there was a fine line between competence and overconfidence.

Scarbeak had put on his finest robe before heading to the gathering. It was made of a soft fabric obtained by endlessly pounding the fibrous shells of a certain jungle nut and dyed purple and red using the condensed juice of fermented berries. At the bottom, it came almost to the tops of his feet and a hood could be raised to cover his head. A knotted rope around the middle of his chest secured the garment.

He liked the robe and wore it on those public occasions when he wished to be noticed. Whitestar used to make fun of it. The men of their clan normally wore little clothing. “It makes you look like an old woman,” he would say. But Scarbeak just ignored him. He was old and entitled to his eccentricities.

Surely this day, as he entered the clearing, he was noticed, though there may have been other reasons. At the far edge stood Sharpwing and a group of his loyalist supporters, a low fog swimming around their ankles. They made small, derisive noises as Scarbeak walked up.

“Where,” demanded Sharpwing, “is he, old man?”

“Is he afraid to come?” asked one Sharpwing supporter.

“Does he send you to fight for him?” laughed another.

“He will fight,” said Scarbeak, tucking his hands inside his robe. “Wait, you will see.” He assumed a waitful posture and proceeded to ignore the pack of noisy hatchlings that Sharpwing had brought with him.

Time passed. The sun was higher in the sky. Scarbeak enjoyed watching the fog thin, and finally disappear. Insects began to buzz about in search of food. It would be a good day, today, he thought.

Sharpwing and his followers were becoming visibly impatient. “Where is he?” demanded Sharpwing, stepping threateningly close to the old warrior. “When will he be here?”

Scarbeak made a little sound of amusement. “I do not believe that I said he would be here at all, only that he would fight.”

“What do you mean?”

Scarbeak looked at the young warrior with as much disgust as he could show. “He has cheated you of the two things you claimed to want: his life, and the right to take the Fist of the Ones Above against the enemy. He has gone to lead our warriors through the walls and into the aliens’ nest. He will strike against them with his last breath, and bring honor to his name and those who fight at his side.”

Sharpwing looked confused.

“Don’t you smell the fight in the air, young one? No, of course not, you smell only your own stink of combat, that of you and your friends. This is how an army could slip by you in the jungle and you would never know.”

Sharpwing hissed in rage. “Did my sire send you to do this, to taunt me?”

“I came on my own, to delay you as long as I could, for you’ll never catch him in time. By the time you arrive, the battle will be all but over, and the people will talk of it. ‘It was glorious,’ they will say. ‘What

courage Whitestar had at the end. But where was Sharpwing? Where were his followers? How did such a fine warrior sire such a coward?’”

Hissing, Sharpwing turned to leave in disgust.

“Wait,” said Scarbeak. “Do not leave without your gift. It is something your father wanted you to have, but could never bear to give you himself.”

Curious, Scarbeak hesitated, then turned back toward the old warrior. “Give it to me,” he said. Under his robe, Scarbeak’s old knife, unused for years, felt good in his hand. He slid the long, curved blade from under the fabric with one smooth motion, and plunged it into Sharpwing’s stomach. He used all his strength to pull up on the handle and twist, a motion that would slice into Sharpwing’s entrails, ensuring a fatal wound. Sharpwing looked down in horror at the wound, but somehow his hand found his own blade. He stabbed the blade deep into the old man’s chest, using his superior strength to force it between the closely-spaced ribs, digging to find something vital. A bloody cough dribbled down from Scarbeak’s open mouth, his head drifted backwards, his eyes already turning milky. “My lord,” he said, his voice a gurgle, “I do precede you into death.”

“Can you hear me?”

Tyrus groaned and turned his head. It hurt too much for him not to be alive, though he wasn’t sure how he’d survived.

“Tyrus. Commander. Can you hear me?”

Dirk. The voice had a name, and he remembered it. Dirk. The mining machine made from a Bolo.

It was hard to breathe. His chest hurt. He managed a wet, gurgling cough.

“I could not get you to the autodoc, but I was able to adjust my internal life support to increase the

oxygen pressure considerably. If you can move, I suggest you be careful not to create a spark or flame.”

“No moving. Don’t worry. No moving.”

“I need you, Commander. The inhibitions placed on my combat reflexes are too strong. I cannot fight

without you.”

He suddenly felt a little more alert. “Fight? Fight who? Fight where?”

“We are nearly to Rustenberg. I could proceed there directly and get you to medical care. However,

among my functional sensors is a suite designed to detect radioactive materials. These produced a certain signature from the alien suicide bomb.”

“You—you found another one?”

“Rapidly moving through the jungle towards the colony. Commander, from the transmissions I have

monitored, this colony has resisted repeated attacks by the enemy, but the enemy has yet to employ such

weapons here. The colonists have not been warned.”

“They have a Bolo,” he said. He studied the conduits and ducts on the ceiling of the passageway, memorizing every detail, and wondering if they would be the last thing he ever saw.

“The Bolo left for the Marikana, to repel a new attack. They have only their fixed defenses. And if I am interpreting my sensors correctly, this device is different than the one that was used at Odinberg, possibly much more powerful.”

Tyrus coughed, feeling something wet on his lips. “You’re asking me what to do.”

“I cannot fight without you. I will not risk your life further without your direct order.” He closed his eyes. He remembered the words he had lasered onto metal back at the Odinberg Colony.

They will be avenged.

It had been an impulse, an afterthought. Perhaps they had been the wrong words. Perhaps the right

words would have been, Never again. He opened his eyes, tried to clear his mind. Then he said aloud to Dirk. “Target that bomb. Let’s intercept it if we can.”

“It will be a close thing,” said Dirk. “Did you open the rest of those gunports yet?”

“I have not tried. The overload could damage other systems. I have been waiting for the right moment.”

“This would be it. Time to fight, Dirk. Do what you were born to do. Do what you have to do.”

“Yes, Commander.” All around him, the gunport servos whirred, then howled, then screamed. The lights in the passage

dimmed—or was it just his vision? Then a crack, like an old style cannon, and another, and another, and

another. “Six of eighteen ports have opened, Commander. The actuators on the rest have burned out, but I have limited secondary armaments at the ready.”

Something about Dirk’s voice sounded different to Tyrus, or was it just his imagination?

“I am fighting unit DRK, Mark XXIV of the Dinochrome Brigade. I proudly serve under Unit Commander Tyrus Ogden. We go to defend humanity against alien aggression.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Tyrus, ignoring the pain in his chest. “Let’s do it.”

Chapter Eight

The wall-repair machine had been trapped outside the walls when the attack came. Donning had ordered the machine rolled away from the colony, avoiding the main body of the aliens, hoping that they might ignore it.

No such luck.

The machine was still moving, slowly, its upper structure now entirely engulfed in flame. As the aliens streamed past on either side, they would shoot it with their rifles, blue arcs of light that slowly were slicing the robotic vehicle to ribbons. Finally a missile slipped through their overloaded defenses and struck the machine, causing it to explode into a shower of metal and flaming parts.

More missiles slipped past, slamming into the walls, one damaging autoturret six. There were fewer aliens this time, but they were more organized, more determined than they’d ever been before. They’d blown up three of the single-shot cannon before the weapon could be used, but when they’d tried to destroy a fourth one, it shattered into splinters, a cleverly made decoy constructed from a hollow log. He had to give them that. The aliens were smart and resourceful in their own suicidal way.

“Sir,” said Peak, “off on the southern horizon.”

At first Donning thought it was a hill, but he’d studied every inch of that horizon, and there was no hill in that direction. Then he saw it was moving. He zoomed in.

Donning watched his screens in amazement. The Bolo looked like it had already been through a war. Its hull was charred and pitted, and smoke poured from a closed aft gunport. Though it bore a family resemblance to Khan, it was even bigger, a lumbering mountain of metal that waded through the jungle like a child wading through a pool. It was much slower than Khan too, though whether that was due to its modifications, its age, or damage sustained along the way, he couldn’t be sure.

A few patches of yellow paint could still be seen on its side, remnants of someone’s absurd attempt to make it look more like a standard mining machine.

Broken bits of welded-on mining gear hung in tatters from its hull, including a huge derrick that lay folded back over the main turret, deprived now of its original Hellbore cannon. He’d had hopes for this machine, that it might be able to fight for them, or mine for them, but now, seeing it, he didn’t think it would be able to do either.

“Sir,” said Peak, “I’m picking up some low power transmissions on one of the civilian mining bands. I think they’re coming from the Bolo.”

“What do they say?”

“Nothing yet, sir. Just a carrier wave and garbled static, but it’s getting stronger.”

“Keep monitoring. We have to know their intentions. Under the circumstances, we can’t just open the gates and let them in.”

Lord Whitestar trotted through the jungle, hunched forward because of the heavy weapon strapped to his back. The air was sweet in his lungs, the foliage as splendid and lush as he ever remembered it, the sun like a jewel as it peeked through the canopy of trees. It felt good to run, good to carry the power of the Ones Above. He had clarity now.

He knew what he had to do.

There were chants for this, to give the warrior focus, to ease his fear, to give him the courage to make the final sacrifice for victory. He had learned those chants, practiced them since he was a hatchling, but now that it was time, he found he had no need of them. He was free of fear, his resolve as sharp as a knife blade, his determination complete.

Instead, in his mind he rehearsed what he must do. Already the diversionary attacks were under way. There would be confusion on the meadows, and his purpose would be to stay away from those attacks, to avoid enemy fire as much as possible. He carried no other weapon, not even a knife, that might attract enemy attention. A loose wrapping of rags helped to disguise the weapon. He had already chosen his spot on the wall, a place that still showed cracks and scars from their last attack, one positioned so that his warriors could do the most damage when they broke through.

Scarbeak had said the weapon would shield him, but he thought that was foolishness. He would simply not get shot. That would be the way to do it. He would sprint up to the wall, arm the weapon, press the face of it against one of those cracks, and press the activation stud.

Probably he would never even feel it. But if what Scarbeak had told him was true, the Fist would explode a column of fire directly into the wall. Almost certainly it would punch through. Ideally it would do terrible damage to the structures and people on the other side, and cause that whole part of the wall to collapse.

From there, his warriors would stream inside, killing every living thing that they saw: warriors, females, hatchlings. All would die, and the world would be cleansed of one more human-devil nest.

Ahead he could see fire, hear the cries of warriors echoing off the walls of the enemy, smell the glory of battle. And then he turned his head and saw something that shattered his resolve. Looming over the trees was an ogre, and it was coming his way. Suddenly, nothing was clear at all.

“Commander,” said Peak, “I’m getting voice transmission from the Bolo.”

“Put it on the speaker.”

“Unit … Dinochro … colony …”

It was still too broken to understand.

“Can you filter that somehow?”

Peak looked very unhappy. Doubtless his console could clear up the message, but it was beyond his limited skills. “I’ll do what I can.”

“Meanwhile, let’s see if we can talk to them. Patch me through.”

He watched as Peak pushed something on his console. “Unidentified Bolo, this is Commander Donning of the Colonial Militia. We can’t yet receive you, but we’re trying to clear up your signal. We’re currently under attack. You may want to withdraw until we can repel the aliens.”

No response. “Keep trying!” Donning ordered.

Tyrus listened to the hidden speaker in wonderment. He’d thought he might never hear a live human voice again. “Dirk, when they can hear us, let me talk to them.”

“Understood,” Dirk said. Tyrus took a moment to try and catch his breath. It was getting hard to talk, hard to even breathe. His whole existence was a dull ache, threaded with sharp pains. He had to focus, to stay alert long enough to save this colony.

“Where’s the bomb?”

“Two thousand meters and closing,” Dirk said. “I can obtain only an approximate position and I can’t make a visual sighting. It may already be within blast radius of the fortifications.”

Tyrus tried to make himself think. They had to stop that bomb. “Can you … shoot it?”

“There might be a secondary explosion, but I do not believe a direct hit would trigger the bomb.”

“Do it.”

“I don’t have a visual identification of the target.”

“Might be hidden. Camouflage.”

“Commander, I have voice contact. Putting you on.” Somebody started to talk from the speaker. “Shut up,” he gasped. “Listen. There’s a fusion bomb. Suicide weapon. Get to shelters.” Someone had left the mike open, and he heard someone shouting a rapid chain of orders before it was cut off. “I see an unarmed alien, alone,” Dirk said, “carrying a heavy object wrapped in rags.”

“Moving directly towards the walls?” Tyrus asked. “Yes.”

“Get him,” Tyrus ordered.

He heard a secondary battery fire. Dirk jerked into faster motion, slamming him into the bulkhead and intense pain.

Whitestar dropped his pace, confused. This was not the same ogre as before. This one was bigger, but it was already wounded, some of its weapons seemingly missing or damaged. It lacked the single “mountain-killer” horn of the other machine. But an ogre was an ogre, and his blood told him to return to his original mission, to go destroy it. He almost turned. Then he thought of the warriors who would die needlessly. The ogre would be dead, but the walls would still stand, and the other ogre might yet return. Destroy the nest. That was what he must do. He moved away from the ogre and doubled his pace. To his alarm, the ogre turned to follow. Had it detected his weapon? He must not be stopped.

Then he saw the mouth of one of the ogre’s firebolts turn toward him, and knew there was no hope. He stopped, faced his attacker, closed his eyes, and awaited his death without fear. A blinding light that came even through his closed eyelids, an indescribable noise, an energy that felt like invisible insects whizzing through his flesh, and a heat that made his fur smolder. Then it was over, and nobody was more surprised than he was that he was still alive.

“I don’t believe it,” said the voice from the speaker. “Your Bolo just fired on a lone alien from maybe five hundred meters, and he’s still standing.”

“Dirk,” Tyrus said, “malfunction?”

“My weapons are operating on reduced power, but he should have been vaporized with several gigawatts of energy to spare.”

“Then what happened?” Tyrus demanded. “My analysis indicates some sort of personal battle screen,” Dirk said, “possibly deriving power inductively from my own weapon. I register that the alien has probably already sustained a fatal radiation overdose, but that may not stop him from completing his mission.”

“Damn, damn, damn,” the voice on the speaker said.

Tyrus groaned. “Keep firing, Dirk, keep firing!” There was a cracking noise, and the lights went out for a moment. Tyrus knew that was not a good sign at all.

“The power buss to my weapons system has just failed.”

“Stop him, Dirk. Any way you can.”

“Yes, Commander,” Dirk said.

Donning shouted into his mike, directing his snipers and fixed guns to fire on the lone figure now sprinting for their southwest wall, but their shots glanced away without effect. The noncombatants were already in their shelters, but unfortunately, those shelters began beneath the streets just a hundred yards inside that wall.

Donning knew, without a doubt, that those walls would not stop a fusion bomb set off close, and neither would the shelters just beyond the walls protect the colonists. Right here, right now, this battle was either going to be won or lost. “Keep firing everything we have at him!” shouted Donning. As he watched, nothing seemed to work. The alien kept moving, getting closer and closer. The old Bolo still churned forward, its guns dead. Perhaps, so were they all.

Whitestar forced himself toward the wall. Though the enemy’s weapons bounced away harmlessly, he felt sick, injured inside in a way he couldn’t describe or understand. No matter. He had only to survive a few more seconds under the miraculous protection of the Ones Above, and then it wouldn’t matter. The ramparts were just ahead of him now—

Then someone rolled a wall in his way, blotted out the sun. He barely stopped himself from tumbling into the churning tracks and giant spinning wheels. He looked around, stunned. He was under the ogre! He was blocked from the walls. It would be so easy now, to lift the weapon over his head, trigger it against the belly of the beast—But that was not his mission. He saw sunlight at the rear of the thing, like the opening of a tunnel, and he sprinted for it. He would complete his task. Not even the ogre would stop him.

“Where is he?” Tyrus demanded. “He’s under our treads, Commander,” Dirk said. “In the galley between tread four and five. He’s trying to escape.”

“Run him down.”

“The bomb may be triggered.”

“Will be … anyway. Do it. That’s an order!” Tyrus felt the passage turn around him as the Bolo spun in its own length.

Suddenly, the spot of light in front of Whitestar began to move, spinning away like a ghost. He found himself in a hellish passage with moving walls of machinery, all ready to eat him alive. One misstep and he would have failed, smashed by the ogre. He ran towards the light, was forced to double back, saw light the other way, but was forced back from there as well. If he did not make it from under this beast, he would at least take the beast with him. As he ran, he unstrapped the weapon from his back. The wall of the human nest was only a few meters away. If he only knew the direction, perhaps he could still trigger the weapon from here. But he was confused after turning so many times, confused by the spinning ogre over his head. He

hesitated, making sure the lights-of-function showed the correct color. The weapon was ready. His attention to the weapon cost him. He never saw the tread until it was on him like a set of giant metal teeth. It threw him down on the ground, crushing him up to the waist. He ignored the pain, worked his free hand to find the firing stud.

“I have him pinned under my number five tread, Commander,” Dirk said. “Good job, good … job.” Tyrus was very tired. Maybe he could finally sleep now. The colony had been saved. “Good-bye, Commander,” Dirk said.

The explosion shook the walls like a groundquake, even in the C&C, mounted as it was on shock absorbers. Donning was tossed to the floor, but he quickly scrambled back to his chair, watching the screens. A moment before, the old Bolo had run right over the top of the alien. He had cheered, thinking the alien had been crushed and the bomb hadn’t exploded. But he had been wrong. Now, on the screen, there was a sight that he would never forget: the blasted, 14,000-ton hull of the Bolo flipping high into the air, end over end, like a tossed coin.

Chapter Nine

Houchen could hardly believe the mess when he and Khan arrived back at the northern colony, but the walls were still intact, the colony survived, and that was all he could have asked for.

No, not quite true. He would have liked to know about the man who had fought on even when he knew it would cost him his life, and the crippled Bolo who had shielded an entire colony with his war hull. But they didn’t know, not even their names. They just knew there had been one survivor of the Odinberg Colony massacre, and now there were none.

The hull was still there, in the charred meadows outside the colony walls, and it would probably still be there centuries from now if the jungles didn’t reclaim it. Eventually the grass would regrow, the flowers would bloom, and animals would make their homes in its gutted hull.

Houchen wondered if humans would still be here then, or if they would have taken what they wanted from this world and left it behind. He wondered if any of the aliens would survive, and what stories they would tell of this day.

Surely some of them must have survived to tell the tale. Not many though. The Bolo’s hull had done more than shield the colony from the blast, it had redirected it, sending a crescent-shaped shock wave away from the walls of the colony that had flattened trees for two kilometers, and killed aliens by the thousands.

There were still a few attacks, an occasional missile or two, and around half a dozen other colonies around the continent the aliens were as much a threat as ever. But here and now, the enemy’s back seemed to be broken. Donning was repairing his fortifications, and they were busy modifying their mining machines to add armor and weapons. Here at least, things might soon be settling into a new routine, something akin to normal.

As Khan rolled past the dead Bolo one last time, he raised his guns in salute, and launched a volley of shots into the empty sky. Twenty-one times he fired.

And then he turned, and they rolled toward the distant horizon. There were other colonies to be defended.

Lord Blackspike pushed himself up painfully with his cane, and hissed in rage at the distant thunder of the human weapons. He had brought his people here, to the deep jungle, far from any of the human nests, so that they could recover and rebuild. But even here, there was no escape from the human devils.

He sat back down on a fallen log and looked around him. The camp was small and ragged. There were only a few warriors left, and most of them were injured or maimed. Some still died slowly from the invisible sickness. What was left were women, eggs, and hatchlings.

Even the oracles were gone, but before Blackspike had left, his sire had come to him and whispered where others could be found. In time, the hatchlings would grow, there would be more eggs, and in three seasons’ time, new warriors to begin again. The Ones Above would show them new weapons. More powerful weapons. Then they would go back.

Then the human devils would pay.

But it was not too early to begin the fight.

Never too early.

“Hatchlings,” he shouted. “Your lord commands you, gather round and listen!”

He sat on his log, and the little ones gathered round. He reached into his pouch, his fingers sliding over

the cool, smooth bone there. He pulled the skull out and held it up for the hatchlings to see.

“This,” he said, “is a human. This is a devil. What do we do to humans?”

At once they began to chant.

Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill… .

The End

Table of Contents

Chapter Nine

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine