by David Weber
She jerked her eyes away from those horribly exposed icons, and her teeth flashed in an ivory snarl as a score of other icons in another quarter of the display, the ones representing the Melconian destroyers and light cruisers, were snared in sudden crimson sighting circles.
“Enemy warships acquired,” Benjy announced. And then, instantly, “Engaging.”
A dozen 110-centimeter Hellbores fired as one, and atmosphere already tortured by the explosions of dying missiles, shrieked in protest as massive thunderbolts of plasma howled upward.
All nine Melconian light cruisers and three of the destroyers died instantly, vomiting flame as those incredible bolts of energy ripped contemptuously through their battle screens and splintered their hulls. Superconductor capacitors ruptured and antimatter containment fields failed, adding their own massive energy to the destruction, and the vacuum above Chartres rippled and burned. The horrified crews of the remaining Melconian destroyers had four fleeting seconds to realize what had happened. That was the cycle time of the Mark XXVIII’s Hellbore… and precisely four seconds later a fresh, equally violent blast of light and fury marked the deaths of the remaining enemy warships.
Maneka Trevor heard her own soprano banshee-howl of triumph, but even as the Battalion’s turrets swivelled back around, the tidal bore of cruise missiles burst upon it.
Countermissiles, infinite repeaters, laser clusters, auto cannon—even antipersonnel clusters—belched defiance as the hypervelocity projectiles came streaking in. They died by the dozen, by the score. By the hundred. But they came in thousands, and not even Bolos’ active defenses could intercept them all.
Battle screen stopped some of them. Some of them missed. Some of them killed one another, consuming each other in their fireball deaths. But far too many got through.
The exposed Mark XXVIIs suffered first. Maneka’s shock frame hammered her savagely as Benjy’s massive hull twisted through an intricate evasion pattern, his defensive weapons streaming fire. But even though scores of missiles bored in on him, far more—probably as many as half or even two-thirds of the total Melconian launch—locked onto the quartet of Mark XXVIIs. The Invictus might mount more antimissile defenses than the Triumphant, but not enough to weather this storm. For an instant, she wondered what had gone wrong with their EW systems, why so many missiles had been able to lock onto them. And then she realized. They weren’t trying to prevent the missiles from locking them up; they were deliberately enhancing their targeting signatures, turning themselves into decoys and drawing the missiles in, away from the Battalion.
Her heart froze as she recognized what they were doing, and then the holocaust washed over them. The towering explosions crashed down on the reconnaissance company like the boot of some angry titan, hobnailed in nuclear flame. They were forty kilometers ahead of the Battalion’s main body, and the warheads were standard Puppy issue, incongruously “clean” in what had become a genocidal war of mutual extermination. Yet there were hundreds of them, and lethal tides of radiation sleeted outward with the thermal flash, followed moments later by the blast front itself.
Maneka clung to her sanity with bleeding fingernails as Thor’s hammer slammed into Benjy. The huge Bolo lurched like a storm-tossed galleon as the green, living forest about them, already torn and outraged by the Battalion’s passage and the handful of high-trajectory missiles which had gotten through, flashed into instant flame. The Battalion charged onward, straight through that incandescent inferno, duralloy armor shrugging aside the radiation and blast and heat which would have smashed the life instantly from the fragile protoplasmic beings riding their command decks. The visual display showed only a writhing ocean of fire and dust, of explosion and howling wind, like some obscene preview of Hell, but it was a Hell Bolos were engineered to survive… and defeat.
None of the reconnaissance Bolos in the direct path of the missile strike survived, but the chaos and massive spikes of EMP generated by the missiles which killed them had a disastrous effect on the missiles which had acquired the rest of the Battalion. Those same conditions hampered the Bolos’ antimissile defenses, but the degradation it imposed on the missiles’ kill probabilities was decisive.
Not that there weren’t still plenty of them to go around. Over seventy targeted Benjy, even as he charged through the raging fires and devastation of the primary strike zone. The gargantuan Bolo’s point defense stopped most of them short of his battle screen, but twenty-three reached attack range, and his fifteen-thousand-ton hull bucked and heaved as the fusion warheads gouged at his battle screen and drove searing spikes of hellfire directly into his armor. Thor’s hammer smashed down again. Then again, and again and again. Even through the concussions and the terrifying vibration, Maneka could see entire swathes of his battle board blazing bloody scarlet as damage ripped away weapons and sensors.
But then, too suddenly to be real, the hammer blows stopped. Ten of the sixteen Bolos who had been targeted charged out the far side of the holocaust, leaving behind all four of the 351st’s Mark XXVIIs. Two of the Battalion’s Mark XXVIIIs had also been destroyed, and all of the survivors were damaged to greater or lesser extent, but they had destroyed the entire remaining Melconian support squadron, and the enemy LZ was just ahead.
“I have sustained moderate damage to my secondary batteries and forward sensors,” Benjy announced. “Main battery and indirect fire systems operational at 87.65 percent of base capability. Track Three has been immobilized, but I am still capable of 92.56 percent normal road speed. Estimate 9.33 minutes to contact with Enemy direct fire perimeter weapons at current rate of advance. Request missile release.”
Missile release ought to have been authorized by Colonel Tchaikovsky, Maneka thought. But Tchaikovsky’s Gregg was one of the Bolos they’d lost, and Major Fredericks’ Peggy had suffered major damage to her communications arrays. There was no time to consult anyone else, and independent decisions were one of the things Bolo commanders were trained to make.
“Release granted. Open fire!” she snapped.
“Acknowledged,” Benjy replied, and the heavily armored hatches of his VLS tubes sprang open. His own missiles blasted outward, then streaked away in ground-hugging supersonic flight. They were shorter ranged and marginally slower than the ones the Melconians had hurled at the Battalion, but they were also far more agile, and the relatively short launch range and low cruising altitudes gave the defenders’ less capable reconnaissance drones even less tracking time than the Battalion had been given against the Melconian missiles.
Fireballs raged along the Melconian perimeter, blasting away outer emplacements and dug-in armored units. Weapons and sensor posts, Loki-class tank destroyers and air-defense batteries, vanished into the maw of the Thirty-Ninth Battalion’s fury. Benjy’s thirty-centimeter rapid-fire mortars joined the attack, vomiting terminally guided projectiles into the vortex of destruction. Follow-on flights of Melconian missiles shrieked to meet them from the missile batteries to the rear, but the indirect fire weapons had lost virtually all of their observation capability. Their targeting solutions were much more tentative, the chaos and explosions hampered the missiles’ onboard seeker systems, and the gaping hole ripping deeper and deeper into their perimeter was costing them both launchers and the sensor capability which might have been able to sort out the maelstrom of devastation well enough to improve their accuracy.
But hidden among the merely mortal Melconian emplacements were their own war machines. The Heimdalls were too light to threaten a Bolo—even the Ninth’s manned vehicles were more than a match for them—but the fists of Surturs and Fenrises were something else entirely. Heavier, tougher, and more dangerous, they outnumbered the Battalion’s survivors by eighteen-to-one, and they had the advantage of prepared positions.
Another of the Battalion’s Bolos lurched to a halt, vomiting intolerable heat and light as a plasma bolt punched through its thinner side armor. Benjy fired on the move, main turret tracking smoothly, and his entire hull heaved as a main battery
shot belched from his Hellbore and disemboweled the Surtur which had just killed his brigade brother. Another Surtur died, and Benjy’s far less powerful infinite repeaters sent ion bolt after lethal ion bolt shrieking across the vanishing gap between the Battalion and the Melconian perimeter to rend and destroy the Surturs’ lighter, weaker companions.
“Take point, Benjy!” Maneka barked as yet another Bolo slewed to a halt, streaming smoke and flame. Her eyes dropped to the sidebar, and she felt a stab of grief as the unblinking letter codes identified the victim as Lazy. It looked like a mission kill, not complete destruction, she thought, but the damage had to have punched deeply into Lazy’s personality center… and there was no way Lieutenant Takahashi could have survived.
And there was no time to mourn them, either.
Benjy surged forward, the apex of a wedge of eight bleeding titans. Surturs reared up out of deeply dug-in hides, lurching around to counterattack from the flanks and rear as the Battalion smashed through their outer perimeter, Hellbores howling in point-blank, continuous fire.
In! We’re into their rear! a corner of Maneka’s brain realized, with a sense of triumph that stabbed even through the horror and the terror.
A brilliant purple icon blazed abruptly on Benjy’s tactical plot as his analysis of Melconian com signals suddenly revealed what had to be a major communication node.
“The CP, Benjy! Take the CP!” Maneka snapped.
“Acknowledged,” Benjy replied without hesitation, and he altered course once more, smashing his way towards the command post. It loomed before him, and as Maneka watched the tac analysis spilling up the plot sidebars, she realized what it truly was. Not a command post, but the command post—the central nerve plexus of the entire Puppy position!
They’d found the organizing brain of the Melconian enclave, and she felt a sudden flare of hope. If they could reach that command post, take it out, cripple the enemy’s command and control function long enough for the Ninth to break in through the hole they’d torn, then maybe A pair of Surturs, flanked by their attendant mediums, loomed suddenly out of the chaos, Hellbores throwing sheets of plasma at the Bolos rampaging through their line. Benjy blew the left-flank Surtur into incandescent ruin while Peggy shouldered up on his right and killed the other. Their infinite repeaters raved as the Fenrises split, trying to circle wide and get at their weaker flank defenses, and the medium Melconian mechs slithered to a halt, spewing fury and hard radiation as their antimatter plants blew.
Then a trio of Fenris-class mediums, all of them orphans which had lost their Surturs, appeared out of nowhere. Their lighter weapons bellowed, and they were on the left flank of Captain Harris and Allen. They fired once, twice… and then there were only seven Bolos left.
Benjy’s port infinite repeater battery shredded Allen’s killers, even as two more Surturs reared up suddenly before him. One of them fired past him, slamming three Hellbore bolts simultaneously into Peggy. The Bolo’s battle screen attenuated the bolts, and the antiplasma armor applique absorbed and deflected much of their power. But the range was too short and the weapons too powerful. One of the newer Bolos, with the improved armor alloys and better internal disruptor shielding, might have survived; Peggy—and Major Angela Fredericks—did not.
Benjy’s turret spun with snakelike speed, and his Hellbore sent a far more powerful bolt straight through the frontal glacis plate of the second Surtur before it could fire. Then it swivelled desperately back towards the first Melconian mech.
Six, Maneka had an instant to think. There are only six of us now!
And then, in the same fragmented second, both war machines fired.
“Hull breach!” Benjy’s voice barked. “Hull breach in—”
There was an instant, a fleeting stutter in the pulse of eternity that would live forever in Maneka Trevor’s nightmares, when her senses recorded everything with intolerable clarity. The terrible, searing flash of light, the simultaneous blast of agony, the flashing blur of movement as Unit 28/G-862-BNJ slammed the inner duralloy carapace across his commander’s couch.
And then darkness.
“Hello, Lieutenant.”
The quiet voice boomed through Maneka’s mind like thunder, and she flinched away from its power. She felt herself swinging through a huge, empty void, like some ghostly pendulum, while vertigo surged and receded within her.
“It’s time to wake up,” the soft voice boomed, and she closed her eyes tighter. No. Not time to wake up. If she did that, something would be waiting. Something she could not—would not—face.
But the voice would not be denied. She clung to her safe, dark cocoon, yet she felt herself being drawn relentlessly, mercilessly, up out of its depths. And then her eyes slid open and slitted under the brilliant tide of light.
No, not her eyes—her eye. She was blind on the right side, she realized, with a sort of dreamy detachment, and raised her right hand to touch the dressing covering that eye. Only her hand refused to move, and when she rolled her head slowly—so slowly—far enough to the right to see, she found that her right arm ended just below the shoulder.
She blinked her remaining eye in syrupy slow motion, her sluggish brain trying to grapple with her wounds, and then a hand touched her left shoulder. She turned back in that direction, eye squinting, trying to make out details, and saw a man in the battle dress uniform of the Concordiat Marine Corps. A colonel, she thought, then blinked. No, she was wrong again. He wore a colonel’s uniform, but the insignia pinned to his collar was that of a brigadier.
“Are you sure she’s going to be all right?” she heard the colonel-turned-brigadier say. He was looking at someone else. A man in white.
“We got to her in time,” the man in white said reassuringly. “Actually, your people got to her in time and pulled her out while we still had something to work with. It’s going to take time and a lot of regen to put her back on her feet, but the actual repairs will be fairly routine. Extensive, but routine.”
“You have a different definition of ‘routine’ from me, Doctor,” the Marine officer said dryly, then looked back down at Maneka.
“Are you with us now, Lieutenant?” he asked, and she recognized the booming thunder which had disturbed her darkness in the quiet question.
She looked up at him, then tried to speak. Only a croak came out, and she licked dry, cracked lips with a tongue made of leftover leather. A hand reached down, holding a glass with a straw, and Maneka shuddered in raw, sensual pleasure as the unbelievable relief of ice water flowed down her throat.
“Better?” the Marine asked, and she nodded.
“Yes, sir,” she got out in a rusty croak. She stopped and cleared her throat hard enough to make her floating head reel, then tried again. “Thank you.”
At least this time it sounded a little like her, she thought.
Her brain was beginning to function once more, although her thoughts remained far from clear. She found herself wondering how she could possibly not feel the pain of her wounds, then gave a distant sort of mental snort. No doubt they had an entire battalion of pain suppressors focused on her. Which probably helped explain the haziness of her mental processes, now that she thought about it.
As if he’d read her thoughts, the man in white reached out, twiddling his fingers on a virtual keyboard, and the wooly blanket slipped back from the front of her brain. A faint wash of pain—an echo of something she sensed was vast and terrible, but which was not allowed to touch her—came with the clarity, and she swallowed again, then gave him a tiny nod of thanks.
“No more than that, Lieutenant,” the doctor said gruffly. “You looked like someone who wanted her mind working, but you’ll have to settle for where you are for the moment.”
“Yes, sir.” Her voice was still rusty and broken-sounding in her own ears, but her speech was less slurred and she felt more of her brain cells rousing to action.
“I’m Colonel-well, Brigadier-Shallek, Lieutenant Trevor,” the Marine said, and she returned her working
eye to him. “I apologize for disturbing you, but they’re going to be shipping you off-world this afternoon, and I wanted to speak to you personally before they do.”
“Off-world?” Maneka repeated. “Sir?” she added hastily, and he gave her a smile. It was a very small smile, shadowed with things that were far from humorous, but it was real.
“For just this minute, Lieutenant, don’t worry about military courtesy,” he suggested gently.
She nodded on her pillow, but her clearer brain was beginning to function properly, and she realized that, impossible though it seemed, they must have won. It was the only way anyone could be talking about sending anyone off-world. And the only way she could still be alive.
“The reason I wanted to talk to you, Lieutenant, was to thank you,” the Marine officer continued after a moment. She looked at him, and he twitched one hand, palm uppermost, between them. “That thanks comes from me personally, from the Ninth Marines—what’s left of us—and from every living human on Chartres. Because without you and your Battalion, none of us would be alive today.”
“The Battalion—?” Maneka began, and Shallek squeezed her good shoulder again.
“You broke them, Lieutenant,” he said simply. “I doubt anyone would have believed it if they hadn’t seen it, but you broke them. You tore a hole ten kilometers wide right through the middle of their line, you took out every Surtur they had, and then you smashed their central command post. Apparently, they hadn’t had time yet to put in a backup CP, and when you took it out, their command and control went straight to hell. As did they, over the space of the next few hours.”