Dragon's Teeth

by Mercedes Lackey

  “It would be entertaining.” Rommel sounded very interested. “And as long as we keep our defensive surveillance up, and an eye on Port City, we would not technically be violating orders . . . .”

  “Then let’s do it,” Siegfried said decisively. “Like I said, the maps they gave us stink; let’s go make our own, then plot strategy. Let’s find every wadi and overhang big enough to hide you. Let’s act as if there really was going to be an invasion. Let’s give them some options, log the plans with the mayor’s office. We can plan for evacuations, we can check resources, there’s a lot of things we can do. And let’s start right now!”

  They mapped every dry streambed, every dusty hill, every animal trail. For months, the two of them rumbled across the arid landscape, with Siegfried emerging now and again to carry surveying instruments to the tops of hills too fragile to bear Rommel’s weight. And when every inch of territory within a week of Port City had been surveyed and accurately mapped, they began playing a game of “hide and seek” with the locals.

  It was surprisingly gratifying. At first, after they had vanished for a while, the local news channel seemed to reflect an attitude of “good riddance.” But then, when no one spotted them, there was a certain amount of concern—followed by a certain amount of annoyance. After all, Rommel was “their” Bolo—what was Siegfried doing, taking him out for some kind of vacation? As if Bachman’s World offered any kind of amusement . . . .

  That was when Rommel and Siegfried began stalking farmers.

  They would find a good hiding place and get into it well in advance of a farmer’s arrival. When he would show up, Rommel would rise up, seemingly from out of the ground, draped in camouflage-net, his weaponry trained on the farmer’s vehicle. Then Siegfried would pop up out of the hatch, wave cheerfully, retract the camouflage, and he and Rommel would rumble away.

  Talk of “vacations” ceased entirely after that.

  They extended their range, once they were certain that the locals were no longer assuming the two of them were “gold-bricking.” Rommel tested all of his abilities to the limit, making certain everything was still up to spec. And on the few occasions that it wasn’t, Siegfried put in a requisition for parts and spent many long hours making certain that the repairs and replacements were bringing Rommel up to like-new condition.

  Together they plotted defensive and offensive strategies; Siegfried studied Rommel’s manuals as if a time would come when he would have to rebuild Rommel from spare parts. They ran every kind of simulation in the book—and not just on Rommel’s computers, but with Rommel himself actually running and dry-firing against plotted enemies. Occasionally one of the newspeople would become curious about their whereabouts, and lie in wait for them when the scheduled supplies arrived. Siegfried would give a formal interview, reporting in general what they had been doing—and then, he would carefully file another set of emergency plans with the mayor’s office. Sometimes it even made the evening news. Once, it was even accompanied by a clip someone had shot of Rommel roaring at top speed across a ridge.

  Nor was that all they did. As Rommel pointed out, the presumptive “battalion” would have been available in emergencies—there was no reason why they shouldn’t respond when local emergencies came up.

  So—when a flash flood trapped a young woman and three children on the roof of her vehicle, it was Rommel and Siegfried who not only rescued them, but towed the vehicle to safety as well. When a snowfall in the mountains stranded a dozen truckers, Siegfried and Rommel got them out. When a small child was lost while playing in the hills, Rommel found her by having all searchers clear out as soon as the sun went down, and using his heat sensors to locate every source of approximately her size. They put out runaway brushfires by rolling over them; they responded to Maydays from remote locations when they were nearer than any other agency. They even joined in a manhunt for an escaped rapist—who turned himself in, practically soiling himself with fear, when he learned that Rommel was part of the search party.

  It didn’t hurt. They were of no help for men trapped in a mine collapse; or rather, of no more help than Siegfried’s two hands could make them. They couldn’t rebuild bridges that were washed away, nor construct roads. But what they could do, they did, often before anyone thought to ask them for help.

  By the end of their second year on Bachman’s World, they were at least no longer the target of resentment. Those few citizens they had aided actually looked on them with gratitude. The local politicians whose careers had suffered because of their presence had found other causes to espouse, other schemes to pursue. Siegfried and Rommel were a dead issue.

  But by then, the two of them had established a routine of monitoring emergency channels, running their private war-games, updating their maps, and adding changes in the colony to their defense and offense plans. There was no reason to go back to simply sitting beside the spaceport. Neither of them cared for sitting idle, and what they were doing was the nearest either of them would ever get to actually refighting the battles their idol had lost and won.

  When High Command got their reports and sent recommendations for further “readiness” preparations, and commendations for their “community service,” Siegfried, now wiser in the ways of manipulating public opinion, issued a statement to the press about both.

  After that, there were no more rumblings of discontent, and things might have gone on as they were until Siegfried was too old to climb Rommel’s ladder.

  But the fates had another plan in store for them.

  Alarms woke Siegfried out of a sound and dreamless sleep. Not the synthesized pseudo-alarms Rommel used when surprising him for a drill, either, but the real thing—

  He launched himself out of his bunk before his eyes were focused, grabbing the back of the comm-chair to steady himself before he flung himself into it and strapped himself down. As soon as he moved, Rommel turned off all the alarms but one; the proximity alert from the single defense satellite in orbit above them.

  Interior lighting had gone to full-emergency red. He scrubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand, impatiently; finally they focused on the screens of his console, and he could read what was there. And he swore, fervently and creatively.

  One unknown ship sat in geosynch orbit above Port City; a big one, answering no hails from the port, and seeding the skies with what appeared to his sleep-fogged eyes as hundreds of smaller drop-ships.

  “The mother-ship has already neutralized the port air-to-ground defenses, Siegfried,” Rommel reported grimly. “I don’t know what kind of stealthing devices they have, or if they’ve got some new kind of drive, but they don’t match anything in my records. They just appeared out of nowhere and started dumping drop-ships. I think we can assume they’re hostiles.”

  They had a match for just this in their hundreds of plans; unknown ship, unknown attackers, dropping a pattern of offensive troops of some kind—

  “What are they landing?” he asked, playing the console board. “You’re stealthed, right?”

  “To the max,” Rommel told him. “I don’t detect anything like life-forms on those incoming vessels, but my sensors aren’t as sophisticated as they could be. The vessels themselves aren’t all that big. My guess is that they’re dropping either live troops or clusters of very small mechs, mobile armor, maybe the size of a Panzer.”

  “Landing pattern?” he asked. He brought up all of Rommel’s weaponry; AIs weren’t allowed to activate their own weapons. And they weren’t allowed to fire on living troops without permission from a human, either. That was the only real reason for a Bolo needing an operator.

  “Surrounding Port City, but starting from about where the first farms are.” Rommel ran swift readiness tests on the systems as Siegfried brought them up; the screens scrolled too fast for Siegfried to read them.

  They had a name for that particular scenario. It was one of the first possibilities they had run when they began plotting invasion and counterinvasion plans.

  “Operation Ca
ttle Drive. Right.” If the invaders followed the same scheme he and Rommel had anticipated, they planned to drive the populace into Port City, and either capture the civilians, or destroy them at leisure. He checked their current location; it was out beyond the drop-zone. “Is there anything landing close to us?”

  “Not yet—but the odds are that something will soon.” Rommel sounded confident, as well he should be—his ability to project landing patterns was far better than any human’s. “I’d say within the next fifteen minutes.”

  Siegfried suddenly shivered in a breath of cool air from the ventilators, and was painfully aware suddenly that he was dressed in nothing more than a pair of fatigue shorts. Oh well; some of the Desert Fox’s battles had taken place with the men wearing little else. What they could put up with, he could. There certainly wasn’t anyone here to complain.

  “As soon as you think we can move without detection, close on the nearest craft,” he ordered. “I want to see what we’re up against. And start scanning the local freqs; if there’s anything in the way of organized defense from the civvies, I want to know about it.”

  A pause, while the ventilators hummed softly, and glowing dots descended on several screens. “They don’t seem to have anything, Siegfried,” Rommel reported quietly. “Once the ground-to-space defenses were fried, they just collapsed. Right now, they seem to be in a complete state of panic. They don’t even seem to remember that we’re out here—no one’s tried to hail us on any of our regular channels.”

  “Either that—or they think we’re out of commission,” he muttered absently. “Or just maybe they are giving us credit for knowing what we’re doing and are trying not to give us away. I hope so. The longer we can go without detection, the better chance we have to pull something out of a hat.”

  An increase in vibration warned him that Rommel was about to move. A new screen lit up, this one tracking a single vessel. “Got one,” the Bolo said shortly. “I’m coming in behind his sensor sweep.”

  Four more screens lit up; enhanced front, back, top, and side views of the terrain. Only the changing views on the screens showed that Rommel was moving; other than that, there was no way to tell from inside the cabin what was happening. It would be different if Rommel had to execute evasive maneuvers of course, but right now, he might have still been parked. The control cabin and living quarters were heavily shielded and cushioned against the shocks of ordinary movement. Only if Rommel took a direct hit by something impressive would Siegfried feel it . . . .

  And if he takes a direct hit by something more than impressive—we’re slag. Bolos are the best, but they can’t take everything.

  “The craft is down.”

  He pushed the thought away from his mind. This was what Rommel had been built to do—this moment justified Rommel’s very existence. And he had known from the very beginning that the possibility, however remote, had existed that he too would be in combat one day. That was what being in the military was all about. There was no use in pretending otherwise.

  Get on with the job. That’s what they’ve sent me here to do. Wasn’t there an ancient royal family whose motto was “God, and my Duty?” Then let that be his.

  “Have you detected any sensor scans from the mothership?” he asked, his voice a harsh whisper. “Or anything other than a forward scan from the landing craft?” He didn’t know why he was whispering—

  “Not as yet, Siegfried,” Rommel replied, sounding a little surprised. “Apparently, these invaders are confident that there is no one out here at all. Even that forward scan seemed mainly to be a landing aid.”

  “Nobody here but us chickens,” Siegfried muttered. “Are they offloading yet?”

  “Wait—yes. The ramp is down. We will be within visual range ourselves in a moment—there—”

  More screens came alive; Siegfried read them rapidly—

  Then read them again, incredulously.

  “Mechs?” he said, astonished. “Remotely controlled mechs?”

  “So it appears.” Rommel sounded just as mystified. “This does not match any known configuration. There is one limited AI in that ship. Data indicates it is hardened against any attack conventional forces at the port could mount. The ship seems to be digging in—look at the seismic reading on 4-B. The limited AI is in control of the mechs it is deploying. I believe that we can assume this will be the case for the other invading ships, at least the ones coming down at the moment, since they all appear to be of the same model.”

  Siegfried studied the screens; as they had assumed, the mechs were about the size of pre-Atomic Panzers, and seemed to be built along similar lines. “Armored mechs. Good against anything a civilian has. Is that ship hardened against anything you can throw?” he asked finally.

  There was a certain amount of glee in Rommel’s voice. “I think not. Shall we try?”

  Siegfried’s mouth dried. There was no telling what weaponry that ship packed—or the mother-ship held. The mother-ship might be monitoring the drop-ships, watching for attack. God and my Duty, he thought.

  “You may fire when ready, Herr Rommel.”

  They had taken the drop-ship by complete surprise; destroying it before it had a chance to transmit distress or tactical data to the mother-ship. The mechs had stopped in their tracks the moment the AI’s direction ceased.

  But rather than roll on to the next target, Siegfried had ordered Rommel to stealth again, while he examined the remains of the mechs and the controlling craft. He’d had an idea—the question was, would it work?

  He knew weapons systems; knew computer-driven control. There were only a limited number of ways such controls could work. And if he recognized any of those here—

  He told himself, as he scrambled into clothing and climbed the ladder out of the cabin, that he would give himself an hour. The situation would not change much in an hour; there was very little that he and Rommel could accomplish in that time in the way of mounting a campaign. As it happened, it took him fifteen minutes more than that to learn all he needed to know. At the end of that time, though, he scrambled back into Rommel’s guts with mingled feelings of elation and anger.

  The ship and mechs were clearly of human origin, and some of the vanes and protrusions that made them look so unfamiliar had been tacked on purely to make both the drop-ships and armored mechs look alien in nature. Someone, somewhere, had discovered something about Bachman’s World that suddenly made it valuable. From the hardware interlocks and the programming modes he had found in what was left of the controlling ship, he suspected that the “someone” was not a government, but a corporation.

  And a multiplanet corporation could afford to mount an invasion force fairly easily. The best force for the job would, of course, be something precisely like this—completely mechanized. There would be no troops to “hush up” afterwards; no leaks to the interstellar press. Only a nice clean invasion—and, in all probability, a nice, clean extermination at the end of it, with no humans to protest the slaughter of helpless civilians.

  And afterwards, there would be no evidence anywhere to contradict the claim that the civilians had slaughtered each other in some kind of local conflict.

  The mechs and the AI itself were from systems he had studied when he first started in this specialty—outmoded even by his standards, but reliable, and when set against farmers with hand weapons, perfectly adequate.

  There was one problem with this kind of setup . . . from the enemy’s standpoint. It was a problem they didn’t know they had.

  Yet.

  He filled Rommel in on what he had discovered as he raced up the ladder, then slid down the handrails into the command cabin. “Now, here’s the thing—I got the access code to command those mechs with a little fiddling in the AI’s memory. Nice of them to leave in so many manual overrides for me. I reset the command interface freq to one you have, and hardwired it so they shouldn’t be able to change it—”

  He jumped into the command chair and strapped in; his hands danced across the k
eypad, keying in the frequency and the code. Then he saluted the console jauntily. “Congratulations, Herr Rommel,” he said, unable to keep the glee out of his voice. “You are now a Field Marshal.”

  “Siegfried!” Yes, there was astonishment in Rommel’s synthesized voice. “You just gave me command of an armored mobile strike force!”

  “I certainly did. And I freed your command circuits so that you can run them without waiting for my orders to do something.” Siegfried couldn’t help grinning. “After all, you’re not going against living troops, you’re going to be attacking AIs and mechs. The next AI might not be so easy to take over, but if you’re running in the middle of a swarm of ‘friendlies,’ you might not be suspected. And when we knock out that one, we’ll take over again. I’ll even put the next bunch on a different command freq so you can command them separately. Sooner or later they’ll figure out what we’re doing, but by then I hope we’ll have at least an equal force under our command.”

  “This is good, Siegfried!”

  “You bet it’s good, mein Freund,” he retorted. “What’s more, we’ve studied the best—they can’t possibly have that advantage. All right—let’s show these amateurs how one of the old masters handles armor!”

  The second and third takeovers were as easy as the first. By the fourth, however, matters had changed. It might have dawned on either the AIs on the ground or whoever was in command of the overall operation in the mother-ship above that the triple loss of AIs and mechs was not due to simple malfunction, but to an unknown and unsuspected enemy.

  In that, the hostiles were following in the mental footsteps of another pre-Atomic commander, who had once stated, “Once is happenstance, twice is circumstance, but three times is enemy action.”