Old Guard Bolos Book #5
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"Only a few garrisons, sir. I've got Captain Chandler on the line now." "Let me talk to her." Martin followed Lang as he approached the com console, where a holographic image flickered above the transmitter plate. Captain Maria Chandler was a handsome, ebon-skinned woman with five battle stars on her tunic and a reputation for a tough attitude and devoted troops in her command. "Colonel Lang!" she snapped as soon as she saw the CO's image on her console. "Either send help or get us the hell out of here!" "What's your tacsit, Captain?" "My tacsit," she said, in a prissy, near-mocking tone, "is tacshit. We have alien transports coming down all over the place. Take a look for yourself." A flatscreen monitor above the console lit up, transmitting jerky, sometimes incoherent images from a handheld camera. Martin saw the domes and greenhouses of flintsteel and blue crystal of one of the eastern settlements—he wasn't sure which one, but Captain Chandler was commanding a garrison at Glacierhelm, and he assumed that was what he was seeing. Smoke rose in columns, illuminated from beneath in the black night sky by the turbulent orange glow of fires. An ungainly landing craft of unfamiliar design, all angles and bulges and blunt ends, descended toward the ice, a shadow behind the harsh glare of landing lights. Heavily armed troops were already on the ice, their combat armor painted white with random smears of dark gray, as camouflage within the icy environment. The bodies on the ground, broken and fire-tossed, were nearly all clad in light Concordiat body armor, panted black with white trim. The scene fuzzed with static suddenly, then went blank. "We need help!" Chandler said, angry. "We're completely outnumbered and have no way to resist! I've ordered the civilian population to board icecats and make it through the passes, but there aren't enough—" And with startling abruptness, the holo image winked out in a white blur of static. "Wait!" Lang bellowed. "Get her back!" "Can't, sir," the technician replied. "Transmission interrupt . . . from her end." Other monitors were showing similar scenes of chaos. The local colonial news service was reporting landings and hostile attacks among most of the domed towns and habitat outposts scattered across the Eastern Tundra, and camera views of incoming landers and running troops were displayed on a dozen monitors. More and more of those monitors were going blank, however. On one, a news reporter, heavily swaddled in synthfur against the cold, was talking into a handheld microphone when white-armored troops burst in behind him, blasters flaring in dazzling bursts of blue light. The reporter's head came apart in a blurred red mist, and then that camera feed as well went dead. "Colonel!" Khalid cried, "you must do something!" Lang was still staring at one of the few active screens. It was difficult to see what was happening—massive, armored shapes moving in the darkness, as flame gouted into the night. "Martin? What are those things?" "I can't tell, sir." He checked another screen, tapping out a command on the keyboard, entering a query for information. "There's nothing on them in the warbook. They may be something new, something we didn't see with the last Kezdai incursion." "Ground crawlers. They look almost like . . . Bolos." "Small ones. They can't mass more than five hundred tons. A Mark XXIV masses fourteen thousand." "But there are a damn lot of them, Lieutenant. And they're heavily armored. Even a Bolo can be taken down by numbers, if there are enough of them." "It takes more than armor to do that, Colonel. Bolos are smart." If you let them use their talents and fight the war their way. . . . "They're headed west," Khalid said. "Toward the passes. Toward us." Lang looked at Martin and nodded. "Order the Bolos out," he said. "Yes, sir!" It's about freaking time. . . . * * *
Were I human, I would exult. "It's about time," I believe, is how humans express this particular emotion. Massive doors rumble aside as I engage my main drive trains. I notice a group of humans, mech-technicians of the Izra'il Field Armored Support Unit, 514th Regiment, standing to one side as I pass like a duralloy cliff towering above them. Humans are so tiny, tiny and frail, yet I must recognize that it was they who created my kind. I move out at full speed, hitting 100 kph by the time I clear the doors and reaching 140 on the open parade ground beyond. While combat feeds do not indicate any immediate threat to this base, I do not wish to expose myself to the possibility of orbital bombardment while I am still restricted in mobility by the physical structure of the base. Three hundred meters south, Andrew emerges from his bunker in a glittering spray of ice crystals illuminated by the base lights, racing east on a course parallel to mine. The Frozen Hell Mountains rise a few kilometers ahead, rugged and ice enfolded. The tactical situation is fairly simple. The Frozen Hells, rising nearly four thousand meters above the Izra'ilian tundra, form an ideal defensive barrier to surface movement, though not, of course, an impediment to air transport or attack. There are only two overland routes through the mountains within almost a thousand kilometers of the base—the Ad Dukhan River Valley to the south, and the Al Buruj Pass to the north. Our tactical data feeds indicate that both passes are now crowded with Izra'ilian civilians streaming west through the two passes, fleeing the slaughter now being wreaked by the Enemy among the towns on the far side of the mountains. The human traffic will make movement through the passes difficult. A more viable option is to open up with a long-range indirect bombardment of Enemy positions on the eastern flank of the mountains and to engage Enemy spacecraft now in planetary orbit. I perform a final systems check and determine that all weapons and combat systems are fully operational. I open the communications channel to headquarters and request weapons free. * * *
"They want to what?" "Bolo HNK is requesting weapons free," Martin said. "He wants to target enemy positions on the far side of the mountains and to hit Kezdai ships in close orbit." "Negative!" Lang said. "Request denied, damn it!" "Sir—"
"I said denied! We start hitting Kezdai ships, and they're going to start hitting our ships. We can't afford that, not if we want to maintain an open route off this rock. As for lobbing missiles over the mountains, forget it! There are still friendlies over there, and I don't want to start an indiscriminant mass-bombardment!" Martin looked at the number one monitor on his console, which showed one of the Bolos up close, grinding off across the ice-locked tundra toward the east. Its hull was pitted, worn, and battle-scarred, reminding him with a jolt that these machines had been in several dozen actions already, stretched across the last couple of hundred years. The machines bore eight battle stars apiece, and they'd seen plenty of minor engagements that hadn't rated the fancy unit citations welded to their glacises. It suggested that they knew what they were doing, damn it. "Lieutenant Martin!" "Yes, sir." "Deploy the armor into the passes. Have them hold the passes against enemy attempts to break through. That should give us the time we need to regroup on this side of the mountains, see what we're going to do." "Yes, sir." He reached for the comm headset. * * *
I find it hard to believe that we have been issued such orders. A Bolo is, first and foremost, an offensive combat unit. Its best assets are wasted in a purely defensive stance. Andrew and I discuss the situation via our QDC link, confident that we cannot be overheard by the Enemy . . . or even understood by those monitoring our transmissions at the Combat Command Center. "They must have reasons for this deployment," Andrew suggests. Of the two of us, he was always the more stolid, the more steady, the more certain of reason behind muddled orders. "The situation on the far side of the mountains is still confused. Perhaps they fear incurring friendly-fire casualties on Izra'ilian civilians." "Perhaps," I reply, "though the use of drones and AI missiles for final targeting options would limit civilian casualties. Especially when our targets would be primary Enemy targets, such as their transports, field headquarters and communications stations, and armor concentrations." "It's also possible that C3's reasons for these orders are the same reasons Marshal Tallard decided against deploying on the Tapfheim Line." "And those reasons are?" I prompted. "Mistaken ones." I was intrigued by the fact that Andrew had just assayed a joke. Not a very good one, perhaps, by humans standards, but a definite attempt at humorous wordplay. Bolos are not known for their sense of humor, nor would such be encouraged if humans had reason to suspect it. It was not the first time that I had wondered if Andrew and I were entirely up to spec. In the past, I've primarily been concerned that I have trouble integrating with other Bolo combat units. Obviously, our QDC link makes us closer than would otherwise be the case, so much so that various of our human commanders in the past have referred to us as "that two-headed Bolo," or as "the Bolo Brothers." Our diagnostics, however, have always been within the expected psychotronic profiles, and no mention of processing aberrations has been made by any of our commanders or service teams. We are combat-ready and at peak efficiency. We are ready to engage the Enemy. Andrew is moving further to the south now, angling onto a new heading of 099 degrees in order to enter the western end of the Ad Dukhan Valley. I can see the valley entrance now, for it is marked by high thermal readings and a visible outflow of water vapor. The name, in the Arabic of this world's colonists, means "The Smoke" and refers to clouds of steam emerging from a river rising from hot thermal vents in the valley. Izra'il possesses considerable tectonic activity, the result of the constant tidal tug-of-war it plays with the gas giant called The Prophet and others of The Prophet's moons. An important deep thermal power station is located at the thousand-meter level of the path; the Ad Dukhan River itself is so hot it remains liquid despite an ambient temperature ranging between minus five and minus fifty degrees all the way to the Al-Mujadelah Sea. The steam filling that valley could provide Andrew with a tactical advantage, masking his heat signature and helping to render him invisible even at close range. My destination is the Al Buruj Pass to the north, a narrow defile through the mountains named "The Mansions of the Stars" in the local tongue. I sense now the near approach of the Enemy ahead and increase my pace. * * *
"I really think we should be listening to them, sir," Martin said, stubborn. "They have more experience on the front line than any of the rest of us have on the chow line." He hesitated, trying to gauge just how far he could go. "Colonel, a good officer knows to listen to his sergeants. What they have to say comes from experience, not simulations!" Lang almost smiled. "Lieutenant, the day I take advice from a giant track-crawling piece of construction equipment with a psycho-whatsit brain and a programmed-to-order attitude is the day I retire from the service! Get it through your head, son. Those toys of yours are machines. Not men. They don't think, not the way we do, and you'll just get yourself in trouble pretending they do!" He turned and glanced at the QDC console, then indicated the fast-flickering screens with a nod of his head. "Besides, it looks like they play simulations. Not paying attention to the real world much, are they?" "Some of that is ordinary conversation, Colonel. They're discussing something. It looks like there's also a game running, but they have it isolated in a pretty small shared virtual world. They don't need that much thought to traverse terrain or watch for incoming. My guess is that they're modeling some possible Kezdai strategy and tactics, so they can decide how best to deploy." "They'll decide, huh?" Lang shook his head. "I'm not getting through to you, Lieutenant. Bolos are machines, not people! Stop goddamn pretending they're alive!" "Yes, sir." Martin returned to his console. On a map display overhead, two points of green light crawled toward the mountains. * * * I am now in full Combat Reflex Mode as battle is joined at 0587 hours, local time. Three Kezdai aircraft, possibly drones but carrying numerous missile weapons, flew across the mountains on an attack vector for the Combat Command Center. I downed one and Andrew two, brushing them from the night's sky with twin bursts of ion bolts from our infinite repeaters. My Vertical Launch System is on-line, and I use it to deploy a combat zone recon drone package. Ninety-six small, autonomous probes will relay visual and e-signal data via Izra'il's military-comm satellite network or, should that fail, by way of relay drones landed atop the Frozen Hell's higher and more inaccessible peaks. As the recon drones come down on the eastern side of the mountains, our battle centers are flooded with incoming data. Weapon and ship designs, radio frequencies and code types, all match samples from the last Kezdai incursion at Delas, verifying the Enemy's identity. They appear more numerous than the first field reports suggested. We observe at least forty-two heavily armored ground crawlers, each with an estimated mass of five hundred tons, each with a turret-mounted energy weapon and obvious missile launch tubes. They appear to be moving in two groups of twenty-one toward the two passes. We could take them out now . . . but our orders from our command center specifically prohibit this. On my long-range sensors, I pick up an orbiting Kezdai battlecruiser rising above the western horizon. For the next 0.015 second, I wrestle with conflicting hierarchies of programming and the orders to avoid firing at targets in orbit. I decide that an attack from the battlecruiser will warrant a reply, but until then I will merely observe. Colonial spacecraft remain in orbit, I note. Possibly the command center hopes to avoid a naval engagement. As I continue to move toward Al Buruj Pass, the ground begins rising. A roadway passes beneath my tracks and is pulverized, but I do avoid brushing against the pylons of the monorail line connecting the east and west plains across the mountains. Several cars have passed already, each filled with civilians. I notice a large number of civilians in ground vehicles—snowcats and hovercraft, mostly—all headed west. The presence of civilians within the narrow confines of the Al Buruj Pass will seriously complicate my defense of this position. I try to increase my speed but am forced to halt several times as the refugee crowds grow thicker. Many, I now note, are on foot. Andrew informs me that similar conditions prevail in the Ad Dukhan Valley. At a much lower awareness level, we continue our round of simulations. We have modeled the surrounding terrain, estimating Enemy capabilities and weaponry as best we can by comparing them with known opponents and materiel. At a conservative guess, we assign the Kezdai armored crawlers with armor values and firepower equivalent to Deng Type A/2 Yavacs, which possess a similar mass. Our initial gaming suggests that the Enemy must employ 8.75 A/2-equivalent crawlers in simultaneous direct-fire combat to jeopardize a single Mark XXIV. Our strategy, clearly, while necessarily defensive in nature, must be directed toward preventing the Enemy from achieving that level of numerical superiority. I reach the top of Al Buruj Pass, a crest that affords an excellent view of the tundra plains beyond . . . and the blazing torches of Consortium villages. * * *
The first refugees were arriving at the spaceport, two kilometers south of the command center. Monorail cars were sliding in one after another, spilling hundreds of shocked, terrified, and confused civilians onto the port concourse, while ground-effect vehicles and snow crawlers continued to arrive from both passes in apparently unending streams. "Order the 5th Brigade to the spaceport," Lang said, speaking into a comm headset. "Off-planet transport is to be reserved for Concordiat military!" Khalid's dark face flushed darker. "You cannot be serious!" "I'm dead serious, Governor. We'll see to it that you and your top people get out okay. But there are seventy thousand colonists on this rock, and we don't have space transport enough for a quarter that. What we don't need now is a riot at the spaceport." "So . . . what is it you intend to do?" "Delay the Kezdai for as long as we can, first off. It won't be easy because they outnumber us by a considerable margin." "But your two Bolos . . ." "Can only do so much. I'm a realist, Governor. Those machines won't more than slow the incoming tide. But in the meantime, we'll be trying to open negotiations with the Kezdai. It's possible that we can arrange a truce and evacuate peacefully . . . and without further bloodshed." "Indeed?" Khalid looked down at Lang with undisguised contempt. "And has it occurred to you, Colonel, that this rock as you keep calling it, this iceball, is our home? We may be only a Concordiat mining venture, but the people here have made this world their home. I suggest you help us defend it." "If we do that, Governor, you won't have a home left." He shrugged. "Defend the place yourselves, if you want. My people were not posted here to die in some hopeless gesture!" "Colonel!" Martin called, hoping to prevent an ugly scene. He could feel Khalid's fury radiating from behind his eyes and clenched fists, barely contained. "What is it, Lieutenant?" "Both Bolos have reached their assigned defensive positions, sir. Andrew reports poor visibility. Hank, however, has a clear view of the towns of Inshallah, Glacierhelm, and Gadalene. He has the enemy in sight." "Then have them open fire on them, damn it! Give 'em Hellbores! Do I have to think about everything around here?" * * *
* * *
"So . . . where do you call home?" Governor Khalid asked. It was a quiet moment in the command center. Colonel Lang had left, moments before, to discuss the fast-worsening crisis at the spaceport with 5th Battalion's senior officers and the military police. "Aldo Cerise," Martin replied, not taking his eyes from the Bolo C3 monitors. There was something odd happening. . . . "A long way. How long since you were home?" "Two . . . no. Almost three years. Why do you ask, Governor?' "I was beginning to wonder if you Concordiat troops had homes. If you knew what it mean to lose it, or to be forced to leave." "Lang is right about one thing," Martin told him. "We can't more than slow the enemy down a bit. There are just too many of them." "I do not understand your colonel. He seems so . . . timid." Martin grunted, then reached out and touched a key on his console. "You might be interested in this, sir." A holo-image of Colonel Thomas Lang appeared above the projection plate. "It's classified data, but I think you should see it. I got curious and did a search of the personnel files." Khalid leaned closer, his hawklike features stage-lit by the glow from the monitors as he read a scrolling column of text. "He was at Durango? I've heard of that." "An all-out last-stand battle. During the Melconian war. He ordered two battalions to hold the town of Cordassa on Durango at all costs. They did and were wiped out." "But the battle was a victory." "Sure. At least that's what the military historians call it. The 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 345th Regiment delayed the main Melconian advance on Cordassa until the Concordiat fleet could arrive and destroy the invasion force." "But Lang—" "They couldn't punish him, not while they were turning Durango into the biggest victory since the Alamo." "Alamo?" "A similar last stand, a long time ago. Pre-spaceflight days, in fact." "I see." "Did you see this?" He highlighted a section of text. Khalid frowned. "His brother . . . ?" |