Old Soldiers

Thoughts of what the Melconians might or might not know turned her/their attention to the grounded transport. That transport had to be neutralized. At the moment, Thermopylae's assault pod gave her/them the mobility advantage. But sooner or later, she/they were going to have to engage the Enemy.

Once they undocked from the pod, redocking would be out of the question. It would take too long, and she/they would be unable to maneuver, too vulnerable to enemy fire, to spend the time to board it once more. For that matter, without her/them mounted on the pod, it would have neither the active defenses nor the electronic warfare capability to penetrate the enemy's combat envelope to reach her/them, in the first place. No. Once she/they detached from the pod, she/they would be unable to use it further until the battle was decided, one way or the other. And if the Melconian combat mechs managed to pin her/them down while a half-dozen Fenrises fell back to the transport and used its mobility to launch a frontal assault on Landing while she/they were too far away to intervene, it would be disastrous. And, unfortunately, the transport had not been obliging enough to park itself in one of the areas covered by her/their previously planted remotes. She/they knew approximately where it had to be, but

"approximately" wasn't good enough for the precision she/they required.

"Concur. Launch," her/their Maneka component replied.

The pod slowed abruptly in its frenzied terrain-following flight. Missile hatches opened, and a dozen air-breathing cruise missiles launched. They configured their variable-geometry wings well forward for subsonic flight and arced away from the Bolo. They circled well to the east of her/their current position, dropped to a nap-of-the-earth altitude of barely twenty meters, and skimmed off on their attack mission, accompanied by no less than three extraordinarily stealthy reco

Captain Na-Tharla tried not to fret too visibly as he prowled restlessly around Death Descending's bridge. The repairs were going as quickly as he could have hoped, under the circumstances, but that made him feel no less vulnerable. There was a Bolo out there, somewhere, and so far, General Ka-Frahkan's brigade had failed to pick up even a hint of its position. That wasn't calculated to reassure the commander of an immobilized transport.

His lips wrinkled back from his canines in a bitterly amused challenge grin. Reassure! There hadn't been a moment since Admiral Na-Izhaaran chose to attack this accursed Human convoy in the first place that Na-Tharla had felt remotely like anything which could have been called "reassurance." And at this particular moment—

"Missile trace!" His head snapped around as the voice spoke abruptly from the communications section. "Air cav look-down radar reports missiles inbound, bearing zero-niner-three, altitude three-zero-zero, course two-seven-three true at three-zero-one-zero!"

The red, glaring icons of incoming missiles blazed suddenly in his tactical plot, and he snarled viciously as he watched them suddenly accelerate to a far higher velocity.

She/they watched through the accompanying drones as the missiles' attack programs reacted to the lash of the Enemy's radar. Their stubby wings configured smoothly back and their turbines howled as they accelerated abruptly to better than Mach 5. The drones could have kept pace easily enough, but only if they'd dropped out of stealth, and she/they had no intention of allowing those platforms to be detected and destroyed. So instead, the drones dropped behind, spreading out like encircling arms, passive sensors listening intently to the Melconians' emissions, while the missiles ran away from them and scorched straight in on the Melconian landing zone.

Active sensors and targeting systems from the transport and the ground-based air-defense systems joined the air cav radar lashing at the missiles, battling their onboard EW systems, fighting to lock them up for defensive fire. Those missiles carried high-kiloton-range fusion warheads; if even one of them got through, the transport would be permanently crippled, even if it was by some miracle not destroyed outright. But the odds of any of them penetrating the Melconian defenses were slight. Which was perfectly all right with her/them.

Countermissiles launched, shrieking out to seek and destroy the attacking birds. Half of her/their missiles were intercepted and destroyed, but the other half only accelerated to Mach 7 as the observations of the accompanying drones refined their targeting data and they came onto their final attack profiles.

The cruise missiles reached the final ridge line between them and their targets. They pitched upward, popping up over the ridge as they must to reach their destination, and the ground-defense lasers and antiarmor Hellbores were waiting. Beamed energy struck at the speed of light, viciously accurate despite the missiles' electronic warfare capabilities and penetration aids, and she/they watched as every single one of her/their attack missiles was destroyed harmlessly, far short of their targets.

He shook himself, then castigated his own sense of shocked, joyous astonishment. Ka-Frahkan had been right all along. However good the Humans' technology might be, they weren't gods. They could be stopped, defeated, and he felt almost ashamed at the realization that he hadn't really believed that, not deep down inside. But they had been, and if their missiles could be stopped that easily here—

She/they completed her/their analysis.

It was a simple enough exercise, given the wealth of data her/their u

capabilities were.

And she/they also knew that in this instant, every Melconian within that perimeter was still looking to the east, the direction from which the missile attack had come.

Which was why her/their pod abruptly popped up over a mountaintop ninety-seven kilometers west of the Melconian landing zone.

"New target!" a voice shouted. "New target at two-two-one, alti—"

The voice never completed its warning. There wasn't time. The range was under a hundred kilometers, which might as well have been a hundred centimeters for the targeting systems of a Mark XXVIII Bolo.

"Contact!" someone screamed over the company net, and Captain Ithkar Na-Torsah's blood ran suddenly cold as the icon simply appeared on his display.

His company of air cavaly was deployed in a circle a hundred and three kilometers across, centered on the LZ and Death Descending. That was the standard deployment for this sort of situation, as laid down by Regs, and it made sense in terrain this rough. There were too many folds and narrow valleys, too many slots through which an enemy could creep into attack range undetected if the pickets were spread too thinly to keep them all under observation.

But this time the perimeter had been too narrow, he realized in the moments he had left. The blood-red icon strobing viciously on his three-man command mount's display was over forty-five kilometers outside his perimeter. It was screaming towards him at almost Mach 4, and it had used that same tumbled terrain with deadly skill to evade detection until it was too late.