Old Soldiers

The same mountains which protected the Melconian column from Maneka/Lazarus' direct fire also protected her/their missiles from interception. They sped directly to their targets, separating, spreading out, adjusting their trajectories with finicky precision.

At precisely the correct moment, all six of them killed their drives and continued onward at just over seven thousand kilometers per hour. They slammed into the mountainside, and the superdense, ballistically shaped deep-penetrator warheads she/they had mounted upon them drilled through solid earth and stone like hypervelocity bullets. They plunged deep into the heart of the mountain, driving directly into the fault pattern Maneka/Lazarus' deep scan radar mapping had revealed weeks before.

And then six megaton-range warheads detonated as one.

The stupendous shockwave was enough to shake even a Surtur like a toy. Ha-Shan had never experienced an earthquake before, and he was ill-prepared to feel his 18,000-ton mech shivering like a frightened child. But Surturs were designed and engineered to survive far worse than a little shaking, and he felt his speeding pulse began to slow once more.

Until he looked into the visual display again.

So that was what the Human was thinking, Theslask Ka-Frahkhan thought. He was too calm about it, a corner of his own brain told him. Shock, he supposed. I should have listened to my instincts. But even if I had, what else could I have done with what I knew?

He watched the thick, curdled cloud of dust rising above what had once been a river valley. Perhaps it would be a river valley again, someday. But at this moment, it was the huge common grave which had just engulfed half of the 3172nd Heavy Assault Brigade's armor and a third of its infantry. The horrendous landslide the Bolo's missiles had triggered had sent two-thirds of a mountain sliding unstoppably across Second Armored and Third Infantry. There were, he already knew, no survivors from either, although the handful of Na-Pahrthal's air cav which had been assigned to Ha-Shan had probably been able to climb out of destruction's path in time.

He turned his head slowly and looked at Na-Salth. The colonel was still staring slack-jawed at the unbelievable sight on his visual display.

"Contact Colonel Na-Lythan and Colonel Ka-Somal," Ka-Frahkan heard his own voice saying with a flat, steady calm. Na-Salth turned stu

He stabbed the visual display with a vicious claw and the soft echo of a barely audible challenge snarl.

"No more finesse, Jesmahr," he said grimly, harshly. "I don't care what the Bolo does. We will advance at our own chosen rate. We will check every valley, every cliff, for booby traps and dangerous terrain features. Eventually that Nameless-cursed Bolo will have to stop and fight us on our terms. And when it does, we will destroy it."

Maneka/Lazarus launched a single recon drone. She/they had no choice; the landslide which had enveloped the Enemy column had also wiped out the sensors with which that stretch of river valley had been seeded.

The drone swept over what had once been the valley, and her/their human half felt a chill as she/they surveyed the desolation. Her/their missiles had shattered an entire mountain, disemboweled it and spewed its fragments across the Melconians in an unstoppable tidal wave of broken rock, shattered trees, and dirt. The river was already begi

She/they made one more sweep of the site with the reco

"Which means the odds are even now," her/their Maneka half thought grimly.

"Which means the odds would be even against a fully modern Bolo," her/their Lazarus half replied.

"Maybe."

In the corner of their fusion which was hers alone, Maneka felt Lazarus' amusement at her qualification, and she understood it. The equation which set one Bolo as equivalent to three times its own number of Melconian heavy combat mechs was, after all, as Lazarus had just pointed out, based upon the combat capabilities of the Mark XXXIs and Mark XXXIIs, not a Bolo whose basic weapons were well over a century out of date. But Maneka had been at Chartres. She knew what those "obsolete"

Bolos were capable of.

She felt Lazarus standing just outside that small, private section of her mind, waiting for her calmly, and the lips of her sleeping body twitched in a slight smile.

"Okay," she told him. "We can go now."

Her/their mighty hull pivoted on its broad tracks and began to move once more.

"It's moving again, sir."

Ka-Frahkan flicked his ears in silent acknowledgment. He sat back in his command chair, watching the tactical display, and just the tips of his canines showed as his upper lip curled back from them.

The Bolo was moving directly back towards his remaining armored battalion once more, reversing the course away from it which had so puzzled him before. It puzzled him no longer, for he understood now why it had not initially completed its advance to the firing position he'd thought it was headed for.

The position I obligingly allowed it to convince me it was headed for, he corrected bitterly. Then he gave himself a mental shake. There would be time enough for grief and self-recrimination after the battle, and even now he knew—intellectually, at least—that without any foreknowledge of the fault line the Bolo had exploited, he'd done exactly the right thing. Or, at least, that a dispassionate staff study, far away from the buried, mangled bodies of a quarter of his brigade's troopers, would conclude that he had, at any rate.

No time for that, he reminded himself sternly. Not when I still have to figure out what to do about the accursed thing.

At least the Bolo still faced a few problems of its own.

It hadn't had any choice but to avoid combat with Na-Lythan's First Armored Battalion until after it had destroyed Second Armored. But when it retreated rather than continuing its advance, it had allowed Na-Lythan and the rest of Ka-Somal's infantry vehicles to move ahead at their top combined speed.

Slower than a Bolo they undoubtedly were, but they were fast enough to have reached the point at which the other two possible routes of advance converged and then diverged once again while the Bolo was elsewhere.

"We'll split our forces, Jesmahr," he a

"Yes, sir. And First Armored?" Na-Salth said as Ka-Frahkan paused.