Old Soldiers

He released the transmit key and sat back in his comfortable chair, and the silence within his command vehicle echoed and roared about him. Even the readiness reports over the tac cha

"Support units," Na-Lythan's voice was level, yet it sounded shockingly harsh as it cut across the stillness, "initiate Fire Plan Alpha."

The Surtur Alphas' Hellbores were far lighter than the Mark XXVIII's single 110-centimeter weapon, but their echeloned turrets allowed all six of them to bear over a firing arc of just over 310 degrees. Anywhere within that field of fire, a Surtur could lay down three times as much main battery fire as Maneka/Lazarus, and if the relative lightness of its weapons meant it could lay down only about twice the weight of fire, number of shots counted, too.

The Fenrises, on the other hand, had no business coming anywhere near a Bolo if they could help it.

Unlike a Surtur, a Fenris' battle screen was light enough, its armor thin enough, that even the Mark XXVIII's ion-bolt infinite repeaters could kill it at medium or short range, and its single 38-centimeter Hellbore would require a minimum of three hits in exactly the same spot to penetrate her/their frontal armor. But engaging Bolos frontally wasn't what Fenrises were intended to do, and now the heavily armored hatches on these mechs' after decks opened and the missile pods rose out of their wells on hydraulic rams. Each Fenris mounted three pods; each pod mounted thirty-two missiles; and there were six Fenrises in Major Sa-Thor's First Armored Battalion.

The pods rose to their full-extension positions and nodded on the long stalks of their rams as they elevated slightly.

Maneka/Lazarus' camouflaged sensors detected the emission spikes as the Fenrises enabled their missiles. Point defense clusters trained forward and elevated, countermissiles slid into their launchers, and she/they slowed still further, diverting power from her/their drivetrain to reinforce her/their battle screen.

It was all she/they could do. The maximum effective powered range for the Fenris's tactical missiles was only eighty kilometers, because they used counter-gravity drives, like her/their own high-speed missiles did. But the Fenrises' missiles were much smaller than hers/theirs, which meant their drives could be neither as powerful nor as robust. They traded off range and sophisticated seeking systems and penetration aids for velocity and numbers, and they were intended to saturate an opponent's missile defenses, spreading them so thin that at least a few of the fusion-warhead missiles had to get through.

Maneka/Lazarus' missiles were much longer ranged and more accurate, but she/they didn't even consider launching any of them. She/they simply didn't mount enough tubes to crack the Melconian battalion's defenses in return, and that was that. In flat, open terrain, the effective range of a Bolo's direct fire weapons went far towards offsetting the Fenrises' missile capability by forcing them to launch at greater range and expose their missiles to more extended defensive fire. But now the Enemy was less than twenty-four kilometers ahead, still hidden from them by the rough, corrugated terrain.

And at that range, tracking and engagement time was going to be very short, indeed.

"Fire!" Na-Lythan commanded.

The Fenrises vanished into huge boils of light, smoke, and fury as the booster charges blasted their missiles clear of the pods. Five hundred and seventy-six flame-tailed thunderbolts lifted from their launchers, accelerating slowly. But only for an instant. As soon as they had cleared their launchers and reached an elevation of thirty-seven meters, just high enough above the Fenrises for the launching mechs to clear the drive zone, their counter-gravity drives kicked in.

Cramming those drives into such tiny missiles had required all ma

At that rate of acceleration, it would take them 5.38 seconds to reach their destination, and their velocity when they did would be well over thirty thousand kilometers per hour.

Maneka/Lazarus had known exactly what was coming.

Data streamed through her/them like a river of lightning, flickering and flashing so rapidly that even with her direct link to Lazarus, Maneka Trevor could not truly perceive it. It was simply and literally impossible for her merely organic brain to organize data into a comprehensible format at such an incredible rate of speed. But if she couldn't organize it, she could grasp it. She shared Lazarus' gestalt, shared the end result of his computations and analysis.

Stealth features and electronic warfare systems were useless against this attack. The Fenrises'

missiles were specifically designed to be stupid and blind. They would fly whatever profile had been programmed into them before launch, and they would make up for the lack of sophisticated seekers and tracking systems, the absence of advanced penetration EW, with the sheer volume of their fire and the power of their warheads. They were an old-fashioned, saturation attack system, capable of in-flight maneuvers only as long as their drives lasted, which defined their outer range. And the rate at which they accelerated, the velocities they attained, were hard on an airframe. It wasn't that bad in vacuum, but, on average, anywhere from six to seven percent of them would suffer catastrophic structural failure in an air-breathing launch. Which was cold comfort to their targets, given the numbers in which they were launched.

The remote sensors watching the Melconians at the moment of launch had measured the missile pods'

angles of train and elevation with minute, absolute precision. Data stored in Lazarus' tactical files knew the exact launch sequence, cycle time, and acceleration capability of the Fenrises' missiles. Analysis of the emission spikes as the missiles were enabled, and the power levels as the launch command itself was given and the pods cycled through the launch sequence, gave him precious fractions of a second of warning before the missiles actually fired. And armed with all of that information, BattleComp predicted the flight paths of those missiles with the accuracy and certainty of an Old Testament prophet declaring the will of God.

Point defense clusters, antiperso

The cloud of missiles pitched up over the ridge, then dropped their noses as sharply as only counter-grav missiles could, and streaked directly towards Maneka/Lazarus. Small they might be, compared to the missiles of a Bolo, but they still massed just under 2.4 metric tons. At their velocity, a simple kinetic impact would have yielded the equivalent of over twenty-two metric tons of old-fashioned TNT, but they weren't kinetic weapons.