Old Soldiers

A tornado of defensive fire ripped into the missile storm as her/their defenses engaged the threat.

Lasers, flechettes, ca

She/they killed many of them. Almost six hundred had been fired at her/them, and four hundred and seventy-three were destroyed by her/their defensive fire. Thirty-seven more suffered structural failure and simply disintegrated, and the debris from their disintegration destroyed six more birds which ran into the wreckage in flight. Nine more dipped too close to the ridge line and slammed into the far side of its crest like artificial meteors. But that left fifty-one.

Fusion warheads detonated in the split instant before they struck her/their battle screen. That screen would have absorbed the purely kinetic energy of those weapons without even a flicker, but the Melconian weaponeers who had built them were well aware of that. And so they had designed their warheads to detonate in the last sliver of a second before the battle screen could tear them apart. Not even the Concordiat could have guaranteed truly simultaneous detonation of that many warheads—not at that velocity. Six of them failed to detonate in time, rammed into Maneka/Lazarus' battle screen, and vanished. Another nineteen failed to detonate quickly enough and were killed by fratricide before their fuses activated. Which meant that "only" twenty-six actually detonated as pla

Those warheads were designed for variable yield, adjustable to suit the tactical circumstances, and Colonel Uran Na-Lythan had ordered them set for maximum yield. Low-megaton-range fireballs slammed into her/their battle screen like brimstone sledgehammers. Her/their fifteen-thousand-ton bulk heaved like a storm-sick galleon as that inconceivable fury bled into her/their battle screen. The ridge between her/them and the Melconians was high enough, thick enough, to protect them from the direct blast of their own weapons. That was the only thing which had made it possible for Na-Lythan to wait so long and employ them at such short range. Yet even though the blast shadow of the ridge protected them from outright destruction, it was a very near thing for First Armored Battalion as Hell itself erupted on its far side.

And what First Armored endured was only the back flash, only an echo, of what hammered down upon Maneka/Lazarus.

Pain circuits screamed as damage rode the dragon-blast of fusion through her/their defenses.

Exposed sensor arrays were stripped away. Light weapons were disabled, broken and half-molten as blast and heat and radiation rolled over them in hobnailed boots. Yet Bolos were designed to face exactly that dreadful ordeal. Even as concussion jarred and shuddered and heaved about her, Maneka Trevor's body lay safe, protected at Lazarus' very core behind battle screen, internal disrupter fields, solid meters of duralloy, and every defensive barrier the Concordiat's engineers had devised in eleven hundred years of building Bolos. But despite the protective shell wrapped about her, Maneka screamed as the holocaust raged outside her/their hull.

Not in fear. Not even in protest. She screamed because Lazarus could not.

Maneka had always known about the "pain circuits" built into Bolos. She understood the theory behind them, the danger-avoidance mechanism borrowed from organic evolution. And she'd always wondered how they actually worked. If a Bolo—a machine, however marvelously designed, however magnificently capable—could truly feel pain.

Now she knew, and her body convulsed in the crash couch on Lazarus' control deck as the echo of his agony poured through her across the bridge of their link. She sensed him trying to shut that portion of the link down, trying to shunt the torment aside and protect her from it even as damage control systems raced to limit the tide of physical destruction crashing over his hull, but he couldn't. The link was too deep, too complete, and the only mercy was that the attack was over in so brief a moment.

Yet she/they were in hyper-heuristic mode. What had slowed time to give them the opportunity to analyze, plan, and respond, stretched that moment of agony into a mini-eternity in Hell itself with equal efficiency.

For long seconds, General Ka-Frahkan was afraid Na-Lythan had miscalculated. That the devastation of their own warheads would destroy them, as well as the Bolo. His command vehicle, much farther back than any of the armored mechs and parked in the lee of yet another hillside, was also designed for battle control and speed, not brute power. It was the brigade's tactical brain, the most capable package of computers and communications equipment the Empire could build, protected in a lightly armored hull faster—and far lighter—than even a Fenris. The ground-transmitted shock waves tossed his vehicle half a meter into the air, and for an instant, he thought the shock wave was going to roll it across the ground like a youth kicking a ball. But it slammed back down onto its tracks with bone-jarring force, instead. Its occupants were hurled against their restraints, battered and bruised, but its suspension and electronics had been engineered to survive that sort of abuse, and the tactical displays scarcely even flickered.

Not that it mattered much for the moment. All of the Empire's combat systems were fully hardened against EMP, but nothing could have "seen" through the inconceivable, fusion-powered blast furnace which had once been a narrow, scenic, pleasantly wooded mountain valley. Every drone which had had the Bolo under direct observation had been wiped away by the fury of Na-Lythan's attack, but that, too, had been foreseen, and fresh drones were already launching.

Ka-Frahkan dragged himself back upright in his command chair, staring into the main display at the solid wall of curdled dust, flame, and heat rolling outward from the epicenter of the target zone.

Surely, he thought shakenly, the corner of his eye noting the red-flashing sidebars which indicated minor damage to his own mechs despite their shielded positions, surely, not even a Bolo could survive that! I know how tough they are, but—

And then, scorched and seared, patches of its frontal armor glowing with white heat where the antiplasma appliques had been stripped away, a long, wide mountain of iodine-dark duralloy topped the ridgeline and came out of that vortex of destruction like a curse.

Eighty-seven meters long, from prow to aftermost antimissile battery. Bogey wheels six meters in diameter and eight grinding tracks, each eight meters wide with track plates a quarter of a meter thick. A

slab-faced turret, towering twenty-seven meters above the ground, mounted on a hull so broad it still managed to seem low-slung, almost sleek. Ion-bolt infinite repeaters in secondary turrets, already swiveling towards their targets, and armored slabs rising as a quartet of hatches on its foredeck opened and thirty-centimeter mortars went to rapid fire. And even as he watched, the main turret's massive Hellbore locked on Colonel Na-Lythan's command Surtur.

Impossible. The thought went through him with the atavistic terror of some primitive cave-dwelling ancestor face-to-face with the most terrifying predator of his world. It can't be here. It can't!

Maneka/Lazarus topped the ridge.

Echoes of agony still reverberated through her/them, but they were secondary, unimportant.

Something to be brushed aside in her/their concentration.

Damage reports cascaded through her/them. One infinite repeater destroyed outright; the second weapon in the same turret disabled until damage control could repair the jammed training gear. Forward sensors reduced to 71.06 percent of base capability. Number Three track severely damaged. Starboard forward track shield buckled, locked in the lowered position, plowing through soil and stone as she/they rumbled forward. Forward antiperso