Old Soldiers

She/they noted the destruction of the third Fenris.

The rapidfire hits of the Enemy vehicles' lighter weapons had rocked her/them and tracked glowing craters thirty centimeters deep across her/their glacis in two ragged lines. Where they crossed, two hits in almost exactly the same place had blasted the better part of half a meter into her/their frontal armor, but even that amounted to no more than superficial damage.

She/they ignored it, and her/their port secondary battery caught the fourth Fenris in an interweaving tracery of ion bolts. The shrieking energy weapons flayed the Fenris with a fan of glittering, lethally beautiful fire, and it staggered to a halt, then exploded as the bolts punched through its flimsy armor.

Two entire fists gone—simply gone. Wiped away.

Theslask Ka-Frahkan shook his head in stu

The remaining Surtur did exactly what Colonel Na-Lythan had hoped it might. Its distance to the rear, the fleeting seconds she/they had taken to kill the forward fists, had given its organic crew precious time. Time to traverse their turrets. To pick their aiming point.

To fire before she/they could acquire their own vehicle ... and this time, all six of its Hellbores would bear.

She/they heaved indescribably as 6.1 megatons/second of energy smashed into her/their frontal battle screen. Damage warnings screamed through her/their systems as her/their battle screen did its best. It managed to absorb almost thirty percent of the destructive energy, and it diverted that stolen power to its own use and the reinforcement of her/their forward internal disrupter shields. It deflected another thirty-five percent of the damage before it failed completely, but over a third of the total energy carved into her/their glacis plate, and two of the Hellbore bolts impacted less than two meters apart.

Not even a Bolo could shrug off that sort of damage.

Duralloy shattered and vaporized, and her/their Maneka half remembered another battle, another Bolo—another hit that had ripped through armor and blasted deep into a command deck.

The damage carved glowing wounds fifteen meters deep that drove her/their entire gargantuan hull backward on her/their suspension. The magazine for her/their mortars exploded, but those weapons had been placed where they were in no small part to absorb damage which got through the outer armored shell, and they did just that. Specially designed blast panels blew outward, venting internal pressure and heat. The outermost shell of disrupter shields failed, but they lasted long enough to cha

The agony blazing in her/their pain circuits was indescribable, but she/they rocked back forward, settling back onto her/their tracks, and her/their turret had never stopped traversing even as the forward sixteen percent of her/their hull was torn open.

For one fleeting instant, Ka-Frahkan allowed himself to hope once more. Na-Lythan's last Surtur had succeeded in the mission the colonel had assigned to it. As the Bolo staggered bodily backward, belching heat and incandescence in a cloud of vaporized alloy, he felt certain that his people had managed to kill it at last.

And then it fired.

The final Surtur vanished in a sun-bright burst of fury, and she/they turned on its supporting Fenrises

.

Theslask Ka-Frahkan sat motionless. There was nothing else he could do. He felt Na-Salth at his elbow, felt the other members of his command vehicle's crew sitting equally motionless, silently, joined with him in a moment of helpless awareness of how close to victory they had come.

The Bolo was brutally damaged. One more hit on its shattered forward hull—even from a Fenris'

light Hellbore—must surely have killed it. But that hit was never scored.

One Fenris exploded almost in the same instant as the Surtur, ripped apart by a deadly hail of fire from the Bolo's infinite repeaters. And that deadly, deadly main turret—the turret which had never paused, never hesitated for an instant as its tracked from one target straight onto the next—turned to face the last Melconian armored mech on the entire planet. Then its Hellbore fired for the fourth—and final—time.

That same calm voice was still speaking in his mind when the Bolo's remaining starboard infinite repeaters tracked around onto his command vehicle.

9

Mary Lou Atwater cringed as a fresh explosion chewed another chunk out of her perimeter ... and killed eight more of her militia troopers.

Yet another assault rolled right in behind the explosion, and she crouched in the bottom of her hole—her original command post had been destroyed over an hour ago—and concentrated on her HUD's iconography.

"Hammer-Two, I need mortar fire on Quebec-Kilo-Seven-Three! Saturation pattern—and be ready to go fusion this time!"

"Yes, ma'am!" Lieutenant Smithson, who commanded what had abruptly become her only mortar platoon in the very opening phase of the attack, acknowledged.

"Backstop-One, get those Hellbores trained around! They're coming through Quebec-Kilo, and they've still got at least one of those goddamned Heimdalls left!"

She heard Sergeant Everard Rodriguez, the commander of one of her two surviving antiarmor sections respond, but she was already turning away to the next command. Her reserve was down to a single platoon, and she wanted desperately to avoid committing it. Once she did, she'd have nothing left to plug the next hole with, unless she could somehow extract something—anything—from the chaotic madness crashing over her perimeter.

Maneka Trevor had confirmed the destruction of the remaining Melconian armored units—was it really eighty-seven minutes ago?—but whoever was in command of this particular pack of Dogs had launched his attack on Fourth Battalion before Trevor ever engaged the enemy armor. Atwater knew she should be grateful that those Surturs and Fenrises weren't crunching in on her at the same time, and she was. But that didn't make the thirty-two percent casualties she'd already taken any less agonizing. Nor did the knowledge that the Melconians had lost far more heavily than she had.

So far, at least.

"Breakthrough! Quebec-Kilo-Eight-Niner!"

"Hammer-Two, I want fusion now! Quebec-Kilo-Eight-Niner!"

"Yes, ma'am! Ten count!"

Six low kiloton-range mortar rounds fell exactly on the zero mark, and every trooper in Fourth Battalion was belly-down in the deepest hole he or she could find as the earth beneath them bellowed and heaved.

Atwater hated using them at all like hell, but she didn't have much choice. The battalion's air defenses had stopped most of the initial Melconian bombardment pretty much cold, and the Dog Boys' infantry units were much less lavishly equipped with fusion rounds than many of the opponents the Concordiat had fought over its long and bloody history. But three had gotten through, and they'd been hellishly accurate. Atwater knew the Melconians hadn't managed to get close-range recon drones over her position for at least three hours prior to their attack, nor had they even attempted to penetrate the battalion's defended airspace with ma