Old Soldiers

Atwater had lost her command staff, her executive officer, and the battalion's main communications capability in the first twenty seconds of the attack. She herself was alive only because she'd been forward, consulting with Alpha Company's CO, at the moment the attack rolled in, and the confusion and temporary loss of cohesion that devastatingly accurate blow had delivered had allowed the Dogs to get the better part of a complete battalion across the fire zone Bravo Company was supposed to have covered. The enemy infantry and their APCs had paid a heavy price, but the survivors—well over half of the troops they'd committed to the thrust—had made it into the dead ground at the edge of Bravo's perimeter, and they'd been pushing hard to cut deeper through Bravo ever since. Now they were driving furiously forward once more, spending their own lives like water in their frantic effort to break through.

Which was why Bravo Company was down to twelve effectives ... and why Mary Lou Atwater had just called down nuclear suppressive fire on top of her own survivors' position.

She made herself watch her HUD as five of Bravo's remaining green icons turned crimson, then blinked out.

These bastards just don't care, she thought, shoving herself upright in her hole once more. Dust, dirt, and debris slithered off her armor, and she checked her radiation counter. Thank God both humanity and the Dog Boys had learned how to make clean fusion weapons centuries ago! Between them, they'd popped off enough by now to have salted this valley with lethal-level poisoning for the next five or ten thousand years, if they'd still been using old-style weapons. Not that low radiation levels made the blast and thermal effects any easier to live with, even for itty-bitty things like mortar rounds.

Not that anybody really cares about background radiation these days, a tiny corner of her brain thought even as the other ninety-five percent fought to sort out the situation. It looked like she'd at least stopped that breakthrough attempt, and it had probably cost the Dogs at least another fifty or sixty troopers. But what did she do about the hole?

"Uniform-Seven, Gold-One. Get your people over to Quebec-Kilo-Eight and shut the door on these fuckers!"

"Gold-One, Uniform-Seven copies." Platoon Sergeant Fiona Sugiyama's voice sounded calmer than she could possibly be. But then, perhaps Atwater's did, too. "We're on our way."

It's only a matter of time before one of these Puppies gets close enough to do us all with one of their big-assed demo charges, she told herself, following up her original thought. Whatever happens, they aren't going home, and they know it. So some floppy-eared son-of-a-bitch is going to come charging through here with a five- or ten-megaton charge strapped to his back, and when he does—

"Gold-One, I've got vehicle movement, Romeo-Mike sector," one of her remaining sensor teams reported. "Ground shocks're consistent with minimum one Heimdall and six-plus APCs!"

"Gold-One, Backstop-One copies," Rodriguez said tersely.

Atwater punched a command into her chest pack, reconfiguring her HUD to show suspected enemy dispositions, and winced. They'd already killed at least an entire Concordiat battalion worth of the Melconians, but Fourth was getting ground away in the process. In another fifteen minutes—half an hour, tops—the surviving Dogs were going to grind right across what used to be Fourth Battalion, and the fact that they'd been so chewed up that the rest of Brigadier Jeffords' people would be able to swat them almost casually wasn't going to be much comfort to her people's ghosts. But what—

A fresh, huge explosion thundered as Rodriguez's Hellbores nailed the Heimdall the instant its turret showed. But nine Melconian APCs were right behind the larger reco

The Melconians won. Rodriguez's people killed six of them, but the other three turned the antiarmor battery into shattered wreckage and shredded flesh before the gu

Infantry spilled out of the three surviving APCs, firing short-range, man-portable antitank weapons at their armored human opponents. Eight more of Atwater's militiamen went down—three of them dead, two of them dying—before a hurricane of defensive fire cut down the Melconian infantry and picked off their vehicles.

"Major, we've got more coming right behind them!" her sensor team commander shouted. "Here they—"

The voice chopped off abruptly, another icon turned crimson, and Mary Lou Atwater snatched up a dead militiaman's plasma rifle. The rifle was a team-served weapon, with a minimum crew of two, according to the Book, but powered armor's exoskeleton had to be good for something ... and she didn't have any damned body else to send.

She started off at a dead run.

"Push them! They're breaking—so push them!" Colonel Verank Ka-Somal bellowed into his microphone, pounding one clawed fist on his console. "Get in there and kill these vermin!"

His command vehicle's crew hunched their shoulders, concentrating on their own displays, their own tactical plots. The fanaticism—the madness—in Ka-Somal's voice lashed at them, but no one protested.

No one wanted to protest. Mad Ka-Somal might be, but he was far from alone in that. And even if he had been, every person in that vehicle knew they were all doomed. So why not kill as many of their killers as they could before they died?

"There!" Ka-Somal barked. "Look there! Na-Rohrn did it—he broke their perimeter! We've got them now, so—"

"Incoming!"

Ka-Somal had time to turn towards the voice. Time to see the fresh icons suddenly blossoming on the displays. Time to realize his vengeance quest had just ended.

Mary Lou Atwater slid to a halt as the flight of missiles shrieked over what was left of Fourth Battalion, banked sharply around an outthrust flank of mountain, and vanished as they streaked up the valley to the northwest across the Melconians' positions.

She tracked them visually and then bared her teeth in a ferocious smile of triumph as only two of them were picked off by the Melconian defenses.

There were no evil, anvil-headed mushroom clouds, heaving themselves upright across the heavens.

Those missiles carried not fusion warheads, but cluster submunitions, and a rolling surf of explosions—chemical, but vastly more powerful than anything pre-space humanity had ever dreamed of—marched up the valley in boots of flame. A second flight of missiles followed hard on the heels of the first, then a third. A fourth.

The hurricane of indirect fire which had been pounding on Fourth Battalion for what seemed an eternity stopped. It didn't gradually wind down, didn't taper off. It simply stopped, like the turning of a switch, as Maneka Trevor and Lazarus, still well over fifty kilometers away and reduced to a maximum speed of barely sixty kilometers per hour, swept the Melconian positions with a broom of fire.

Small arms fire continued to spatter across the militia's positions, but it was nothing compared to the weight of fire which had been beating across the battalion. Most of it was simple power rifle fire, without a hope in the world of penetrating the human defenders' armor, and Mary Lou Atwater's expression was a frightening thing to see.

"All right, people," her voice said harshly over the com. "The Old Lady just broke these goddamned bastards' backs. Now let's get in there and finish the job for her!"

Maneka Trevor finished sealing her battle dress uniform. She didn't have a mirror, but she didn't really need one. She still wore the neural interface headset, and although she and Lazarus were no longer welded into a single entity, she was sufficiently linked to him to use his command tac's optical pickups to examine her appearance.