Bolo!

Maneka clung to her sanity with bleeding fingernails as Thor’s hammer slammed into Benjy. The huge Bolo lurched like a storm-tossed galleon as the green, living forest about them, already torn and outraged by the Battalion’s passage and the handful of high-trajectory missiles which had gotten through, flashed into instant flame. The Battalion charged onward, straight through that incandescent inferno, duralloy armor shrugging aside the radiation and blast and heat which would have smashed the life instantly from the fragile protoplasmic beings riding their command decks. The visual display showed only a writhing ocean of fire and dust, of explosion and howling wind, like some obscene preview of Hell, but it was a Hell Bolos were engineered to survive… and defeat.

None of the reco

Not that there weren’t still plenty of them to go around. Over seventy targeted Benjy, even as he charged through the raging fires and devastation of the primary strike zone. The gargantuan Bolo’s point defense stopped most of them short of his battle screen, but twenty-three reached attack range, and his fifteen-thousand-ton hull bucked and heaved as the fusion warheads gouged at his battle screen and drove searing spikes of hellfire directly into his armor. Thor’s hammer smashed down again. Then again, and again and again. Even through the concussions and the terrifying vibration, Maneka could see entire swathes of his battle board blazing bloody scarlet as damage ripped away weapons and sensors.

But then, too suddenly to be real, the hammer blows stopped. Ten of the sixteen Bolos who had been targeted charged out the far side of the holocaust, leaving behind all four of the 351st’s Mark XXVIIs. Two of the Battalion’s Mark XXVIIIs had also been destroyed, and all of the survivors were damaged to greater or lesser extent, but they had destroyed the entire remaining Melconian support squadron, and the enemy LZ was just ahead.

“I have sustained moderate damage to my secondary batteries and forward sensors,” Benjy a

Missile release ought to have been authorized by Colonel Tchaikovsky, Maneka thought. But Tchaikovsky’s Gregg was one of the Bolos they’d lost, and Major Fredericks’ Peggy had suffered major damage to her communications arrays. There was no time to consult anyone else, and independent decisions were one of the things Bolo commanders were trained to make.

“Release granted. Open fire!” she snapped.

“Acknowledged,” Benjy replied, and the heavily armored hatches of his VLS tubes sprang open. His own missiles blasted outward, then streaked away in ground-hugging supersonic flight. They were shorter ranged and marginally slower than the ones the Melconians had hurled at the Battalion, but they were also far more agile, and the relatively short launch range and low cruising altitudes gave the defenders’ less capable reco

Fireballs raged along the Melconian perimeter, blasting away outer emplacements and dug-in armored units. Weapons and sensor posts, Loki-class tank destroyers and air-defense batteries, vanished into the maw of the Thirty-Ninth Battalion’s fury. Benjy’s thirty-centimeter rapid-fire mortars joined the attack, vomiting terminally guided projectiles into the vortex of destruction. Follow-on flights of Melconian missiles shrieked to meet them from the missile batteries to the rear, but the indirect fire weapons had lost virtually all of their observation capability. Their targeting solutions were much more tentative, the chaos and explosions hampered the missiles’ onboard seeker systems, and the gaping hole ripping deeper and deeper into their perimeter was costing them both launchers and the sensor capability which might have been able to sort out the maelstrom of devastation well enough to improve their accuracy.

But hidden among the merely mortal Melconian emplacements were their own war machines. The Heimdalls were too light to threaten a Bolo—even the Ninth’s ma

Another of the Battalion’s Bolos lurched to a halt, vomiting intolerable heat and light as a plasma bolt punched through its thi

“Take point, Benjy!” Maneka barked as yet another Bolo slewed to a halt, streaming smoke and flame. Her eyes dropped to the sidebar, and she felt a stab of grief as the unblinking letter codes identified the victim as Lazy. It looked like a mission kill, not complete destruction, she thought, but the damage had to have punched deeply into Lazy’s personality center… and there was no way Lieutenant Takahashi could have survived.

And there was no time to mourn them, either.

Benjy surged forward, the apex of a wedge of eight bleeding titans. Surturs reared up out of deeply dug-in hides, lurching around to counterattack from the flanks and rear as the Battalion smashed through their outer perimeter, Hellbores howling in point-blank, continuous fire.

In! We’re into their rear! a corner of Maneka’s brain realized, with a sense of triumph that stabbed even through the horror and the terror.

A brilliant purple icon blazed abruptly on Benjy’s tactical plot as his analysis of Melconian com signals suddenly revealed what had to be a major communication node.

“The CP, Benjy! Take the CP!” Maneka snapped.

“Acknowledged,” Benjy replied without hesitation, and he altered course once more, smashing his way towards the command post. It loomed before him, and as Maneka watched the tac analysis spilling up the plot sidebars, she realized what it truly was. Not a command post, but the command post—the central nerve plexus of the entire Puppy position!

They’d found the organizing brain of the Melconian enclave, and she felt a sudden flare of hope. If they could reach that command post, take it out, cripple the enemy’s command and control function long enough for the Ninth to break in through the hole they’d torn, then maybe A pair of Surturs, flanked by their attendant mediums, loomed suddenly out of the chaos, Hellbores throwing sheets of plasma at the Bolos rampaging through their line. Benjy blew the left-flank Surtur into incandescent ruin while Peggy shouldered up on his right and killed the other. Their infinite repeaters raved as the Fenrises split, trying to circle wide and get at their weaker flank defenses, and the medium Melconian mechs slithered to a halt, spewing fury and hard radiation as their antimatter plants blew.

Then a trio of Fenris-class mediums, all of them orphans which had lost their Surturs, appeared out of nowhere. Their lighter weapons bellowed, and they were on the left flank of Captain Harris and Allen. They fired once, twice… and then there were only seven Bolos left.