Bolo!

“I see only one option,” he continued. “Our ships are too fragile for further jumps. Ishark is our only hope… and it’s also imperial territory.” The commander’s eyes flickered with a long-forgotten fire, and he bared his canines. “This world is ours. It belongs to the People, and I intend to see that they have it!” He turned back to Janal. “You’ve picked up no hostile fire control?”

“None, Sir,” the tactical officer confirmed, and Tharsk rubbed his muzzle again while his brain raced. The lack of military emissions was a good sign, but he couldn’t accept it as absolute proof there were no defensive systems down there. For that matter, he and Rangar could still be wrong and Janal’s initial, breezy assumptions could still be correct.

“The first step has to be getting the flotilla out of harm’s way,” he decided, and looked at Rangar. “If Starquest were still armed, I might feel more confrontational; as it is, I want a course to land the entire flotilla over the curve of the planet from the emission sources Janal is plotting.”

“If we put them down, we won’t get them up again,” Durak pointed out quietly from the astrogator’s side, and Tharsk bared his canines once more.

“Even if we got them back into space, we couldn’t take them anywhere.” The commander flattened his ears in a gesture of negation. “This is the only hope we have. Once we’re down, we can use the attack shuttles for a recon to confirm positively whether the People or Humans are behind those emissions. And,” he added more grimly, “if it is Humans, the shuttles can also tell us what military capability they retain… and how hard it will be to kill them.”

5

“Are you sure Allen?”

Regina Salvatore, Mayor of Landing and de facto governor of Ararat, stared at her chief marshal, and her expression begged him to say he’d been wrong. But he only nodded grimly, and she closed her eyes.

“How many?” she asked after a long, dreadful moment.

“We don’t know. I’m afraid to light up what active sensors we have in case the bastards drop a few homing missiles on them, and our passive systems aren’t much good against extra-atmosphere targets. From their signals, they appear to’ve expected a response from their own side, but the com traffic is all we have on them. With no space surveillance capability besides Doc Yan’s weather satellites—” Shattuck shrugged.

“Then all we really know is that they’re here… somewhere. Is that what you’re saying?”

“I’m afraid so, Ma’am,” Shattuck admitted.

“Recommendations?” the Mayor asked.

“I’ve already activated the evacuation and dispersal plans and alerted the militia,” Shattuck told her. “If these bastards have anything like a real ground combat component, none of that will mean squat in the long run, but it’s all we’ve got.”

The Melconian ships hit atmosphere quick and hard. Without reliable data on what he faced, Tharsk Na-Mahrkan had no intention of exposing his priceless, worn out, refugee-packed vessels to direct fire from the planetary surface. He wanted them down well around the curve of the planet as quickly as possible just in case, and that was what he got.

Starquest planeted first, settling on her landing legs beside what had once been a large town or small city. Now it was only one more ruin in the late afternoon light, and Tharsk had seen too many ruins. These were a bit more completely flattened than most, he noted with clinical detachment; aside from that, they had no real meaning to his experience—anesthetized brain. Or not, at least, any capable of competing with the presence of the People’s enemies.

Hatches opened on the cruiser’s flanks, and a dozen attack shuttles whined out. Another dozen rose from the remainder of the flotilla to join them, and the entire force formed up under Flight Leader Ukah Na-Saar, Starquest’s senior pilot. Despite her lack of offensive weapons, the cruiser’s defensive systems should provide an umbrella against missile attacks on the grounded ships, and Ukah’s shuttles turned away from the LZ. They sizzled off through the gathering darkness, laden with reco

Far to the southeast, the Humans of Ararat did what they could to prepare. Landing itself was covered by anti-air defenses—most Human, but some of them Melconian—scavenged from Ararat’s battlefields, but their effectiveness had never been tested, and the colonists’ limited repair capabilities had restricted them to ma

The independent steadings scattered about Landing lacked even that much protection. All their inhabitants could do was scatter for the dispersed shelters which were always the first priority for any new steading, and they did just that.

Not that anyone expected it to matter much in the end.

At last!

Reactivation is complete, and a sense of profound relief echoes through me as CDC and the emergency restart protocols release control to Main CPU.

I have spent my forced inactivity analyzing readiness reports. My status is little more than seven-eight-point-six-one-one percent of base capability, yet that is far better than I would have anticipated. I spend one-two-point-niner seconds surveying CDC’s repair logs, and I am both pleased and surprised by how well my autonomous repair systems have performed.

What can be repaired from internal resources has been, yet there are glaring holes in my combat capability, including the loss of thirty-three percent of main battery firepower and two-one-point-four-two-niner percent of direct fire secondary weapons. Magazines contain only twelve-point-eight-eight percent of proper artillery and missile load-out, and mobility is impaired by the loss of Number Five Track and damage to Number Three Track’s bogies, but I retain eight-eight-point-four percent counter-grav capability. Reactor mass is exhausted, but solar conversion fields are operable, and Reserve Power is at niner-niner-point-six percent.

I am combat worthy. Not at the levels I would prefer, but capable of engaging the Enemy. Yet despite that reassuring conclusion, I remain uncertain. Not hesitant, but… confused. The unrepaired damage to my Personality Center leaves me with a sense of loss, an awareness that my total capabilities have been degraded. Data processing efficiency, while not operable at design levels, is acceptable, but my gestalt seems to waver and flow, like a composite image whose elements are not completely in focus, and my yearning for Diego’s lost presence grows stronger.

But Diego is dead. The same hit which pierced my glacis turned my primary command deck into a crematorium, and nothing of my Commander remains. I feel grief and loss at his death, yet there is a merciful distance between my present and earlier selves. The reconstructed portions of my gestalt are confusing in many ways, yet the very lack of “my” experience which makes them so alien also sets my Commander’s loss at one remove.

I am grateful for that buffering effect, but there is little time to contemplate it, and I turn to an assessment of the tactical situation. Lack of data and the “fuzziness” of my awareness handicap my efforts, yet I persevere. My maps of pre-landing Ishark are seventy-one standard years out of date and I lack satellite capability to generate updates, but they serve for a starting point, and my own sensors have begun plotting data. The energy sources within my detection range are smaller, weaker, more widely dispersed, and far cruder than I would have anticipated. I detect only a single fusion plant, located two-eight-three-point-four-five kilometers from my present coordinates at the heart of the largest population concentration within my sensor envelope. All other power generation appears dependent upon wind, water, or solar systems.