Bolos: Cold Steel
Created by Keith Laumer
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Prologue
It wasn’t anywhere you went for a vacation. Thule’s eccentric orbit hinted the planet was not native to its sun, but had been captured from a passing star. That same orbit made for an agonizingly hot, wet, and short summer followed by a winter where a good day was merely unbearable. Both seasons shared only one thing: storms featuring winds over 100 KPH. To which was added the joy of a thin crust and constant volcanic activity.
The star system was crowded with debris; Thule itself had seventeen moons and the beginnings of at least one ring. It was generally a good place to avoid when there were so many more hospitable worlds to colonize. But that wasn’t an option. Thule was unique for more than being the virtual poster world for being barely habitable. Wherever the planet originated, it had gathered into itself the largest concentration of the rare earth element saganium ever found by humans among the over 40,000 explored worlds—saganium was the vital trace ingredient in a newly developed and amazingly resistant duralloy armor. With the Deng Incursion reaching its destructive climax, mining colonies were en route before the survey team’s preliminary report was even finished printing out. There were just a few details they had missed.
The Greater Machine
J. Steven York &
Dean Wesley Smith
Chapter One
For the moment it wasn’t pouring rain. Jennifer Harom dropped off the last rung of the ladder onto the damp sand and stretched, glad to be out of the massive pulverizer that towered fifty meters into the air above her. Her overalls were damp from the sweat and the light breeze felt good against her skin, cooling her and clearing her head. The jungle greenery pulped by the big machine had a chlorophyll and vinegar smell, like a Caesar salad.
The ground under her feet shook as the grinder tore into the earth, ultrasonic cannon aimed downward, tearing sand and gravel apart at a molecular level, turning it into the uniform, black ore-sand that crunched under her boots. Despite the violence and power of the pulverizer, active noise dampeners shielded the machine from its own power, reducing the sound to a low rumble, and incidentally keeping the crew from going deaf. She could have even heard the noises from the jungle around her, if the machine hadn’t frightened away every animal within five kilometers.
Confident that she was safe from the local predators, she scrambled up a nearby bank and looked back at the big machine, floating on its contra-gravs a few meters above the ground, a duralloy thundercloud lost down from heaven and pretty damned pissed about it. Behind it a two-hundred-meter swath of freshly created ore-sand stretched back up the valley, waiting for the processing machines that followed a kilometer behind. Keeping the beast running, keeping it from ripping itself apart, was a big job, but her three co-workers were more than capable of covering for her while she got a little fresh air. Getting out of the control cabin in the middle of a shift was against the rules, especially while the grinder was in operation, but they all did it. Staying cramped into that small control cabin for ten hours straight would drive anyone nuts. Besides, who cared as long as the pulverizer kept tearing up the ground on this godforsaken planet.
She stepped toward the edge of the jungle. The wide-leafed plants and tall trees towered over her like a wall. At the moment the grinder was tearing a wide path up a sandbar beside a small river. When they reached the end of the valley they would turn around and come back down, cutting another swath beside the one they were working on now, passing the processing machines somewhere along the way. The pulverizer’s downward-pointing sound cannon dug the ground to a depth of twenty meters and could chew up rocks as if they were cotton candy.
Eventually all the jungle would be gone from this valley as they mined the saganium, but that would take at least a year and she planned on being gone, headed back into civilized space, long before then. Ten years from now this valley would be twice as deep and wide as it was now, a scar big enough to see from orbit. There were ten colonies and more than double that number of mining sites spread around the planet. This planet, with its smells and heat was barely worth inhabiting now. She had no doubt that in ten years the place would be nothing more than a large pile of rock orbiting a weak sun.
She dropped down onto the ground and rested her back against a boulder. As the machine slowly moved away from her, the Caesar salad smell was already fading, replaced by a stench like mildew, old socks and rotting garbage. Now, after two weeks, she was starting to get used to the smells of this ugly planet. Not all the way yet, but enough that they didn’t make her choke anymore. It was ironic that the only way to get a good smell out of the jungle was to blast it to hell, and even that didn’t last.
She took a deep breath and let the solidness of the ground ease the tension of a long morning inside the pulverizer. She would take a few minutes, then get back to work. They were pushing the grinder as fast as it would go, and she had every intention of getting the bonus promised them if they made the cliff at the head of the valley in two weeks. The more money she made, the quicker she could head out of here, get back to school, finish the degree in architecture. Then all this labor would just become a bad memory, laughed at over drinks and a good meal.
Suddenly the smell of rot engulfed her even more strongly, and a branch cracked just behind her.
“What—?”
She sprang to her feet and spun around.
For a moment her mind didn’t register what she was seeing. Along the edge of the jungle were at least twenty massive alien creatures. For a moment she thought that they were predators of some kind, that she’d been wrong about the sound scaring them away. The things were vaguely humanoid, small heads mounted on massive, fur-covered bodies. The fur was black and scattered with bold, irregular white spots. The things hunched slightly as they spotted her, their heads shifting nervously as they looked at her, first with one side-mounted eye, then the other, like massive birds. The lips on their wide mouths looked hard, beaklike, adding to the impression that these things were somehow in the bird family.
At first, she didn’t realize they wore clothes, their black loincloths and harnesses blended so well with their fur. It was only when she saw the primitive hand weapons, curved knives, long blades mounted on shafts to create something like a cross between a spear and a broadsword, that she was sure she was dealing with intelligent creatures. The biggest of them also carried a long, heavy-looking, leather bag over his shoulder, though he lacked the spear/sword that the others carried.
Natives? The damned survey hadn’t said anything about natives. She tried to remember something, anything that she’d been taught about first contact in school, but it was all gone, vanished down the same mental sinkhole as hyperspatial geometry and most of her Earth history. She held up her hands, trying to indicate she was unarmed. “Where did you come from?” she asked, managing to choke down the fear. That was stupid. Like they could understand her. Why had she left her side arm back in the pulverizer? It was regulation that she always carry it, just as it was regulation that they stay inside their machine for the entire shift. But there weren’t supposed to be any aliens on this planet, especially aliens as big as these beasts.
The creature closest to her just turned its head from side to side, its birdlike black eyes staring down at her with great intensity, even if she couldn’t read the emotion behind it. The creature showed no sign that it understood her. Of course, it wouldn’t.
She eased a step back, trying not to move too suddenly. The smallest of the creatures, still a good three heads taller than she was, stepped forward, lowered his spear-weapon, and casually jabbed it at her. She cursed and jumped back, feeling the dull impact of the weapon against her side, just below the rib cage.
She cursed again, more angry than afraid. Her side hurt, and without thinking she touched herself, feeling something hot and wet on her fingers. She looked at her bloody fingers in shock. “You cut me, you bastards!”