The alien watched her intently, still utterly unreadable to her. Then it made a noise, a hissy, rasping noise, punctuated by clicks of those hard lips. It was talking.
The others joined in, all chattering at once.
She knew without a doubt she was going to have to make a break for it, and while they were talking seemed as good a time as any. She just hoped the others up in the grinder control cabin could see what was happening out here and have the door open when she came up the ladder.
She bolted, skittering back down the slope toward the waiting ladder. After twenty steps, she dared to glance back, and was surprised to see that the aliens weren’t following. Instead, the big one had lowered his bag to the ground, and the others gathered around as he opened it and pulled out a large, cylindrical object made of metal. She had no idea what the object was, only that it clearly hadn’t been made by a bunch of savages in loincloths. She stopped and clutched her injured side, trying to figure out what they were doing.
The big creature hoisted the cylinder up onto his shoulder, one eye pressing awkwardly against a rearward-facing eyepiece that seemed totally out of position for its anatomy. Then he turned toward the pulverizer. The other natives chattered excitedly.
If she didn’t know any better, she’d think it was some kind of energy weapon. But that couldn’t be. The rest of these creatures looked primitive, and none of them were carrying anything but swords and knives. Maybe they’d just found the weapon somehow, didn’t even know what it did. Maybe they just wanted to see the pretty colors in the sighting system.
“Hey!” she shouted, stepping back slowly. “Don’t be aiming that thing at my machine!”
The small alien barked something. From the tone, it might have been an expletive, then started moving towards her, stafflike sword raised. The big one snapped something else at the little one, but was ignored.
The large alien again lifted the energy weapon. For a moment she hesitated between running and trying to watch. Then it was decided for her. The flash nearly blinded her.
She felt the shock wave in her rib cage and staggered back. It was a plasma cannon.
The small alien paused, looking, as she was, at the pulverizer.
The cannon had been powerful, but the big mining machine was built to take punishment— Then she saw the smoke coming from the emitters over the sonic cannon. They’d taken out the active noise cancellation. She felt it first through her feet, like a pipe organ hitting a low note, building in intensity. Instinctively she covered her ears, knowing how little good it would do. The pulverizer was shaking now, ripples running through its metal sides. Shut down, shut down! What was wrong with her crew?
Then she saw someone on one of the catwalks near the control room. She squinted against the sky. Not one of her people. Another alien, and it carried something in one hand. It tossed the object down to the others. It was round. It bounced in the sand and rolled to a stop at the big one’s taloned feet.
It was a head. She caught a glimpse of Vanderhaven’s blonde hair, and felt her last meal fighting to come back up.
Then the sound came, full blown, like needles in her eardrums, distracting her even from the horror of what she had just seen. She fell to her knees in pain.
The pulverizer was tearing itself apart from the inside, shedding hull plating and external fittings in a gentle rain as it continued its blind way down the valley. The aliens watched, seemingly unbothered by the sound. The big one raised the weapon again, aiming at the midsection where the power core now stood revealed by peeling hull. She couldn’t believe they knew what they were doing, but they clearly did.
He fired again. The power core exploded, not in a single blast, but like a string of huge firecrackers angling down through the hull toward the sonic cannon. She watched the machine, her friends, and every hope she had of earning her way off this rock, plow into the riverbank, sending up a shower of sand, smaller explosions sending shudders through its flame-engulfed hull.
Her friends were dead, and if she didn’t run, she was going to be as well. While the aliens were still occupied watching the machine burn, she bolted, staggering as she slipped in the loose sand.
She never saw how the small one noticed her, never heard him as he made pursuit. She didn’t even know the alien was there until the talons closed around the back of her neck, smashing her face down into the ore-sand.
She struggled weakly, called out, barely able to hear her own voice. The creature rolled her over effortlessly, the point of the alien’s blade centimeters from her face.
She fought, but the talons on the creature’s feet held her while it reached down to grab her hair and yank it back hard.
Her hearing started to come back, just in time as the alien screamed and flashed toward her neck. And this time—this time she understood the alien’s meaning completely.
Victory.
* * *
Tyrus Ogden stood on a catwalk that crossed the roof of the vast vehicle hangar. On the floor below, a space big enough to park a Concordiat cruiser of the line with room to spare, a half dozen huge mining machines were being assembled or repaired. Voices echoed through the vast space, sometimes shouted instructions, sometimes, eerily, a whisper relayed, as though by some acoustic wormhole, from a hundred meters away. Power tools chattered, buzzed, and roared. Brilliant flashes from a dozen different exotic welding methods cast colorful shadows on the walls. The place smelled of ozone, hot metal, machine lubricant, and just a little of sweat.
For Tyrus it should have been just another job. It could have been any world, literally. Big as the building was, it was a standard prefab that he’d seen on a dozen planets. But he hadn’t asked to come here, hadn’t planned to drag his family to this jungle hellhole of a mining colony. And most of all, he hadn’t planned on the machine whose superstructure towered up from the floor, ending only a few meters below the catwalk. It was the machine beneath his feet that made the job different. He looked down at the gleaming durachrome hull, the ranks of two-meter-wide treads, the main turrets, each bigger than any house he’d ever lived in.
“Mr. Ogden,” a man’s voice, high and nasal, called from behind him.
Tyrus turned at the sound of dress shoes clattering on metal grate. The man walking towards him was thin, dark, average height, dressed in an executive suit wholly inappropriate to the environment. Tyrus recognized him from previous holo conversations. “Dyson, isn’t it?”
Dyson shoved out his hand, and Tyrus shook it without enthusiasm. Company man.
“I see you’re settling right in.” He made a sweeping gesture to the machine below. “Like our new mining machine?”
“It’s a Bolo, Dyson.” He looked down, but not at the machine. “You shouldn’t be wearing shoes like that up here. You slip, it’s a long way down.”
Dyson looked nervously down at his own feet. “I didn’t know.”
“I’m sure.”
Dyson stepped cautiously up to the railing and looked over. “I do know about that, though. I signed the purchase order. It’s a Prescott 4800 surface excavator, the first of its kind.”
“It’s a Bolo, Dyson.”
Dyson looked uncomfortable. “Well—it’s that too. A converted Bolo actually, an old Mark XX . . . I think, maybe a XXI. I don’t know about those things. I hear Prescott found a whole regiment of them rusting in a scrap yard on some moon somewhere.”
Tyrus looked at the shining sweep of the hull and felt his mind slipping back to another place and time, a place of fire, a time of war. “Bolos don’t rust. After a few centuries on a planet like this, they might develop a surface patina. But they don’t rust, and they don’t bleed, and they don’t ever, ever die.”
“Excuse me?”
He looked at Dyson. “That’s why they diverted me here, isn’t it? Why they dragged me and my family into what amounts to a combat zone. I’ve had combat experience.”
Dyson nodded. “This situation has developed very quickly and unexpectedly. The 4800’s were already ordered as part of a trial program. You were already in the sector. You have the skills we needed. And you—know about Bolos.”
“I’ve fought on the same side as Bolos, Dyson. That’s a whole different thing. Maybe Bolo commanders are comfortable with those things, but I was infantry, and I never served with a man who wasn’t rattled by them, who didn’t spend as much time looking over his shoulder at his own Bolos as he did looking at the enemy line. What in heaven’s name made you want to convert one into a blasted tractor?”