My destruction of the fusion device seems finally to have taken the fight from the attackers. I continue to bombard them as they scatter in all directions, disappearing into the jungle, diving into the river. I signal my commander that the landing zone is nearly secure, but that he make a rapid combat descent, and should be prepared for missile attacks.
I am hailed by the defending forces, a Commander Donning of the local militia. I relay the message to my commander, and he patches his own voice through my short-range transmitters.
* * *
Donning had the transmission patched through his wristcom.
“Commander, this is Colonel Houchen of the Dinochrome Brigade.”
“Thank you for the timely assist, Colonel. You got here just in time.”
“Actually, Commander, I’m not there yet, but I hope to be shortly. Until then, I believe you’ve already met Bolo KNN. Khan, say hello to Commander Donning. You two probably have things to talk about until I get there.”
“Hello, Commander,” said a second voice, one that sounded as human as any of his men.
It took Donning a moment to find his voice. “Hello back,” he finally said.
Chapter Four
It had taken Dirk almost six hours to dig itself out from under the collapsed hillside and the debris from the fallen hangar. The problem was not lack of power or traction, but the loose nature of the rubble and the unstable hillside above, which threatened to completely collapse on top of them. Add to this the fact that Dirk was unfamiliar with his own new capabilities and limitations. Much of the equipment that had been welded to his duralloy hull was constructed of more fragile materials and threatened to wrench off with each movement. It would have been easy just to order Dirk to sheer it all off, but lacking proper weapons and sensors, there was no telling what of it they might need.
After a while, Tyrus became impatient. He felt well enough to disconnect himself from the autodoc and climb down into Dirk’s electronic bays for a closer inspection. Butchery was still his assessment. He found whole banks of molecular circuitry ripped out, probably for salvage, and bridged or bypassed with primitive optical circuitry a hundred years out of date. It was no wonder Dirk had memory and operational problems. If this reflected the overall quality of Dirk’s “conversion” into a mining machine, they were bound to discover other problems as they went on. Well, there was nothing he could do about it now. The Bolo was still his best hope of finding his family.
Twice Dirk had to stop and back up to loosen debris threatening to rip away a sensor, or disable a sonic cannon. After five hours the screens inside the main cabin started to show some light, and an hour later Dirk was completely free. It was the longest five hours Tyrus could ever remember.
It was midday when Tyrus opened the top hatch and stared at the sight that surrounded him. He could see both human and alien bodies, burnt and scattered in the rubble. The sun was hot on his face, and the wind was light and humid, blowing a sickening smell of death and burning plastic past him. He was forced to retreat to the cabin and find a breathing mask in one of the emergency lockers.
He emerged again and climbed down the Bolo’s rock-scarred flank. Where the day before there had been a freshly built colony of homes, public buildings, and a full-fledged mining and processing operation, now only debris remained.
He did a slow turn, forcing himself to study everything. The jungle edges were leveled below the colony, and nothing over five feet high was left standing within a thousand meters of his position in all directions.
He pulled the Bolo command headset from his pocket and clipped it behind his ear. “Dirk, what type of weapon was used to cause this type of destruction?”
“From the readings I received during the time of the destruction, and the evidence now, it was a small fusion explosion, low residual radiation, limited yield. You should take an anti-radiation tab when you return to the cabin, but the current danger is slight, especially with the breathing mask.”
“They carried it by hand?” Tyrus asked, remembering the aliens carrying weapons that ranged from spears to plasma cannons.
“From playback of my sensor logs before the event, this seems probable,” Dirk said.
Tyrus looked down the hill at where his family’s apartment had been in a three-story building. There was nothing left of the entire complex but debris. The bomb must have killed thousands of aliens at the same time. Why would they do that? And why had they attacked? None of this made any sense at all to him. He climbed back up onto the Bolo and ordered Dirk to move towards the residential section.
“Do you detect anyone left alive in the colony?”
“No,” Dirk said.
“Can you trust your sensors?”
“My ability to detect biological signs has been severely compromised, however I am quite seismically aware. If there were anyone moving or talking in the area, I believe I could detect it.”
He moved carefully over the Bolo’s massive hull, from handhold to handhold, until he could look down over the machine’s flank, down at one of its mighty treads. Once they got away from the area of the hangar, most of the human bodies he passed hadn’t died from the explosions or weapon fire. They had been stabbed, hacked, their throats slit, or in many cases, beheaded. The damned aliens had taken the time to kill them one by one, men, women and children alike.
Tyrus just stared at the pile of rubble that had once held his home and his family, and maybe still did. There were hundreds of bodies visible, probably countless more buried in the collapsed buildings. He didn’t recognize anyone. He hadn’t had time to get to know any of his neighbors yet. There had been over thirty thousand people in this colony.
Now he might be the only survivor.
But there was still that shuttle he’d seen leaving. Still a little hope that his family, that someone, had survived.
He stared at the destroyed colony around him, ignoring the smell of burnt and rotting flesh. The images of his family flashed through his mind, how just a few days ago he had taken the kids out to a special dinner, an apology for bringing them here. His wife, angry, had stayed home. Now the restaurant, even the street they had walked down talking and laughing, was gone.
He fought the tears back and forced himself to take a deep breath. With the breath came a stench of death that gagged him. He desperately wanted to dig, search for his family’s bodies, and give them the burial they deserved. But they might not be there, and right now he didn’t dare take the time. There were other things to be done. The dead would wait.
“Dirk, can you contact any of the other colonies?”
“No,” Dirk said. “My long-range communications capabilities appear to be limited, and were further damaged while digging out of the landslide. I am unable to contact anyone. If we move closer, or if we contact a station with relay capability, that could change.”
Tyrus nodded. Though he’d hoped otherwise, he’d half expected it. A functional Bolo could communicate over interstellar distances, but that transceiver had probably been sold as salvage decades ago. Dirk wasn’t much of a Bolo any more. It was just lucky the machine still had armor or he would be dead.
The conversion had left some of the old Bolo intact though, something he could resist the enemy with, maybe even something that could fight back. What had Dirk said? “I have power, I can move, I can think,” something like that. It would have to be enough.
He climbed down again and found a laser rifle still clutched in a headless woman’s hand. He found himself checking the rings on that hand. Not his wife’s. Who was she, he wondered? Had she died defending her children? Avenging her lover? No way to know.
He shouldered the rifle, aimed it at an uptilted slab of duracrete, and pulled the trigger. With some difficulty he managed to laser the date into the top of the slab. Then he began to form letters.
Here Lie The People Of Ellerbey Mining’s Thule Central Colony, Killed in a Sneak Attack.
He hesitated, then raised the rifle again and added:
They Will Be Avenged.
He looked at the charge reading on the rifle, almost empty, and tossed it aside. He climbed back up to the Bolo’s hatch, staggered inside, heard it slam shut behind him.
“Get going,” he said. “We’re headed north.”
* * *
Simulations are one thing, Colonel Bud Houchen observed, it’s quite another when somebody is really trying to blow your ass out of the sky. It had been quite a ride down to the planet in his Bolo’s assault pod, dodging missiles all the way. Fortunately, without the Bolo’s 14,000 tons of dead weight the pod turned into a surprisingly agile brute, able to power itself through most any maneuver that its relatively fragile human cargo could stand.