The scene fuzzed with static suddenly, then went blank.
“We need help!” Chandler said, angry. “We’re completely outnumbered and have no way to resist! I’ve ordered the civilian population to board icecats and make it through the passes, but there aren’t enough—”
And with startling abruptness, the holo image winked out in a white blur of static.
“Wait!” Lang bellowed. “Get her back!”
“Can’t, sir,” the technician replied. “Transmission interrupt . . . from her end.”
Other monitors were showing similar scenes of chaos. The local colonial news service was reporting landings and hostile attacks among most of the domed towns and habitat outposts scattered across the Eastern Tundra, and camera views of incoming landers and running troops were displayed on a dozen monitors. More and more of those monitors were going blank, however. On one, a news reporter, heavily swaddled in synthfur against the cold, was talking into a handheld microphone when white-armored troops burst in behind him, blasters flaring in dazzling bursts of blue light. The reporter’s head came apart in a blurred red mist, and then that camera feed as well went dead.
“Colonel!” Khalid cried, “you must do something!”
Lang was still staring at one of the few active screens. It was difficult to see what was happening—massive, armored shapes moving in the darkness, as flame gouted into the night. “Martin? What are those things?”
“I can’t tell, sir.” He checked another screen, tapping out a command on the keyboard, entering a query for information. “There’s nothing on them in the warbook. They may be something new, something we didn’t see with the last Kezdai incursion.”
“Ground crawlers. They look almost like . . . Bolos.”
“Small ones. They can’t mass more than five hundred tons. A Mark XXIV masses fourteen thousand.”
“But there are a damn lot of them, Lieutenant. And they’re heavily armored. Even a Bolo can be taken down by numbers, if there are enough of them.”
“It takes more than armor to do that, Colonel. Bolos are smart.” If you let them use their talents and fight the war their way. . . .
“They’re headed west,” Khalid said. “Toward the passes. Toward us.”
Lang looked at Martin and nodded. “Order the Bolos out,” he said.
“Yes, sir!”
It’s about freaking time. . . .
* * *
Were I human, I would exult. “It’s about time,” I believe, is how humans express this particular emotion.
Massive doors rumble aside as I engage my main drive trains. I notice a group of humans, mech-technicians of the Izra’il Field Armored Support Unit, 514th Regiment, standing to one side as I pass like a duralloy cliff towering above them. Humans are so tiny, tiny and frail, yet I must recognize that it was they who created my kind.
I move out at full speed, hitting 100 kph by the time I clear the doors and reaching 140 on the open parade ground beyond. While combat feeds do not indicate any immediate threat to this base, I do not wish to expose myself to the possibility of orbital bombardment while I am still restricted in mobility by the physical structure of the base.
Three hundred meters south, Andrew emerges from his bunker in a glittering spray of ice crystals illuminated by the base lights, racing east on a course parallel to mine. The Frozen Hell Mountains rise a few kilometers ahead, rugged and ice enfolded.
The tactical situation is fairly simple. The Frozen Hells, rising nearly four thousand meters above the Izra’ilian tundra, form an ideal defensive barrier to surface movement, though not, of course, an impediment to air transport or attack. There are only two overland routes through the mountains within almost a thousand kilometers of the base—the Ad Dukhan River Valley to the south, and the Al Buruj Pass to the north.
Our tactical data feeds indicate that both passes are now crowded with Izra’ilian civilians streaming west through the two passes, fleeing the slaughter now being wreaked by the Enemy among the towns on the far side of the mountains. The human traffic will make movement through the passes difficult. A more viable option is to open up with a long-range indirect bombardment of Enemy positions on the eastern flank of the mountains and to engage Enemy spacecraft now in planetary orbit.
I perform a final systems check and determine that all weapons and combat systems are fully operational. I open the communications channel to headquarters and request weapons free.
* * *
“They want to what?”
“Bolo HNK is requesting weapons free,” Martin said. “He wants to target enemy positions on the far side of the mountains and to hit Kezdai ships in close orbit.”
“Negative!” Lang said. “Request denied, damn it!”
“Sir—”
“I said denied! We start hitting Kezdai ships, and they’re going to start hitting our ships. We can’t afford that, not if we want to maintain an open route off this rock. As for lobbing missiles over the mountains, forget it! There are still friendlies over there, and I don’t want to start an indiscriminant mass-bombardment!”
Martin looked at the number one monitor on his console, which showed one of the Bolos up close, grinding off across the ice-locked tundra toward the east. Its hull was pitted, worn, and battle-scarred, reminding him with a jolt that these machines had been in several dozen actions already, stretched across the last couple of hundred years. The machines bore eight battle stars apiece, and they’d seen plenty of minor engagements that hadn’t rated the fancy unit citations welded to their glacises.
It suggested that they knew what they were doing, damn it.
“Lieutenant Martin!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Deploy the armor into the passes. Have them hold the passes against enemy attempts to break through. That should give us the time we need to regroup on this side of the mountains, see what we’re going to do.”
“Yes, sir.” He reached for the comm headset.
* * *
I find it hard to believe that we have been issued such orders. A Bolo is, first and foremost, an offensive combat unit. Its best assets are wasted in a purely defensive stance. Andrew and I discuss the situation via our QDC link, confident that we cannot be overheard by the Enemy . . . or even understood by those monitoring our transmissions at the Combat Command Center.
“They must have reasons for this deployment,” Andrew suggests. Of the two of us, he was always the more stolid, the more steady, the more certain of reason behind muddled orders. “The situation on the far side of the mountains is still confused. Perhaps they fear incurring friendly-fire casualties on Izra’ilian civilians.”
“Perhaps,” I reply, “though the use of drones and AI missiles for final targeting options would limit civilian casualties. Especially when our targets would be primary Enemy targets, such as their transports, field headquarters and communications stations, and armor concentrations.”
“It’s also possible that C3’s reasons for these orders are the same reasons Marshal Tallard decided against deploying on the Tapfheim Line.”
“And those reasons are?” I prompted.
“Mistaken ones.”
I was intrigued by the fact that Andrew had just assayed a joke. Not a very good one, perhaps, by humans standards, but a definite attempt at humorous wordplay. Bolos are not known for their sense of humor, nor would such be encouraged if humans had reason to suspect it.
It was not the first time that I had wondered if Andrew and I were entirely up to spec.
In the past, I’ve primarily been concerned that I have trouble integrating with other Bolo combat units. Obviously, our QDC link makes us closer than would otherwise be the case, so much so that various of our human commanders in the past have referred to us as “that two-headed Bolo,” or as “the Bolo Brothers.” Our diagnostics, however, have always been within the expected psychotronic profiles, and no mention of processing aberrations has been made by any of our commanders or service teams. We are combat-ready and at peak efficiency.
We are ready to engage the Enemy.
Andrew is moving further to the south now, angling onto a new heading of 099 degrees in order to enter the western end of the Ad Dukhan Valley. I can see the valley entrance now, for it is marked by high thermal readings and a visible outflow of water vapor. The name, in the Arabic of this world’s colonists, means “The Smoke” and refers to clouds of steam emerging from a river rising from hot thermal vents in the valley. Izra’il possesses considerable tectonic activity, the result of the constant tidal tug-of-war it plays with the gas giant called The Prophet and others of The Prophet’s moons. An important deep thermal power station is located at the thousand-meter level of the path; the Ad Dukhan River itself is so hot it remains liquid despite an ambient temperature ranging between minus five and minus fifty degrees all the way to the Al-Mujadelah Sea.