Old Soldiers

9

Mary Lou Atwater cringed as a fresh explosion chewed another chunk out of her perimeter ... and killed eight more of her militia troopers.

Yet another assault rolled right in behind the explosion, and she crouched in the bottom of her hole—her original command post had been destroyed over an hour ago—and concentrated on her HUD's iconography.

"Hammer-Two, I need mortar fire on Quebec-Kilo-Seven-Three! Saturation pattern—and be ready to go fusion this time!"

"Yes, ma'am!" Lieutenant Smithson, who commanded what had abruptly become her only mortar platoon in the very opening phase of the attack, acknowledged.

"Backstop-One, get those Hellbores trained around! They're coming through Quebec-Kilo, and they've still got at least one of those goddamned Heimdalls left!"

She heard Sergeant Everard Rodriguez, the commander of one of her two surviving antiarmor sections respond, but she was already turning away to the next command. Her reserve was down to a single platoon, and she wanted desperately to avoid committing it. Once she did, she'd have nothing left to plug the next hole with, unless she could somehow extract something—anything—from the chaotic madness crashing over her perimeter.

Maneka Trevor had confirmed the destruction of the remaining Melconian armored units—was it really eighty-seven minutes ago?—but whoever was in command of this particular pack of Dogs had launched his attack on Fourth Battalion before Trevor ever engaged the enemy armor. Atwater knew she should be grateful that those Surturs and Fenrises weren't crunching in on her at the same time, and she was. But that didn't make the thirty-two percent casualties she'd already taken any less agonizing. Nor did the knowledge that the Melconians had lost far more heavily than she had.

So far, at least.

"Breakthrough! Quebec-Kilo-Eight-Niner!"

"Hammer-Two, I want fusion now! Quebec-Kilo-Eight-Niner!"

"Yes, ma'am! Ten count!"

Six low kiloton-range mortar rounds fell exactly on the zero mark, and every trooper in Fourth Battalion was belly-down in the deepest hole he or she could find as the earth beneath them bellowed and heaved.

Atwater hated using them at all like hell, but she didn't have much choice. The battalion's air defenses had stopped most of the initial Melconian bombardment pretty much cold, and the Dog Boys' infantry units were much less lavishly equipped with fusion rounds than many of the opponents the Concordiat had fought over its long and bloody history. But three had gotten through, and they'd been hellishly accurate. Atwater knew the Melconians hadn't managed to get close-range recon drones over her position for at least three hours prior to their attack, nor had they even attempted to penetrate the battalion's defended airspace with manned recon units. Yet somehow, they had managed to score direct hits on her command post, one of her three antiarmor Hellbore sections, Captain Hearst's second mortar platoon (and Captain Hearst herself), and a quarter of Bravo Company. All three targets had been deeply dug in, and all of the battalion's personnel were in the best individual powered armor the Concordiat knew how to build, but there had been zero survivors from any of those three hits.

Atwater had lost her command staff, her executive officer, and the battalion's main communications capability in the first twenty seconds of the attack. She herself was alive only because she'd been forward, consulting with Alpha Company's CO, at the moment the attack rolled in, and the confusion and temporary loss of cohesion that devastatingly accurate blow had delivered had allowed the Dogs to get the better part of a complete battalion across the fire zone Bravo Company was supposed to have covered. The enemy infantry and their APCs had paid a heavy price, but the survivors—well over half of the troops they'd committed to the thrust—had made it into the dead ground at the edge of Bravo's perimeter, and they'd been pushing hard to cut deeper through Bravo ever since. Now they were driving furiously forward once more, spending their own lives like water in their frantic effort to break through.

Which was why Bravo Company was down to twelve effectives ... and why Mary Lou Atwater had just called down nuclear suppressive fire on top of her own survivors' position.

She made herself watch her HUD as five of Bravo's remaining green icons turned crimson, then blinked out.

These bastards just don't care, she thought, shoving herself upright in her hole once more. Dust, dirt, and debris slithered off her armor, and she checked her radiation counter. Thank God both humanity and the Dog Boys had learned how to make clean fusion weapons centuries ago! Between them, they'd popped off enough by now to have salted this valley with lethal-level poisoning for the next five or ten thousand years, if they'd still been using old-style weapons. Not that low radiation levels made the blast and thermal effects any easier to live with, even for itty-bitty things like mortar rounds.

Not that anybody really cares about background radiation these days, a tiny corner of her brain thought even as the other ninety-five percent fought to sort out the situation. It looked like she'd at least stopped that breakthrough attempt, and it had probably cost the Dogs at least another fifty or sixty troopers. But what did she do about the hole?

"Uniform-Seven, Gold-One. Get your people over to Quebec-Kilo-Eight and shut the door on these fuckers!"

"Gold-One, Uniform-Seven copies." Platoon Sergeant Fiona Sugiyama's voice sounded calmer than she could possibly be. But then, perhaps Atwater's did, too. "We're on our way."

It's only a matter of time before one of these Puppies gets close enough to do us all with one of their big-assed demo charges, she told herself, following up her original thought. Whatever happens, they aren't going home, and they know it. So some floppy-eared son-of-a-bitch is going to come charging through here with a five- or ten-megaton charge strapped to his back, and when he does—

"Gold-One, I've got vehicle movement, Romeo-Mike sector," one of her remaining sensor teams reported. "Ground shocks're consistent with minimum one Heimdall and six-plus APCs!"

"Gold-One, Backstop-One copies," Rodriguez said tersely.

Atwater punched a command into her chest pack, reconfiguring her HUD to show suspected enemy dispositions, and winced. They'd already killed at least an entire Concordiat battalion worth of the Melconians, but Fourth was getting ground away in the process. In another fifteen minutes—half an hour, tops—the surviving Dogs were going to grind right across what used to be Fourth Battalion, and the fact that they'd been so chewed up that the rest of Brigadier Jeffords' people would be able to swat them almost casually wasn't going to be much comfort to her people's ghosts. But what—

A fresh, huge explosion thundered as Rodriguez's Hellbores nailed the Heimdall the instant its turret showed. But nine Melconian APCs were right behind the larger reconnaissance mech. They used the explosion itself for cover, driving through it at their maximum speed, and fire slammed back and forth in a knife-range shootout between Rodriguez's battery and the light armored vehicles.

The Melconians won. Rodriguez's people killed six of them, but the other three turned the antiarmor battery into shattered wreckage and shredded flesh before the gunners could relay their weapons.

Infantry spilled out of the three surviving APCs, firing short-range, man-portable antitank weapons at their armored human opponents. Eight more of Atwater's militiamen went down—three of them dead, two of them dying—before a hurricane of defensive fire cut down the Melconian infantry and picked off their vehicles.

"Major, we've got more coming right behind them!" her sensor team commander shouted. "Here they—"

The voice chopped off abruptly, another icon turned crimson, and Mary Lou Atwater snatched up a dead militiaman's plasma rifle. The rifle was a team-served weapon, with a minimum crew of two, according to the Book, but powered armor's exoskeleton had to be good for something ... and she didn't have any damned body else to send.

She started off at a dead run.

"Push them! They're breaking—so push them!" Colonel Verank Ka-Somal bellowed into his microphone, pounding one clawed fist on his console. "Get in there and kill these vermin!"

His command vehicle's crew hunched their shoulders, concentrating on their own displays, their own tactical plots. The fanaticism—the madness—in Ka-Somal's voice lashed at them, but no one protested.

No one wanted to protest. Mad Ka-Somal might be, but he was far from alone in that. And even if he had been, every person in that vehicle knew they were all doomed. So why not kill as many of their killers as they could before they died?

"There!" Ka-Somal barked. "Look there! Na-Rohrn did it—he broke their perimeter! We've got them now, so—"

"Incoming!"

Ka-Somal had time to turn towards the voice. Time to see the fresh icons suddenly blossoming on the displays. Time to realize his vengeance quest had just ended.

Mary Lou Atwater slid to a halt as the flight of missiles shrieked over what was left of Fourth Battalion, banked sharply around an outthrust flank of mountain, and vanished as they streaked up the valley to the northwest across the Melconians' positions.

She tracked them visually and then bared her teeth in a ferocious smile of triumph as only two of them were picked off by the Melconian defenses.

There were no evil, anvil-headed mushroom clouds, heaving themselves upright across the heavens.

Those missiles carried not fusion warheads, but cluster submunitions, and a rolling surf of explosions—chemical, but vastly more powerful than anything pre-space humanity had ever dreamed of—marched up the valley in boots of flame. A second flight of missiles followed hard on the heels of the first, then a third. A fourth.

The hurricane of indirect fire which had been pounding on Fourth Battalion for what seemed an eternity stopped. It didn't gradually wind down, didn't taper off. It simply stopped, like the turning of a switch, as Maneka Trevor and Lazarus, still well over fifty kilometers away and reduced to a maximum speed of barely sixty kilometers per hour, swept the Melconian positions with a broom of fire.

Small arms fire continued to spatter across the militia's positions, but it was nothing compared to the weight of fire which had been beating across the battalion. Most of it was simple power rifle fire, without a hope in the world of penetrating the human defenders' armor, and Mary Lou Atwater's expression was a frightening thing to see.

"All right, people," her voice said harshly over the com. "The Old Lady just broke these goddamned bastards' backs. Now let's get in there and finish the job for her!"

Maneka Trevor finished sealing her battle dress uniform. She didn't have a mirror, but she didn't really need one. She still wore the neural interface headset, and although she and Lazarus were no longer welded into a single entity, she was sufficiently linked to him to use his command tac's optical pickups to examine her appearance.

"I suppose I should have put this thing on sooner," she remarked, and shook her head. "How's it going to look in the history books when they find out I spent the entire battle in a swimsuit?"

"I propose that we simply never tell them you did," Lazarus' voice replied. "It did not, after all, have any negative impact on your performance during that battle."

"No, I suppose not," she said. "On the other hand, if either of us had remembered I had a spare on board, I would have changed into it."

"Unlike humans, I am incapable of forgetting," Lazarus pointed out. "Or, at least, of forgetting by accident. I did not forget in this instance, either. It simply did not occur to me to mention it to you."

"We've been spending too much time together," she told him, smiling crookedly at the visual pickup.

"We're starting to think—and not think—too much alike."

"Perhaps," Lazarus said serenely. "I believe, however, that in this instance we have earned the right to some minor idiosyncrasies on your part."

"Maybe so," she said bleakly, her smile disappearing, "but other people paid even more than you did for this one, Lazarus." She inhaled deeply. "So now that I'm dressed, I suppose it's time to go."

Lazarus said nothing, but she felt him in the back of her brain, still joined through the headset, and the access hatch slid silently open in wordless invitation.

She stepped through it, turned to the internal ladder, and started climbing downwards. It was hard, in some ways, to fully accept, on a visceral level, how badly Lazarus had been damaged. The spaces through which she passed on her way down the ladders were as immaculate, as brightly lit, as ever, and the enviro plant was undamaged. The air was cool, clean, with just a hint of ozone. It was, she reflected, a stark reminder of just how huge a fifteen-thousand-ton vehicle actually was.

But then she reached the bottom of the final ladder, climbed through the belly hatch, and stepped out under Lazarus' huge bulk, and the harsh reality slammed down on her like a hammer.

She was glad she'd finally remembered she had the uniform on board. Dinochrome Brigade battle dress was designed with moments like this in mind, and she could almost feel its sophisticated fabric adjusting itself about her. It wasn't bulletproof, though it did have some antiballistic qualities, but it was an extremely efficient hostile-environment suit. The clear hood deployed upward, snugging itself about her head and face, at the same time the sleeve cuffs extruded the protective gloves. She wasn't quite as well shielded as Major Atwater's armored personnel, but her battle dress was thoroughly up to the task of handling the contamination which even the relatively "clean" weapons used here had left behind.

"Thank God they build Bolos tough," she said fervently.

"A sentiment which I have shared on several occasions now," Lazarus agreed. She heard his voice over her mastoid com implant, and something like a subliminal echo of it through the headset. It was just a bit disorienting, even now, but it was also a sensation she had become accustomed to over the past couple of years. And given how severely Lazarus' forward hull had been damaged, she wasn't about to disconnect until both of them knew his damage control systems truly did have the situation well in hand.

She walked forward, but not as far as she normally would have. The tangled wreckage hanging down over the crippled track shield gave off an unpleasantly high radiation signature even for someone in Brigade uniform. She stepped out from under the Bolo, into its immense shadow, and saw an armored figure with the flashes of a major standing to wait for her.

"Mary Lou," she said quietly over her com.

"Maneka," Atwater replied.

"I'm sorry," Maneka said. "We got back here as quickly as we could, but—"

"Don't say it," Atwater cut her off. "Yeah, we got reamed. I figure fifty-seven percent casualties, three quarters of them fatal. That's the price we paid, and Jesus, it hurt. But you didn't have one damned thing to do with what happened here. You did your job; we did ours, and thanks to the fact that your missiles saved our asses, some of us are still around afterward. And maybe, just maybe, the people who are going to live on this planet a thousand years from now because you did your job, will remember our names and figure we did all right, too. And if they don't," Maneka realized there was an edge of genuine amusement in Atwater's voice, "then screw 'em! 'Cause you, me, my people, and Lazarus—we're damned sure going to remember we did, right?"

"For my part, certainly, Major," Lazarus said over his external speakers, and Atwater snorted a harsh laugh.

"Well, there you are, Maneka! I think we can trust Lazarus to see to it the history books get it straight. I mean, who's going to argue with him?"

"Point taken," Maneka agreed.

"Good! And now, Captain Trevor, if you'd come with me, there are some people who'd like to shake your hand, I believe."

Private Karsha Na-Varsk crouched in his vantage point, staring down at the Human position while his stunned brain tried to come to grips with what had happened.

The Brigade was gone. He himself was almost certainly the last survivor, and he had no idea why he was still alive. He'd provided the information for the initial bombardment's targeting, and he'd tried sniping the Humans from his towering position once the attack actually rolled in. He knew he'd discharged his forward scout's duty well ... for all the good it had done in the end. But his efforts as a sniper had been completely wasted. Even at point-blank range, his power rifle probably wouldn't have managed to inflict any true damage on the Humans' powered armor. He supposed that it was only the sheer volume of fire being exchanged which had kept some Human's armor's sensors from back-plotting his own fire and locating him at the height of the battle, and he'd stopped wasting power taking his futile shots long before the accursed Bolo had completed its slaughter of his comrades. He hadn't known at the time why he'd bothered to stop. Now he did.

"—so they came around that bend about then," Major Atwater told Maneka, waving one armored arm up the valley. "We had our sensors out, but their opening bombardment ..." She shook her head behind the visor of her helmet. "I saw some nasty targeting while I was still a Jarhead, but this was just about the worst. We wouldn't have gotten hurt nearly as bad if they hadn't screwed over our command and control from the get-go. You'd almost think—"

Something punched suddenly into Maneka.

Na-Varsk shouted aloud in triumph as the uniformed figure so far below went down. He tracked it, reacquiring it in his electronic sights, and his eyes were ugly. That Human was almost certainly already dead, but before they managed to find him, he would make absolutely sure.

He laid the bright red dot of his electronic sight on the fallen figure's head and began to squeeze the firing stud.

Mary Lou Atwater was still frozen in shock, her armor splashed with Maneka's blood, when Lazarus' port infinite repeater battery snapped suddenly around. She just had time to realize what was happening when the Bolo opened fire and two thousand square meters of mountainside erupted in flame, smoke, dust, and flying fragments of shattered stone.

"It hurts."

"I know."

She tried to open her eyes, but they refused to obey. She tried to move her arms, but they refused to move.

"Lazarus?" She was vaguely surprised there was so little fear in her mental voice.

"You have been shot," the Lazarus presence said inside her brain.

"A sniper?" She felt his confirmation, and something almost like a silent chuckle ran through the red haze of anguish enveloping her. "Figures. Had to make a target out of myself putting this damned uniform on, didn't I?"

"I should have detected his presence before he fired." Self-condemnation was like some huge, stony weight in Lazarus' voice.

"Not your fault." She realized, vaguely, that Lazarus had pulled them both into hyper-heuristic mode. Which was odd. She hadn't realized they could do that when their personalities weren't fully merged. Then she realized her mind wasn't really working very well.

"How bad is it?" she asked.

"Very bad," Lazarus told her quietly, his voice unflinching. "Major Atwater's senior medic is working to save your life, Maneka. He will not succeed."

"Oh." She supposed she ought to have reacted more strongly to that, but somehow she couldn't.

She felt Lazarus, as if he were ... coming physically closer to her. As if he had arms, and they were lifting her up as her own presence seemed to be fading.

"It's cold, Lazarus," she thought.

"I had so many things I meant to do," she told him, aware even as she did that she was losing focus, beginning to drift.

"I know," he repeated.

"You'll tell Edmund? Tell him I'm sorry?"

"I will," he promised.

"I wonder if Bolos have souls?" she wondered through the chill, drifting blackness. "I hope so. I hope Benjy is waiting for me out there. If he is, we'll both wait for you, too, Lazarus. I promise."

"I know," he said yet again.

"Hold me?" she asked, feeling her anchor fraying, her oddly detached mind and thoughts floating further and further from her physical presence.

"Of course," that gentle voice said from the blackness, and she sensed those huge, invisible arms folding themselves tightly about her. Even her detached thoughts knew that was ridiculous, that Bolos had no arms. But reality was unimportant just now. "I will hold you until the end, Maneka," his vast, comforting voice said.

"Good," she murmured, nestling down into the embrace like a sleepy child. She sensed the flow between them, the glowing, intricately woven web which had made them one, allowed them to accomplish so much, and the beauty of it glittered before her fading mental eye like a tapestry of light. But the tapestry was also fading, dimming as she gazed at it, and she was oddly content to watch it go.

There was silence for a time. A very long time, for two beings joined in the hyper-heuristic reality of Bolo-kind. And then, at the very last, Maneka Trevor spoke once more to the enormous presence sheltering the flicker of her life.

"It's cold, Lazarus," she whispered sleepily. "It's so cold ..."