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circuitry ripped out, probably for salvage, and bridged or bypassed with primitive optical circuitry a hundred years out of date.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 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.
With that, Khan's considerable remote piloting skills, the pod's own defensive countermeasures, and supporting fire from the Bolo, he'd been able to set down on the landing strip of Rustenberg without a scratch.
The pod had paused only long enough to drop off Houchen and its load of arms and relief supplies before Khan sent the craft back to the relative safety of orbit. At the same time, it would provide a decoy while the other two Bolos landed in their assault pods.
Once on the ground, he found a situation as difficult as anything he could imagine.
There were no standing military forces on the planet, only a lightly armed militia of terrified colonists, most with little or no military experience. As he stood on the defensive ramparts of the colony with Militia Commander Donning, he observed that it is one thing to have someone trying to kill you when you're trained and mentally prepared for the job. It is quite another when you're a civilian cloaked in your typical civilian illusion of safety.
"I want you to know that your people did well here today, Donning. You got them organized and held your lines."
Donning smiled grimly. "We did what we had to do, Colonel. It's not like we had much choice. Now, when is the Concordiat going to get us off the rock? When do the rest of our reinforcements arrive?"
This, thought Houchen, is where it gets dicey. "Commander, I've received no word of any planned evacuation. The mining colonies here are seen as vital to Concordiat security, and our superiors don't seem inclined to release our toe-hold here."
"Duck," said Khan's voice in his command headset.
Houchen shoved Donning down behind the ramparts just as an explosion rocked the air beyond the wall. Though he didn't see it, he knew that Khan's secondary batteries had picked off the missile before it could strike the colony.
"Clear," said Khan. It had become routine. The harassment missile attacks went on and on.
Houchen stood and brushed himself off. "We have two more Bolos in orbit, but as soon as they land we're going to have to dispatch them to patrol other hot spots. You aren't the only colony on the planet, and all of them are being at least harassed by the aliens. Another full-scale attack could come at any point, and at any time."
Donning's smile had faded, replaced by a glare of anger. "So, you're saying we're drafted because some bureaucrat twenty light-years away has decided this ball of jungle rot is somehow important?"
Houchen looked grimly out at the ocean of trees dotted with mountaintop islands, that stretched off to the horizon. "I don't make those decisions, Donning, I'm just reporting what I've been told. I have my duty here, and so do you. I know that we can expect a greater show of military force here, in fact whatever it takes to keep the mining operations going, but I don't know the time frame. Concordiat forces in this sector are stretched rather thin at the moment. For the moment these three Bolos, and your own resources, are all we've got."
Donning was almost shaking, clearly from the weight that Houchen had suddenly put on his shoulders.
Houchen could imagine what Donning had been thinking, that they'd just hold the line until rescue, jump on a shuttle and head back to civilization. He could sympathize. He'd spent too many years in a headquarters office, and hadn't been under fire himself since he was a young man. He had a much keener sense of his own mortality these days.
"I'm a civilian," said Donning, "a volunteer. You can't hold me."
"As I said, I'm not doing anything, just passing down the word from above." He looked out at the vast sea of trees. "From where I stand, you don't have any place to go. We've got a few shuttles in orbit to extract the severely wounded, but I can't even get them down at the moment without risking lives."
Donning just frowned.
"Now, nobody can make you fight, much less command this outfit, but there doesn't seem to be anyone else better qualified to do the job. You rounded this crew up and organized this defense, and without what I saw today, you might have ended up like the Odinberg Colony."
Houchen wasn't even sure Donning was listening, but he went on anyway. "You could step down, go sit in your apartment, and wait for the place to be overrun, but somehow, I don't think you're the kind of person who would do that."
Donning chewed the inside of his lip. Then he nodded, hard and firm, as if making a sudden decision. "I don't have to like this, but I'll do what I can."
"Good," Houchen said. "We'll need you to keep your forces alert and ready. I'm sure command thought that three Bolos would have more than enough to handle the situation, but I have more colonies to defend than I have Bolos. That means that you can't count on Khan to be here full time."
"Wonderful," Donning said, looking out at the jungle.
"I understand," Houchen said. "But we might have to redeploy forces at any moment in response to a new attack, and that means you have to be prepared to defend yourselves until we get back."
"I don't understand. With all this firepower, why don't you just go after the hairy bastards? Wipe them out before they can attack again."
Houchen shook his head. "This isn't the kind of war Bolos are designed to fight, Donning. As far as we can tell, these aliens have no supply lines to cut, no factories to disrupt, no bases to destroy, and they seem utterly immune to fear and intimidation."
"True," Donning said. "All too true."
"Very little about this situation makes sense," Houchen said, "and that bothers me more than what we've seen so far on the battlefield. These aliens shouldn't be able to put together a muzzle-loader musket, much less a plasma cannon. From the looks of it, they don't even make their own steel for their knives and swords. They were probably still using bronze before somebody started giving them weapons."
"You're kidding?" Donning asked, staring at him. "Who would give creatures like these monsters weapons?"
"No one knows yet," Houchen said, "Moreover, there appear to be distinct subgroups of aliens. The group that attacked here and at the Odinberg Colony seems to be the same, but other colonies have reported aliens with completely different markings, completely different ways of fighting. All of them seem to have technology from the same source, and at about the same technical level, but there are differences in the types and distribution of individual weapons, as well as how they're used."
"You sound worried."
"I just keep wondering, who gives a plasma cannon to people living in mud huts? What could they possibly have to trade? Or failing that, what do their mysterious benefactors really want?"
"To kill us," Donning said. "Clearly."
Houchen knew Donning was right.
Lord Whitestar was in an especially foul mood. He walked the trails of their encampment in darkness, headed nowhere and going there fast. Nightbats and glow wings fluttered out of his way as he crashed, much louder than necessary, though the brush.
His first-wife rebelled, his second eldest son wished to kill him, and as the Ones Above had warned, the devils had brought their metal ogres into the battle. Countless warriors had died, not just fodder, but highborn too, and precious weapons were lost or destroyed.
It was easy to assume that the Ones Above would always provide more weapons, but Whitestar could not bring himself to rely on it. He knew that the Ones Above came down from the sky only infrequently, hiding their weapons, only later telling his people, through their oracles, where the weapons could be found.
Around him, men huddled in groups, sharpening their weapons, telling tales of battle. He could smell them, the damp, earthy smell of satisfaction and contentment. Their losses this day had been huge, and yet the mood among his men was high. They had seen glorious battle this day, battle that they had lived all their lives only dreaming of. So, they died? Wasn't that what they were born to do?
Whitestar hissed quietly in anger. No. They were not born to die, they were born to kill.
The rivers ran with the juices of his people, and still the devils lived, their nest still stood, their hatchlings still slept safe. This was insufferable. They had to be made to die, and the ogres stood in his way.
He turned right at the next branch in the trail, walked on a log that crossed a rapidly flowing stream, and reached the large burrow that was Scarbeak's. The opening was curtained with several layers of fiber mats to keep in the light. Whitestar blinked and averted his eyes as he first stepped inside. Scarbeak worked using the magic torches that the Ones Above had provided him. Their light was pure and unflickering, white like daylight, and yet cool to the touch.
Except for a corner where a rumpled sleepmat lay spread, the room was full of the sacred modules of the Ones Above. On each module, a light glowed to show that it was functional, and color-coded connections showed how it was to be connected to its fellows to make a weapon.
All of the highborn were taught to repair and maintain the sacred weapons, but only old Scarbeak was their master. He was their weapons master, repairing weapons, and assembling new ones from salvaged parts. It was said that Scarbeak had even assembled modules against their sacred color coding, and made them do things that the Ones Above had not intended.
But Whitestar liked and trusted the oldster and would not listen to such lies. Scarbeak was of the faithful, a Speaker to the Oracle, and would never do such things. He was very old, and might not last more than another season or two. Whitestar would miss him.
For the moment, Scarbeak crouched on the floor, piecing together one plasma cannon from the parts of several damaged ones. He looked up. "My lord, I did not hear you coming. What brings you here this night?"
"You have to talk to the oracle, Scarbeak. We need a weapon, more powerful than any we've had so far, one that can kill the ogres."
"Ah," said Scarbeak, "yes. I've heard of the metal beast that killed so many of our warriors."
"Tell the oracle that we must kill it. Show us how."
"I cannot tell the oracles what to do, my lord."
"Of course not, but you can ask. You can plead. The ogres must die."
Scarbeak looked thoughtful for a moment. "A missile would not work. The ogre destroys our missiles in flight. Perhaps a mine."
"It would have to be a thousand and twenty-four mines, or a hundred and twenty-eight times that many. We cannot wait a lifetime for the ogre to be lured across a single mine."
"Then the weapon would have to be carried, my lord. Perhaps placed right under the ogre's belly. Who will do that?"
"I have no shortage of highborn willing to take that honor, Scarbeak."
Scarbeak clucked his disapproval. "A waste of a good highborn, my lord. Perhaps it is time you considered training the fodder to—"
"I will take the weapon to the ogre." They both turned to the new voice in the room. It was Sharpwing, his second eldest.
Whitestar hissed in anger. "How long have you been there?"
"Listening, my sire? Eavesdropping? Long enough. I claim the honor as mine."
"No," said Whitestar firmly. "It would be a waste of a young warrior."
"It was not a request, sire, it was a challenge. You heard me, Scarbeak. You are my witness. I challenge you on tomorrow's moon for the right to take the new weapon to the ogre."
"You have no right."
"I have every right! I wish to die as my blood commands me. I tire of being called a coward, the hatchling of a coward." Sharpwing studied his father's face. "Oh, yes, that is what the young warriors say of you, that you fight from your burrow, that you hide from battle like an old woman."
Scarbeak looked first at one, then the other, seemingly trying to find some way out of the situation. Finally he spoke. "There will be no weapon for a time, young lord-son. Even if the oracles answer my request, it will be a span of nights."
Sharpwing looked at the old man. "Time enough till we die then. I challenge you in a span of nights for the right to carry the weapon."
He pulled his curved knife from his belt and brandished it at Whitestar. "And I promise you, sire, that I will strike you with my brother's blade, and that I will strike to free my mother of your unworthy hold on her. Our ways are ever parted."
Then he stepped back through the curtains and was gone.
Whitestar looked down at Scarbeak, who looked back.
Finally Whitestar said, "I have too many wars to fight, and too many ogres to face. I hunger for an ending."