David Weber - Old Soldiers

Theslask Ka-Frahkan stared in disbelieving shock at the communicator display which had abruptly gone blank.

I told him I'd keep the Humans too busy to come after him. I told him that ... and I was wrong.

Bleak guilt hammered through him as the reality of Na-Tharla's death slammed home. Almost two hundred of his own artillerists had died with Death Descending and her crew, but it was Na-Tharla's face Ka-Frahkan saw before him. The face of the naval officer who had never questioned, who'd performed his daily miracles for so many endless months just to get them here.

Who had become Theslask Ka-Frahkhan's friend.

"Sir," Colonel Na-Salth said shakenly, "what—"

"It changes nothing," Ka-Frahkan said harshly. Na-Salth looked at him, and the general showed his canines. "We've lost our reserve ammunition, our spare parts, and our maintenance facilities," he continued, "and we no longer have a starship of our own. But the Humans are still here, still waiting for us to kill them. And their industrial facilities are still here to support us after we do."

"Yes, sir. Of course," Na-Salth said after a moment, with just a bit less assurance than Ka-Frahkan would have preferred.

"It's my fault," Ka-Frahkan admitted unflinchingly to his second-in-command. Na-Salth's ears moved in an expression of polite disagreement, and Ka-Frahkan snorted bitterly. "We outnumber this Bolo by six-to-one in heavy mechs, alone. I ought to have left at least one fist behind to provide additional security."

"Sir, I completely agreed with the logic of your deployments."

"Then we were both wrong, weren't we?" Ka-Frahkan said with mordant humor. Na-Salth started to say something more, but the general cut him off with the wave of a hand. "Protecting your line of retreat is fundamental to sound tactics, Jesmahr. Admittedly, this is a special circumstance—literally, a do-or-die, all-costs operation—but I still should have taken more precautions than I did. I think part of it may have been how well aware I was of all of Death Descending's serviceability problems. I didn't think about the fact that the Humans wouldn't have that information. They had to assume the ship was still fully operational. And if I'd considered that, I might have been able to at least use her as bait in a trap. In that case, her loss might actually have accomplished something. As it is—"

He shrugged, his expression bitter, and Na-Salth's ears flicked in an expression of agreement. Or acknowledgment, at least, Ka-Frahkan thought. Na-Salth was being kinder to him than he deserved, continuing to extend him the benefit of the doubt.

The general turned to his senior communications tech.

"Still no word from Captain Ka-Paldyn?" he asked quietly.

"None, sir. Not since his initial subspace flash that he'd succeeded in boarding the target." The noncommissioned officer looked up at his CO. "Still, sir, Death Descending did lose both her primary and secondary subspace arrays during the insertion maneuvers," he reminded Ka-Frahkan respectfully.

"Captain Ka-Paldyn couldn't know that, so he may still be sending reports via subspace. In which case, we couldn't receive them anyway."

The sergeant was correct, of course ... even if he was one more well-meaning subordinate doing his level best to keep the Old Man from worrying. But the cold ache in Ka-Frahkan's belly wouldn't go away. The continued silence from Ka-Paldyn weighed upon his soul almost as heavily as the destruction of Death Descending. He'd never had much hope that the inner-system special ops teams would manage to seize very many of the Human starships. But with both Death Descending and the surviving Human Bolo transport in his possession, he would have been well-placed to run down and capture those same starships after defeating the Bolo. Now it was beginning to look as if he would have neither of them, and without them, he felt his chances of gaining long-term control of the star system and placing a colony of the People here slipping through his claws like grains of sand.

None of which means the Humans will retain it, he thought grimly. We can still insure that much, at least, and that was the primary mission all along.

"Sir," Na-Salth said quietly. "We've located the Bolo."

Major Beryak Na-Pahrthal's three-man command mount swerved wildly, side-slipping to place a solid flank of mountainous rock between it and the nightmare demon which had suddenly come screaming down from above him to sweep through his lead battalion, thundering death as it came.

Na-Pahrthal had never personally encountered a Bolo transport pod. Although he'd been with the Brigade at Tricia's World, they'd faced no Bolos there. And none of the combat reports he'd reviewed, none of the simulations he'd worked through in training, had ever pitted air cavalry mounts against a Bolo docked with its pod. Even if it had not been self-evident suicide for air cav to engage a Bolo under any circumstances, Bolos never fought from their pods. By the time they joined combat against the People, they were on the ground, where they belonged ... and where a single lucky shot that brought down a transport pod could not also destroy an entire Bolo.

But this Bolo didn't seem aware of that, and the sheer speed of its pod—the preposterously agile maneuvers something that size could perform this close to the ground—far exceeded anything Na-Pahrthal would have believed possible. It screamed straight through Second Company, infinite repeaters flaming, and Captain Ya-Fahln's mounts vanished like grain before the reaper under that deadly thunder of ion bolts.

"Fall back!" Na-Pahrthal barked over the regimental command net as his own pilot went side-slipping and swerving back to the west, using every evasive maneuver he could think of. "Get clear—fall back on the armored regiment!"

A handful of frantic acknowledgments came back from First Company and Third Company. There was only silence on the Second Company net.

She/they watched with the matching yet very different ferocities of her/their organic and psychotronic halves as she/they sliced through the advanced screen of the air cavalry which had been harassing Fourth Battalion.

Maneka remembered the day, back on the planet of Santa Cruz, when she and Benjy had gone to the firing range for the first time and she'd truly recognized the staggering firepower she controlled as Benjy's commander. She'd thought then that nothing could ever make her more aware of the deadly power of a Bolo, but she'd been wrong. Today, she didn't simply "command" Lazarus. She was Lazarus.

The lethally accurate ion bolts ripping from her/their infinite repeaters were hers, just as much as his. It was as if she simply had to "look" at one of the Dog Boy air cav mounts and imagine that sleek, speedy vehicle's destruction to see it vanish in a teardrop of plunging flame. It was that quick, that accurate ...

that deadly.

"Beside Mary Lou's CP," her/their Maneka half directed. "Let's not squash her toes."

"I shall endeavor to park the car with a modicum of competence," her/their Lazarus half responded dryly.

Major Mary Lou Atwater watched the assault pod come whining quietly in. The plumes of funeral pyre smoke from an entire battalion of Puppy air cavalry billowed skyward behind it, and the major watched them rising with fierce satisfaction. Those air cavalrymen hadn't posed that serious a threat to her position, and her people had been well dug-in by the time they arrived. But they'd still managed to kill two of her perimeter pickets with their light weapons. If they'd continued to close, her air-defense teams would have taught them the error of their ways, but the Bolo's murderously efficient arrival had been a thing of beauty for any ground-pounder.