David Weber - Old Soldiers

Until he looked into the visual display again.

So that was what the Human was thinking, Theslask Ka-Frahkhan thought. He was too calm about it, a corner of his own brain told him. Shock, he supposed. I should have listened to my instincts. But even if I had, what else could I have done with what I knew?

He watched the thick, curdled cloud of dust rising above what had once been a river valley. Perhaps it would be a river valley again, someday. But at this moment, it was the huge common grave which had just engulfed half of the 3172nd Heavy Assault Brigade's armor and a third of its infantry. The horrendous landslide the Bolo's missiles had triggered had sent two-thirds of a mountain sliding unstoppably across Second Armored and Third Infantry. There were, he already knew, no survivors from either, although the handful of Na-Pahrthal's air cav which had been assigned to Ha-Shan had probably been able to climb out of destruction's path in time.

He turned his head slowly and looked at Na-Salth. The colonel was still staring slack-jawed at the unbelievable sight on his visual display.

"Contact Colonel Na-Lythan and Colonel Ka-Somal," Ka-Frahkan heard his own voice saying with a flat, steady calm. Na-Salth turned stunned eyes towards him. "Tell them both that I want their recon elements to begin deploying seismic sensors immediately. They're to use the sensors and sounding charges, as well as the Heimdalls' sonar and deep-scan radar, to check for additional fault lines. I doubt very much that there are more of them out here, but I could be wrong, and this Human devil is not going to lead us into any more ambushes like that one."

He stabbed the visual display with a vicious claw and the soft echo of a barely audible challenge snarl.

"No more finesse, Jesmahr," he said grimly, harshly. "I don't care what the Bolo does. We will advance at our own chosen rate. We will check every valley, every cliff, for booby traps and dangerous terrain features. Eventually that Nameless-cursed Bolo will have to stop and fight us on our terms. And when it does, we will destroy it."

Maneka/Lazarus launched a single recon drone. She/they had no choice; the landslide which had enveloped the Enemy column had also wiped out the sensors with which that stretch of river valley had been seeded.

The drone swept over what had once been the valley, and her/their human half felt a chill as she/they surveyed the desolation. Her/their missiles had shattered an entire mountain, disemboweled it and spewed its fragments across the Melconians in an unstoppable tidal wave of broken rock, shattered trees, and dirt. The river was already beginning to back up behind the solid plug of debris, and she/they saw the rising water lapping at a single Melconian corpse. From its equipment, it had been an infantryman, probably one of the advance scouts probing ahead of the Enemy column on their one-man grav-scooters. But he hadn't been far enough ahead. Two-thirds of his body was buried under the huge boulder which had come bounding down to crush the life out of him. He lay face-down, one arm and shoulder protruding from the rubble and earth, and the clawed fingers of his raised hand seemed to be reaching for the heavens, as if to hang onto his life for just a moment longer.

She/they made one more sweep of the site with the reconnaissance drone. It was remotely possible that there might be one or two Enemy survivors, she/they decided, but there could not be more, and all of the Enemy armored battalion's mechs had been positively accounted for.

"Which means the odds are even now," her/their Maneka half thought grimly.

"Which means the odds would be even against a fully modern Bolo," her/their Lazarus half replied.

"Maybe."

In the corner of their fusion which was hers alone, Maneka felt Lazarus' amusement at her qualification, and she understood it. The equation which set one Bolo as equivalent to three times its own number of Melconian heavy combat mechs was, after all, as Lazarus had just pointed out, based upon the combat capabilities of the Mark XXXIs and Mark XXXIIs, not a Bolo whose basic weapons were well over a century out of date. But Maneka had been at Chartres. She knew what those "obsolete"

Bolos were capable of.

She felt Lazarus standing just outside that small, private section of her mind, waiting for her calmly, and the lips of her sleeping body twitched in a slight smile.

"Okay," she told him. "We can go now."

Her/their mighty hull pivoted on its broad tracks and began to move once more.

"It's moving again, sir."

Ka-Frahkan flicked his ears in silent acknowledgment. He sat back in his command chair, watching the tactical display, and just the tips of his canines showed as his upper lip curled back from them.

The Bolo was moving directly back towards his remaining armored battalion once more, reversing the course away from it which had so puzzled him before. It puzzled him no longer, for he understood now why it had not initially completed its advance to the firing position he'd thought it was headed for.

The position I obligingly allowed it to convince me it was headed for, he corrected bitterly. Then he gave himself a mental shake. There would be time enough for grief and self-recrimination after the battle, and even now he knew—intellectually, at least—that without any foreknowledge of the fault line the Bolo had exploited, he'd done exactly the right thing. Or, at least, that a dispassionate staff study, far away from the buried, mangled bodies of a quarter of his brigade's troopers, would conclude that he had, at any rate.

No time for that, he reminded himself sternly. Not when I still have to figure out what to do about the accursed thing.

At least the Bolo still faced a few problems of its own.

It hadn't had any choice but to avoid combat with Na-Lythan's First Armored Battalion until after it had destroyed Second Armored. But when it retreated rather than continuing its advance, it had allowed Na-Lythan and the rest of Ka-Somal's infantry vehicles to move ahead at their top combined speed.

Slower than a Bolo they undoubtedly were, but they were fast enough to have reached the point at which the other two possible routes of advance converged and then diverged once again while the Bolo was elsewhere.

"We'll split our forces, Jesmahr," he announced. His executive officer looked at him, and the general bared his fangs mirthlessly.

"Yes, sir. And First Armored?" Na-Salth said as Ka-Frahkan paused.

"Uran will take First Armored down Axis Three."

"If we remain concentrated, we'll have more firepower to deal with the Bolo," Na-Salth pointed out respectfully.

"Ka-Somal's infantry won't be much use against a Bolo in a frontal engagement," Ka-Frahkan replied, "and in this terrain, it's going to be a head-on meeting for Uran's mechs, whenever it comes. But between both of his remaining battalions, the recon mechs, and Na-Pahrthal's air cav, Ka-Somal ought to have an effective superiority against the militia in that dammed blocking position."

"But even if he does, sir," Na-Salth said, even more respectfully, "our long-range drones have confirmed that the Humans have at least two additional militia battalions digging in closer to their settlement. Ka-Somal doesn't begin to have the firepower to break through that sort of opposition without Uran's support. And he'll take losses against the blocking position, probably serious ones, even if he manages to take it in the end."

"I'm aware of that," Ka-Frahkan said grimly. He turned to face Na-Salth fully. "Ka-Somal is a diversion—a bluff."

"A diversion, sir?" Na-Salth repeated.

"By splitting up now, we force the Bolo to choose which of our two columns to pursue. It can catch either one of them short of the militia's position; it can't possibly catch both of them. Our armored units obviously pose the greater threat, and that makes them the logical column for the Bolo to pursue. But Axis Three is the longer approach route by a considerable margin, and Uran's mechs will be slower than Ka-Somal's column. It's possible the Bolo will choose to pursue Ka-Somal instead of following Uran because it would probably be able to overtake and destroy him and still have time—barely—to return down Axis Three and catch First Armored from behind before Uran can get his Fenrises' missile batteries into range of the blocking position."