I have fallen to the fifteen-thousand-meter level. Much of the ground below me is covered now by clouds of smoke rising from several destroyed targets, making direct observation difficult.
I note that there are numerous Enemy ground positions that do not correlate with known positions in my target files. Some positions, in particular, are evidently deeply buried, well fortified and shielded, and mount heavy weapons—planetary defense bastions of unexpected strength. They will need to be dealt with on an individual basis once I land.
Assuming I am able to land successfully, that is, and do not share the fate of Bolo serial 837989. Laser and particle beam fire is searching the sky, scattering from the droplets of ablated hull material in quick, rainbow flashes of color and puffs of expanding vapor.
And I have now reached an altitude of twelve thousand meters and must begin decelerating, a maneuver that is certain to attract unwanted Enemy attention. . . .
"Here we go, everybody," Streicher said. "Be alert."
They watched as VR graphics traced out the courses of the five surviving Bolo drop pods. Each had begun braking savagely, pushing fifteen Gs to kill their downward plummet. Enemy fire was tracking more accurately, as their fire control computers picked out the targets from the clutter that were maneuvering independently.
One by one, though, each pod's finned tail assembly broke free, then split, continuing to maneuver to further confuse enemy fire. At the same time, telemetry showed the pods opening, their blunt hulls unfolding to create broad delta wings with wide-open air brakes. They began pulling out of their dive as well, nosing up second by second, battling against the inertia of their Mach-two dives.
They were fighting hellish G forces, and if any flesh-and-blood pilots had been facing them without inertial dampers, they would have been immediately unconscious and possibly dead.
Bolos were not flesh and blood, however, nor were the artificial intelligences piloting those pods. Data continued to stream into the command craft, with only occasional data dropouts or static fuzz from bursting thermonukes. The heaviest anti-air fire was slackening now, as the pods dropped close enough to the surface that they were below the horizon for the more distant weapons launch sites. At the same time, tactical fire was picking up, lasers and particle beams from vehicles on the ground, from ships, or from low-flying aircraft.
Streicher accessed the time readout, which painted itself in the corner of his vision. Two more minutes to go. . . .
Vibrational . . . levels . . . increasing . . . as my pod . . . pulls . . . out of its . . . dive . . .
Contra-gravity thrusters . . . at maximum. . . .
The pod . . . pulls . . . fifty Gs. . . .
My dive is flattening out as I continue to decelerate, the G-load dropping. Twenty gravities now . . . fifteen . . .
The maneuver is a tight one, designed to avoid my slamming into the ground at twice the speed of sound. Inertial dampers might ease the stress but are too large and require too much power for a disposable landing pod. I am unaffected by high-G maneuvering, though I am concerned that the pod's variable-geometry wings are approaching G-load stress tolerances.
In any case, the worst is over. I am flying level now across a dark sea at an altitude of 1200 meters, with a velocity of 436 meters per second, roughly mach 1.5 for this altitude and air pressure. Several remote shards from the pod's tail assembly accompany me, maneuvering independently. My pod in this configuration has external stealth characteristics which give it an apparent radar cross section of less than five centimeters, while the shards reflect the image of a much larger target. Some of the decoys begin to maneuver now, drawing attention away from my position.
Ahead, the sky is aglow, partly with the approach of dawn, but judging from spectral analysis of the light, much of that glow is from cities set ablaze by orbital Hellbore fire.
I begin dropping toward the water. . . .
LKN 8737938 entered the cavern the gods called Trolvas. The place was deep, so deep that he entered the compound across a bridge spanning a deep chasm, at the bottom of which bubbled and seethed a black-crusted river of molten rock. The walls themselves were aglow with ruddy light, and sulfurous fumes steamed and roiled in the air, collecting beneath the rocky, sulfur-encrusted ceiling high overhead.
The thunder of the bombardment continued, but it was so distant now, so muffled, that Elken was scarcely aware of it. The throb of power shackled to the gods' service, booming and rumbling from the generator stations and factory complexes ahead, was much more evident.
Awaiting his arrival, drawn up in three ranks on a broad parade ground before the squat, black and brown Aetryx buildings, were forty machines identical to Elken's new form . . . huge, broad, tracked, with slab-armored sides and low single-turret weapon mounts, each bearing the ugly snout of a 200cm General Polydynamics Hellbore.
And . . . he realized that he recognized the minds, the thoughts behind many of those blunt, metallic facades, though he wasn't entirely sure how he knew. There was VBR 9383733, an old friend from his crèche. And that was NGK 2225344, from Paimos, a friend, he thought, of his parents. He'd thought both of them had moved on to the Gardens of the Gods long ago.
And the mental voice of that one in the front rank had to be SND 9008988. She, like him, he knew, had volunteered for elective surgery some cycles ago, her bid for immortality.
He was distracted enough that, just for a moment, he searched about himself for a cockpit release and a hatch . . . until he realized that he was not riding one of the crawlers popular for ground transport in Caern's more formidable outback terrains. He was the crawler, a huge, tracked warfighting monstrosity with a human brain, and the thought brought a fresh rush of fear. What was going to happen to them . . . to him?
Everything is going to be all right. <confidence> All is as it should be.
"Hey, Elken!" A Bolo that Elken somehow knew was PLT 94635469, a teenaged kid from the city who'd just graduated from the crèche a few twelves of daycycles ago. "Look what I can do!"
The Bolo shifted back on its tracks, shuddered, then popped its forward contra-gravity projectors, lifting its ungainly prow high into the air. For an ominous moment, Elken was treated to the sight of a 21,000-ton Mark XXXII Bolo standing upright on the back curve of its rear tracks at an angle from the ground of about sixty degrees, holding that precarious balance with short, sharp, quick back-and-forth nudges from its hind drive wheels.
"Huh?" Elken heard Palet's voice answering an unheard command. The Bolo dropped back to a solid connection with the ground with a thud that rattled Elken's suspension. "Uh, sorry. . . ."
Many of your comrades are still adjusting to their new forms, the voice in Elken's thoughts explained. Adaptation will not take long. Move there . . . take your place in the front rank.
He ground forward, swinging into line alongside SND 9008988. He felt Sendee's warm thought of welcome. "Elken! I'm so glad you joined us!"
"I . . . wasn't expecting this," he replied. "A new body. I thought it would be human . . . or at least have some human left in it, like the Specials."
"We are Specials now," she told him. "The most Special there are! . . ."
"It's taking some getting used to."
Attend, children. <earnestness> We know many of you are surprised at your new bodies, surprised at this form the gods have chosen for you as your first step into golden immortality. Trust us when we say that our first and greatest desire would have been to welcome you all to the ranks of immortality directly, without the need for this intermediate form. Events, however, have forced drastic measures upon all who live upon this world, gods and humans alike. Behold. . . .
An image formed in Elken's mind, unfolding with a depth and a clarity startling in its realism, and startling, too, because he had never been in space.
He seemed to be hanging in space high above Caern's dawn terminator—he recognized his world, of course, from maps and news feeds. Great Dis was visible in the background, swollen and huge and golden-ringed. A vast armada of alien spaceships drifted above Caern, and he could see the flash and twinkle of titanic explosions sparkling here and there within the night-shrouded portion of Caern just in front of the transition from night to day.
The view, he thought, must be computer generated, a fiction mirroring actual events. How, otherwise, could the gods be getting this image from the midst of the invading fleet?
But then, the gods could do anything. He refused to question that.
The image expanded, as though he were swooping in toward his world's surface, the horizon opening up from tightly curved to scarcely curved at all. At this much lower altitude, he could see whole cities wrecked and ruined, vast, mountain-high piles of smoke as thick and as ash-laden as the pall from any volcanic eruption.
The city of Ledelefen. <deep sorrow>
Ledelefen? That was in the south, not too far from Paimos. He'd been there many times, visiting the Hall of Histories in the course of his studies as a student monk of the Brotherhood, and he knew it well. What he was looking at now . . . rubble and the broken-off stumps of towers, obelisks, and hab centers, peppered by numerous craters each with a seething, still molten bottom . . . no. This could not be Ledelefen.
No, that was the Tower of Learning, still standing next to a circular emptiness that once had been the Park of Divine Prospect, scorched and blackened, canted now at an angle.
By all the gods and the world they made. . . .
The Sky Demons ravage our garden world. <righteous anger> Their bombardment blindly smashes our cities, our crèches, our places of learning and study. This wanton destruction is intended to bring us all, humans and gods alike, to cowering submission. This strategy will turn and strike back against its fomenters. The Sky Demons will learn that savagery, barbarism, and treachery cannot break the spirit of civilized peoples living in harmony with their gods.
For this reason, you have been recruited to serve the gods and your people. You are here now, within the warm and molten depths of Trolvas. The Sky Demons' landing vessels approach, and soon the bombardment of our world will cease.
And when it does, you shall strike . . . to wipe this scourge from our world.
I drop to within ten meters of the surface of the Storm Sea, flying east at a velocity of 1230 kilometers per hour. This is well above the speed of sound for the ambient air pressure. The shock wave of my passing raises a towering wall of water and white spray in my wake as I outpace the thunder of my passage.
I am paralleling the shoreline, here. The Kretier Peninsula lies 32.7 kilometers north, on my left, but 58.1 kilometers ahead of me the shoreline curves to the south, and at my current velocity I will pass from sea to land in another 19.8 seconds.
My targeted landing zone is the rocky beach just north of the city of Ghendai, one of the larger and more populated of Caern's cities. My intelligence download identifies Ghendai as an important logistical, communications, and command-control center, as well as the location of at least two underground Bolo storage depots. Since the storage depots are deeply buried and well defended against orbital attack, my primary mission is to engage local forces, neutralize the depot defenses, and hold the position for the arrival of Confederation military specialists who will secure any Bolos still operational at the site.
I spend almost a tenth of a second speculating about Bolos stored here on Caern. They will be Mark XXXIIs, machines nearly as capable as myself on many levels, though massing only 21,000 tons and possessing only a single 200cm Hellbore in a dorsal turret mount. Although our records of this sector are fragmentary, these Bolos would have been transported here for storage as a strategic reserve during the chaos of the near galaxy-wide Melconian War of nearly five centuries ago. They will have been powered down and placed on the lowest operational standby alert, and will require considerable preparation and maintenance work to bring them back to awareness. Still, if this can be accomplished by Confederation Bolo technicians, we will have a large local force to draw upon for scouting, patrol, and garrison duty as the strike force completes its investment and reduction of the planet's defenses.
It would be interesting to speak with Bolos awakened from that past age. I and most of my comrades date from nearly two centuries later, when the conflict known to humans as the Melcon Holocaust had largely burned itself out. So many records from the beginning of that war were lost, especially with the scorching of Old Earth. Much could be learned from these old veterans of that devastating galactic conflagration.
Unlike my human commanders, I have no fears at all that the Bolos on Caern might be reactivated and used against us by the Enemy. Mark XXXII Bolos possessed a sophisticated psychotronic AI nearly as powerful as my own. A revolutionary neural-psychotronic interface allowed direct human-Bolo communications through optical net or laser communications links. The Mark XXXII's basic loyalty and doctrinal operating systems programming would prevent its use by any non-human agency, even if that agency could access the layers of codes, program traps, firewalls, logic cut-outs, and destruct-sequence barriers protecting the basic AI function.
Rumors do persist of a machine intelligence in toward the Galactic Core which suborned a Bolo on a world called Cloud nearly a century ago . . . reportedly a Mark XXXIII, though that seems incredible. If true—and I cannot accept much of what I have heard as fact without more proof than evidently exists—that suborning of a Bolo AI can only have been possible because the Enemy in that case was itself a highly sophisticated artificial intelligence of a technological capability considerably in advance of the human culture under attack.
In this case, the technology of the Enemy, the alien Aetryx, is self-evidently on a par with our own. They cannot have the programming skills, or the knowledge of our technology, necessary to bend the Mark XXXIIs stored on Caern to their will.
Even if such a thing could be managed, it remains true that I am vastly superior in technology, firepower, and tactical management skills to the Mark XXXII, to say nothing of earlier, more primitive machines in the local arsenal depots. The local forces have managed to mount a surprisingly savage and well-fought defense against our landings but will be no match at all for the Confederation deployment, once the invasion force has come to grips with the planetary defenses.
With eighteen seconds to go before I reach the coast, I use the pod's external sensors to probe in all directions, searching for possible centers of Enemy resistance. My intelligence briefings indicate a large planetary defense bastion at Dolendi, on the Kretier Peninsula to the north, but I am receiving no electronic signs of life from that direction at all. Dolendi had been the focus of a far-flung web of radar sites and fire-control bases, but the bombardment appears to have successfully neutralized them all.
Encrypted signals employing frequencies and keys not employed by the Confederation forces are coming from several points up ahead, at 078, 091, and 095 degrees, respectively. Clearly, these are leakage from Enemy tight-beam communications equipment, but they are low-powered and weak, possibly undetected from orbit.
No matter. I assign the location and destruction of the radiating sites to my combat priorities list.
Fifteen seconds to go. It is time to slow to landing speed. Airbrakes unfold from the trailing edges of the pod's delta wings, taking hold of the air in a shrieking, shuddering deceleration. Its ventral contragravity generators angle forward, applying a hard four Gs of thrust. I feel the shudder as I go subsonic. The pod also initiates a slight bank to the left, moving from a heading of 089 degrees to 082 degrees, in order to put me down near the storage depot complex just north of Ghendai.
And then everything starts to happen at once.
"Vic is under attack!" Lieutenant Kelly Tyler yelled. The regimental Space Strike Command team looked down on open ocean dotted with scattered islands and a hurtling, delta-wing landing craft. "I've got a reading on a launch, coordinates Sierra one nine by Oscar five three!"
"Impossible!" Major Lawrence Filby, Second Battalion's CO, snapped. "That's open water!"
"No, I check her," Major King said. "There's a ship or submersible there, something rising up out of the sea."
Streicher saw it, a long, black shark-shape running with upper decks awash. It must have been lurking behind those islands, possibly under water.
"I read three small nuke warheads, half-kiloton range," Ramirez said. "They're locked onto Victor's pod. Range five kilometers . . . three . . ."
"Target them," Streicher ordered. "Take them out!"
"Too late!" King said. An instant later, three dazzling brilliant white suns blossomed above the water, and all communications telemetry with Victor was lost.
The Enemy missiles arc over an island to the south, racing at low altitude across the water at hypersonic speeds. The pod has defensive weaponry—antimissile gatling lasers and kinetic-kill gauss guns—but they are currently aimed forward, and the pod AI is distracted for a critical instant by the need to apply its full attention to the low-altitude bank.
I attempt to take control of the pod's weapons system myself, but lose a full 0.08 second negotiating with the pod AI through an outdated interface. The first missile warhead detonates less than five hundred meters to the south.
The pod's battlescreens dissipate and absorb much of the thermal energy, but the shockwave sends me tumbling, the pod wildly out of control. A second airburst, this one at a range less than two hundred meters a scant 0.45 second after the first, shreds the pod's right wing, overloads the battlescreen generators, and melts critical control circuits in the pod AI suite.
I initiate override protocols and take control of the landing craft myself. The wings are no longer generating lift, but I can use the ventral contra-gravity generators to raise thrust enough to regain control and bring me down for a soft water landing.
But a third nuclear blast follows the second by 0.34 second. I feel the pod's skin melting . . . and then I lose all external sensation as the pod's sensory data feeds are catastrophically closed down.
In utter blackness, I feel the pod's wreckage tumbling.
I have few options. I must get clear of the pod, or risk serious damage upon impact. With luck, the jettison charges are still intact. . . .
The god Ulyr'ijik saw the sky light to the north, saw the target vanish from his screens aboard the submersible Dannek. The vessel was already sliding beneath the surface as the shock wave reached them, a disk of pure white sea-froth and a wall of shrieking, hurricane winds. The vessel shuddered and lurched, then steadied as its launch tower submerged completely, leaving the raging storm to roil and slash the sea's surface, while the Dannek rode in comparative calm and silence.
An excellent job, Ulyr'ijik told the submarine's human crew, wired to their control panels and couches. You have brought down one of the Sky Demon Bolos! You will be remembered forever in the Gardens of the Gods! . . .
The god knew just how lucky that shot had been. Had he been any farther away, the Confederation landing pod's defenses would have had time to react to his sneak launch; had he been closer, his own weapons would not have had time to acquire the target after launch and home on it.
To say nothing of the fact that they would not have survived the triple firestorm of the warhead detonations.
A very good job indeed.
Now, though, they needed to make their escape. The launch, the destruction of one of the Sky Demons' landing craft would not have gone unnoticed, and their retaliatory fire would be swift and deadly. . . .
And the god Ulyr'ijik intended to survive a bit longer, to claw a few more Sky Demons down in nuclear flames.
The charges fire and the landing pod's hull shatters. White-hot flame scours my outer hull . . . some from the jettison charges, true, but most from the seething nuclear fireball of the last detonation.
Sensors fail. I am tumbling a scant few meters above a flame-lashed sea of steam and spindrift. My hull temperature soars, approaching 900 degrees Celsius. The radiation flux is terrific, well above 1500 rads, and it is possible that my external hull has become hopelessly contaminated.
These are minor problems, however, since they pose no immediate threat within the next two to three seconds. Of more immediate concern is my landing.
I engage my contra-gravity generators. Mark XXXIII Bolos, unlike earlier marks, have internal contra-gravity generators. This increases their battlefield mobility, of course, and also allows a direct assault landing capability, something the Mark XXXII could manage only with special auxiliary modules. Landing pods were employed for this assault, however, because it was expected that the landing would be contested, and the pod provided stealth and decoy characteristics that helped insure a safe landing.
At least, that was the idea, before I found myself tumbling in a cloud of wreckage through a superheated nuclear fireball.
Thunder shrills all about me. I trigger the contra-gravity generators . . . and nothing happens. A critical circuit has overloaded and burned out. Approximately 3.1 seconds later, I strike the water in my left side, still travelling in excess of 200 kilometers per hour. A cloud of wreckage—the shredded and half molten remnants of the landing pod—follow me into the depths.
"Victor is . . . gone," Kelly Tyler said, her voice ragged. Then she seemed to collect herself, to realize where she was. "Sir."
It was hard not to project yourself into these virtual reality simulations, even knowing that you were safe, sitting back on a command deck thousands of kilometers out in space.
It was especially hard when you cared about the machines you were watching in the sim, when you thought of them as people.
"Stay linked," Streicher told her. "Vic may have pulled out." It was a fragile hope, staring down into the holocaust of steam and incandescence rising above the ocean, illuminating sea and clouds in a baleful green-yellow deathlight, but it was a hope. The Bolo might have survived the blast . . . though there was a terrifyingly good chance that it would be smashed when it hit the water, crushed by the pressure of the depths, or trapped if it landed upside down and, turtlelike, was unable to right itself.
"Oh, God," he heard Kelly say.
"Besides," he continued, "I need you in reserve. Pull it together. We have a long way to go yet."
He wanted to reach out to both Kelly and Jaime, to clap them on their shoulders and tell them it was okay, that he understood . . . but that was less than perfectly professional behavior, and he held back. They all needed to stay focused right now, and not be distracted. The inevitable fruit of combat was casualties and missing friends, and it was tough to deal with, even when those friends were machines.
"He'll pull through," he heard Kelly mutter over the command sim's comm channel. The depth, the sheer ferocity of her emotion surprised him. She was usually so withdrawn. "He'll pull through! He's got to! . . ."