He sighed and rubbed his face with his hands, and fear fluttered in the pit of his belly.
“I sure hope to hell your ‘associates’ have managed to ‘deal’ with that Bolo, Mister Scully,” Colonel Granger muttered.
“Amen,” someone muttered from the recesses of the big transport’s CIC, and Gerald Osterwelt shrugged.
“You’ve seen the plan, Colonel,” he said mildly. “I can’t blame you for worrying, but I certainly wouldn’t be here if I didn’t expect it to work.”
“I can believe that,” the colonel muttered to herself, and turned away from the glowing tactical display. The single aspect of the plan she most disliked was the tight timing. They were scheduled to hit the planet within two hours of Colonel Sanders’ arrival, and she didn’t like it a bit. It would take less than fifteen minutes for an air car to reach the maintenance depot from the field, and Sanders could burn the Bolo’s command center in less than ten once he got it shut down, so if all went according to schedule, two hours was an ample cushion. But if things didn’t go as scheduled-if they got there too soon, before the Bolo went down, and its commander She clenched her teeth and commanded herself to stop worrying over what she couldn’t change. Besides, Scully was right in at least one respect. The Bolo commander-this Captain Merrit-had to be among the fatalities, because if he wasn’t, the fact that someone had fixed the Bolo would be glaringly evident. But the same thing would be true if anyone on the planet happened to com Central-or anyone else off-planet-and casually mention the presence of “Dinochrome Brigade officers” on Santa Cruz at the same moment a “pirate raid” just happened to hit it.
They had to take out the planet’s com sat relays as the opening gambit of their attack, anyway, because if there were so much as a single Navy destroyer anywhere within jump range of Santa Cruz and a message got out, it could blow all three of Matucek’s Marauders’ starships to scrap. And since they did have to take out Santa Cruz’s FTL communications, they might as well do it as quickly as possible after Sanders’ arrival to ensure that no word of his presence got out. Besides, they didn’t know how thoroughly Merrit had settled in on Santa Cruz, or how much contact he normally had with the locals. If he had friends who knew he was being visited by an off-world deputation, they might well com him to find out how things had gone, and when they didn’t get an answer-or if they figured out he was dead-they were almost certain to com Central. All of which made it highly desirable to hit the planet as soon as possible after Sanders did his dirty work.
She understood that, but she still didn’t like the timing. The smart move-as she’d told Scully (or whatever the hell his real name was) and Matucek repeatedly-would be to wait until Sanders shut down the Bolo and was able to confirm his success. Unfortunately, Scully was calling the shots, and Matucek wasn’t about to argue with him.
Well, at least they had confirmation that Sanders had arrived on schedule, courtesy of the ship which carried him, and, as Scully had pointed out, there were two strings to the colonel’s bow. If this Captain Merrit argued with him, all that was needed was for Captain Merrit to die a little sooner than scheduled. With him dead, Sanders, as the senior Brigade officer on Santa Cruz, would become the Bolo’s legal commander. His access at Sector Central had given him the command authorization phrase he needed to so identify himself to the Bolo, and it was only a Mark XXIII. It wouldn’t be bright enough to ask any difficult questions when he ordered it to shut down-not that it would matter. With the command phrase in his possession, Sanders could lobotomize the damned thing even if it proved unresponsive.
Granger bared her teeth at her tactical console. She’d read Merrit’s record. The man was tough, smart, gutsy, and as good as they came, but it didn’t matter how good he was. He knew who Sanders was, so he wouldn’t be suspicious of the colonel, and he had absolutely no reason to suspect that the other “Brigade members” with his superior were professional killers. If he proved difficult, it would be a very brief difficulty.
“Assault orbit in ninety-six minutes, ma’am,” her ops officer murmured, and she nodded.
“Double-check the fire solution on the com sats. All three of those birds have to go down the instant we enter orbit.”
“I’m on it,” the ops officer grunted laconically, and Louise Granger sat back in her command chair with an evil smile.
16
I advance through the jungle, sweeping on an east-west arc at 30.25 kph. As ordered, I have disabled my independent link to the planetary surveillance satellites and all com channels save for that to the emergency contact unit in the maintenance depot. I am operating blind, yet I am confident that I can fulfill my mission, and the challenge is both pleasing of itself and an anodyne to my anxieties over my relationship to my Commander.
It is odd, I reflect while my Battle Center maintains a 360-degree tactical range broad-spectrum passive search, but this is the closest I have ever approached to actual combat. I am a warrior, product of eight centuries of evolution in war machine design, and I have existed for eighty-two years, four months, sixteen days, eight hours, twelve minutes, and five seconds, yet I have never seen war. I have never tested myself against the proud record and tradition of the Dinochrome Brigade. Even today’s exercises will be but games, and I sense a dichotomy within my emotions. Through my Commander and the words of poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, I have come to appreciate the horrors of war more clearly, perhaps, even than those of my brothers who have actually seen it. I recognize its destructiveness, and the evils which must always accompany even the most just of wars. Yet I am also a Bolo, a unit of the Line. Ultimately, war is my function, the reason for my existence, and deep within me there lives an edge of regret, a longing not for the opportunity to destroy the Enemy but for the opportunity to test myself against him and prove myself worthy.
My sensors detect a faint emissions source at 075 degrees. I am operating in passive mode, with no active sensor emissions to betray my presence in reply, and the source is extremely faint, but 0.00256 seconds of signal enhancement and analysis confirm that it is the short-range air-search radar of a Wolverine heavy tank.
I ponder the implications for 1.0362 seconds. Colonel Gonzalez is a clever tactician. Logically, she, even more than I, should be operating under emissions control doctrine, for she knows her objective and needs only to slip past me undetected to attain it. It is possible that she fears I have deployed reconnaissance drones and seeks to detect and destroy them before they can report her actual deployment, but I compute a probability of 89.7003 percent that this is a deception attempt. She wishes me to detect the emissions. She has divided her force and hopes to draw me out of position against the decoy while her true striking force eludes detection.
I alter course to 172 degrees true and engage my tactical modeling program. I now have a bearing to the unit she wishes me to detect, which indicates the direction in which I should not move, and I begin construction of alternative models of her probable deployment from that base datum. In 2.75 minutes, I will, in fact, deploy my first reconnaissance drone, but first I must generate the search pattern it will pursue.
Paul Merrit grimaced as the depot sensors detected an approaching bogey, then grinned as its emissions signature registered. Esteban had done exactly as promised and delayed Sanders’ arrival for over an hour, and from that signature, he hadn’t exactly given the colonel a luxury sedan, either. The power readings were just about right for one of the old man’s air lorry melon haulers, with a maximum speed of barely five hundred kph, less than twelve percent of what Merrit’s own recon skimmer could manage.