“Release granted. Open fire!” she snapped.
“Acknowledged,” Benjy replied, and the heavily armored hatches of his VLS tubes sprang open. His own missiles blasted outward, then streaked away in ground-hugging supersonic flight. They were shorter ranged and marginally slower than the ones the Melconians had hurled at the Battalion, but they were also far more agile, and the relatively short launch range and low cruising altitudes gave the defenders’ less capable reconnaissance drones even less tracking time than the Battalion had been given against the Melconian missiles.
Fireballs raged along the Melconian perimeter, blasting away outer emplacements and dug-in armored units. Weapons and sensor posts, Loki-class tank destroyers and air-defense batteries, vanished into the maw of the Thirty-Ninth Battalion’s fury. Benjy’s thirty-centimeter rapid-fire mortars joined the attack, vomiting terminally guided projectiles into the vortex of destruction. Follow-on flights of Melconian missiles shrieked to meet them from the missile batteries to the rear, but the indirect fire weapons had lost virtually all of their observation capability. Their targeting solutions were much more tentative, the chaos and explosions hampered the missiles’ onboard seeker systems, and the gaping hole ripping deeper and deeper into their perimeter was costing them both launchers and the sensor capability which might have been able to sort out the maelstrom of devastation well enough to improve their accuracy.
But hidden among the merely mortal Melconian emplacements were their own war machines. The Heimdalls were too light to threaten a Bolo—even the Ninth’s manned vehicles were more than a match for them—but the fists of Surturs and Fenrises were something else entirely. Heavier, tougher, and more dangerous, they outnumbered the Battalion’s survivors by eighteen-to-one, and they had the advantage of prepared positions.
Another of the Battalion’s Bolos lurched to a halt, vomiting intolerable heat and light as a plasma bolt punched through its thinner side armor. Benjy fired on the move, main turret tracking smoothly, and his entire hull heaved as a main battery shot belched from his Hellbore and disemboweled the Surtur which had just killed his brigade brother. Another Surtur died, and Benjy’s far less powerful infinite repeaters sent ion bolt after lethal ion bolt shrieking across the vanishing gap between the Battalion and the Melconian perimeter to rend and destroy the Surturs’ lighter, weaker companions.
“Take point, Benjy!” Maneka barked as yet another Bolo slewed to a halt, streaming smoke and flame. Her eyes dropped to the sidebar, and she felt a stab of grief as the unblinking letter codes identified the victim as Lazy. It looked like a mission kill, not complete destruction, she thought, but the damage had to have punched deeply into Lazy’s personality center… and there was no way Lieutenant Takahashi could have survived.
And there was no time to mourn them, either.
Benjy surged forward, the apex of a wedge of eight bleeding titans. Surturs reared up out of deeply dug-in hides, lurching around to counterattack from the flanks and rear as the Battalion smashed through their outer perimeter, Hellbores howling in point-blank, continuous fire.
In! We’re into their rear! a corner of Maneka’s brain realized, with a sense of triumph that stabbed even through the horror and the terror.
A brilliant purple icon blazed abruptly on Benjy’s tactical plot as his analysis of Melconian com signals suddenly revealed what had to be a major communication node.
“The CP, Benjy! Take the CP!” Maneka snapped.
“Acknowledged,” Benjy replied without hesitation, and he altered course once more, smashing his way towards the command post. It loomed before him, and as Maneka watched the tac analysis spilling up the plot sidebars, she realized what it truly was. Not a command post, but the command post—the central nerve plexus of the entire Puppy position!
They’d found the organizing brain of the Melconian enclave, and she felt a sudden flare of hope. If they could reach that command post, take it out, cripple the enemy’s command and control function long enough for the Ninth to break in through the hole they’d torn, then maybe A pair of Surturs, flanked by their attendant mediums, loomed suddenly out of the chaos, Hellbores throwing sheets of plasma at the Bolos rampaging through their line. Benjy blew the left-flank Surtur into incandescent ruin while Peggy shouldered up on his right and killed the other. Their infinite repeaters raved as the Fenrises split, trying to circle wide and get at their weaker flank defenses, and the medium Melconian mechs slithered to a halt, spewing fury and hard radiation as their antimatter plants blew.
Then a trio of Fenris-class mediums, all of them orphans which had lost their Surturs, appeared out of nowhere. Their lighter weapons bellowed, and they were on the left flank of Captain Harris and Allen. They fired once, twice… and then there were only seven Bolos left.
Benjy’s port infinite repeater battery shredded Allen’s killers, even as two more Surturs reared up suddenly before him. One of them fired past him, slamming three Hellbore bolts simultaneously into Peggy. The Bolo’s battle screen attenuated the bolts, and the antiplasma armor applique absorbed and deflected much of their power. But the range was too short and the weapons too powerful. One of the newer Bolos, with the improved armor alloys and better internal disruptor shielding, might have survived; Peggy—and Major Angela Fredericks—did not.
Benjy’s turret spun with snakelike speed, and his Hellbore sent a far more powerful bolt straight through the frontal glacis plate of the second Surtur before it could fire. Then it swivelled desperately back towards the first Melconian mech.
Six, Maneka had an instant to think. There are only six of us now!
And then, in the same fragmented second, both war machines fired.
“Hull breach!” Benjy’s voice barked. “Hull breach in—”
There was an instant, a fleeting stutter in the pulse of eternity that would live forever in Maneka Trevor’s nightmares, when her senses recorded everything with intolerable clarity. The terrible, searing flash of light, the simultaneous blast of agony, the flashing blur of movement as Unit 28/G-862-BNJ slammed the inner duralloy carapace across his commander’s couch.
And then darkness.
“Hello, Lieutenant.”
The quiet voice boomed through Maneka’s mind like thunder, and she flinched away from its power. She felt herself swinging through a huge, empty void, like some ghostly pendulum, while vertigo surged and receded within her.
“It’s time to wake up,” the soft voice boomed, and she closed her eyes tighter. No. Not time to wake up. If she did that, something would be waiting. Something she could not—would not—face.
But the voice would not be denied. She clung to her safe, dark cocoon, yet she felt herself being drawn relentlessly, mercilessly, up out of its depths. And then her eyes slid open and slitted under the brilliant tide of light.
No, not her eyes—her eye. She was blind on the right side, she realized, with a sort of dreamy detachment, and raised her right hand to touch the dressing covering that eye. Only her hand refused to move, and when she rolled her head slowly—so slowly—far enough to the right to see, she found that her right arm ended just below the shoulder.
She blinked her remaining eye in syrupy slow motion, her sluggish brain trying to grapple with her wounds, and then a hand touched her left shoulder. She turned back in that direction, eye squinting, trying to make out details, and saw a man in the battle dress uniform of the Concordiat Marine Corps. A colonel, she thought, then blinked. No, she was wrong again. He wore a colonel’s uniform, but the insignia pinned to his collar was that of a brigadier.
“Are you sure she’s going to be all right?” she heard the colonel-turned-brigadier say. He was looking at someone else. A man in white.