14.4-to-1—thanks to the Fenrises' smaller size. Those were daunting odds, and she/they were going to have to fight smart even by Bolo standards. In a stand-up slugging match against the Surturs' combined thirty-six Hellbores, she/they would be quickly destroyed, despite her/their far superior battle screen and thicker and tougher armor. But for all their massive firepower, the Enemy mechs suffered from one huge disadvantage; they were manned units whose AI support was extremely limited. They were slow compared to any Bolo ... and old as Lazarus was, his psychotronics had been heavily refitted when he was reactivated. He was more lightly armed than later-mark Bolos, but he thought—and reacted—just as quickly as his younger brothers and sisters.
That was going to have to be enough, her/their Maneka half thought in the small corner of her mind which remained outside the link. That, and the surveys she/they had carried out and the carefully planted sensor net which was letting her/them observe the Enemy directly without expending recon drones just looking for him. And, she/they devoutly hoped, lulling the Puppies into a sense of false security when none of those airborne sensor platforms "found" them. She/they weren't about to rely on that, but it would be nice if the Puppies hadn't twigged to the sensor net's presence.
Thoughts of what the Melconians might or might not know turned her/their attention to the grounded transport. That transport had to be neutralized. At the moment, Thermopylae's assault pod gave her/them the mobility advantage. But sooner or later, she/they were going to have to engage the Enemy.
Once they undocked from the pod, redocking would be out of the question. It would take too long, and she/they would be unable to maneuver, too vulnerable to enemy fire, to spend the time to board it once more. For that matter, without her/them mounted on the pod, it would have neither the active defenses nor the electronic warfare capability to penetrate the enemy's combat envelope to reach her/them, in the first place. No. Once she/they detached from the pod, she/they would be unable to use it further until the battle was decided, one way or the other. And if the Melconian combat mechs managed to pin her/them down while a half-dozen Fenrises fell back to the transport and used its mobility to launch a frontal assault on Landing while she/they were too far away to intervene, it would be disastrous. And, unfortunately, the transport had not been obliging enough to park itself in one of the areas covered by her/their previously planted remotes. She/they knew approximately where it had to be, but
"approximately" wasn't good enough for the precision she/they required.
"Concur. Launch," her/their Maneka component replied.
The pod slowed abruptly in its frenzied terrain-following flight. Missile hatches opened, and a dozen air-breathing cruise missiles launched. They configured their variable-geometry wings well forward for subsonic flight and arced away from the Bolo. They circled well to the east of her/their current position, dropped to a nap-of-the-earth altitude of barely twenty meters, and skimmed off on their attack mission, accompanied by no less than three extraordinarily stealthy reconnaissance platforms, while she/they angled still farther to the west before swinging back onto a more northerly heading.
Captain Na-Tharla tried not to fret too visibly as he prowled restlessly around Death Descending's bridge. The repairs were going as quickly as he could have hoped, under the circumstances, but that made him feel no less vulnerable. There was a Bolo out there, somewhere, and so far, General Ka-Frahkan's brigade had failed to pick up even a hint of its position. That wasn't calculated to reassure the commander of an immobilized transport.
His lips wrinkled back from his canines in a bitterly amused challenge grin. Reassure! There hadn't been a moment since Admiral Na-Izhaaran chose to attack this accursed Human convoy in the first place that Na-Tharla had felt remotely like anything which could have been called "reassurance." And at this particular moment—
"Missile trace!" His head snapped around as the voice spoke abruptly from the communications section. "Air cav look-down radar reports missiles inbound, bearing zero-niner-three, altitude three-zero-zero, course two-seven-three true at three-zero-one-zero!"
The red, glaring icons of incoming missiles blazed suddenly in his tactical plot, and he snarled viciously as he watched them suddenly accelerate to a far higher velocity.
She/they watched through the accompanying drones as the missiles' attack programs reacted to the lash of the Enemy's radar. Their stubby wings configured smoothly back and their turbines howled as they accelerated abruptly to better than Mach 5. The drones could have kept pace easily enough, but only if they'd dropped out of stealth, and she/they had no intention of allowing those platforms to be detected and destroyed. So instead, the drones dropped behind, spreading out like encircling arms, passive sensors listening intently to the Melconians' emissions, while the missiles ran away from them and scorched straight in on the Melconian landing zone.
Active sensors and targeting systems from the transport and the ground-based air-defense systems joined the air cav radar lashing at the missiles, battling their onboard EW systems, fighting to lock them up for defensive fire. Those missiles carried high-kiloton-range fusion warheads; if even one of them got through, the transport would be permanently crippled, even if it was by some miracle not destroyed outright. But the odds of any of them penetrating the Melconian defenses were slight. Which was perfectly all right with her/them.
Countermissiles launched, shrieking out to seek and destroy the attacking birds. Half of her/their missiles were intercepted and destroyed, but the other half only accelerated to Mach 7 as the observations of the accompanying drones refined their targeting data and they came onto their final attack profiles.
The cruise missiles reached the final ridge line between them and their targets. They pitched upward, popping up over the ridge as they must to reach their destination, and the ground-defense lasers and antiarmor Hellbores were waiting. Beamed energy struck at the speed of light, viciously accurate despite the missiles' electronic warfare capabilities and penetration aids, and she/they watched as every single one of her/their attack missiles was destroyed harmlessly, far short of their targets.
He shook himself, then castigated his own sense of shocked, joyous astonishment. Ka-Frahkan had been right all along. However good the Humans' technology might be, they weren't gods. They could be stopped, defeated, and he felt almost ashamed at the realization that he hadn't really believed that, not deep down inside. But they had been, and if their missiles could be stopped that easily here—
She/they completed her/their analysis.
It was a simple enough exercise, given the wealth of data her/their unnoticed reconnaissance platforms had amassed. The locations of the active sensors and weapon emplacements which had tracked and engaged her/their missiles had been plotted to within the nearest six centimeters. The perimeter air cav mounts had been detected, counted, and localized. Emissions signatures had been recorded, identified, and analyzed. Standard Melconian defensive dispositions had been extracted from memory, overlaid across the positive data points she/they had plotted, compared and evaluated, extrapolated in hyper-heuristic mode. She/they knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, precisely where every sensor station, every weapon emplacement, was located, and what those weapons and sensors'
capabilities were.
And she/they also knew that in this instant, every Melconian within that perimeter was still looking to the east, the direction from which the missile attack had come.
Which was why her/their pod abruptly popped up over a mountaintop ninety-seven kilometers west of the Melconian landing zone.