“As soon as you think we can move without detection, close on the nearest craft,” he ordered. “I want to see what we’re up against. And start scanning the local freqs; if there’s anything in the way of organized defense from the civvies, I want to know about it.”
A pause, while the ventilators hummed softly, and glowing dots descended on several screens. “They don’t seem to have anything, Siegfried,” Rommel reported quietly. “Once the ground-to-space defenses were fried, they just collapsed. Right now, they seem to be in a complete state of panic. They don’t even seem to remember that we’re out here—no one’s tried to hail us on any of our regular channels.”
“Either that—or they think we’re out of commission,” he muttered absently. “Or just maybe they are giving us credit for knowing what we’re doing and are trying not to give us away. I hope so. The longer we can go without detection, the better chance we have to pull something out of a hat.”
An increase in vibration warned him that Rommel was about to move. A new screen lit up, this one tracking a single vessel. “Got one,” the Bolo said shortly. “I’m coming in behind his sensor sweep.”
Four more screens lit up; enhanced front, back, top, and side views of the terrain. Only the changing views on the screens showed that Rommel was moving; other than that, there was no way to tell from inside the cabin what was happening. It would be different if Rommel had to execute evasive maneuvers of course, but right now, he might have still been parked. The control cabin and living quarters were heavily shielded and cushioned against the shocks of ordinary movement. Only if Rommel took a direct hit by something impressive would Siegfried feel it. . . .
And if he takes a direct hit by something more than impressive—we’re slag. Bolos are the best, but they can’t take everything.
“The craft is down.”
He pushed the thought away from his mind. This was what Rommel had been built to do—this moment justified Rommel’s very existence. And he had known from the very beginning that the possibility, however remote, had existed that he too would be in combat one day. That was what being in the military was all about. There was no use in pretending otherwise.
Get on with the job. That’s what they’ve sent me here to do. Wasn’t there an ancient royal family whose motto was “God, and my Duty?” Then let that be his.
“Have you detected any sensor scans from the mothership?” he asked, his voice a harsh whisper. “Or anything other than a forward scan from the landing craft?” He didn’t know why he was whispering—
“Not as yet, Siegfried,” Rommel replied, sounding a little surprised. “Apparently, these invaders are confident that there is no one out here at all. Even that forward scan seemed mainly to be a landing-aid.”
“Nobody here but us chickens,” Siegfried muttered. “Are they offloading yet?”
“Wait—yes. The ramp is down. We will be within visual range ourselves in a moment—there—”
More screens came alive; Siegfried read them rapidly—
Then read them again, incredulously.
“Mechs?” he said, astonished. “Remotely controlled mechs?”
“So it appears.” Rommel sounded just as mystified. “This does not match any known configuration. There is one limited AI in that ship. Data indicates it is hardened against any attack conventional forces at the port could mount. The ship seems to be digging in—look at the seismic reading on 4-B. The limited AI is in control of the mechs it is deploying. I believe that we can assume this will be the case for the other invading ships, at least the ones coming down at the moment, since they all appear to be of the same model.”
Siegfried studied the screens; as they had assumed, the mechs were about the size of pre-Atomic Panzers, and seemed to be built along similar lines. “Armored mechs. Good against anything a civilian has. Is that ship hardened against anything you can throw?” he asked finally.
There was a certain amount of glee in Rommel’s voice. “I think not. Shall we try?”
Siegfried’s mouth dried. There was no telling what weaponry that ship packed—or the mother-ship held. The mother-ship might be monitoring the drop-ships, watching for attack. God and my Duty, he thought.
“You may fire when ready, Herr Rommel.”
They had taken the drop-ship by complete surprise; destroying it before it had a chance to transmit distress or tactical data to the mother-ship. The mechs had stopped in their tracks the moment the AI’s direction ceased.
But rather than roll on to the next target, Siegfried had ordered Rommel to stealth again, while he examined the remains of the mechs and the controlling craft. He’d had an idea—the question was, would it work?
He knew weapons systems; knew computer-driven control. There were only a limited number of ways such controls could work. And if he recognized any of those here—
He told himself, as he scrambled into clothing and climbed the ladder out of the cabin, that he would give himself an hour. The situation would not change much in an hour; there was very little that he and Rommel could accomplish in that time in the way of mounting a campaign. As it happened, it took him fifteen minutes more than that to learn all he needed to know. At the end of that time, though, he scrambled back into Rommel’s guts with mingled feelings of elation and anger.
The ship and mechs were clearly of human origin, and some of the vanes and protrusions that made them look so unfamiliar had been tacked on purely to make both the drop-ships and armored mechs look alien in nature. Someone, somewhere, had discovered something about Bachman’s World that suddenly made it valuable. From the hardware interlocks and the programming modes he had found in what was left of the controlling ship, he suspected that the “someone” was not a government, but a corporation.
And a multiplanet corporation could afford to mount an invasion force fairly easily. The best force for the job would, of course, be something precisely like this—completely mechanized. There would be no troops to “hush up” afterwards; no leaks to the interstellar press. Only a nice clean invasion—and, in all probability, a nice, clean extermination at the end of it, with no humans to protest the slaughter of helpless civilians.
And afterwards, there would be no evidence anywhere to contradict the claim that the civilians had slaughtered each other in some kind of local conflict.
The mechs and the AI itself were from systems he had studied when he first started in this specialty—outmoded even by his standards, but reliable, and when set against farmers with hand-weapons, perfectly adequate.
There was one problem with this kind of setup . . . from the enemy’s standpoint. It was a problem they didn’t know they had.
Yet.
He filled Rommel in on what he had discovered as he raced up the ladder, then slid down the handrails into the command cabin. “Now, here’s the thing—I got the access code to command those mechs with a little fiddling in the AI’s memory. Nice of them to leave in so many manual overrides for me. I reset the command interface freq to one you have, and hardwired it so they shouldn’t be able to change it—”