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  In another war, against another enemy, there might have been other options to ponder. The possibility of honorable surrender might even have existed. But this was the war they had, and however desperately some inner part of him might have longed for it to be otherwise, Major Beryak Na-Pahrthal could no longer truly imagine any other sort.

  "Uniform-Three-Seven, this is Alpha-Zero-One." he said into his microphone. "Watch those turns.

  You're sliding too high, skylining yourself. Do that closer to the enemy, and he'll blow you right out of the air!"

  "Alpha-Zero-One, Uniform-Three-Seven copies. Sorry about that, sir. I'll try not to let it happen again."

  "You do that, Tharsal," Na-Pahrthal said. "I'd hate to have to break in a new horrible example to show the others how not to fly a mission."

  "Yes, sir. Uniform-Three-Seven, out."

  "Alpha-Zero-One, out," Na-Pahrthal acknowledged, and his ears twitched in another flicker of wryly bitter amusement. So they were all still playing the game, still pretending.

  Odd how precious that threadbare pretense could be, even now.

  * * *

  "The Bolo is already inside our mediums' effective engagement range, sir," Colonel Na-Lythan said levelly. "It will overtake us completely in no more than another twenty minutes at our relative rates of advance, and this looks like as likely a place as we're going to find, especially if we can keep that ridge line between us and it until we launch. With your permission, I'd like to begin deploying my units."

  "Uran, they're your units," Ka-Frahkan replied over the com. "If this is the spot you want, then go ahead and deploy. For what it's worth, I'm formally handing tactical control over to you. May the Nameless Ones send you victory."

  "Thank you, sir," Na-Lythan acknowledged. And then, without a pause, he began issuing his orders.

  * * *

  Maneka/Lazarus weren't surprised when the Enemy slowed in his headlong rush. The terrain ahead was as favorable to him as any he might have hoped to find, and she/they slowed her/their own approach, watching to see how the Enemy commander deployed his assets.

  "He's not exactly trying for finesse, is he?" her/their human half observed wryly as her individual viewpoint rose briefly above the fusion of their personalities and perceptions.

  "It is not a situation which calls for finesse," her/their Bolo half replied. "Their commander is wise enough to recognize that."

  Maneka agreed wordlessly, and then her merely human viewpoint vanished once more as she/they bent their attention upon the developing patterns of the Enemy's deployment.

  Actually, she/they thought, he was trying for at least a little finesse. The tactical situation was brutally simple for both sides, but he was deliberately placing two of his three "fists" well forward of the third. In essence, he was writing off two thirds of his total strength, positioning those units to take the brunt of her/their assault and accepting that they would be destroyed, rather than bringing his full firepower to bear from the beginning. Clearly, he hoped that before they were destroyed, they would inflict serious damage upon her/them—enough for his own fresh, undamaged fist to finish her/them off without suffering heavy losses of its own. In which case, he would almost certainly come out of the engagement with sufficient remaining combat power to carry through and destroy the colony, after all.

  "Probability of our destruction by forward-deployed fists, 36.012 percent; probability of their destruction, 93.562 percent," her/their Lazarus component remarked. "Probability of our destruction by remaining fist after destroying lead fists, 56.912 percent. Probability of colony's survival following our own destruction or incapacitation becomes 73.64 percent, assuming destruction of all remaining Surturs and expenditure of all Fenrises' missile armament against us. Probability of colony's survival, assuming survival of one Surtur becomes 32.035 percent. Probability of colony's survival, assuming survival of two Surturs, becomes 01.056 percent. Survival of each Fenris with no remaining missile armament decreases probability of colony's survival by approximately 06.753 percent. Survival of one Fenris with unexpended missile load-out decreases probability of colony's survival by approximately 32.116 percent.

  Survival of two Fenrises with unexpended missile load-out decreases probability of colony's survival to under one percent, exclusive of any consideration of surviving Surturs."

  "Then we'll just have to see to it that none of them survive, won't we?" her/their Maneka half replied coldly.

  "All units, stand by. Prepare for Fire Plan Alpha on my command."

  Uran Na-Lythan's voice was terse, shadowed with tension and yet curiously relaxed, almost calming.

  Ka-Frahkan listened to it, hearing an echo of the strange serenity which seemed to hover at his own center, and wondered what the colonel was actually thinking as the Bolo ground steadily towards his units.

  His ears folded tight to his skull as the questions rolled through his mind.

  But in the end, it doesn't really matter, does it? he told himself sadly. Butcher or champion, I have no choice now. None of us do—Human or of the People. We have saddled the whirlwind; now we must ride it and pray that somehow the bridle holds. That we can stay in the saddle one battle longer, one living star system farther, than they can. And so I will drown this world in blood, because I must. Because I cannot take the chance, cannot risk holding my hand. And in the end, somewhere, some other general—Melconian or Human—will have to make one final decision when the last world of his own race's murderers lies helpless before him.

  And that general will not be me. Ka-Frahkan eyes narrowed as he recognized the source of his strange inner serenity at last. It was knowledge, acceptance. I will die here, on this world, he realized.

  If not in this minute, or this hour, still, I will die here. Ka-Paldyn is gone, or he would have reported in by standard radio by now. Our inner-system special ops teams are all dead, without securing a single one of the Humans' starships, and Death Descending and Gizhan are gone. We can still ensure that no Humans survive here either, that this is simply one more charnel house world, slaughtered in the cause of racial survival, but there will be no escape for me or for any of my people. And so, either way, this is the end of the killing for me. I will slay no more worlds, murder no more children, face no more nightmares, unless, indeed, the Nameless decree the eternal damnation we all have earned so amply.

  I will sleep, he thought, with a sense of infinite, bittersweet relief. I've done my duty, and if that earns damnation, then so be it, yet I long for that final sleep, that end, for I am so tired of the killing. And yet, these are still my troopers, my family. How do I tell them how much they mean to me, when I've brought them all here to die with me?

  "All units," he heard his own voice say over the central command channel, surprised to discover that he had depressed the transmit key, "this is General Ka-Frahkan. You are about to engage the enemy.

  This is not the planet we were originally tasked to seize, yet these are still the enemies of the People we face, and what happens here may well be far more vital to the People than anything which might have happened at our original objective. I am prouder of you than any poet, any bard, could ever forge the words to say. I am honored to have commanded you, privileged to have fought beside you so many times before, and to fight with you here, today. The Empire may never know what we do here, yet that makes it no less important, no less our duty. Men and women of the 3172nd, you have never flinched, never failed in your duty to me, to yourselves, or to the People. I know you will not fail today."

  He released the transmit key and sat back in his comfortable chair, and the silence within his command vehicle echoed and roared about him. Even the readiness reports over the tac channels seemed momentarily hushed, stilled, and he realized suddenly that they understood.

  "Support units," Na-Lythan's voice was level, yet it sounded shockingly harsh as it cut across the stillness, "initiate Fire Plan Alpha."

  * * *

  The Surtur Alphas' Hellbores were far lighter th
an the Mark XXVIII's single 110-centimeter weapon, but their echeloned turrets allowed all six of them to bear over a firing arc of just over 310 degrees. Anywhere within that field of fire, a Surtur could lay down three times as much main battery fire as Maneka/Lazarus, and if the relative lightness of its weapons meant it could lay down only about twice the weight of fire, number of shots counted, too.

  The Fenrises, on the other hand, had no business coming anywhere near a Bolo if they could help it.

  Unlike a Surtur, a Fenris' battle screen was light enough, its armor thin enough, that even the Mark XXVIII's ion-bolt infinite repeaters could kill it at medium or short range, and its single 38-centimeter Hellbore would require a minimum of three hits in exactly the same spot to penetrate her/their frontal armor. But engaging Bolos frontally wasn't what Fenrises were intended to do, and now the heavily armored hatches on these mechs' after decks opened and the missile pods rose out of their wells on hydraulic rams. Each Fenris mounted three pods; each pod mounted thirty-two missiles; and there were six Fenrises in Major Sa-Thor's First Armored Battalion.

  The pods rose to their full-extension positions and nodded on the long stalks of their rams as they elevated slightly.

  * * *

  Maneka/Lazarus' camouflaged sensors detected the emission spikes as the Fenrises enabled their missiles. Point defense clusters trained forward and elevated, countermissiles slid into their launchers, and she/they slowed still further, diverting power from her/their drivetrain to reinforce her/their battle screen.

  It was all she/they could do. The maximum effective powered range for the Fenris's tactical missiles was only eighty kilometers, because they used counter-gravity drives, like her/their own high-speed missiles did. But the Fenrises' missiles were much smaller than hers/theirs, which meant their drives could be neither as powerful nor as robust. They traded off range and sophisticated seeking systems and penetration aids for velocity and numbers, and they were intended to saturate an opponent's missile defenses, spreading them so thin that at least a few of the fusion-warhead missiles had to get through.

  Maneka/Lazarus' missiles were much longer ranged and more accurate, but she/they didn't even consider launching any of them. She/they simply didn't mount enough tubes to crack the Melconian battalion's defenses in return, and that was that. In flat, open terrain, the effective range of a Bolo's direct fire weapons went far towards offsetting the Fenrises' missile capability by forcing them to launch at greater range and expose their missiles to more extended defensive fire. But now the Enemy was less than twenty-four kilometers ahead, still hidden from them by the rough, corrugated terrain.

  And at that range, tracking and engagement time was going to be very short, indeed.

  "Fire!" Na-Lythan commanded.

  The Fenrises vanished into huge boils of light, smoke, and fury as the booster charges blasted their missiles clear of the pods. Five hundred and seventy-six flame-tailed thunderbolts lifted from their launchers, accelerating slowly. But only for an instant. As soon as they had cleared their launchers and reached an elevation of thirty-seven meters, just high enough above the Fenrises for the launching mechs to clear the drive zone, their counter-gravity drives kicked in.

  Cramming those drives into such tiny missiles had required all manner of shortcuts and engineering compromises, and there was simply no way to build them tough enough on such small dimensions to survive the enormous power slamming through them. At the best of times, the missiles' drives consumed themselves in just under ten seconds, and they had no atmospheric control surfaces. They could not correct their courses or evade once their drives burned out, which left them dreadfully vulnerable to interception after that point. But for the seconds in which their drives survived, they accelerated the missiles in which they were mounted at a hundred and seventy gravities.

  At that rate of acceleration, it would take them 5.38 seconds to reach their destination, and their velocity when they did would be well over thirty thousand kilometers per hour.

  * * *

  Maneka/Lazarus had known exactly what was coming.

  Data streamed through her/them like a river of lightning, flickering and flashing so rapidly that even with her direct link to Lazarus, Maneka Trevor could not truly perceive it. It was simply and literally impossible for her merely organic brain to organize data into a comprehensible format at such an incredible rate of speed. But if she couldn't organize it, she could grasp it. She shared Lazarus' gestalt, shared the end result of his computations and analysis.

  Stealth features and electronic warfare systems were useless against this attack. The Fenrises'

  missiles were specifically designed to be stupid and blind. They would fly whatever profile had been programmed into them before launch, and they would make up for the lack of sophisticated seekers and tracking systems, the absence of advanced penetration EW, with the sheer volume of their fire and the power of their warheads. They were an old-fashioned, saturation attack system, capable of in-flight maneuvers only as long as their drives lasted, which defined their outer range. And the rate at which they accelerated, the velocities they attained, were hard on an airframe. It wasn't that bad in vacuum, but, on average, anywhere from six to seven percent of them would suffer catastrophic structural failure in an air-breathing launch. Which was cold comfort to their targets, given the numbers in which they were launched.

  The remote sensors watching the Melconians at the moment of launch had measured the missile pods'

  angles of train and elevation with minute, absolute precision. Data stored in Lazarus' tactical files knew the exact launch sequence, cycle time, and acceleration capability of the Fenrises' missiles. Analysis of the emission spikes as the missiles were enabled, and the power levels as the launch command itself was given and the pods cycled through the launch sequence, gave him precious fractions of a second of warning before the missiles actually fired. And armed with all of that information, BattleComp predicted the flight paths of those missiles with the accuracy and certainty of an Old Testament prophet declaring the will of God.

  Point defense clusters, antipersonnel clusters, rotary cannon, even infinite repeaters were already moving, swiveling towards the points in space at which she/they knew the missiles must appear. The towering, knife-sharp ridge line almost exactly midway between her/them and the Enemy—the same ridge which had protected the Fenrises from her/their Hellbore and infinite repeaters and would protect them from the blast of their own detonating warheads—forced the missiles to climb, and at their velocity, they could not fly a tight nap-of-the-earth profile. They had to climb well clear of the ridge, expose themselves to her/their fire, and that fire was waiting for them when they did.

  The cloud of missiles pitched up over the ridge, then dropped their noses as sharply as only counter-grav missiles could, and streaked directly towards Maneka/Lazarus. Small they might be, compared to the missiles of a Bolo, but they still massed just under 2.4 metric tons. At their velocity, a simple kinetic impact would have yielded the equivalent of over twenty-two metric tons of old-fashioned TNT, but they weren't kinetic weapons.

  A tornado of defensive fire ripped into the missile storm as her/their defenses engaged the threat.

  Lasers, flechettes, cannon shells, proximity-fused countermissiles which had actually launched fractions of a second before the Fenrises had. It was as if a solid, incandescent battering ram lunged downward, hurling itself across the ridge at them, and its mushrooming head of flame was the missiles being splintered and torn asunder by her/their fire.

  She/they killed many of them. Almost six hundred had been fired at her/them, and four hundred and seventy-three were destroyed by her/their defensive fire. Thirty-seven more suffered structural failure and simply disintegrated, and the debris from their disintegration destroyed six more birds which ran into the wreckage in flight. Nine more dipped too close to the ridge line and slammed into the far side of its crest like artificial meteors. But that left fifty-one.

  Fusion warhead
s detonated in the split instant before they struck her/their battle screen. That screen would have absorbed the purely kinetic energy of those weapons without even a flicker, but the Melconian weaponeers who had built them were well aware of that. And so they had designed their warheads to detonate in the last sliver of a second before the battle screen could tear them apart. Not even the Concordiat could have guaranteed truly simultaneous detonation of that many warheads—not at that velocity. Six of them failed to detonate in time, rammed into Maneka/Lazarus' battle screen, and vanished. Another nineteen failed to detonate quickly enough and were killed by fratricide before their fuses activated. Which meant that "only" twenty-six actually detonated as planned.

  Those warheads were designed for variable yield, adjustable to suit the tactical circumstances, and Colonel Uran Na-Lythan had ordered them set for maximum yield. Low-megaton-range fireballs slammed into her/their battle screen like brimstone sledgehammers. Her/their fifteen-thousand-ton bulk heaved like a storm-sick galleon as that inconceivable fury bled into her/their battle screen. The ridge between her/them and the Melconians was high enough, thick enough, to protect them from the direct blast of their own weapons. That was the only thing which had made it possible for Na-Lythan to wait so long and employ them at such short range. Yet even though the blast shadow of the ridge protected them from outright destruction, it was a very near thing for First Armored Battalion as Hell itself erupted on its far side.

  And what First Armored endured was only the back flash, only an echo, of what hammered down upon Maneka/Lazarus.