Werehunter (anthology)

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.