'As you can see, the situation in the Chartres System is...'
Maneka lay back once again in the command couch at Benjy's heart. She was aware that her pulse was hammering harder than it ought to have been, and although her mouth seemed unaccountably dry, she found herself swallowing again and again.
Jitters, she told herself. And no wonder! I guess I'd have to be a Bolo myself not to feel them. But, God, I'm scared!
'Benjy?'
'Yes, Maneka?'
'Benjy, I'm terrified out of my wits,' she confessed miserably.
'No, you are not,' he told her calmly.
The visual display showed the blurry, featureless gray of hyper-space, all his optical heads could pick up as he rode the assault pod locked to the exterior of the Sleipner-class transport Tannenberg. Over half his entire hull protruded beyond the pod's skin, exposing his onboard sensors and his weapons, and Captain Anton Harris and Unit 28/D-431-ALN rode the pod hardpoint on the far side of Tannenberg's hull. Between them, Benjy and Allen provided the otherwise unarmed transport with the equivalent of a battlecruiser's energy-weapon firepower, and an antimissile capability at least as good as a light cruiser's. What they could not provide was the stand-off attack range of a standard ship-to-ship missile; their weapons simply weren't designed for that sort of environment.
Maneka and Benjy shared their pod with Company C, Third Battalion, Second Regiment, Ninth Marine Division. Captain Belostenec, Charlie Company's CO, had introduced herself to them when her company embarked, and she and Maneka had spent several hours discussing possible scenarios once they hit the surface of Chartres.
Assuming any of us get to the surface, she thought grimly, acutely conscious of the flutter of her pulse.
'Oh, yes, I am terrified,' she told her Bolo.
'You are frightened,' Benjy agreed. 'This is a normal and, indeed, healthy reaction to the prospect of battle and possible death. But your fear is far from paralyzing you or preventing you from thinking clearly. Nor is fear a bad thing for you to experience.
'Bolos do not experience that particular emotion in the same fashion as humans, Maneka, or so I believe. It has been said with reason that our personalities are more 'bloodthirsty' than those of most humans. As a result, we feel as much anticipation as anxiety at a moment like this. It is, quite literally, what we were designed and built to do. Our highest function.
'But do not think we are strangers to fear. We fear that we will fail in our mission. We fear we will prove unequal to the challenge we face. And, just as our internal diagnostic systems have been programmed to feel the equivalent of pain when we take damage, our personalities include a fierce desire to survive. It has been some time since the Concordiat made the error of believing that a warrior who embraces death without fear is the ideal. Fear is as much a tool as courage, Maneka. As too much 'courage' becomes suicidal recklessness, too much 'fear' can become paralyzing panic. But to achieve his most effective level of combat, any warrior-human or Bolo-must properly balance the cautionary impact of fear and the aggressiveness engendered by courage. This, I believe, you have done.'
'You have a better opinion of me than I do,' Maneka said.
'Because you perceive all of your faults from within,' Benjy said serenely. 'I, however, am able to observe your responses and actions from without. You would not have been able to coordinate so well with Captain Belostenec had you been 'terrified out of your wits.''
'Maybe,' Maneka conceded dubiously.
Actually, she thought, for all of the time she and Belostenic had spent discussing possible tactical situations and responses to them, there hadn't really been a great deal of planning they could do. Either they got to the surface of the planet alive, or they didn't. If they did, Belostenec's Marines would disembark their own light armored vehicles and form up to follow her and Benjy as the Thirty-Ninth Battalion advanced against the enemy. And after that, everything would depend on what happened next.
The Ninth Marines were a potent fighting force, at least the equal of any Melconian Army division, and arguably superior to two of them in actual combat power. But neither their personal armor nor their vehicles had the firepower and toughness to stand up to Melconian combat mechs. If the Thirty-Ninth could get it through the perimeter of the Melconian LZ, the Ninth would undoubtedly prove its worth, but getting it through that perimeter in the first place was going to be supremely difficult.
'Captain Jeschke informs me that we will be dropping out of hyper in approximately twelve minutes,' Benjy informed her suddenly, and she twitched in her command couch. That 'approximately twelve minutes' had to have come directly from Jeschke, Tannenberg's merely human commander. No Bolo would have been guilty of such imprecision.
The thought made her giggle unexpectedly, and she blinked as she realized her unanticipated amusement was entirely genuine.
Maybe I'm not quite such a hopeless basket case, after all, she thought.
'Understood,' she said aloud. 'Please make sure Captain Belostenec also has that information.'
'I have.'
'Then I guess all we can do is wait.'
The relief force from Santa Cruz dropped out of hyper in a single, perfectly coordinated transition, and tactical displays aboard the Navy task force's warships began blinking alive with a rash of ominous red icons.
Commodore Selkirk's entire combat strength consisted of one four-ship battlecruiser division and one carrier, supported by eight heavy cruisers, nine light cruisers, and twelve destroyers. From the reports Chartres Near-Space Command had managed to get out before the subspace communications satellites were taken out, he already knew that even after the attackers' losses against Chartres' orbital defenses-which had not been insubstantial-he still faced six Melconian battleships, five battlecruisers, and twenty screening 'fists.' Like the Melconian ground unit of the same name, a naval 'fist' consisted of three ships, in this case a heavy cruiser supported by a light cruiser and a destroyer. The comparative number of hulls-thirty-four human vessels opposed to sixty-nine Melconian ships-was bad enough. The tonnage differential was worse... much worse.
Despite that, Selkirk had certain offsetting advantages. One was that unlike the deep-space arrays which had given Chartres two full days of warning before the Melconians' arrival, even a battleship's detection range against a unit approaching through hyper was severely limited. The Melconian CO had been given less than four hours' warning before Selkirk's ships came piling out of hyper, and his combat strength was still out of position. Another advantage was that every one of Selkirk's ships possessed a fully self-aware AI... and that those ships' command crews were neurally linked with them. They literally thought and fought at the same hyper-heuristic speed as Bolos.
None of which changed the fact that the battleship component of the enemy force alone out-massed his entire task force by more than two-to-one.
Orders flashed outward from Selkirk's flagship. He had arranged his approach very carefully, and his task force and the accompanying transports deployed with smooth efficiency. The commodore had deliberately dropped most of his warships back into normal-space well inside the three-light-minute sphere of the Chartres jump point. That was precisely where the Melconians had been expecting him, although he still managed to emerge into n- space outside their immediate engagement range. But the transports, accompanied by the carrier Indomitable and two of his destroyers, had made the transition to normal-space out on the very rim of the jump point at its closest approach to the inner system.
It had been a calculated risk, since it was always possible the Melconian CO might have anticipated the maneuver and deployed to smash the transports first, but it had paid off. The main body of the Melconian fleet was exactly where Selkirk had hoped it would be-well out-system from the transports' emergence point, with the commodore and his main combatants between it and the transports.
The eight transports, trailing their three escorts, arrowed straight towards the planet while Selkirk and his brutally outnumbered force squared off to keep the Melconians off their backs. Maneka felt physically sick to her stomach as her tactical plot showed the sea of hostile icons sweeping towards the commodore and his handful of
