“Acknowledged,” Benjy replied without hesitation, and he altered course once more, smashing his way towards the command post. It loomed before him, and as Maneka watched the tac analysis spilling up the plot sidebars, she realized what it truly was. Not a command post, but the command post—the central nerve plexus of the entire Puppy position!
They’d found the organizing brain of the Melconian enclave, and she felt a sudden flare of hope. If they could reach that command post, take it out, cripple the enemy’s command and control function long enough for the Ninth to break in through the hole they’d torn, then maybe A pair of Surturs, flanked by their attendant mediums, loomed suddenly out of the chaos, Hellbores throwing sheets of plasma at the Bolos rampaging through their line. Benjy blew the left-flank Surtur into incandescent ruin while Peggy shouldered up on his right and killed the other. Their infinite repeaters raved as the Fenrises split, trying to circle wide and get at their weaker flank defenses, and the medium Melconian mechs slithered to a halt, spewing fury and hard radiation as their antimatter plants blew.
Then a trio of Fenris-class mediums, all of them orphans which had lost their Surturs, appeared out of nowhere. Their lighter weapons bellowed, and they were on the left flank of Captain Harris and Allen. They fired once, twice… and then there were only seven Bolos left.
Benjy’s port infinite repeater battery shredded Allen’s killers, even as two more Surturs reared up suddenly before him. One of them fired past him, slamming three Hellbore bolts simultaneously into Peggy. The Bolo’s battle screen attenuated the bolts, and the antiplasma armor applique absorbed and deflected much of their power. But the range was too short and the weapons too powerful. One of the newer Bolos, with the improved armor alloys and better internal disruptor shielding, might have survived; Peggy—and Major Angela Fredericks—did not.
Benjy’s turret spun with snakelike speed, and his Hellbore sent a far more powerful bolt straight through the frontal glacis plate of the second Surtur before it could fire. Then it swivelled desperately back towards the first Melconian mech.
Six, Maneka had an instant to think. There are only six of us now!
And then, in the same fragmented second, both war machines fired.
“Hull breach!” Benjy’s voice barked. “Hull breach in—”
There was an instant, a fleeting stutter in the pulse of eternity that would live forever in Maneka Trevor’s nightmares, when her senses recorded everything with intolerable clarity. The terrible, searing flash of light, the simultaneous blast of agony, the flashing blur of movement as Unit 28/G-862-BNJ slammed the inner duralloy carapace across his commander’s couch.
And then darkness.
“Hello, Lieutenant.”
The quiet voice boomed through Maneka’s mind like thunder, and she flinched away from its power. She felt herself swinging through a huge, empty void, like some ghostly pendulum, while vertigo surged and receded within her.
“It’s time to wake up,” the soft voice boomed, and she closed her eyes tighter. No. Not time to wake up. If she did that, something would be waiting. Something she could not—would not—face.
But the voice would not be denied. She clung to her safe, dark cocoon, yet she felt herself being drawn relentlessly, mercilessly, up out of its depths. And then her eyes slid open and slitted under the brilliant tide of light.
No, not her eyes—her eye. She was blind on the right side, she realized, with a sort of dreamy detachment, and raised her right hand to touch the dressing covering that eye. Only her hand refused to move, and when she rolled her head slowly—so slowly—far enough to the right to see, she found that her right arm ended just below the shoulder.
She blinked her remaining eye in syrupy slow motion, her sluggish brain trying to grapple with her wounds, and then a hand touched her left shoulder. She turned back in that direction, eye squinting, trying to make out details, and saw a man in the battle dress uniform of the Concordiat Marine Corps. A colonel, she thought, then blinked. No, she was wrong again. He wore a colonel’s uniform, but the insignia pinned to his collar was that of a brigadier.
“Are you sure she’s going to be all right?” she heard the colonel-turned-brigadier say. He was looking at someone else. A man in white.
“We got to her in time,” the man in white said reassuringly. “Actually, your people got to her in time and pulled her out while we still had something to work with. It’s going to take time and a lot of regen to put her back on her feet, but the actual repairs will be fairly routine. Extensive, but routine.”
“You have a different definition of ‘routine’ from me, Doctor,” the Marine officer said dryly, then looked back down at Maneka.
“Are you with us now, Lieutenant?” he asked, and she recognized the booming thunder which had disturbed her darkness in the quiet question.
She looked up at him, then tried to speak. Only a croak came out, and she licked dry, cracked lips with a tongue made of leftover leather. A hand reached down, holding a glass with a straw, and Maneka shuddered in raw, sensual pleasure as the unbelievable relief of ice water flowed down her throat.
“Better?” the Marine asked, and she nodded.
“Yes, sir,” she got out in a rusty croak. She stopped and cleared her throat hard enough to make her floating head reel, then tried again. “Thank you.”
At least this time it sounded a little like her, she thought.
Her brain was beginning to function once more, although her thoughts remained far from clear. She found herself wondering how she could possibly not feel the pain of her wounds, then gave a distant sort of mental snort. No doubt they had an entire battalion of pain suppressors focused on her. Which probably helped explain the haziness of her mental processes, now that she thought about it.
As if he’d read her thoughts, the man in white reached out, twiddling his fingers on a virtual keyboard, and the wooly blanket slipped back from the front of her brain. A faint wash of pain—an echo of something she sensed was vast and terrible, but which was not allowed to touch her—came with the clarity, and she swallowed again, then gave him a tiny nod of thanks.
“No more than that, Lieutenant,” the doctor said gruffly. “You looked like someone who wanted her mind working, but you’ll have to settle for where you are for the moment.”
“Yes, sir.” Her voice was still rusty and broken-sounding in her own ears, but her speech was less slurred and she felt more of her brain cells rousing to action.
“I’m Colonel-well, Brigadier-Shallek, Lieutenant Trevor,” the Marine said, and she returned her working eye to him. “I apologize for disturbing you, but they’re going to be shipping you off-world this afternoon, and I wanted to speak to you personally before they do.”
“Off-world?” Maneka repeated. “Sir?” she added hastily, and he gave her a smile. It was a very small smile, shadowed with things that were far from humorous, but it was real.
“For just this minute, Lieutenant, don’t worry about military courtesy,” he suggested gently.
She nodded on her pillow, but her clearer brain was beginning to function properly, and she realized that, impossible though it seemed, they must have won. It was the only way anyone could be talking about sending anyone off-world. And the only way she could still be alive.
“The reason I wanted to talk to you, Lieutenant, was to thank you,” the Marine officer continued after a moment. She looked at him, and he twitched one hand, palm uppermost, between them. “That thanks comes from me personally, from the Ninth Marines—what’s left of us—and from every living human on Chartres. Because without you and your Battalion, none of us would be alive today.”
“The Battalion—?” Maneka began, and Shallek squeezed her good shoulder again.
“You broke them, Lieutenant,” he said simply. “I doubt anyone would have believed it if they hadn’t seen it, but you broke them. You tore a hole ten kilometers wide right through the middle of their line, you took out every Surtur they had, and then you smashed their central command post. Apparently, they hadn’t had time yet to put in a backup CP, and when you took it out, their command and control went straight to hell. As did they, over the space of the next few hours.”
He smiled again, and this time his smile was harsh and ugly.
“It didn’t come cheap,” he went on after a moment. “Not for any of us. I’m the senior ranking officer the
