Bolo Brigade by William H Keith Page A

lead her eight down the slope, striking into the enemy compound from the west. Schaagrasch waited and watched with the others, as fires winked and flickered among shattered buildings, and smoke began staining the pearly glow of the predawn sky.
    Schaagrasch was curious about whether or not one of the autochthons' mechanical gr'raa'zhghavescht —the things they called Bolos—was going to make an appearance. She'd read the Deathgiver's report of the preliminary Malach scouting raids on two other outlying worlds inhabited by these curiously weak and fragile creatures. On the world code-named Zsha'h'lach , the Warm and Soft One, a machine similar to the primitive tanks used by the Malach themselves centuries ago had destroyed several Hunters. According to reports, the war machines were heavily armored, operated on fusion power, and possessed a deadly and hard-hitting array of weaponry, including plasma and ion beam weapons, heavy-caliber howitzers, and vertically launched missiles. It had not yet been ascertained whether the things were piloted by crews, were teleoperated by remote control, or were autonomous robots operating according to programmed instructions.
    The single specimen on Zsha'h'lach had been destroyed, unfortunately. Schaagrasch's orders included a level-four directive—low priority—to capture one of the machines if possible, in order to better ascertain the sophistication of the autochthons' military technology. She would not risk her Pack to fulfill those orders, but if she saw the opportunity . . .
    She was, in fact, pretty sure that she saw a way that the thing might be done. Her pre-invasion briefing had included extensive vid and sound files on every aspect of the Zsha'h'lach operation, including a step-by-step, bolt-by-bolt account of the battle with the artificial gr'raa . The things were slow, like their namesakes, and ponderous, with poor maneuverability in tight quarters. The Pack that had brought down the machine on Zsha'h'lach had done so by moving in close, to claw-slashing range, in fact, and engaging the thing in battle at point-blank range, so close that the more powerful ion and plasma weapons couldn't be brought to bear.
    The trick, of course, was in getting that close in the first place. She hoped that one of the machines was, in fact, operating in this region and that she would have the opportunity to test herself against the best they could throw at her Pack.
    She was looking forward to the challenge.
     
    "We're sending out the Bolo now!" Static fuzzed the big vidscreen, breaking up the army captain's face. When Alexie could see him again, he'd turned away from the camera and was shouting at someone out of its field of view. "Damn it, I don't care about authorization, Lew! Get that thing moving, stat!" He turned again to face Alexie. "Ms. Turner, we've been hit pretty hard. We'll hold 'em if we can, but frankly, things are not looking good."
    Major Fitzsimmons crowded himself past Alexie's chair, leaning over to put his face into the vid pickup's field. "Captain Hemingway! What the devil's going on back there?"
    "Oh, Major!" the captain said. "I already told the DDG. We're in deep trouble here. Enemy war machines of some kind. Stilters, big ones. Look, I'll patch in a view from one of our externals."
    The captain's face winked off the screen and was replaced by a blurry shot of flat-bodied, jet-black stalkers entering the base compound. From the way they towered over the nearby buildings, each stood ten meters tall, with triangular bodies studded with wicked-looking spikes or muzzles that might have been weapons of some kind. Hemingway's descriptive word "stilters" was apt; they walked with a delicate, almost mincing grace, like enormous, ornamental flightless birds of some kind . . . save that these were the size of a house, and where they walked, they left utter and complete devastation in their steps. Alexie watched, wide-eyed, as several soldiers ran past the camera; a