Keith Laumer - Bolos 1 - Honor of the Regiment

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BOLOS: HONOR OF THE REGIMENT

CREATED BY KEITH LAUMER

EDITED BY BILL FAWCETT

Fout! Onbekende schakeloptie-instructie.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and

any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, N.Y. 10471

ISBN: 0-671-72184-4

Cover art by Paul Alexander

First printing, September 1993

Distributed by

SIMON & SCHUSTER

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, N.Y. 10020

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, N.H.

Printed in the United States of America

FOR THE HONOR OF THE REGIMENT

My forty-seven pairs of flint-steel roadwheels are in depot condition. Their tires of spun

ber~yl~lium monocrystal, woven to deform rather than compress, all have 97% or better of their

fabric unbroken. The immediate terrain is semi-arid. The briefing files inform me this is typical

of the planet. My track links purr among themselves as they grind through scrub vegetation and

the friable soil, carrying me to my assigned mission.

There is a cataclysmic fuel-air explosion to the east behind me. The glare is visible for 5.3

seconds, and the ground will shake for many minutes as shock waves echo through the planetary

mantle.

Had my human superiors so chosen, I could be replacing Saratoga at the spearhead of the

attack.

The rear elements of the infantry are in sight now. They look like dung beetles in their hard

suits, crawling backward beneath a rain of shrapnel. I am within range of their low-power

communications net. "Hold what you got, troops," orders the unit's acting commander. "Big

Brother's come to help!"

I am not Big Brother. I am Maldon, a Mark XXX Bolo of the 3rd Battalion, Dinochrome

Brigade. The lineage of our unit goes back to the 2nd South Wessex Dragoons. In 1944, we broke

the last German resistance on the path to Falaise—though we traded our flimsy Cromwells

against the Tigers at a ration of six to one to do it.

The citizens do not need to know what the cost is. They need only to know that the mission

has been accomplished. The battle honors welded to my turret prove that I have always

accomplished my mission.

Baen Books By Keith Laumer

The Retief Series

Retief and the Rascals

Reward for Retief

Retief's War

Retief and the Warlords

Retief: Diplomat at Arms

Retief: Envoy to New Worlds

Retief of the CDT

Retief to the Rescue

Retief and the Pangalactic Pageant of Pulchritrude

Retief in the Ruins

The Compleat Bolo

Alien Minds

Dinosaur Beach

A Plague of Demons

The Ultimax Man

Zone Yellow

Judson's Eden

Time Trap

The Stars Must Wait

Star Treasure

Earthblood

(with Rosel George Brown)

Bolos: Honor of the Regiment

LOST LEGION

S.M. Stirling

"Shit," Captain McNaught said.

The map room of Firebase Villa had been dug into the soft friable rock with explosives, then

topped with sheet steel and sandbags. It smelled of sweat and bad coffee and electronic

components, and the sandbags in the dog-leg entrance were still ripped where a satchel charge—a

stick grenade in a three-pound ball of plastique—had been thrown during the attack six months

ago.

"Captain?" the communications specialist said.

"Joy, wonder, unconfined happiness, shit," the officer snarled, reading the printout again.

"Martins, get in here!"

Lieutenant Martins ducked through the entrance of the bunker and flipped up the faceplate of

her helmet. The electronics in the crystal sandwich would have made the bunker as bright as the

tropical day outside, but also would have turned her face to a nonreflective curve. Human

communication depends on more than words alone to carry information, as anyone who meets

face-to-face for the first time after telephone conversations learns.

"News?" she said.

"Look." He handed over the paper.

"Aw, shit."

"My commandante, is this the right time for the raid?"

Miguel Chavez turned and fired a long burst. The muzzle blast of the AK-74 was deafening

in the confined space of the cave. The other guerilla's body pitched backwards and slammed into

the coarse limestone wall, blood trailing down past fossilized seashells a hundred and twenty

million years old. Pink intestine bulged through the torn fatigues, and the fecal odor was

overwhelming.

None of the other guerilla commanders moved, but sweat glistened on their high-cheeked

faces. Outside the sounds of the jungle night—and the camp—were stilled for an instant. Sound

gradually returned to normal. Two riflemen ducked inside the low cave and dragged the body

away by the ankles.

"The Glorious Way shall be victorious!" Chavez said. "We shall conquer!"

The others responded with a shout and a clenched-fist salute.

"I know," Chavez went on, "that some of our comrades are weary. They say: The colossus of

the North is reeling. The gringo troops are withdrawing. Why not hide and wait? Let the enemy's

internal contradictions win for us. We have fought many years, against the compradore puppet

regime and then against the imperialist intervention force.

"Comrades," he went on, "this is defeatism. When the enemy retreats, we advance. The

popular masses must see that the enemy are withdrawing in defeat. They must see that the

People's Army of the Glorious Way has chased the gringos from the soil of San Gabriel. Then

they will desert the puppet regime, which has attempted to regroup behind the shelter of the

imperialist army.

"Our first objective," he went on, "is to interdict the resupply convoy from the coast. We will

attack at—"

"Yeah, it's nothing but indigs," Martins said, keeping her voice carefully neutral. "The

indigs, and you and me. That's a major part of the problem."

Will you look at that mother, she thought.

The new tank was huge. Just standing beside it made her want to step back; it wasn't right for

a self-propelled object to be this big.

The Mark III was essentially a four-sided pyramid with the top lopped off, but the simple

outline was bent and smoothed where the armor was sloped for maximum deflection; and jagged

where sensor-arrays and weapons jutted from the brutal massiveness of the machine. Beneath

were two sets of double tracks, each nearly six feet broad, each supported on eight interleaved

road wheels. Between them they underlay nearly half the surface of the vehicle. She laid a hand

on the flank, and the quivering, slightly greasy feel of live machinery came through her fingerless

glove, ~vibrating up her palm to the elbow.

"So we don't have much in the way of logistics," she went on. Try fucking none. Just her and

the Captain and eighty effectives, and occasionally they got spare parts and ammo through from

what was supposed to be headquarters down here on the coast. "Believe me, up in the boonies

mules are high-tech these days. We're running our UATVs"—Utility All Terrain Vehicles—"on

kerosene from lamps cut with the local slash, when someone doesn't drink it before we get it."

The tank commander's name was Vinatelli; despite that he was pale and blond and a little

plump, his scalp almost pink through the close-cropped hair. He looked like a Norman Rockwell

painting as he grinned at her and slapped the side of his tank. He also looked barely old enough to

shave.

"Oh, no problem. I know things have gotten a little disorganized—"

Yeah, they had to use artillery to blast their way back into New York after the last riots, she

thought.

"—but we won't be hard on your logistics. This baby has the latest, ultra-top-secret-burn-

before-reading-then-shoot-yourself stuff.

"Ionic powerplant." At her blank look, he expanded: "Ion battery. Most compact power

source ever developed—radical stuff, ma'am. Ten years operation at combat loads; and you can

recharge from anything, sunlight included. That's a little diffuse, but we've got five acres of

photovol screen in a dispenser. Markee"—he blushed when she raised a brow at the nickname—

"can go anywhere, including under water.

"We've got a weapons mix like you wouldn't believe, everything from antipersonnel to air

defense. The Mark III runs its own diagnostics, it drives itself, its onboard AI can perform about

fifteen or twenty combat tasks without anybody in the can. Including running patrols. We've got

maps of every inch of terrain in the hemisphere, and inertial and satellite systems up the wazoo,

so we can perform fire-support or any of that good shit all by ourselves. Then there's the armor.

Synthetic molecules, long-chain ferrous-chrome alloy, density-enhanced and pretty well immune

to anything but another Mark III."

Bethany Martins ran a hand through her close-cropped black hair. It came away wet with

sweat; the Atlantic coast lowlands of San Gabriel were even hotter than the interior plateau, and

much damper, to which the capital of Ciudad Roco added its own peculiar joys of mud, rotting

garbage and human wastes—the sewer system had given up the ghost long ago, about the time

the power grid did. Sweat was trickling down inside her high-collared suit of body ~armor as

well, and chafing everywhere. Prickly heat was like poverty in San Gabriel, a constant condition

of life to be lived with rather than a problem to be solved.

She looked around. The plaza up from the harbor—God alone knew how they'd gotten the

beast ashore in that crumbling madhouse, probably sunk the ships and then drove it out—was full

of a dispirited crowd. Quite a few were gawking at the American war-machine, despite the

ungentle urging of squads of Order and Security police to move along. Others were concentrating

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摘要：

BOLOS:HONOROFTHEREGIMENTCREATEDBYKEITHLAUMEREDITEDBYBILLFAWCETTFout!Onbekendeschakeloptie-instructie.Thisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental.Copyright©1993byBillFawcettandAssociates"LostLegion"copyrigh...

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