Keith Laumer - Bolo 01 - Honor Of The Regiment.pdf - Keith Laumer - widez2

Bolo: Honor of the Regiment

Table of Contents

LOST LEGION

CAMELOT

THE LEGACY OF LEONIDAS

PLOUGHSHARE

GHOSTS

THE GHOST OF RESARTUS

OPERATION DESERT FOX

AS OUR STRENGTH LESSENS

BOLOS: HONOR OF THE REGIMENT

CREATED BY KEITH LAUMER

EDITED BY BILL FAWCETT

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

Page 1

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

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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

Page 3

"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—"

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"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

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Keith Laumer - Bolo 01 - Honor Of The Regiment.pdf

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