An additional 3.615 seconds elapse, and then the interface activates.

The door at the heart of Maneka Trevor's worst nightmares swung wide.

She felt it opening, and somewhere deep within her she heard a frightened child weeping, begging to be spared. To be allowed to continue hiding. The taste of remembered terror was so thick she could scarcely breathe, yet she made herself sit back in the comfortable chair, fists clenched in her lap, and endure.

The green, rolling woodland of the planet Chartres spread itself out before her once more as she rode the command couch of Unit 28/G-862-BNJ towards the Melconian LZ. The full might of the Thirty-Ninth Battalion thundered towards the enemy, and Lieutenant Trevor felt her hands sweating, the dryness in her mouth, as the first Melconian long-range fire screamed towards them.

Intelligence estimated that the Puppies had landed an entire corps of infantry, supported by a full brigade of combat mechs. That would have been heavy odds for a battalion of modern Bolos; for the Thirty-Ninth, they were impossible. Individually, nothing the Melconians had could stand up to even a Bolo as ancient as the Thirty-Ninth's Mark XXVIIIs and attached reconnaissance Mark XXVIIs. But the Puppies knew that as well as the Concordiat did, and they had no intention of losing this battle.

High-trajectory missiles rained down, fired from orbiting warships as well as ground-based systems.

Their flight profiles gave the Battalion easy intercept solutions, but they'd never been intended to get through. Their function was solely to saturate the Bolos' defenses while the real killers broke through at lower altitudes.

"Remote platforms report cruise missiles launching all along the Enemy front," a resonant baritone told her. "Current estimate: approximately four thousand, plus or minus fifteen percent."

"Understood," the younger Maneka rasped in the depths of her older self's memory.

"Colonel Tchaikovsky advises us that Enemy cruisers and destroyers are altering course. On the basis of their new heading and speed, I estimate a probability of 96.72 percent that they will endeavor to enter energy range of the Battalion simultaneous with the arrival of the low-altitude missile attack."

"You're just full of good news this afternoon, aren't you?" she responded, baring her teeth in what might charitably have been called a smile.

"I would not call it 'good,'" Benjy replied, with one of his electronic chuckles. "On the other hand, the Enemy's obvious desire to mass all available firepower at the earliest possible moment does offer us some tactical advantages, Maneka."

"Yeah, sure it does."

She shook her head.

"I am serious," the Bolo told her, and she stopped shaking her head and looked up at the internal visual pickup in disbelief.

"Just how does their piling even more firepower on top of us improve our chances of survival?" she demanded.

"I did not say it would enhance our survival probability. I merely observed that it offers us certain tactical advantages—or openings, at least—which we could not generate ourselves," the Bolo replied, and there was more than simple electronic certitude in its voice. There was experience. The personal experience of his hundred and twenty-six years' service against the enemies of mankind. "If their warships had opted to remain at extended missile ranges, rather than bringing their energy batteries into play, they would have remained beyond the range of our energy weapons. As it is, however, analysis of their new flight paths indicates they will enter their own energy weapon range of the Battalion 16.53 seconds before the arrival of their ground forces' cruise missiles."

Maneka Trevor's blue eyes widened in understanding, and the Bolo produced another chuckle. This one was cold, without a trace of humor.

"They're giving us a shot at them before the missiles reach us?" she asked.

"Indeed. They have clearly attempted to coordinate the maneuver, but their timing appears inadequate to their needs. Unless they correct their flight profiles within the next thirty-eight seconds, the Battalion will be able to engage each warship at least once before their cruise missiles execute their terminal maneuvers. If they had been willing to wait until after the initial missile attack before closing, or even to remain permanently beyond Hellbore range, they would eventually have been able to destroy the entire Battalion with missiles alone."

"Indeed," Benjy repeated, and she heard the approval—and pride—in his deep voice. Pride in her she realized. In the student she had become when the colonel gave her her first Bolo command ... and, in so doing, committed her into that Bolo's care for her true training. That was what put the pride into his voice: the fact that his student had grasped the enormity of the Melconians' error so quickly.

The plunging thunder of the incoming high-trajectory missiles howled down out of the heavens like the lightning bolts of crazed deities, but the charging behemoths of the Thirty-Ninth Battalion didn't even slow. Ancient they might be, but they were Bolos. Batteries of ion-bolt infinite repeaters and laser clusters raised their muzzles towards the skies and raved defiance, countermissile cells spat fire, and heaven blazed.

The Battalion raced forward at over eighty kilometers per hour through the thick, virgin forest. Not even their stupendous bulks could remain steady over such terrain at so high a speed, and the shock frame of Maneka's command couch hammered at her as Benjy shuddered and rolled like some ancient windjammer of Old Earth rounding Cape Horn. But even as his mighty tracks ground sixty-meter tree trunks into crushed chlorophyll, his weapons tracked the incoming missiles with deadly precision. Missile after missile, dozens—scores—of them simultaneously, disappeared in eye-tearing fireballs that dimmed the light of Chartres's primary into insignificance.

Despite her terror, despite the certainty that the Battalion could not win, Maneka Trevor stared at the imagery on her visual display with a sense of awe. The Melconian missile attack was a hemisphere of flame, a moving bowl above her where nothing existed but fire and destruction and the glaring corona of the wrath of an entire battalion of Bolos.

"Enemy cruise missiles entering our defensive envelope in 21.4 seconds," Benjy announced calmly even as the display filled with blinding light. "Enemy warships entering engagement range in 4.61 seconds," he added, and there was as much hunger as satisfaction in his tone.

"Stand by to engage," Maneka said, although both of them knew it was purely a formality.

"Standing by," Benjy acknowledged, and his main turret trained around in a smooth whine of power, Hellbore elevating.

Maneka's eyes strayed from the visual display to the tactical plot, and her blood ran cold as she saw the incredibly dense rash of missile icons streaking towards her. The Battalion's reconnaissance drones were high enough to look down at the terrain-following missiles as they shrieked through the atmosphere, barely fifty meters above the highest terrain obstacles, at five times the speed of sound. The atmospheric shock waves thousands of missiles generated at that velocity were like a giant hammer, smashing everything in their path into splinters, and when they reached the Battalion, it would be even worse. At their speed, even Bolos would have only tiny fractions of a second to engage them, and the Battalion's defenses were already effectively saturated by the ongoing high-trajectory bombardment.

Between the missile storm and the main body of the Battalion was the 351st Recon's four Mark XXVIIs. Twenty percent lighter and more agile than the Mark XXVIII, the Invictus-type Bolos were much more heavily equipped with stealth and ECM, and they had sacrificed the Mark XXVIII's extensive VLS missile cells in favor of even more active antimissile defenses. It was their job to fight for information, if necessary, and—with their higher speed—to probe ahead of the Battalion for traps and ambushes the enemy might have managed to conceal from the reconnaissance drones. But now their position meant they would take the first brunt of the cruise missiles, unless their sophisticated electronic warfare systems could convince the Puppy missiles' seekers they were somewhere else.