Eagle Station

Startled, Lavrentyev looked in that direction… and swore. One of the other cargo landers blocked his view of that section of the rim wall. He shook his head in consternation. Another age-old military maxim had proved true. His “brilliant” plan to hold their ground and fight from cover hadn’t survived first contact with the enemy. He jumped up, readying his autocannon. “Yanin! Come with me!”

Brad McLanahan clambered awkwardly up the last few yards of the slope and scrambled out onto the plateau. He dropped to one knee and scanned his surroundings. Damaged sensors created patches of darkness across his field of vision. But he could still see well enough to make out a bleak landscape dotted with grounded spacecraft, a weird-looking, off-white cylindrical habitat module, and, most important of all, the three raised mounds of dirt and rock topped by the enemy’s radars and plasma rail gun.

Microwaves suddenly lashed his CLAD. Through the neural link, the sensation translated into something like needles stabbing his chest. Warning, X-band radar has locked on, his computer reported.

“Ah, crap,” Brad muttered to himself. He’d hoped to come in under that radar emplacement’s horizon… but his navigation system had fritzed out a couple of minutes ago and he’d obviously misjudged his exact position. This robot was dying under him, as system after system shut down — either because of damage or because its power demands were too high for the juice left in his surviving batteries and fuel cells. On the other hand, he finally had a clear line of sight to their mission’s primary target.

He raised his 25mm autocannon. His computer silhouetted the stubby cylinder and starfish-shaped supercapacitor array of the Russian plasma rail gun. Without waiting, he squeezed off a shot. And another. And then, shifting his aim slightly, he fired a third time… all in fractions of a second. Three brief, blue-tinted flashes strobed across his vision.

Hit twice, the plasma gun’s cylindrical firing tube shattered. Brad’s third armor-piercing round tore through the weapon’s supercapacitors. They blew up. A huge orange flash lit the plateau — temporarily overloading his damaged visual sensors. When they cleared, Brad saw that the plasma gun had been turned into a heap of half-melted slag.

“Not exactly an earth-shattering ka-boom,” he said with satisfaction. “But it’ll do.” He opened a secure channel to Nadia’s robot. “Wolf Two to Three, the enemy’s plasma gun is kaput.”

Warning, movement alert, his computer blurted. Two hostiles to the right front. Range close, two hundred yards. The enemy combat machines had suddenly appeared out of one of his sensor blind spots.

“Damn it,” Brad growled. He swung his autocannon toward the charging Russians. Too late. They were already firing their own weapons.

A series of hammer blows across his chest and arms smashed him backward. He toppled over the edge of the crater rim in a spray of torn armor. As the robot tumbled and rolled down the steep slope in a boiling avalanche of loose rock and dust, he was slammed against the sides of the cockpit — thrown around like a rag doll tossed into a blender. Red failure warnings shrieked through his dazed, pain-filled mind. Total hydraulic system failure. Fire control system inoperative. Life-support systems failure. Neural link deteriorating. Multiple hull breaches.

“Oh, Christ,” Brad mumbled, barely conscious. Now he could hear the high-pitched whistle of his oxygen venting out into space. He fumbled desperately for the helmet he’d stowed somewhere in the cockpit… just as his neural link went dead… and everything went black.

Lavrentyev slewed to a halt next to the edge of the rim wall and peered over. The American combat robot lay motionless in a twisted heap several hundred meters down the slope, half-buried by the debris torn loose by its uncontrolled fall. Quickly, he queried his KLVM’s sensors. Power readings?

None, the computer assured him.

“Did we kill it?” Yanin asked. The younger cosmonaut had his robot facing back the way they’d come, ready to open fire at the first sign of movement anywhere among the spacecraft and other installations dotting the plateau.

“We did,” Lavrentyev answered. He breathed out in relief. “That one’s just wreckage. It’s no longer a threat.”

“So that’s one down,” Yanin said. “Out of how many?”

Lavrentyev shrugged, feeling more confident now. The American war machines were not invincible after all. “They couldn’t have crammed very many of those robots inside their lander,” he pointed out. “Maybe only two total.”