Bolo Brigade Read Online Free PDF Page A

Confederation are in green," Wood said. He touched a control on his desk, and one of the green stars momentarily pulsed brighter. "That one's McNair . . . and Muir, of course. McNair IV. Hanging on the ragged edge of damn-all, with nothing beyond but empty."
    Donal pursed his lips but said nothing. Muir had been first of the Strathan Cluster's worlds to be colonized by humans, during the last great wave of colonial expansion along the outlying fringes of the Eastern Arm centuries before. Beyond the cluster, the Arm dwindled away into emptiness. Muir's sky might blaze with crowded suns; but beyond the cluster's ragged boundaries, looking outward from the Arm into the intergalactic night, lay parsec upon empty megaparsec of void, where suns were hauntingly few and far between.
    He wondered if the cluster's location at the end of the Eastern Arm preyed on men's minds here. Phalbin had sounded preoccupied by the emptiness beyond the close, familiar spacelanes of the civilized Galaxy. Wood seemed almost morbidly so.
    "Muir is, technically, at any rate, the capital of the entire Confederation, thirty-six inhabited suns scattered through a volume of some one hundred twenty thousand cubic light years. Communications and travel between those suns, though, can be a mite difficult." White lines appeared throughout the map, a webwork connecting the green points. "Navigation gets tricky in that star jungle. We depend on automated interstellar beacons. When we lose one of those, we can lose contact with some of the other confederacy worlds for months, even years at a time.
    "Our strategic difficulty, of course, is maintaining any kind of coherent political order over the thirty-six inhabited systems that make up the Strathan Confederation. The Confederation Armed Forces are responsible both for protecting us from hostile forces and for keeping the peace on all thirty-six worlds, but it's obviously a lot easier to rush troops to a trouble spot than a Bolo or three. The Mark XVIIIs were split among the most important worlds a long time ago, and no one's ever bothered moving them."
    "Oh, great," Donal said under his breath. A scattered brigade, and uncertain communications. That was just wonderful . . . .
    "We could do more, of course, with more help from the Concordiat," Wood continued, with a sour look that suggested he took Donal's presence on Muir as far too little, too late. "But I gather that the Concordiat is having troubles of its own. We'll get no help from that quarter."
    There could be no answer to that statement. Since the Terran Concordiat had first encountered the out-reaching probes of the Melconian Empire several years ago, relations had been steadily deteriorating. War was coming to the Concordiat, a paroxysm that some were already referring to somewhat apocalytically as "the Last War." The Concordiat's full attention was fixed, not on the Galaxy's remote outer rim, but inward, toward the teeming suns of the galactic core, and the Melconian threat.
    "Have you heard anything about the rumors, sir?" he asked, probing. "About a new and hostile race from outside?"
    "Shoot, Lieutenant. Hang out at the bars in the Kinkaid Strip long enough and you'll hear every wild kind of story there is." The slur that Donal had noted earlier was growing more pronounced now, and the colonel seemed to be having some trouble focusing on his visitor. "I've heard all kinds of rumors. You can pretty much take your pick."
    "General Phalbin thought the whole idea could be discounted. He thinks there's no place out in the Gulf where hostiles could come from."
    "There isn't."
    "Sir, you must know as well as I do that the space between galaxies isn't completely empty. There are planet-bearing suns in the halo. There must be. They're just scattered too thinly to be worth our sending a survey to check them out."
    "Sure. But they're so thinly scattered that it'd be impossible for any race that'd evolved intelligence out there to be able to develop FTL.