Free Bolo Brigade by William H Keith

she fired her main air-breathing jets, decelerating sharply, as G piled upon G and her speed bled away in jets of superheated steam.
    Then she struck the ground, bellying in with a grinding crunch and a geysering cascade of rock and earth. She felt the savage, flesh-ripping joy of completion, of success. She was down, safe, intact . . . and still as sane as she could be after her enforced confinement.
    Battle-lust surged within her, hot and pounding and urgent. She began searching for an enemy against which she could turn it.
     

Chapter Six
    For a moment there was no sound save the sharp, intermittent ping of cooling metal and briefly, the sonic-boom rumble of another pod arrowing in overhead. The Hunter had excavated a small gully as it slid into the ground, blasting a crater into the spot where it had finally come to rest. With a whine, panels at the rear dilated wide, aerodyne pods split open, and the Hunter rose from the steaming pit on skeletal steel-and-ceramic legs that unfolded beneath it like jointed, telescoping stilts.
    Fully combat-deployed, the Hunter stood perhaps five times the height of an adult Malach, the manta-body sleek, armor-plated, and wedge-prowed, a shape much, in fact, like a Malach's head, bristling with the spikes and needles of its main and secondary armament clusters. The legs were digitigrade, like those of organic Malach, the joints thrust backward, the feet splayed into durasteel-sheathed slasher claws. The paint scheme was a light-drinking black that eliminated shadows and made the machine's overall shape difficult to discern in daylight, and nearly invisible at night. That paint drank radar frequencies as easily as it drank light; Hunters were difficult to see, and even more difficult to track and target-lock.
    The military base spotted from the air lay approximately twelve thousand erucht to the south, uncomfortably close by the standards of Malach mobile warfare . . . but if the Hunter Pack had truly achieved surprise, that closeness might translate into advantage if they could slash and gut the local defenders before they could organize a proper defense.
    Pivoting on spindly legs, Schaagrasch scanned the immediate area. A number of autochthons were approaching from the southwest, and she moved swiftly to meet them.
    For the Malach warrior, the Hunter was a kind of second body. Suspended inside a close-fitting harness, her body closely embraced by thousands of sensors and position feeds, she could walk, run, stoop, and leap, her movements in the harness translated into movements of her teleoperated steed. A striding gait against the enveloping pressure of her leggings became the ground-eating sprint of the Hunter; thrusts and movements of her arms and gestures of her hands and claws aimed, locked, and fired various of her weapons or triggered the bursts of superheated air that could send the Hunter sailing along in low, gliding leaps. Cameras and other sensors embedded in the heavily armored outer hull gave her very nearly all-round vision inside the control cell, and her computer gave constantly updated enhancements of the view, blended with identifying alphanumerics to help her sort rapidly through the torrent of battle information.
    At the moment, light levels were low, though not uncomfortably so. There was more than enough light from the sky to navigate by, though Schaagrasch cut in full infrared imaging to provide the maximum informational input.
    Smashing through a thick-growing wall of tangled vegetation, she emerged at the top of a low ridge, her legs angled sharply back to keep the Hunter's body just a couple of erucht above the ground. Movement snared her full attention, along with the flare of color signifying multiple heat sources. The autochthons were scrambling up the ridge from the opposite side, two eights of them, at least, so many that it was difficult to sort them out one from another, their body heat showing as strangely shaped blobs of color against the cooler