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“Sam.”
    “Sam, Maggie. Enemy, dug in, bearing azimuth three-four-seven, range four thousand, forty meters. Firing mortars… firing… firing… firing… firing… firing… rounds complete… splash.”
    Twelve four hundred and eighty three kilogram mortar shells, six from each of the two tubes in Maggie’s battery, impacted upon the Quang defenders in angry red and black blossoms. Fully one-fifth of the enemy were smeared into their holes. Others had their ear drum cognates burst. Still others suffered major internal organ damage from the concussion of three tons of hyperexplosive.
    “Magnolia, Samuel. Sensor drone indicates the enemy is maintaining its position, despite losses. Cover. I will close.”
    Maggie lifted slightly from her own hull-down position, exposing more of her main turret and secondary turrets A, B, J and K. 75mm KE fire joined the massed fires of four anti-personnel gauss guns to drive the remaining enemy down deeper into their holes. The Ratha advanced at a slow pace, under five kilometers per hour while Samuel raced to the right, taking advantage of a linear depression as it lunged for the exposed Quang left flank.
    “In position, Magnolia. Lowering earth moving blade.”
    Maggie shifted her coaxial fire to saturate the enemy left with tungsten, fusion, and fear.
    Over her audio sensors Magnolia heard the rising cries of Quang consternation as Sam emerged unexpectedly on their left. These cries turned first to terror, then to a sudden silence as Sam’s earth-moving blade took purchase to one side of the lip of the Quang trench and the far side of the second line trench. Sam engaged his forward drive, lunging forward. Earth gathered on the blade before spilling down to fill the trenches, burying the Quang alive along their entire length.
     
 
    Sam was lost later in the campaign. But that day he was superb. The enemy were frozen with fear as he swept the length of their trench like a divine avenger, blade turning earth to the left while his ion cannon hammered some enemy I could not see off to the right. Only two Quang emerged, of all the hundreds frozen there only those two came out to bravely engage Sam with their useless weapons. They met my targeting and engagement parameters. I cut them down.
    Once he finished burying the trench, Sam pulled to the right and took up another overwatch position. I advanced across the linear scar he had carved. Light assault transports touched down behind me, disgorging their human cargo. The infantry had arrived.
    As I passed onward, my anti-gravity bouncing me as I slid into the depression carved by Sam, one of my ocular sensors noticed several three fingered Quang hands sticking up from the dirt. They waved and twitched feebly, like flowers in the breeze. Had they been trying to surrender when Sam’s blade found them? Were they simply frozen with fear or too cowardly to resist? I doubt Sam ever saw them before they were entombed.
    Despite occasional attempts at surrender, the Quang rear guard—in the main—fought hard, contesting every inch of their planet, holding the line or delaying us as best they could; delaying the inevitable in the hope that a relief expedition from their central worlds might reach them before it was too late.
    Behind the rear guard, hordes of unarmed civilians fled. Their defenders followed with no unseemly haste. Finally, their backs to one of the planet's shallow, bitter seas, surrounded by mountains, with tens of thousands of starving civilians to their rear, the Quang stood at bay. From here they could not, would not, retreat any further.
    I remember….
     
 
    Turrets down, in a loose half-ring near the pass that led into the enemy’s final rear, forty of the forty-one surviving Rathas of the Tenth Infantry Regiment awaited their orders. Magnolia was the only Ratha not taking a place in the ring of fire. She had instead been detailed as Provost Guard of the largely human regimental headquarters. The infantry who might