Warstrider: Jackers (Warstrider Series, Book Three)

by Ian Douglas

  The Nagas, it was now known, once they'd converted much of the crust of a planet to their own purposes, entered a reproductive phase, hurling spore pods by the billions into space on intensely powerful magnetic fluxes. Most of those pods were lost in vastness, but a scant few, guided by biologically programmed instincts homing on heat and magnetic fields, reached the worlds of other stars after millions of years of dreamless sleep adrift. Touching down, they tunneled into virgin crust and began the cycle anew.

  But from the weirdly inverted Naga point of view, it wasn't that way at all. The universe was a Void surrounded by endless depths of rock; so far as the Nagas themselves were concerned, their voyages across interstellar space were mere excursions from one wall of a rock-walled gulf to another . . . and the eventless ages separating launch from planetfall and rebirth literally no time at all.

  Bracing herself, she reached in once more with her comel-clad hand. . . .

  Excitement. Shells of the not-Selfs-that-know move within the Void.

  Katya furrowed her brow as she leaned closer, trying to decipher the torrent of alien thoughts.

  Enemy . . . the enemy? The enemy . . . is coming, and >>self<< must be protected. . . .

  She concentrated on key thoughts. Soon, the Naga would be taken into the Void once more—Wonder! Soaring, dizzying emptiness stretching out forever on every side!—and transported to another world—What is "world?"—where it would be allowed to rejoin a Self that would have no knowledge of humans.

  Where is . . . not-Self-that-knows-called-Dev?

  Pressing back frustration, Katya tried to concentrate. Fred, a tiny fraction of its Eriduan "parent," possessed limited intelligence. Talking with it was like trying to talk with a small and ofttimes singlemindedly stubborn child.

  Focusing her thoughts, she tried to explain that Dev was someplace else, another world.

  What is world?

  Where is Dev?

  What is love?

  That last startled her, and she pulled back again. God, what had Fred managed to pick up from the currents whipping back and forth across the surface of her brain?

  Where is Dev?

  What is love-Dev?

  Damn! She liked Dev . . . but didn't love him. True, she was worried about him, about the fate of the mission to Athena, but . . .

  "Oh, it's just you. Where's the general?"

  Katya whirled at the sound of the voice, her arm pulling free from the Naga with a wet slurp. "Gok, Pol! What the hell are you doing here?"

  Pol Danver was one of Sinclair's senior aides, a chubby, self-important man who, Katya sensed, resented her presence, her violation of his territory.

  "I have the same clearance you do," he said. "Listen, I can't find Travis." He emphasized the first name, as though proving a point. "Someone said he was down here with you."

  "Hardly. He's on his way to Henry," she told him, naming a town northwest of Jefferson, in a valley high amid the rugged, wooded vastness of the Silverside Cascades.

  "Huh. The who-was is we're pulling out."

  "We are. The general said to carry out Plan Kappa, then get the hell out. His words, Pol."

  Danver looked stubborn. "I'll need authorization for that, Colonel. You understand I can't simply take your word for it."

  "It's already downloaded," she snapped back, pointing at a computer access panel on the wall. Danver had been grating on her since she'd come here, and she was in no mood to coddle him. "Palm it for yourself."

  The aide hesitated, opened his mouth as though to say something more, then whirled, touched a contact, and stepped through the dissolving door.

  Danver, Katya thought, was a jouleech. The word, originally coined to describe a Maian powervore that attached itself to sources of electrical or thermal energy, had come to mean people like Danver who thrived on being close to the centers of political power. His use of Sinclair's first name, for instance, was little more than a means of shouting I'm important.

  It was a kind of flattery, she supposed, to be disliked by such a man. Within the rather informal structure of New American politics, Travis Sinclair was not in fact anything more than one of the several dozen delegates representing the North American colony on the planet. In the real world, however, and beyond the posturings and public imagings of Congress, Sinclair was one of a small handful of men and women who were almost single-handedly responsible for creating the Confederation. As chief architect of the Declaration of Reason, Sinclair, more than any other man, could be considered the spirit, the motivating force behind the entire rebellion.

  It was only natural that such power should attract people like Danver.

  Composing herself, Katya removed the comel and replaced it in its container. She wasn't sure what she'd managed to communicate to Fred, but at least it was anticipating another voyage through space. Danver was gone by the time she left the chamber.

  In Franklin Park, Lassiter's giant image still gestured and mouthed silent platitudes. It looked as though the ViRnews services were playing part of his address to Congress, from the moments just before news of the Imperial's arrival had reached him. God, Katya thought . . . was the ViRnews media actually downloading that to the public? That was exactly the sort of defeatist propaganda the Imperials would love to see disseminated throughout New America.

  What would be next, she wondered, a call for surrender?

  Her task here done, she left. Returning to the Sony Building, she completed the transfer of essential computer records to Henry. Five hours later, after battling through the crowds clogging the city, she rejoined her unit at Port Jefferson.

  Twenty-eight hours after dropping out of the K-T plenum, the first elements of Ohka Squadron entered close orbit around New America. Eighteen hours after that, Donryu made orbit as well, close-escorted by her retinue of cruisers and transports.

  By that time, the destroyers Hatakaze and Yakaze had already docked with the station, and their complements of black-armored Imperial Marines had stormed aboard. There'd been no resistance. All local militia and Confederation troops had withdrawn hours before, escaping in small ships that were now scattering through the system, or riding ascraft down to New America's surface, where several sizable armored units were beginning to congregate.

  The marines had orders to secure the station and maintain control but to leave the civilian population alone. Except for a few, inevitable incidents—the initial report downloaded to Kawashima from the station commander included mention of eight dead civilians, forty-five reports of theft or looting, twelve rapes, and one marine murdered by one of his victims—those orders had been carried out precisely. Kawashima was well aware that his presence here was to be one of controlled power.

  There was no denying that he wielded terrible power over the 26 Draconis System and its inhabitants. A massive bombardment from orbit, or simply turning Donryu's searing plasma drives toward the planet from a hundred kilometers up, could exterminate every trace of life on New America. But such a brute-force approach would be counterproductive. New America was one of the Hegemony's richest and most productive worlds; more, it was a rarity within the Shichiju, a world that had not required terraforming for humans to live unaided on its surface. If Kawashima captured it by reducing it to a radioactive desert, he would have lost . . . and in the losing been completely disgraced.

  He would employ terror tactics where necessary, certainly, but he would employ them selectively, and with extreme precision. New America's Highport would become his orbital base of operations, though, for now at least, he would remain in his headquarters aboard Donryu, parked a few kilometers beyond the station.

  The next step was as obvious as it was necessary.

  Kawashima would have to capture Port Jefferson.

  Chapter 8

  A warstrider's chief strength lies neither in its armor nor its weaponry, but in its flexibility. With legs instead of tracks, wheels, or jets, with a sealed hull and self-contained life-support system that permit operations in environments
ranging from corrosively poisonous to hard vacuum, the warstrider can go almost literally anywhere. Warstriders have climbed mountains and penetrated forests inaccessible to tracked vehicles, have waded swamps, have even operated in the depths of the sea, though their mobility is necessarily limited in such environments.

  —Armored Combat: A Modern Military Overview

  Heisaku Ariyoshi

  C.E. 2523

  Katya was receiving very little data from the outside world, had been virtually isolated for the past four hours. Her hull sensors were sending in a steady flow of information on pressure, temperature, and the like, but the data were unchanging, confirmation merely that though hell was rampaging across Port Jefferson's fabricrete apron, the seas just off the stony beaches of Cape Dickson were quiet.

  Her only feed from the world above came through a tiny sensor packet bobbing on the surface of the water five meters above her head, connected to her RS-64D Warlord by a slender fiber-optic cable. The sensor pack was too small to give her more than low-res visual and access to the combat radio frequencies, and it increased her feeling of smothered isolation. Old dreads—of darkness, of being buried alive—stirred uneasily just below the fringes of her conscious thoughts.

  Sometimes she wished she had an Imperial Marine's mastery of Kokorodo, the Way of the Mind. She'd been exposed to the discipline, of course, during her training for the Hegemony Guard, enough to allow her to focus her thoughts on mnemonic codes. Nothing she'd learned, however, would take away the raw, nerve-grating fear . . . especially in the long wait before a battle.

  Four hours earlier she'd taken command of thirty-six warstriders, one quarter of the 1st Confederation Rangers' entire complement, and under the sky-screening cover of billowing smoke clouds had waded into the steep-bottomed, high-tide waters off Cape Dickson. There, the striders had released their sensor packets and hunkered down to wait. The waters, if calm, were murky, heavy with silt backwashed from the surf along the beach. Tides on New America, prodigious with huge Columbia in the sky, were nonetheless ponderously slow. World danced with moon here in a lockstep two-to-three ratio—a pair of 5.2-standard-day orbits of Columbia to three of New America's eighty-three-hour days. At low tide, Cape Dickson rose above kilometer upon empty kilometer of wet, weed-choked tidal flat; at high tide, the surf lapped nearly to the perimeter of the port. Luck had begun the Imperial assault before the tide was in full ebb. Had the invaders delayed their attack by so much as another couple of orbits of their fleet, Katya's plan might not have worked.

  That fear, at least, was ended now. The fighters had appeared, and eighty minutes later the first of the striderpods had streaked in out of the west, shedding foil chaff and decoys, arrowing in toward the port on flickering white tails of plasma.

  Thank God that the last of the shuttles bearing key members of the Confederation government—and Fred, still secure in his travel pod—had rendezvoused hours ago with the Transluxus, a big, fifth-generation K-T drive passenger liner owned and operated by the pro-rebellion Highstar lines. Most of the independence-minded delegates ought to be safely on their way to Mu Herculis by now, escorted by a precious few of New America's interstellar ships.

  General Sinclair and the senior military leaders, however, had remained on the colony world. New America was too vital to Confederation interests, as a base, as a symbol of resistance, as a world, simply to surrender it to the Imperium without a fight.

  A victory here, at the spaceport, before the Imperial assault forces achieved a firm beachhead, might be enough to delay the enemy's attack indefinitely, as at Eridu.

  It had better. It was all they had to work with now.

  "Ready," she transmitted, the coded signal flashed to the other bobbing sensor packs in the sea around her. Her plan called for close coordination and precisely calculated timing. The counterattack would go nowhere if it was launched in spluttering fits and starts, a few warstriders emerging from the sea at a time. Peering from her vantage point, bobbing on the waves a hundred meters from shore, she waited until she was certain the Imperial assault wave had grounded.

  It was time. "Forward!"

  Through her tenuous link with the surface, she could see very little of the shore a hundred meters ahead, so shrouded was it in billowing clouds of smoke. She fixed her gaze on one particular part of the beach, flexed her powerful legs, and started moving.

  "Take it, Ken," she told Sublieutenant Ken Maubry, her number-two in the three-slot Warlord. Number-three was her weapons tech, Warrant Officer Francine DelRey.

  "Yes, sir," Maubry replied, and control of the Warlord passed smoothly to him. Maubry was a raw newbie, newly recruited from some town in the Newamie outback. Francine had been Hegemony Guard for four years before she'd elected to join the rebels . . . and an enlisted trooper, a "crunchie," in the New American militia for three years before that. Katya was counting on Francine's steel-nerved steadiness handling the strider's weapons so that she, Katya, could concentrate on running the counterattack.

  Though Ken was jacking the machine toward the beach, she could still feel through the Warlord's sensors. The ground was steep beneath her massively flanged feet, a mix of course-grained sand and stones smoothed to pebbles by the tides. Progress was painfully slow as the nearly sixty-ton machine dragged its massive shell through the water. She could feel the tide's ebb-flow current on her skin, clutching at her, dragging at her with each step forward like a cold and sluggish wind.

  Then the Warlord's upper works broke the surface, exposing submerged sensors as water cascaded down the machine's curved flanks, and Katya's awareness was once again flooded by light and motion and noise. She reeled in the sensor pack with a thought, then pulled down a quick scan of the entire panorama. The coastline ahead was shrouded in smoke and the more ominous, drifting gray patches of ground-hugging fog that marked nano-disassembler clouds. Flashes, like muted lightning, flared and stabbed through the mist, accompanied by thunderous rumbles, but so far there was no direct sign of the enemy.

  Progress was faster now as the Warlord's torso cleared the water. The machine plowed ahead, trailing a churning wake. Movement flashed, high and to the left; the Warlord's upper torso canted and turned, weapons tracking . . . then discharging in twin bolts of blue light from the arm-mounted proton CPGs. Locked in the flashing embrace of a targeting cursor within Katya's ViRdisplay, a Ko-125 Akuma flared sun-brilliant for an instant, then disintegrated, smoke-streaming fragments descending on the sea like a fiery rain.

  "Never mind the ascraft," Katya warned Francine. "Save it for the heavies ashore."

  "Sure, Katya," the weapons officer replied. "That bird was radar-locking us, though."

  "Nice shooting. But if you have to bird-shoot, use the hivel. I want full-power on the main weapons when we wade ashore."

  "Yes, sir."

  Gouts of water rose to either side; steam boiled away as lasers grazed the surface. To left and right, a ragged line stretching for a kilometer in either direction, the rest of Katya's reserve heavy company splashed out of water that now broke and curled about the warstriders' feet. Wading out of the surf and onto the steeply sloping beach, they entered the wet intertidal zone that had been submerged a few hours earlier, but which now was open and exposed. Rocks cracked and popped beneath the great weight of her RS-64's feet; a stray shell whined lonesomely overhead. Battle fog swirled about the advancing machines, cloaking them as their surface nano shifted from water-dark to smoke gray.

  Movement . . . nano-shrouded, but large and heavy. The Warlord's CPGs barked again; steam exploded from a tumble-down of water-smoothed boulders. A laser flashed in return, an emerald sparkle in the fog-heavy air. Katya felt the beam hit. Pain was not transmitted through the link, of course, but the sensation was one of being lightly punched, a solid thump against her side.

  Fire! She willed the return volley, though she didn't verbalize the order. Francine returned fire with left-right-left hammerblows from the CPGs, a salvo of rockets from the Warlord's ventral Mark II
I weapons pod.

  The target, revealed now as a KR-86 Tachi, was half the Warlord's bulk, lightly armored, built for speed rather than endurance. Explosions savaged its side and dorsal surfaces, gouged holes through layered duralloy, smashed the left leg motivator assemblies in a fine spray of broken parts. Another CPG struck home, a bolt of blue-white light that melted through the machine's left side. Oily smoke boiled from the crater, where wires and circuitry glowed red-hot. The Tachi twisted right, shuddered, and fell, right leg twitching spastically with the final nerve discharges of its dying pilot.

  The AI in Katya's Warlord keened warning: an unidentified strider to the rear. Maubry spun in time to catch another Tachi rising from the water, twenty meters offshore. Evidently, some of the incoming assault striders had undershot or overshot the narrow cape that was their target and come down in the sea. Francine hit with a twin laser-CPG blast that sent great clouds of steam boiling into the sky and ripped the right arm from its joint. The Tachi swung fast, trying to bring its electron cannon to bear, but Francine completed the destruction with a long burst from the hivel cannon, slamming fifty rounds through the Tachi's armor and punching it back beneath the rolling tumble of the surf.

  "Watch yourselves!" Katya warned over her company's tactical channel. "We've got some with us in the water!"

  To her right, another Warlord, jacked by Captain Vic Hagan and his crew, lumbered onto the sand, water streaming from its armor. Nanoflage blurred its outlines and color, save for a bright patch of nose art—a shaggy blond caveman shouldering a club beneath the legend Mission Link. Hagan's strider had just smashed a third Tachi at the water's edge.

  "Hey, Boss!" Hagan's voice rasped across the tactical lasercom channel. "Easy pickings!" Katya's command Warlord was The Boss, though no nose art accompanied the name.

  "These guys were stragglers," she replied. "It'll be tougher with the guys already ashore."