by Ian Douglas
The first Xenophobe incursion on Lung Chi occurred thirty years later. Seven years after that, mass evacuations up Lung Chi's sky-el had begun, and Hegemony warstriders were fighting a desperate rearguard action in the foothills of the Xinjiang Shan Mountains. At Lung Synchorbital, a ragtag gaggle of liners, freighters, colony transports, even tugs and ore barges, began gathering to evacuate the colonists coming up the sky-el.
Cameron's squadron was ordered in. One of the great mysteries of the Xenophobes was how they spread from system to system, invading eleven worlds in the past forty years. Contrary to the fictions of popular ViRdramas like Battlefleet, no nonhuman vessel of any kind had ever been seen, despite fleet deployments, ground searches, satellite networks, and scanner arrays of every kind. Rumor had it that Xeno ships were invisible, though they'd never shown that kind of technological magic on the ground.
As always, there'd been no sign of Xenophobe ships. As always, the enemy had risen in shapeshifting hordes from underground, devouring buildings by the hundreds and panicked colonists by the thousands in deadly clouds of nanotech disassemblers. Evacuation efforts were redoubled. Half a million Manchurian colonists remained on Lung Chi, screened by ten thousand Hegemony infantrymen, an Imperial Marine assault battalion, and five regiments of lightly armored Lung Chi militia. With three elevator rails working full time on the ascent and one to send the empty shuttles back down for another load, with families packed into each shuttle to the limit of available life support, eight thousand refugees could be lifted to synchorbit every day. Conditions at Lung Orbital began to break down, as more and more terrified colonists arrived each hour.
Then the Xenophobes had tunneled up behind the marine perimeter, next to the base of the sky-el tower itself, slaughtering civilians waiting to board the shuttles. Communications with the surface were lost. Fragmentary reports from ascraft still transmitting indicated that the space elevator itself was somehow changing, transforming from carbon diaweave into something black and twisted, the change streaking skyward up the sky-el cable. . . .
Aboard his flagship, the Imperial fleet destroyer Hatakaze, Admiral Cameron had made the only decision possible. The Xenophobes might be merely destroying the sky-el, as they seemed to destroy all of the toys of civilization they encountered . . . or they might be using it as a bridge to reach synchorbit, where over three hundred thousand refugees and a hundred starships were crowded together in weightless, cheek-by-jowl horror.
According to the Hatakaze's log, he'd not hesitated more than a few seconds before launching a Starhawk missile tipped with a twenty-kiloton warhead, teleoping the projectile into the slender target of the sky-el himself so that no one else in his command would be forced to live with the horror of that decision. The detonation severed the elevator at the 2,000-kilometer mark. Fragmenting, the upper part of the elevator tower whipcracked into space, spilling refugee-crammed shuttles in its wake. The lower portion, hundreds of kilometers of elevator cable, crashed to the surface in fiery reentry.
How many tens of thousands of people in the general towerdown area were killed by falling debris was never learned. Most of those remaining on the planet were trapped, with no way to reach orbit. A handful were evacuated by ascraft shuttle, including the Imperial general in command of the assault battalion, who accused Admiral Cameron of cowardice at his trial.
Half a million people died as the Xenophobes completed their destruction of every building, every vehicle, every trace of civilization existing on the planet. Cameron's defenders claimed he'd acted correctly. Had the Xenophobes reached synchorbit, had they captured that waiting fleet of transports, things might have been far worse. Humankind still did not understand how the Xenophobe infection spread from star system to system; those transports might well have become vectors, spreading the disease from Lung Chi to every world in the Shichiju.
Might have. The hard truth of the matter, carefully presented at Cameron's court-martial, was that yet again a Xenophobe landing force had slipped invisibly past blockading ships . . . and Cameron's missile shot had been directly responsible for the deaths of half a million Hegemony citizens. Manchuria, close ally of Japan and a powerful supporter of the Empire within the Hegemony Council, had demanded his execution.
Cameron had escaped that humiliation, at least. After the guilty verdict was handed down, he'd taken the so-called honorable way out—not through the painful and messy ritual of sepuku, but by means of poison smuggled to his cell by a loyal former member of his staff.
Not long afterward, Dev had decided to join the navy, the Hegemony Navy, but his application had been turned down by the Naval Academy at Singapore. Thinking that experience and a few light-years from Earth might give him a better chance, Dev had signed on with Orion Lines and begun his self-imposed exile from Earth.
His younger brother was still in school. His mother, the last he'd heard, was working for a ViRsoftware firm in Kyoto; she'd finally accepted an implant, but after her husband's death, she'd used it to take psychoreconstruction.
Dev had spoken with her once, months afterward. She remembered him and Greg—in a distant sort of way—but very little else remained of her own life. Autoamnesia, a deliberate memory dump, was widely considered one of the most effective means of treating severe mental trauma.
For Dev, though, it was as though she had died as well.
Dev was in bed with Desirée when the warning chime sounded. The shuttle had entered atmosphere some time before and was now ten minutes above Midgard Towerdown. He let himself come to a satisfying climax, then released his linkage, awakening in the shuttle with a hundred other orange-clad travelers.
Moments later, the shuttle grounded at Towerdown. Its magnetic grapples released the rail, and the arms of a port loader carried it to the debarkation bay. There Dev and the others were led to private cubicles where shuttlesuits were exchanged for personal clothing. Dev retrieved his luggage then, and stepped into the riot of color and noise that was Loki's first city.
Midgard was much like Asgard, louder and more crowded, perhaps, and dirtier, with a higher density of both holosigns and people. Midgard's population topped one hundred thousand, a third that of the entire planet, and the confines of pressure walls seemed to amplify the crowding, confining and compressing it within the city's cluster of forty-two domes. Loki's storm-lashed atmosphere was monotonous enough that Midgard's designers had not bothered with windows, and the gray-walled tunnels radiating out from Towerdown Dome looked grimly claustrophobic.
Here Dev noticed the first concrete signs of the military alert he'd suspected back in Asgard. Hegemony troopers in light, single-slot warstriders mounted guard at intervals around Towerdown Dome's perimeter. Three meters tall, they stood as motionless as statues, each coated by surface films set to show the gray of their surroundings.
Dev had never had much interest in the trivia of surface warfare and could not identify the different models. Still, it was obvious that they were on alert. So many war machines were rarely assembled in such numbers save for Emperor's Day or for formal reviews.
"Cameron?"
He turned. A big, hard-looking man in orange coveralls with a military look to them stepped out of the milling crowd.
"That's me."
"I'm Castellano. C'mon."
"Huh? Who are—"
"They sent me to collect you, hojie. Got any more gear? No? Okay, come with me."
Castellano was already walking away, and Dev had to hurry to catch up. "Where are we going?"
"HEMILCOM's dreamland, where else? Gok, man, you're gonna be sorry you ever palmed for enlistment in this hole."
"Why's that?"
"Take it from me, hojie. You've just grounded in a world of shit."
Chapter 3
Still, in all the towering, golden splendor of Man's technological achievements, one advance stands out from the rest, more significant than the advents of nuclear fusion or quantum power taps, of terraforming on a planetary scale, of industrial and medical nanotech
nology or even of the K-T drive.
I refer, of course, to the direct cybernetic interface, "jacking" in everyday parlance, the means by which men no longer merely control their starships, terrain striders, or other heavy machinery, but in a very real sense actually become ship, strider, or machine. . . .
—Man and the Stars: A History of Technology Ieyasu Sutsumi
C.E. 2531
Two VK-141 Stormwinds, Hegemony ascraft with stubby, down-canted wings amidships and twin V-stabilizers on the end of slender tail booms, howled northward through the black of the Lokan night. Locked into the number-one strider slot in the main hull, Tai-i Katya Alessandro fixed her attention on the feed coming down from the ascraft's AI and tried to ignore the darkness.
Katya hated the dark, hated it so much, it took an effort of will each time she squeezed her lanky frame into the commander's module of her sixty-ton warstrider and plugged herself in. Shifting her vision to infrared, she strained to make out some detail from the craggy cold-desert landscape sweeping past a hundred meters beneath her feet, but the surface was uniformly cold and masked by gusting swirls of snow, a patchwork of icy blues that only hinted at rugged, mountainous terrain.
Suspended by massive clamps within an open slot in the Stormwind's side, she was sheltered beneath one of the ascraft's canted wings. Rather, the warstrider she was jacking was in the slot; Katya, linked to the strider's on-board AI, was tucked away inside the combat machine's armored torso, probing the darkness below with electronic senses.
For Katya, "wearing" the strider was exactly like wearing her own body. She could feel the crisscross weave of the steel grating pressed against her back, feel the wind snapping past her legs. The nerve impulses that let her move her body's arms or legs were routed through her C-socket to move the strider's arms or legs instead.
Looking down—her primary optical sensors were set into a universal turret mounted below the Warlord's blunt snout—she could see her legs and the massive, flanged pads of her feet tucked up against the fuselage, and the black-gray-blue blur of the ground whipping past beneath the Stormwind's keel. Her external temperature sensors didn't relay the true, biting cold of the Lokan atmosphere, but she felt the chill and the wet nonetheless.
Inwardly she shivered. Midgard and a warm bunk lay eight hundred kilometers astern. Somewhere ahead was a mining colony called Schluter.
Schluter was an exception in the Lokan naming conventions, named after the valley, the Fossae Schluter, where it had been grown. Most names on Loki were drawn from Norse myth: Asgard, the heavenly city of the gods; Midgard, the realm of men; Bifrost, the Rainbow Bridge joining heaven and earth. Loki itself was named for the Norse god of discord and strife.
Katya felt the buffeting of that methane gale and decided that the name had been well chosen. Someday the second world of 36 Ophiuchi C would change its name; Loki would become Freyr, god of peace, good weather, and harvest bounty. Now, though, the surface was still storm-wracked, the atmosphere unbreathable. The terraforming project had been under way for over a century; it would be two centuries more before temperatures rose above freezing and appreciable quantities of oxygen and nitrogen replaced the current mantle of carbon dioxide. The overcast was solid, and after sunset, the darkness became almost palpable.
"Temperature at minus two-eight, wind from the northwest at three-five," a woman's voice said, speaking in Katya's mind. "Great day for flying, ain't it?"
"Hell, Lara," Katya replied. "For you every day's good for flying."
She heard Tai-i Lara Anders's low chuckle. "Won't argue there, Kat. Born with wings, that's me."
With scarcely the pretense of streamlining, the ascraft gave a savage jolt as it plowed through bumpy air. The Stormwind was a true aerospace craft; in vacuum its fusorpaks heated cryo-H slush to a starhot plasma, expelling it as reaction mass; in atmosphere, gaping intakes gulped air and fed it through twin fusion furnaces, negating the need for large quantities of on-board fuel. It wasn't fast as ascraft went, strictly subsonic usually, but it could hit Mach 25 and orbit with a scramjet hotbox and a belly shell.
For orbit-to-surface insertions, an ablative shield covered the Stormwind's belly, enclosing its riders and protecting them from the blowtorch blast of atmospheric entry, but in normal ops the VK-141 had power enough to ignore such niceties. Katya's warstrider, an RS-64D Warlord, was securely held in magnetic clamps, but Katya felt vulnerable, exposed, as the wind plucked at her lower torso.
"We're coming up on the DZ, Captain," the pilot continued. "Seven minutes."
"Any more word from Schluter?"
"Not in the last ten minutes. HEMILCOM says the fighting seems to be spreading into the city. Sounds like things are pretty confused. They're still picking up DSAs, big ones, so the Xenos aren't all in the open yet."
"Damn." This was going to be a messy one. Hegemony Military Command, based in Asgard Orbital, was ideally placed to monitor events on the surface. If only they'd come down here and get their minds dirty once in a while . . .
"They said to set you down right outside the dome. There'll be local militia on the ground, and civilians, of course. Watch your shots."
"Hey, they want to send warstriders in there," Katya said, "they'd better keep their goking heads down. Something flops in my direction, Lara, I'm going to burn it!"
Hours ago, surface remotes had picked up a Deep Seismic Anomaly, subsurface tremors that could mean a Threat breakout at Fossae Schluter, a thousand kilometers north of Midgard, and HEMILCOM had put the Thorhammers, technically the Fifth Loki Warstrider Regiment, on alert. There were two important targets in the area, one of the big terraformer atmosphere plants and a mining colony. Colonel Gustav Varney, the Thorhammers' CO, had detailed the regiment's A Company, "Alessandro's Assassins," for a platoon-strength deployment to the threatened sector. Company Commander Katya Alessandro had picked First Platoon for the mission, and decided to lead the operation herself.
One platoon—theoretically that was eight warstriders. Alessandro's Assassins had a company TO calling for twenty-four warstriders organized into three platoons, but in fact, Katya had just thirteen operational striders under her command, plus, as of that morning, another five downgriped for battle damage or lack of spare parts. First Platoon fielded six of the operational machines, and her Warlord made seven.
She hoped that would be enough for the situation unfolding at Schluter.
"Five minutes," Anders reminded her. "HEMILCOM has given weapons clearance."
"Right." She shifted to the Assassins' tac channel. "Listen up, Hunters," she said, thinking the words and letting her implant transmit them over the link network. "This is Hunter Leader. We're three minutes from drop. We have weapons clearance, repeat, weapons are free. Final check, all systems."
She listened as the acknowledgements came back over the net, mingled with the usual soldiers' banter.
"Roger, Hunter Leader. Hunter One, ready to go."
"Hunter Two, ready and rarin' to go."
"Three's go. Let's odie!"
"Hunter Four. Armed and ready."
"Hunter Five. I think I left the water running in the barracks, Captain. No? Okay, Five's ready."
"Six, go."
She shifted to her strider's internal ICS. "Mitch? Junior? How's she wired?"
"Systems ready, Captain," Chu-i Mitch Dawson said over the intercom link.
"Weapons armed and ready," Jun-i Chris Kingfield added.
The RS-64D Warlord carried a crew of three, commander, pilot, and weapons tech, though in fact, any of the three of them could control the strider if necessary. The usual breakdown called for two sho-i junior lieutenants or a sho-i and a chu-i senior lieutenant in the commander and pilot modules; a jun-i, a warrant technical officer universally nicknamed "Junior," manned the teleop weapons. Commander and pilot could spell each other in running the strider, and the commander had the added responsibility of coordinating pilot and weapons tech in combat.
Katya's Warlord, nicknamed Assassin's B
lade, had been modified to serve as a command strider, with extra comlink gear and a more powerful AI. In combat, Dawson handled the maneuvering while Katya ran the company or, in this case, a seven-strider platoon.
She was proud of her crew, and of her company. She'd been bossing them, firm and fair, since Rainbow two years earlier. They'd responded with an absolute loyalty that bordered at times on fanaticism.
"Katya?" It was Dawson's voice, speaking over their private ICS. "I, ah, I just wanted to say that last night was terrific."
"Don't say it, Mitch. It never happened, right?"
"If you say so, Captain." She could feel the hurt behind the words.
Life in the Hegemony Guard could be lonely . . . strangely so since there were few times when she wasn't surrounded by men and women in conditions that could only be described as claustrophobic. Frontier barracks rarely had the space for civilized amenities. Service men and women slept together in open dorms, shared communal showers, used the same toilets. The only privacy to be had was the privacy of the mind—lying in one's bunk and plugging into a good ViRdrama, for instance, or setting thoughts and soul adrift in a meditative trance.
Camaraderie in the service was intense; shared death, loss, and hardship quickly made brothers and sisters of total strangers. Romantic pairings were less common. Sometimes it seemed as if getting too close to someone special angered the gods of war. If nothing else, transfers and rotations were common enough that no relationship could ever be considered permanent.
But Katya had felt attracted to Mitch. Their encounter the night before had been purely recreational and purely electronic, a linked fantasy shared through a pair of ViRcom modules.