by Ian Douglas
He touched the door annunciator. "Enter," Alessandro's voice called from inside.
"You wanted to see me, sir," he said, stepping into her office. It was small and utilitarian, rather spartan save for a framed holoview on one wall, a tropical-looking landscape of feathery trees and white buildings under a golden sun.
"Yes, Cameron." She gestured to the room's only other chair. "Come in and dock yourself. How are you getting settled in?"
"Fine, I guess. There's a lot to learn they never fed us in boot camp."
She smiled at that. "Welcome to reality. Always a shock." She hesitated, as though wondering how to put what she had to say into words. "I guess the best way to do this is to give it to you straight. I'm turning down your request for a retest."
He felt the anger rising, the protest at the blind unfairness of it all, but bit it back.
When he said nothing, Alessandro continued. "I was impressed with what I saw of your simulations in Basic. You have the makings of a terrific striderjack. Now, I know Mr. Fisher said you could retest and put in for a transfer as soon as you were out of basic training, but our reasoning still stands. The numbers on your MSE still say the navy won't want you."
"I guess I wasn't expecting any different."
That was true enough. He'd put in the request the day he'd checked in with the 1/5, but with no hope that he'd get what he wanted. He extracted a memory from his implant RAM. A tiny window opened in his mind, Castellano's arrogant face grinning at him. You think anybody gives a rusty jack about you? The bastards upstairs'll stick you wherever they've got a slot. . . .
Castellano was right. They—the ubiquitous and all-powerful They of HEMILCOM Training Command, and Alessandro herself—would all do as they damn pleased to make their numbers balance.
"I want you to give us a try for a while. In, say, six months we'll talk about it again. Who knows? Maybe with some experience, your MSE scores will change."
She didn't sound as though she believed that. "Will that be all, Captain?"
"No. I want the straight hont from you. I want to know how you feel, right now, about winding up here instead of in a navy slot."
"The truth? I'm not happy about it. I'm beginning to think I made the wrong choice when I palmed up." He shrugged. "I'll do what I'm told, take it a day at a time, and try to stay out of trouble." He stopped. He wasn't sure what the woman wanted from him.
"Why were you so set on the navy, anyway?" When he didn't answer right away, she added, "Was it your father?"
"I guess so. You know about him?"
"I don't think there's a New American who doesn't. If it's any help, I think he did exactly the right thing at Lung Chi. He had a couple of seconds to make a decision no man should ever have to face. He made it, and I for one think it was the right one."
Dev nodded. "You know, I always thought I could . . . I don't know, prove something, I guess, if I could join the navy."
"What? That he knew what he was doing? How could you prove something like that?"
"Sounds pretty silly when you put it that way. I know. Maybe I just wanted to prove something to myself." He leaned back in the chair, crossing his legs. "For as far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a starship. First helm. Once I got a taste of it with the Orion Lines—"
"Swimming the godsea."
He caught the look in her eye, the note of . . . wistfulness? And wonder. "You . . . know?"
"I used to link starships too, Dev. Back in my youth, I jacked a little fifty-meter racing yacht. So later, of course, when I palmed for Hegemony service, they slotted me in an I-4000."
Dev whistled. Ishikawajima 4Ks were the largest interstellar carriers in human space, kilometer-long monsters usually used as colonization transports. The military used them for moving whole regiments and their equipment from system to system.
"I'm impressed," Dev said. Memory clicked. "Hey, you said you had a high TM rating. How—"
"Boring story," she replied. "Tell me what you would do if you had a chance at starships."
"I don't know anymore. Maybe nothing. Once I thought I'd be, I don't know, able to set the record straight, somehow. Now . . . well, I'm not so sure."
"What's changed?"
"That goking TM rating," Dev said. His fists, resting on his legs, clenched hard. "Captain, I always thought that a man was something more than just numbers. But there are damned numbers on everything today. Psychotechnic disorders." He worked his mouth around the phrase as though it tasted bad. "It's like they have us programmed. Download our RAM and they know everything about us, right down to when we use our finger to pick food from our teeth." He stopped, then looked up at Katya. "Captain, do you think my father could have screwed up because of his TM rating? That he, I don't know, miscalculated, maybe tried to cowboy things and made a bad call?"
Katya shook her head. "I told you I thought he made the right choice. More than that, I can't tell you. Look, I've seen Xenophobes in action. You haven't, not for real. Once the Xenos were in the sky-el, nothing could have saved the colonists still on Lung Chi. You have my promise on that."
"I keep wondering if I would have done things any differently if I'd been on the Hatakaze. Hell, who am I kidding? I've seen Xenos in training sims, and . . . I'll tell you the truth, Captain, I'm scared. I don't know how I'll do out there, realworld." His mouth pulled back in a rueful grin. "It's not quite the same as jacking star freighters."
"You're good, Dev. I've watched you."
"In sims—"
"They're as real as reality. I think what you need to do is stop being so damned introspective."
"Huh? What—"
"Stop worrying about it so much. If you stop to think about it in combat, you're dead. Believe me, I know."
Dev saw pain in her dark eyes. "You're not going to leave me hanging there, are you, Captain? What's the story?"
She appeared to consider it, then shrugged. "Let's just say that my first time under stress, I screwed up, okay? And it was because I was thinking too much. I damn near bought it, too."
"What happened?"
"I fought it. I'm still fighting it, every day." She paused for a moment, quietly studying her hands folded on her desk. "Dev, you told me you think you're more than a number. If that's true, you won't let the numbers back you into a corner. When I lost it as a starship, everybody figured I'd quit and go home. I could have, too." She tapped the side of her head. "I was pretty badly dinged up in here. I think maybe the fact that I knew they expected me to quit was what made me keep going."
"Are you telling me to fight your decision to keep me in the Assassins?" He managed a smile. "Wouldn't that be mutiny?"
"No. I'm telling you to make the best of it, don't dump program over the MSEs, and try again in six months. I think you' re more than a number, too, Dev. And that means you can be whatever you want to be."
More than a number.
Ever since his father's promotion to admiral, Dev realized, he'd been fighting the impersonal and faceless system that transformed humans into ciphers, statistics to evaluate, numbers to shuffle, equations to balance.
Funny. He'd been furious at Alessandro, furious with the whole system, but the anger was gone now. And all because this captain with the brush-cut hair had actually treated him like an individual.
It was an unusual feeling.
Chapter 9
In combat, man and machine must become one, the machine taking on the man's life and vitality, the man assuming a machine's emotionless and unwavering purpose. There can be no thought of fear.
—Kokorodo: Discipline of Warriors
Ieyasu Sutsumi
C.E. 2529
"C-Three, this is Gold Seven," Dev reported. "We're at the crater and moving into position."
"Roger that, Seven. Stand by to copy new orders."
"We're ready, C-Three."
"Transmitting, Seven." Data flickered across Dev's awareness, an illegible muddle of alphanumerics without the necessary decryption codes. He shunted it
into the strider's AI.
It was snowing heavily, the wind swirling flakes of mingled ice and frozen CO2 past the Ghostrider as it moved along the crater rim. It was midmorning, but the thick and leaden overcast kept the tortured landscape under a gloomy, gray-green dusk. Several times Dev had considered switching on the LaG-42's external lights but settled instead on increasing the sensitivity of his optical scanners. There was no need to call any more attention to High Stepper than was necessary. The strider's surface nanoflage mimicked the gray-white-brown gloom of the Lokan surroundings. In the snow, at ranges of more than a few tens of meters, the strider was quite difficult to see, a fuzzy, gray ghost.
He wondered if the camouflage made any difference to the Xenos.
"Okay, newbie," Tami Lanier told him. "I'll take it now."
The Ghostrider's commander had been running her own check of the strider's weapons, leaving him to communicate with HEMILCOM C3 and navigate the strider up the crater slope. Now, though, she was relegating him again to passenger status. He wondered if that was because she didn't trust him.
"Orders just in from C-Three," he said. "I parked them in Stepper's RAM."
"I saw 'em. HEMILCOM probably wants another inspection, full kit, just to impress the Imps." She brought the strider to a halt, overlooking the twenty-meter expanse of snow-covered crater floor. "Keep watch while I see what they want."
"Right, Lieutenant."
Dev panned the twin stereoptic cameras mounted in the chin laser turret housing, scanning his surroundings. To his left, the dome of the Schluter mining facility emerged from its hillside, barely visible through the blowing snow. C3—militarese for command, control, and communications—was watching over the deployment from there. Straight ahead, well beyond the crater and present only as a shadow behind a curtain of snow, the pyramid of the atmospheric plant rose above the more distant mountains. To his right, a kilometer away, stripping and fractionating towers vanished into the low, churning overcast of the sky.
Few signs of the Xenophobe attack at the Schluter facility remained, except for the crater itself, the tunnel mouth through which the attackers had emerged seven weeks earlier. The facility dome had been repaired, and constructors had cleared away most of the blast-shattered wreckage. Line soldiers, crunchies in gray and black combat armor, were helping to position huge Rogan molds slung from the bellies of lumbering four-legged constructors. Inside the molds, engineering nano was converting rock and dirt into fabricrete, growing defensive walls in position.
The rest of the company's striders were gathered near the dome, but the two recon machines—High Stepper and Rudi Carlsson's LaG-42 Snake Stomper—had been deployed to the crater rim, where a half dozen Rogan-grown gun towers thrust like teeth from the broken rock, maintaining their robotic vigilance.
The Imperial Marine unit that had relieved the Assassins at the Schluter facility was still at the site, but fresh signs of Xenophobe activity—the ground-transmitted rumblings of movements deep beneath the ground—had been detected, and HEMILCOM had ordered the Assassins to redeploy back to the crater at Schluter to reinforce the marines against the possibility of another Xeno attack.
Dev focused on a squad of Imperial Marines, six hulking Daimyo striders protecting the facility's small landing strip two kilometers away, their surface films jet black even through distance and snow. Those, Dev thought, were the real machine-warriors, men trained in the martial art called kokorodo—the Way of the Mind—to control their striders with an almost inhuman speed and efficiency. There weren't many of them available, but it was said that their presence alone had turned the tide against a Xeno assault more than once.
He knew he should feel better seeing the Impie Marines close by, but watching the motionless Imperial squad, he could only wonder why, if the Impies were so good, the Assassins had been deployed to Schluter at all.
Dev had joined a few of the late night talk sessions in the Assassins' barracks, even though he was still a newbie and an outsider. The Imperials thought of the Hegemony units as cannon fodder, some of the other 1/5 pilots were saying. After all, why risk highly trained marines and their pretty black machines when the locals were available to blunt the enemy's attack? Strangely, such comments didn't appear to carry any bitterness or anger. Their nature was closer to the inter-service rivalry between navy and army, joking and almost good-natured. Dev was willing to admit that, in his current frame of mind, he couldn't really appreciate the banter.
Why the hell weren't they as scared as he was?
"Right, newbie," Lanier said, interrupting dark thoughts. "Stay alert. HEMILCOM Asgard's called a Class-Two alert. They've tracked a solid DSA, right beneath our feet."
"A Deep Seismic Anomaly? Here?"
"Yup. Looks like the Xenies're coming back for seconds."
It was an eerie sensation, knowing that the Xenos were there, swimming through solid rock a few hundred meters beneath the crater floor, but unreachable, untouchable. Dev and the other newbies had been shown recordings of the Xenophobe attack at the site seven weeks earlier—at just about the same time, he knew now, as the alert that had paralyzed communications during his first day on Loki.
Like so much else about the Xenophobes, exactly how they performed their subsurface movement trick was unknown. It was assumed that they were able to turn rock plastic or even fluid by manipulating it somehow with intense, focused magnetic fields and clouds of nanotechnic tunnelers. In sims, Dev had watched streamlined Xenophobe snake-shapes emerge from the ground, nosing their way up through solid rock turned plastic by a technology humans didn't understand and could not copy.
The rock did not remain plastic after a Xenophobe passed through it, nor was an actual tunnel excavated. However, the rock was certainly weakened by the machine's passage, creating what was known as an SDT, or Subsurface Deformation Track. HEMILCOM theorized that the Xenophobe forces might well use existing SDTs as underground highways. Possibly it took less power to force a path through rock that had been deformed once before. If HEMILCOM was tracking a Deep Seismic Anomaly here, now, it meant the Xenos could be rising toward the surface.
"What are we supposed to be doing out here, Lieutenant?" Dev asked.
"We're a recon strider, newbie. We recon."
"Why the hell don't they just nuke the tunnel mouth and be done with it?"
"Maybe someone's sentimental about Schluter and doesn't want the place incinerated."
"If they know the Xenophobes are coming back, they ought to evacuate it," Dev said. "How many people are here, anyway?"
"Five, maybe six thousand. It's Mitsubishi's biggest ore-processing plant on Loki. I don't think they're going to let it go without a fight."
The argument made no sense to Dev. In seven weeks, surely they could have evacuated six thousand people to Asgard. Which was more important, the people or Mitsubishi's investment?
Numbers again.
"Gold Seven, Gold Seven," Katya Alessandro's voice called over the tacnet. "This is Gold Leader."
"Gold Leader, Gold Seven," Lanier replied. "Go ahead."
"Looks like this might be it. Sensors have a hot spot triangulated at Bravo three-seven, Hotel one-niner. That puts them smack under your feet, Tami. Back off and let the towers take the first rush."
"Don't see anything happening yet," Lanier replied. "It looks dead."
Which is what we'll be if you don't do what Alessandro says and get us out of here, Dev thought. He kept the thought off the ICS, however, and focused his optics on the crater floor. He could almost imagine that he was sensing a deep-down vibration, transmitting itself through the ground and the Ghostrider's legs. He tried lowering his audio range. In Basic he'd learned that it was sometimes possible to detect a Xeno approach through infrasonics—the low-pitched grumble of rocks yielding far below the surface.
"Gold Seven, we've got a plus five on IR at your coordinates," another voice said. "Local magnetic now at point three gauss, with a flux of point two five. Data feed on Channel Five."
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br /> The data from C-Three began scrolling down one side of Dev's visual display. He shifted his own vision to infrared and overlaid it with computer graphics representing the local magnetic field. The ground was warmer inside the crater, glowing now in shades of green that contrasted with the blues and purples of the surrounding rock and snow, and there was a vague node of magnetic force in the crater's center.
"Gold Seven, Gold Leader. Suggest you pull back. Now!"
"Sounds like a good idea to me, Lieutenant," Dev added. He hoped that his voice didn't sound as scared as he felt. Sometimes cephlinked transmissions could carry a lot more emotion than the sender intended.
"Copy, Gold Leader. There's no danger yet. Maybe I can get off a shot or two when the bastard rears its ugly head."
Damn it, Dev thought. That's what the gun towers are for! I don't want to be a hero!
"All units, go to combat alert!" Alessandro's voice barked. "Weapons free!"
"IR at plus six," the emotionless voice of C-Three added. "Centered on Schluter Crater. Mag now at point three-two, flux point three-seven."
"Back off the crater rim, Gold Seven. That's an order!"
"Roger, Gold Leader." Lanier actually sounded disappointed. The Ghostrider turned and, gingerly on the uneven footing, began picking its way back down the crater slope. Dev was certain that he could feel a trembling now underfoot. The gun towers appeared to have come to life, their movements urgent as the muzzles of paired heavy lasers twitched back and forth. "Let us have a visual feed from one of the towers."
"You got it, Gold Seven. Patched in."
A window opened on Dev's field of view, an inset of the crater floor from the vantage point of one of the robot sentry towers.
Something was happening there, but it was becoming harder to see. The snow was melting, vanishing into a swirl of fog obscuring the ground. The continuing data feed from C-Three showed that the crater floor temperature had risen ten degrees Celsius in the last fifteen seconds.
And then something burst through the cloaking fog.
Gravel sprayed into the overcast, like cinders from a volcanic eruption. The fog billowed into the sky as something struck Dev's legs from behind, a savage blow that nearly toppled him. He cursed as he tried to balance himself . . . then realized that his reactions were still out of the circuit. Tami Lanier was in control of the strider, and all he could do was watch as the crater interior exploded in hurtling fragments of rock. Gravel pelted the Ghostrider like hailstones, and the ground continued to lurch underfoot. On the inset picture from the sentry tower, a blunt-nosed worm or snake five meters thick was squeezing out of the ground and into full view.