by Ian Douglas
All six laser towers fired at the same instant, and the clouds above the crater lit blue-white with their reflected glare. Other warstriders were advancing across the valley now, a staggered line rushing to put themselves between the dome and the emerging Xenophobes. Stepper and Snake Stomper, the other LaG-42, were closest to the eruption. Dev glimpsed Carlsson's strider, blurred and indistinct by its nano film, dropped into a gunfighter's crouch atop the ridge, loosing a salvo of rockets. Explosions masked the crater's center for a thunderous moment. Dev caught a glimpse of a silvery fragment spinning end over end as it arced through the dirty air.
More elongated shapes were forcing their way up through the ground now. Shock waves rippled through the fog, and across those patches of bare rock and gravel Dev could see. It looked as though the ground was writhing.
Then the visibility grew worse. Heavy, white smoke was boiling from the ground, a mist that could have been mistaken for fog except that it had a milky texture that made it seem almost liquid. Almost immediately the outside nano count began to soar.
"Lieutenant!" Dev yelled. "We're picking up nano-D on our hull! Point three-one . . . no, three-two, and rising!"
"I see it." Lanier cut loose with a rocket salvo of her own, sending a rippling barrage of M-22s searing into the crater. Dev saw something like a huge, silver worm shuddering as the LaG-42's volley smashed into it, the detonations flashing and snapping and hurling smoke and dirt into the air. With startling suddenness the Xeno machine's sinuous body changed, lengthening, extruding silvery whiplash tentacles. Dev had seen recordings of Xenos morphing during Basic, but seeing it this way was different. This was no AI-simulated graphic, but the real thing, transforming itself from traveler to killer. Dev recognized the new shape—a flattened sphere studded with slender spines and tentacles, a Fer-de-Lance in combat mode. The thing was jet black until a beam from one of the gun towers touched it, and then it flashed silver, scattering light in a rainbow cascade.
"Cameron!" Lanier shouted over the ICS. "Take the chin laser!"
Dev felt the inner chunk of relays slamming home, saw the target reticle for the 100-megawatt laser drop onto his field of view. The lieutenant was now handling both the strider's movement and its left and right weapons pods; Dev had control of the heavy Toshiba Arms laser mounted beneath the Ghostrider's blunt prow.
For several seconds, all was chaos and raw, thundering noise. Dev saw pieces of Xenophobe machine on the ground, most of them inching forward with a horrible, blindly searching life of their own. On either side, other Assassin striders were coming up the ridge in support. Something roughly the size and shape of a beach towel leaped through the air and hit Carlsson's Ghostrider, clinging wetly to the right leg. Dev stared in horror as the strider's leg began to dissolve, streams of white smoke gushing from visibly enlarging holes in the armor. Large patches of surface film had eroded away as nano disassemblers attacked it. No longer reflecting the colors of the strider's surroundings, the affected areas looked like crumbling patches of rust.
"Damn it, Cameron!" his partner yelled against the muddled background of his thoughts. "Shoot! Shoot!"
He stared, unable to find the coded thoughts that would let him engage the Ghostrider's laser. Things seemed to be happening around him in slow motion. Directly in front of him, ten meters away, a disk-shaped head balanced on a slender snake of a neck rose from the smoke.
"Cobra!" Lanier shouted, naming the Xeno machine. "Lase it, Cameron!"
He tried, but the codes, the numbers, would not come. Helplessly Dev watched as the flat head opened lengthwise, exposing a deep groove extending from a hole that gave the machine a sinister, one-eyed look. The opening glowed red, and a stream of high-velocity slugs howled into the Ghostrider's left weapons pod with a sound like tearing sheet metal.
Something slammed into Dev with pile-driver force. The shock surprised him; despite training sessions, feeds, and lectures, he hadn't realized that he would feel the impact of enemy rounds when he was not actually in control of the strider. A second blow struck his side, spinning him partway around. Glancing down, he could see the left Kv-70 pod dangling from the wreckage of its ball-and-socket mount. The pod's upper surface had been opened from front to back, and loops of interior wiring were spilling from the tear, smoking and sparking in the cold air.
"Left arm's gone, Dev!" Lanier called. "Fire, damn you, fire!"
Shifting the focus of his eyes, he brought the targeting reticle into line with that flat, deadly head, willing the main laser to fire, desperate now, still unable to make the thing work. Tami was still firing with the right arm pod, sending a long burst of high-velocity rounds into the rapidly descending horror that appeared to be coming apart even as he watched.
Then the Cobra's main hull slammed into the Ghostrider, sending him toppling over backward in a spray of sand, gravel, and glittering fragments. A three-meter tentacle slashed across the cameras transmitting his visual feed. There was a flash of static, and then his vision was gone.
Gone! Desperately he tried to switch to another camera group on the LaG-42's hull, but the entire visual feed network was down. He could still sense the warstrider's position; he was on his back, a heavy, squirming weight across his chest, but he couldn't see to fight back. A shrill scream filled his mind, going on and on and on for an eternity before he realized that the scream was his.
His hand came off the palm contact, and suddenly he was strapped to a narrow couch in a dark and fear-stinking space, surrounded by metal and feed cables and the lonely amber and green lights of the strider's manual power-up system. His breath came in short, shallow gasps that rasped in his ears through the confines of his helmet. The metal walls reverberated as something hit the strider outside and rocked it to one side. He grabbed for support, his fist striking cold steel.
He slapped his palm back on the contact panel, but nothing happened. Lights winked at him, baleful eyes in the darkness warning of system shutdowns and failing power. The strider shuddered again, with a shriek like that of a damned soul. Dimly, with his ears rather than his mind, he thought he heard a far-off, muffled scream, not his scream this time, but someone else. A woman's scream.
The lieutenant was sealed into the command pod, and he had no way of reaching her. He was trapped, and a Xeno Cobra had them in its deadly embrace.
He had to get out! Out!
Dev tried to interface with the strider AI again, and this time succeeded. The feeling of pressure on his chest and legs was terrible, suffocating, and he still couldn't see. Words flowed across the emptiness: power was down to twenty-seven percent, left leg hydraulics were gone, massive damage to imaging and control systems, command module dead . . .
Dead! He tried to get more information, tried to open the ICS link, and failed. Either Tami Lanier was dead or the strider's internal communications were completely shot. A red square flashed insistently at the corner of his vision. The Ghostrider's AI was trying to pass control to him.
The darkness enveloping him was more terrifying than the sight of the oncoming Cobra. "Eject sequence!" he commanded. "Code . . . uh . . . red, seven, three . . . Eject! Eject! Eject!"
Nothing! Dev didn't know whether the failure was in the eject sequence or in him. Breaking the linkage, he woke again to the darkness of the pilot's module. Groping above his head, he found the manual controls, flipped up a guard shield, and grasped the ejection handle inside its recess.
He twisted it to the right. A thunderclap of sound and pressure battered Dev into unconsciousness.
Chapter 10
. . . it is left to war itself to strip the mask from the man of straw, which it will do with a quite ruthless precision of its own.
—The Anatomy of Courage
Lord Moran
mid-twentieth century
Katya spoke up for Dev at the inquest, but there was very little that she could do. The young Terran was doomed from the very start.
The review board included her, as Dev's company commander; her own 1
st Platoon Leader, Chu-i Victor Hagan; the Thorhammers' CO, Taisa Gustav Varney; commanding officer of the Midgard Training Command, Shosa Karl Rassmussen; and an Imperial, the Adept Ieyasu Sutsumi. They sat behind a long table covered by a green cloth, while Cameron, still looking somewhat dazed, stood before them and answered their questions.
Sutsumi was not, strictly speaking, a military man, nor was the inquest a court-martial. The Imperial Adept—he was addressed by the title Sensei—was a master of the mind-control art called kokorodo. He'd designed several of the AI routines that oversaw the training of Hegemony recruits in managing implanted links. Rather than trying to punish Devis Cameron, it was the board's duty to review his case and determine whether or not he could be of any further use to the Hegemony strider forces, and Sensei Sutsumi was present as an expert in neopsychometrics. He'd been asked to come down from Asgard and attend the inquest because the young striderjack's problems appeared to be primarily psychological.
"Did you ever have trouble accessing weapons codes during your training?" Karl Rassmussen asked.
"No, sir," Dev replied. His voice was, not cold, exactly, but distant, almost as though he didn't care what was happening to him anymore.
As the questioning continued, Katya remembered the look on his face when she'd told him that once, years before, she'd been a starpilot, too.
New America was a raw frontier world, so new that it didn't even have a sky-el yet. Like Lung Chi, 26 Draconis IV had already developed an ecosystem of its own when human explorers first discovered it in the early 2400s. All that it had needed was a slight decrease in the atmospheric CO2 and the genetic tailoring of several microbion species to help the native life adjust to the change.
Life in the young colony was hard; modern equipment and industrial nanomolds were hard to come by, the costs of shipping, say, farm machinery from Earth prohibitive.
Katya, the third daughter of a Greek-American father and a Ukrainian mother, had grown up hating that farm. Attending New America's only technic university, at Jefferson, she'd mortgaged her expected income over the next eight years for a three-socket implant; her first job had been as a panel rigger aboard New America's single tiny space station.
From there, however, she'd managed to get better slots, first as shuttle transport pilot, then crewing aboard the Golden Aphrodite, the fifty-meter interstellar yacht belonging to Prestis Chadwick, one of the major shareholders in the New American Corporation, and a vice-president of the colony's local branch of Bank Nakasone-America.
She hadn't cared for life among the New American elite, not when keeping that job demanded hours and activities not listed in her job description. At her first opportunity, she'd tendered her resignation and visited the Hegemony service recruiter in Jefferson. With her experience jacking the Aphrodite, she'd been immediately slotted into interstellar transports.
Starting as reserve helm aboard the 12,000-ton Kosen Maru, she'd swiftly worked her way up to first pilot on a monster I-4K, the 1,900,000-ton Kaibutsu Maru. She'd paid off her socket loan in two years, after just one New-America-to-Earth-and-back run.
During that whole time, there'd been no indication at all that she had a TM rating of point three.
Much later, she figured out what must have happened. Working conditions aboard the Aphrodite had been unsettling enough, unpleasant enough, that her emotions had overshadowed some of her MSE responses.
In fact, she'd been very nearly emotionally dead when she tested for her slot with the service. Maybe someone in the evaluations section had been sloppy. Maybe the scores themselves didn't matter as much as the way they were interpreted. But Katya was glorying in the raw power and wonder of the godsea, guiding her lumbering charge through the swirling blue currents that ViRsimulated the interface between normal four-space and the Quantum Sea, the K-T Plenum.
Katya knew exactly what Devis Cameron had experienced there, where energy came into existence from nothing, free for the taking, where the reality of fourspace became a fragile bubble adrift on an unimagined, unimaginable flux of quantum energy. It was so easy to ride that feeling of invincibility, to stretch the odds and take that extra chance, riding on the edge of the godsea tide. . . .
A quantum flux shunt circuit had burned out as the Kaibutsu Maru rode the blue currents between Sol and 26 Draconis. She'd felt the power levels fluctuating, felt her control slipping, but had known she could ride the crest and maintain control.
An entire damper rack had burned out, and Kaibutsu's AI had jettisoned the starboard engine seconds before a power cascade had transformed five thousand tons of complex technology into starcore-hot plasma. The Kaibutsu had dropped out of the K-T Plenum, power systems dead, drives fused, the freighter ten light-years from home.
Still linked, Katya had stared into a star-dusted immensity, Blackness Absolute, an emptiness that she'd never had to cope with before. She'd viewed space directly, of course, aboard the space station and every time she'd maneuvered Aphrodite or one of her cargo haulers into or out of orbit. Always before, though, there'd been sun and planet filling part of the sky, convenient anchors that gave her particular location in space an identity, an address, with light enough to keep those lonely stars at bay.
This, however, was something completely different. Through the starship's senses, she'd seen nothing but stars and the faint frost-dusting of the Milky Way describing an unimaginably vast circle about the sky. For a horrible moment—it might have been seconds or hours or days—she'd felt as if she were falling into that horror of emptiness, and all the while the Dark was closing in. . . .
Their rescue had been a million-to-one shot. Ships could be detected within the godsea by the pulse-regular interference patterns their passage left against the random noise of the quantum energy fluctuations, a kind of orderly wake against chaos. The watchstanders of another ship, the free trader Andrew St. James, noticed when the Kaibutsu's wake vanished. They logged the incident and reported it to New American space traffic control when they arrived at 26 Draconis ten days later. The Imperial destroyer Asagiri dropped into fourspace and picked up Kaibutsu's distress beacon two weeks after that, while quartering the area with a small fleet of search and rescue vessels.
Katya had spent another week in the hospital. There'd been talk about psychoreconstruction and deliberate, selective amnesia. She'd been subjected to a hell of a shock, and dumping some of those memories might be the only way she'd be able to face the world again.
But she'd fought back.
She'd told Dev the truth that day in her office. Everyone had expected her to quit the service and go back to the farm.
Katya had refused, choosing instead to transfer to the infantry. With three sockets and experience jacking starships, she'd been accepted into the 2nd New American Minutemen.
Six months later, the Minutemen had been transferred. The Hegemony had a policy—one encouraged by the Imperials—of not letting a military unit remain too long attached to one world, a way of preventing too great an attachment between soldiers and civilians. Besides, Xenophobes had appeared on 36 Ophiuchi C II—Loki—and the Empire wanted to reinforce the local forces. The 2nd New American Minutemen became the 5th Loki Thorhammers, arriving just in time to take part in the campaign at Jotunheim.
Katya had been happy since, working up through the ranks, first to platoon leader, then to company commander just six months earlier. But she still remembered her unshielded look at the stars, enough that she was glad the nights on Loki were always cloudy.
And she still hated the dark.
She became aware that someone had spoken her name.
"I beg your pardon?"
Varney looked at Katya, one eyebrow creeping higher on his forehead. "I asked if there was anything you had to add in this case, Captain Alessandro."
She paused, gathering her thoughts, retracing her memories of the proceedings so far. "Yes, Colonel. I'd like to remind the board that even if Cadet Cameron had been able to lock and fire, the outcome would not have been di
fferent. As you know very well, LaG-42 Ghostriders are no match for Cobras in combat mode. If anything, the fault was mine. Those two light striders should not have been so close to the tunnel mouth."
"According to the action debriefs," Varney said, "you had already twice ordered Lieutenant Lanier's strider back off the crater rim. The other Ghostrider, commanded by Lieutenant Carlsson, did manage to escape, did it not?"
"Stomper sustained considerable damage, sir. But yes. Rudi managed to get clear. The rest of the company came up in support and destroyed both the Cobra and the Gamma attacking Rudi's machine."
"Cadet Cameron?" Varney said. "Is there anything you'd like to add to the record?"
"I have no excuse, sir." His eyes locked with Katya's. His voice sounded dead. "I screwed up. I'm sorry."
"I remind you, Cadet, that we're not here to judge you. I tend to agree with Captain Alessandro that the outcome would have been the same in regard to Lieutenant Lanier's death even if you'd been able to access your weapons. In fact, you would almost certainly have died as well if you'd tried to fight the Cobra, rather than ejecting as you did. Once you discovered that you could not control your warstrider's systems, you acted correctly.
"But it is not the correctness of your actions that we are discussing here. Sensei? Can you add anything?"
"Yes," the Japanese Adept said. He was an old man, though the age resided more in and around his eyes than in wrinkled skin or sagging features. "If you would each palm your interface?" Katya laid her palm on the 'face panel in the table in front of her. Data began scrolling past her mind's eye, as Sutsumi discussed the findings point by point.