by Ian Douglas
As he rose, Dev felt a peculiar sinking feeling, as though he were descending in an elevator. The APW was lowering its body to the ground. He adjusted his Mark XIV's harness; even in Loki's .8 g gravity, the weapon weighed over eight and a half kilos, and his armor added another fifteen. He felt awkward and clumsy.
"Every man, check your neighbor!"
Dev studied the readouts on Rosen's chest panel, as Rosen studied his. Combat Armor served as a full environmental suit, with life support for up to eight hours. The readouts showed suit systems readiness and the condition of the wearer. All green. He gave Rosen a thumbs up and received one in return. He could see Rosen grinning at him through his helmet visor. "You'll do okay, Strider," the brown said over the squad net.
Two troopers clashed gauntlets, a noisy high-five. "Let's odie!" someone else called. Odie was soldier's slang, twisted from the Nihongo word for "dance." Morale was high, the troops ready to go.
Movement stopped, and a warning light on the ceiling winked red. A section of the deck split open, admitting a swirl of cold and dusty air. Dev caught a glimpse of snow-covered ground below as the ramp lowered itself from the walker's belly.
"Squad!" Anderson called. "Let's hit it!"
In a rush, the two men in the rear of the compartment pounded down the ramp and into the dusty light. The rest followed after, two tight columns filing down the ramp and into the light.
It seemed bright outside, though the sky was the usual dirty gray overcast of Loki. Norway Base was little more than a newly grown landing pad and a few RoProcess huts and storage buildings. Directly in front of him, the Norway Line stretched along the crest of the ridge like the walls and towers of some medieval fortress. The Rogan process allowed combat nangineers to grow fabricrete structures in a matter of hours wherever there was a plentiful supply of stone and dirt. Jogging across uneven ground toward the wall, Dev had a blurred impression of men, of vehicles and heavy machinery, of swirling confusion.
Crack-thud!
The ground lurched beneath his feet, nearly throwing him. Smoke boiled into the sky from the far side of the ridge. The squad reached the shelter of a two-meter-tall Rogan wall near the crest of the ridge and dropped to the ground. Behind them, their hulking APW rose on tree-trunk legs, its turret sweeping back and forth in quick, nervous jerks. A laser tower twenty meters to their right shifted, then fired at some unseen enemy toward the north with an eye-searing flash.
Crack-thud!
"Steady, people," Anderson's voice said, cool and unhurried. "Those're ours. They're calling in railgun packages on 'em from orbit."
That was reassuring . . . and frightening. With Loki's cloud cover, lasers and most other orbital weapons were useless, but spotter drones could call in railgun fire with pinpoint accuracy. The crack he'd heard was the sonic boom of a high-velocity artificial meteor piercing the atmosphere from almost straight overhead; the thud was the concussion as the meteor liberated its considerable payload of kinetic energy into the planet's crust.
But the barrage sounded awfully close.
Crack-thud!
"God damn!" an unidentified voice said over the tactical frequency. "Where are the goking striders?"
"Morgan's Hold!" another voice called. "The bastards're pulling a Morgan's Hold on us!"
"Okay, okay, people," Anderson snapped. "Can the comments. Lock and load."
Dev's external mike picked up the harsh clatter and snick of weapons as full magazines were snapped home, as charging levers were pulled, chambering rounds. He checked the play of his weapon in the steadimount, then pulled a cable from the weapon's side and jacked it into his helmet's external socket. Static flickered in his brain, then cleared, leaving red-glowing cross hairs superimposed on his vision.
Suddenly the ground struck him and he was on his back. He didn't hear an explosion, though he assumed there must have been one, because he was half-buried by dirt and gravel and shattered chunks of fabricrete.
"Xenos!" someone screamed over the tacnet. "Xenos! They're coming through the wall!"
Chapter 12
Squad Support Plasma Guns, SSPGs, fire slivers of cobalt, vaporized, stripped of electrons, and ejected by an intense magfield as finger-sized bolts of plasma, hot as the core of a sun. Cyclic rates are variable, ranging up to five hundred rounds per minute. Unfortunately, the gun is bulky enough that a level-two linkage is necessary to handle the targeting feedback, limiting its use to gunners with appropriate hardware.
—Modern Military Hardware
HEMILCOM Military ViRdocumentary
C.E. 2537
Dev lay on his back, half-buried in mud and rubble. A black, churning pillar of smoke mushroomed from the far side of the wall, the crown unfolding toward the overcast zenith like the mushroom of a nuclear detonation. His first thought was that the Xenos were using nukes, something they'd never done before. His second was that something had gone wrong, that Asgard had accidentally dropped a railgun load too close to the Wolfguard position.
Friendly fire or hostile, it didn't matter much. Something was pushing through the wall three meters in front of him, something with a surface like quicksilver, flowing over the splintered remnants of the RoPro wall, dissolving solid fabricrete in currents of milky white fog. It slapped a flattened pseudopod across Hadley's back, and Dev heard the man scream in sudden, wild panic.
Dev dragged his plasma gun around, swinging the muzzle until the glowing reticle in his vision centered on what seemed to be the silvershifter's center of mass as it bulked its way through the hole in the wall. His right hand squeezed the trigger grip, sending white fire blazing into the Xeno.
Each burst of plasma flame left a dancing trail of purple spots on Dev's retinas, despite the automatic polarization of his visor. Under that deadly barrage, the Xeno machine twisted, form morphing into monstrous form as it tried to escape that searing hellfire.
It was an awkward shot from a sprawled, seated position, but the stream of fire convulsed the Gamma's body, splattering droplets of molten metal. The pseudopod released the struggling trooper, lashing the air. Then the life seemed to drain from the thing and it literally fell apart, pieces of smoking slag hitting the snow and mud with a sputtering hiss.
"Nice shooting, Cameron!" Dahlke said.
"Way to go, Strider-man!" Rosen added.
The thing's surface was blackening, dissolving as he watched, its edges curling away in streamers of heavy white smoke. Someone sprayed the back of Hadley's armor with an AND aerosol canister, hosing down the crinkled scar on the ceramic surface with anti-nano; the nano-D count was high, point twenty-eight, and seemed to be coming from the disintegrating Gamma.
"C'mon, c'mon, people!" Anderson bellowed. "Clear the hot spot!"
The squad shifted right, following the wall in single file, moving away from the nano-D-contaminated area at a slow jog. The wall was too high for Dev to see beyond it to the north, but elsewhere, the landscape was a crawling confusion of men and machines.
There was furious activity everywhere. Troops manned weapons behind RoPro walls, moved about Norway Base in platoon-sized bands, or spilled down the ramps of four-legged APWs. Lightly armored hovercraft shrieked along on wakes of splattering mud and snow. On the towers, the twin barrels of heavy robotic lasers dipped and turned and flashed. It looked as if the whole Wolfguard regiment—eighteen hundred men in all—had been deployed along this section of wall.
"Gok, Sarge, where are the striders?" Lipinsky called. "What're they thinking of, throwing light infantry against Xenos?"
"Can it, Lipinsky," Anderson replied. "You got your flamer. Use it."
"Yeah, and if we run into a stalker?"
"Striders're on the way," Anderson replied. "If you want to live long enough to see 'em, keep the damned Xenos off this hill!"
Lipinsky had a point. The squad was armed with a collection of light weapons, from combat rifles to the barely man-portable SSPGs carried by Dev and a big-shouldered trooper named Bronson. Lipinsky and Rosen had be
en issued Taimatsu Type-21s, squat, large-bored weapons that the troops called flamers.
Mark XIVs and flamers might be able to damage a Xenophobe Alpha—with luck and concentrated fire—but throwing infantry against stalkers made as much sense as throwing them against warstriders, an exchange of many men for a few machines, a shocking waste of good infantry.
Dev flinched from the thought. The idea of meeting a Xeno Alpha face-to-face without the relative safety of forty centimeters of nanofilmed durasheath and ceramic armor surrounding him was horrific, conjuring the memory of Tami Lanier's body in the pilot's module of her half-eaten Ghostrider. It conjured, too, Phil Castellano's bitterness, his insistence that the brass simply didn't care for the enlisted men and combat-rank officers.
"Spread out, people!" Anderson yelled, gesturing with an armored hand. "Take your positions!"
They'd reached a low point along the wall. Swiftly they fanned out, leaning their weapons across the gray-white parapets. For the first time, Dev had a clear look at the terrain to the north, across a stretch of flat valley to another snow-patched ridgeline two kilometers away. Black pillars of smoke churned skyward from hundred-meter craters scattered across the landscape, and everywhere, everywhere, the ground was crawling, as though it had taken on a life of its own. Lasers and plasma gun bolts were striking and flashing at hundreds of Xenophobe Gammas, raising gouts of earth and vaporizing snow in swirling puffs of steam. Dev saw no Alphas or Betas anywhere, only the small and slithering Gammas, fragments of quicksilver and tar. The orbital bombardment and the steady barrage from the robot laser towers, Dev reasoned, must have shattered all of the Alphas.
Good. Gammas were deadly up close and they attacked in huge numbers, but infantry, which also relied on numbers, stood a better chance against them than did warstriders. He locked on to a meter-long crumpled-rag shape crawling up the ridge twenty meters downslope and loosed a burst of plasma flame. Gleaming metal exploded in quicksilver gobbets that steamed when they hit the mud.
Fire swept the slope from the entire length of the Norway Line wall, burning down the advancing Xenos. Dev tracked left, acquired another target, then loosed a stream of bolts that tore the Gamma into hurtling flecks of liquid metal.
The valley flashed and glowed in the actinic glare of manmade lightnings. Fires were impossible in the oxygen-poor atmosphere, but wrecked and half-melted Gammas lay smoldering everywhere on the ground.
Dev glimpsed movement on the far ridge. A touch of a button set into his left forearm dropped foam-padded eyepieces over his eyes. Leaning into the helmet optics, he engaged the telescopic zoom. Movement became distinct shapes moving across the crest of the ridge on amorphous, shapeshifting legs.
He recognized the combat mode of a Mamba, a Fer-de-Lance, a Copperhead, the weaving neck of a King Cobra.
Alpha stalkers. But it would take some time for them to cross the two-kilometer valley. Dev raised his optics out of the way. The Gammas close at hand were a more urgent problem.
"The striders!" someone yelled. Dev thought the voice was Falk's. "Here come the striders!"
Four ascraft were drifting out of the sky above Norway Base, blunt-nosed Stormwinds with stubby wings and Y-tail stabilizers. His external mikes caught the shrill whine of approaching fusion jet intakes. God, HEMILCOM couldn't have cut things much closer than that. The Alphas were well into the valley now, and more hulking shapes were silhouetted against the far skyline. Dev dropped his attention back to the killing ground to the north, frying a meter-long fragment that was humping toward him like a demented inchworm.
Somebody was shouting over Dev's helmet phones, but he couldn't make out the words. Static induced by the Xenophobe magnetics was so bad, Dev could scarcely hear the hiss and thunderclap of the big tower lasers, or the volleyed clatter of automatic rifle fire. Bolts of living flame keened overhead, deafening, filling the air with mind-numbing thunder, a sheer, elemental violence so raw that movement, that thought itself, was all but impossible.
Most of the Gammas were dead. The human forces were winning! The line was holding! If the striders could deal with the advancing Alphas . . .
Behind him, all four Stormwinds were on the base landing pad, each releasing its cargo of warstriders, then lifting again in a swirl of dust and steam. Dev wondered which unit it was. The striders were anonymous in their reflective nanoflage, but the blue and white markings on the ascraft looked like those of the Thorhammers. Dev wondered if Katya was down there.
"Attention, First Platoon!" Anderson snapped, his voice carried over the laser tacnet. "By squads, fall back to Norway Base! One and Three, lay down cover! Two and Four, move out!"
Dev had never heard such warm and welcome words. When the big boys arrived, leg infantry was best pulled back and kept out of the way. Dev stayed where he was as half of the platoon moved back from the wall and started slipping and sliding back down the south slope of the ridge toward the base and the waiting APWs.
A Gamma as large as a groundcar was gliding up the north face of the ridge faster than a man could walk, flowing like a rippling, living blanket. Sergeant Anderson raised his laser rifle and fired into the shape, and Dev brought his SSPG up to assist.
An orange line of fire pierced the clouds and struck in the valley, a piece of star suddenly released. Dev stared into the expanding fireball, then realized he could see nothing at all as his helmet visor's polarizers cut in. A heartbeat later there was a shock like a full-speed collision with a RoPro wall, and he was lying on his face in the mud ten meters down the slope, blinking away light-dazzled blotches of visual purple that were dancing before his tearing eyes. Again, he'd heard nothing. His armor's speakers had cut out, a safety measure to keep him from being deafened. As his vision returned, he could make out the red-lit underbelly of a new cloud mushrooming above him.
He rose, stunned and dizzy but otherwise unhurt. That railgun package had been entirely too close!
At the top of the ridge, the Gamma he'd been aiming at had flowed over the shattered ruin of the wall, had knocked Sergeant Anderson down and was pinning him to the ground. Dev heard Anderson's scream in spite of the static.
Frantically Dev reached for his plasma gun, but his gloved hands groped empty air. Looking down, he saw that the steadimount had been sheared off as cleanly as if sliced through by a laser. Anderson screamed again, not in fear but in mind-tearing agony.
Nearby, a body lay sprawled on its back, a flamer still clutched in gauntlet-clad hands. Stooping, Dev retrieved the flamer, trying to avoid seeing Lipinsky's bloody, staring-eyed face behind the shattered helmet visor. He aimed the stubby weapon and loosed a burst of incendiary rounds that blossomed into a golden stream of chemical flame washing across the Gamma, which writhed and twisted and cycled from black to silver in pulsing waves.
Suddenly it released its prey and turned, slithering down the ridge toward Dev in a suicidal rush. Dev clamped down on the trigger until the flamer was empty and the Gamma lay two meters from his feet, a blackened, smoking corpse.
Platoon Sergeant Anderson was dead. His armor had been opened up the front as though cut by a knife. What remained inside did not look human anymore. Skin and muscle, bone and teeth, had melted into the inside of the armor, which smoked as though it had been sprayed with hot acid. Biting back his rising gorge, Dev stumbled back a step, then looked around helplessly. Where was the rest of his squad? Lipinsky's body lay a few meters away . . . and farther along the slope, Falk sprawled like a broken doll, white smoke steaming from corroded patches on his armor. That railgun load had landed squarely on the ridge less than a hundred meters away, shattering the Norway Line wall and spilling troops about in every direction.
Spotting movement farther down the slope, Dev hurried forward. It was Bronson, lying on his back, half of his SSPG beside him on the ground. The plasma gunner was clawing wildly at his helmet, and as Dev stepped closer, he could see the man's visor turning opaque as the transplas crazed in myriad tiny cracks. A viscous white smoke curled off th
e helmet, as fluid as a lighter-than-air liquid. Bronson's gloved fingertips began smoking as he scrabbled wildly at his invisible attackers.
Dev's knees almost gave way as he fought to control a paralyzing fear. The Xeno that had killed Anderson had released a cloud of nano disassemblers that was attacking every piece of artificial material within reach.
The only way to fight a nanotechnic weapon was with nanotechnics. Dev fumbled at his belt for his aerosol, aimed it at Bronson, and pressed the trigger. One burst should have released enough N-tech hunter-killers to neutralize the Xeno nano-Ds, if Dev had gotten there in time. Dev's external speakers could pick up Bronson's helmet-muffled screams.
God, part of Bronson's suit was softening into swirls of white mist. His chest armor was crumbling away into black char as the nano-D ate through ceramic and durasheath. Twinkles of light played across his chest armor, energy released by snapping chemical bonds.
Dev heard the pop-hiss of escaping air and dropped to his knees, digging into a side pouch for a nano sealpad, but it was too late. Through the visor, the man's eyes bulged, his mouth gaped and filled with blood, and his screams turned to ghastly, drawn-out shrieks as his air mix became contaminated with the lung-searing flame of ammonia. An instant later, Bronson's helmet visor blew in a spray of glass and blood.
Dev's helmet buzzed warning, as words appeared on his HUD. His right arm had been contaminated, and both legs. The count stood at point six-three. Nano disassemblers were eating their way through his suit.
Desperate now, Dev stumbled back out of the contaminated area, tripped on something unseen, and fell heavily to the ground. Frantically he used the aerosol to dust his arm and legs and the front of his armor, praying all the while that he hadn't picked up such a heavy dose of Xeno nano-Ds that countermeasures wouldn't work. A dozen meters away, he saw a manlike shape struggling to free itself from ground gone suddenly soft. One gloved hand clawed at the air, then froze into immobility.
They were dead, all of them. Dev was still alive, so the aerosol must have worked in time for him. He thought about going back to look for more survivors, but couldn't bring himself to move toward the sprawled horrors of Anderson, Bronson, and the others. Besides, the area was completely contaminated now and would remain deadly until the nano-Ds' internal clocks ran out and they started to break down.