by Ian Douglas
Rising, replacing the aerosol canister in its pouch, he started running, a heavy-footed slog, actually, moving down the slope and away from those mangled, motionless forms. Smoke filled the air, reducing visibility to a few tens of meters. He couldn't see the APWs, but he knew they were not far from Norway Base. He switched on his radio. "Bravo Company! Bravo Company! Can anybody hear me?"
Static was his only answer. All radio channels were out. He stopped for a moment, checking the compass reading in his HUD to get his bearings. The horror and confusion of the last few moments had really twisted him around. Which way was south?
That way.
Panic grew, a throbbing urgency beneath his chestplate, a heavy rasp of his suit respirator as he dragged at each breath. Damn it, where was the base? His boot hit something hard and he glanced down. A piece of Gamma lay there, a blackened twist of dead metal. Nearby was another . . . and another. . . .
Then Dev knew a fresh horror. Somehow he had gotten turned around. The railgun blast had flung him onto the north side of the ridge; he was in the valley north of the Norway Line, with the ridge between him and the base and the rest of Bravo Company.
Alone . . . except for those advancing Xenophobe stalkers.
Chapter 13
Our lack of understanding of Xenophobe tactics and strategy, the fact that we didn't even know if they did think, lost us some major battles that we should have won. At Norway Ridge, for instance, our warstrider units were kept back because certain Hegemony senior commanders thought the main Xeno wave was a diversion.
—Testimony before the Imperial Staff
Shosho Minoru Nagumo
C.E. 2540
Katya was not thinking of Dev Cameron as she guided the Assassin's Blade up the ridge toward the Norway Line. She was thinking that whoever was directing this null-headed hema of a battle at HEMILCOM Command ought to be shot for gross stupidity. For three hours, an eternity in modern battle, she'd been waiting with rising fury for the orders releasing the Thorhammers from their Midgard barracks. A battle was being fought within twenty kilometers of Midgard, a battle that could well mark the beginning of a major assault on Loki's capital city and sky-el, but the Thorhammers, put on alert the day before, had been left hanging at Midgard's airfield.
Colonel Varney had told her the reason. A new DSA had been detected very close to the chain of fortifications called the Norway Line, evidence, possibly, of a new Xenophobe breakthrough. Was this evidence of a new Xenophobe strategy, a frontal attack on human defenses followed by a swift strike in the rear or flank from underground? Or was it coincidence in the seemingly blind probings of Xenophobe forces? Where and when would the new Xeno force surface?
No one on or off Loki was even willing to take a guess, and HEMILCOM was waffling, unwilling to commit the warstriders until the situation had been clarified.
The problem was that nearly two thousand foot soldiers had already been committed. The Second Loki Infantry, the Wolfguard, was fighting a desperate delaying action against an advancing wave of Xenophobes that had surfaced earlier that morning nearly one hundred kilometers to the north.
Katya had never thought much one way or the other about the leg infantry. Certainly she didn't share the disdain some of her brother striderjacks had for the "crunchies." They were useful for patrols and for standing guard duty, for house-to-house searches and in-dome security and other tasks that warstriders were simply too bulky or clumsy to handle. In most combat, however, striders were so clearly superior to line infantry that it seemed silly to think of the two as separate branches of the same infantry.
But they were people, and flinging them against Xenophobes without adequate weapons or armor or strider support was nothing short of murder.
The orders had come through at last, but even then, the commitment had been piecemeal. The Thorhammers' First Battalion would be deployed to the Norway Line, while Second Battalion reinforced the Sweden Line. The two remaining Loki warstrider regiments, the Heimdal Guard and the Odinspears, prepared the last-ditch defense of Midgard itself.
On a three-D holomap the deployment might look good, but Katya's own company, now numbering sixteen operational warstriders, would have to cover twelve kilometers of the Norway Line defenses. Her First Platoon, six striders on two ascraft, had set down at Norway Base, at the point where the Xenophobes were pushing hardest.
Disaster had struck only moments after their arrival.
Asgard had been bombarding the advancing Xenos for hours, pounding the enemy until few of their Alphas remained intact. Unfortunately, the communications between ground and Asgard Orbital were ragged and on the point of breaking down. Several railgun projectiles had fallen close enough to the human lines to cause casualties. As Katya guided her Warlord up the slope, another artificial meteor had thundered out of the sky, striking the ridge a few hundred meters to the west.
The concussion flung her strider off its feet. The legger infantry manning the line had been in the process of falling back from the RoPro fortifications. The sudden detonation almost on top of the ridge had thrown an orderly retreat into complete chaos.
Carefully Katya levered the Blade upright. Armored soldiers ran past her down the hill, sliding and falling in the well-churned ice and mud. To her left, mud-covered soldiers were filing up the ramp of a big APW, which was squatting between folded legs like a large and improbable-looking spider.
"Close one," Chris Kingfield said over the net. "I think Asgard Orbital forgot to allow for the wind on that last one."
"Maybe so. Let's see if we can cover these people."
"How can we do that without burning them, too?" her pilot asked. "The Xenos are already coming through the wall."
Suresh Gupta was one of the newbies fresh from the Training Command. He was eager, but inexperienced.
"We help by getting behind the Xeno lines and making a pain of ourselves. The Xenos might act crazy sometimes, but they do respond to threats. If we kill enough of them, they'll slow their advance while they take care of us."
"I love the way this woman thinks," Kingfield said. "Don't you, Suresh? A laugh a minute."
"Quiet, Junior," she replied. "You take the hivel and the belly pod. Leave the arms to me." Shifting her optics for a three-sixty scan of her surroundings, she spotted another strider at her five-o'clock position, two hundred meters off, shimmering and fuzzy in its nanoflage as it slogged up the hill. Tagging it with her communications laser, she opened a static-free channel. "Guiterrez!"
"I hear you, Captain," Sho-i Raul Guiterrez replied. His strider was a big fifty-four-ton Battlewraith, the Deus Irae.
"Stay with me," she ordered. "Extended formation."
Footing was treacherous. Mud clung to the strider's feet with each step, and Katya found herself leaning hard into the balancing gyros to keep them from skidding on the hillside. At the top of the ridge, the RoPro wall was a temporary obstacle, too high to step across. Delivering three quick kicks, she reduced a three-meter section to rubble. The works, she noticed, were deserted. The last defenders had pulled back within moments of that last railgun bolt from the sky.
Scanning the terrain to the north, she picked up numerous targets with motion sensors and infrared. Heat sources were everywhere, picked out, framed in glowing reticles, and IDed by the Warlord's AI; the brightest were the fresh-blasted craters, courtesy of Asgard Orbital, but other sources smoldered, unmoving, or advanced across the open plain singly or in small groups. Less than a kilometer away, Katya saw a trio of large heat sources, almost certainly Xenophobe Alphas . . . and they were moving toward her at a steady pace.
"Three targets," she said, alerting Kingfield. "Bearing three-five-one, range nine hundred and closing."
"Got them," the weapons tech replied. "Striker missiles, firing one! And two! And three!"
One after the other, the three Mitsubishi DkV laser-guided missiles hissed from their dorsal launch tubes, then arrowed toward the north on white contrails. Explosions strobed and flashed in the va
lley.
"More stalkers on the way," Suresh warned. "I have six bandits, bearing zero-one-five, range fifteen hundred."
"I've got four bandits at zero-two-five, range two thousand," Guiterrez added. "Engaging . . ."
Data from Blade's AI scrolled past her visual display. The nano count in the valley was fierce, up to point sixty or seventy in some hot spots, and nowhere less than point fifteen. Worse, her motion sensors were picking up movement all around the Warlord, and close. The ground was alive with Gammas, and they were closing in on the lumbering Warlord from all directions. "Guiterrez!" she called. "Watch the Gammas!"
Before Guiterrez could respond, something large and black detached itself from the ground and struck the Battlewraith's legs. He turned a point-defense flamer on it, and it dropped away, but the Battlewraith's lower left leg was smoking, the armor under attack by invisible clouds of nano disassemblers.
A second Gamma rippled across the ground, as quick as thought, and heading for the Blade . . . followed by a third. The hivel cannon on her back spat brief buzzsaw shrieks, tearing the Gammas to shreds in rapid succession. Gammas were everywhere. Twice she fired her CPGs, shriveling attackers in searing bolts of electric flame. Twisting her torso left and right, she began picking off the Gammas with precisely targeted bursts of coherent light from her bow lasers.
Movement was a slow agony of step—wrench—step. Hours of combat and orbital bombardment had melted water ice and churned the ground to mud half a meter deep. Many of the Gammas were actually hidden under the mud, alerted to the warstrider's passing by vibration or heat or some unknown Xeno sense. Slogging forward, she kept her attention on the Gammas and the ground within ten meters of the Blade, leaving Gupta and Kingfield to watch the approaching Alpha stalkers. More missiles slashed from the Blade's dorsal tubes. The flash of their detonations seemed unnaturally dark under the pall of smoke and soot that stained the darkening sky.
Something moved. . . .
She swiveled the Warlord's torso, locking on the target, then bit off a savage curse as she recognized the clumsy humanoid shape of a soldier in combat armor. That armor, gray and black and splattered boots to helmet with mud, was hard to see in hunorm vision; under IR, he glowed with the heat of overworked servomotors and power pack.
Under the cold double stare of her lasers, the figure stood for a moment as though transfixed, then lifted one arm and waved. Angry at the distraction, she kept the strider moving forward, ignoring the lonely figure.
God, what was he doing out here? In this mud, with so many Gammas about, the poor bastard wouldn't last another five minutes.
Well, there was nothing she could do for him. Two Alphas, a Copperhead and a Cobra, were less than five hundred meters off. She increased the strider's gait, closing the range.
The Copperhead was in the lead, moving so quickly now that each step threw a spray of freezing mud to either side as it galloped ahead on shifting silver legs. Katya stopped, bracing herself, then opened fire with both CPGs and her lasers. The Copperhead crumpled under the assault, great slashes torn in its body, its charge stopped, but the Xeno was morphing as Katya watched, filling in the molten holes. Katya fired again, missed. . . . The Xeno unfolded a gleaming pseudopod, and she sensed the gathering of an intense magnetic field. Too late, she tried to shift her aiming point, then staggered under the impact of five hard-driven blows against her chest that slammed her back a step.
Warnings shrilled in her mind. Nanotech projectiles had pierced her armor in three places, damaging her right arm, tearing away her belly weapons pod, smashing armor on leg and torso. Nano-contaminated hot spots glowed against her hull. She was initiating anti-nano-D countermeasures when the Copperhead splashed toward her out of the gathering smoke, a vaguely octopuslike shape, though without the body, a rubbery sprawl of broad tentacles that engulfed Katya in black and silver coils.
With a sharp slashing motion, Katya knocked the Xeno down and fired both CPGs at point-blank range. Lightning arced, blue-white and dazzling, carving through the Copperhead's core in a splatter of molten droplets. Two tentacles fell away, followed by three more, the pieces huge and smoking on the ground. Lightning flared again, and what was left of the Copperhead fell away, shriveling.
"Suresh!" she called. She felt uncertain of the strider's balance, as though she were teetering, about to fall. The landscape wobbled around her. "Chris!"
Data from the Warlord's AI indicated that Chris Kingfield was dead. One of those nano shells had torn through the Warlord's lateral armor and exploded inside his module. Internal nano-D countermeasures had been released. Would they be enough?
Suresh Gupta wasn't answering either, but she couldn't tell if he was dead or simply knocked out of the circuit. She was having trouble with her own link, too. Static crashed in her brain, blinding her. The interference cleared, briefly, giving her a glimpse of tortured ground and the smoking hulk of the Copperhead, and then her link failed and she was back in her body, her human body, lying inside the dark and stinking coffin of the strider's command module.
She felt herself falling. When the Warlord's body hit the ground, the concussion exploded like a galaxy of stars in Katya's mind, a dazzling light that engulfed her, then carried her into blackness. . . .
Chapter 14
If you are in a tight place and feel fear, recognize it. Then get control over it and make it work for you. Fear stimulates the body processes. You can actually fight harder, and for a longer time, when you are scared. . . .
—Guidebook for Marines
Fifteenth revised edition
late twentieth century
Alone on a battlefield of giants.
Dev stood in shin-deep mud that was already starting to refreeze around his feet, staring after the towering apparition. The Warlord had advanced ponderously out of the gloom, its surfaces distorted by nanoflage, each step a measured concussion, a titan's footfall. He'd held his breath as it paused, so close he could hear the hiss of its hydraulics and pressure bearings, the grating chirp of metal on metal in a worn articulator. It was an RS-64D, powerful, magnificent, a storm god astride the wind of the battle's storm. He could see the name picked out on the hull against the reflective nano, Assassin's Blade.
Katya Alessandro's Warlord.
Had Katya seen him? Or Suresh? Idiot, he told himself. Of course they had. Little happened within range of a warstrider's senses that the commander and crew weren't aware of, and as if in answer, the machine's blunt nose angled sharply with a whine of servos, bringing the twin bow lasers to bear on him. He waved, but the big machine's torso angled up almost disdainfully, the right leg swept past, and the Blade moved on, ignoring him.
He let his arm drop, feeling foolish. Hell, the only thought striderjacks gave to infantry was their nickname for them—crunchies—and they certainly wouldn't have recognized a lone grunt in combat armor. Dev had been lucky the Blade hadn't walked him down.
One thing the strider had done was confirm his guess that he'd gotten turned around, that he was north of the Norway Line. His helmet, he realized, was only lightly shielded, and the powerful Xeno magfields had hopelessly scrambled his field sensors. Trusting to intuition, then, he started to move up the slope in the direction from which the Warlord had come. He just hoped the APWs hadn't already packed up and left.
Thunder crashed, and lightning painted the smoke clouds and billowing dust with savage hues of blue and green. Turning, Dev saw the Warlord clashing with something huge, a Copperhead, he thought, bolt following crashing bolt. Feeling small and alone and terribly naked on this no-man's-land of giants, he started running up the ridge, his boots slipping and scrabbling in the mud. He stopped when his HUD warned of N-tech disassemblers, a count of point thirty-two and rising. Eight meters away, the ground was writhing and changing as he watched, stones dissolving into steam.
Dev stepped back, lost his balance, and began sliding down the hill. At the bottom the nano count stood at point twenty-one. Better, but his helmet electronics
identified hot spots on his gloves and arms. He used the AND spray on them, wondering how much longer the canister would last.
The clash of metal, the thunderous discharge of lightning and a flash that lit up the sky, grabbed his attention. Through drifting smoke and the deepening gloom, he could see the Warlord, lying on its side fifty meters away.
Dev started running then, straining to reach the fallen strider. The mud was quickly freezing, and with each step he had to struggle to pull his foot free as the slop steadily assumed a nightmare's consistency of thickening tar. He wasn't sure what he could do, but he knew the Blade's crew was in trouble. They might have ejected, or they might still be trapped inside. Either way, he had to get down there fast.
Smoke curled from a gash in the armored flank. His helmet warned of a nano count of point fifty, and everywhere he looked, pieces of the shattered Copperhead lay twitching on the ground. He grabbed a handhold and pulled himself up the curving side of the Warlord's hull . . . then another, then two more. No one had ejected. The explosive hatches were still sealed and intact.
In moments, Dev found what he was looking for, a maintenance panel set into the external hull near the commander's hatch, with a readout for techs who needed to check the machine's systems when it was powered up and in the field. He slapped the release, and the cover slid back. A constellation of green, red, and amber lights winked at him, and he frowned, puzzling out their meaning.
The commander's module showed definite life signs. Captain Alessandro was alive but unconscious, possibly hurt, and there was class-three damage to her control circuitry, a nano burn-through, it looked like, in the primary computer link node. The Warlord's AI had cut her out of the circuit to isolate the damage, shifting primary control to the pilot.