by Ian Douglas
But the pilot's module showed a mix of red and green, and Dev winced. Suresh—if he was the guy in the pilot's compartment—was dead, though his systems were still powered up and operational. The weapons tech was dead as well.
Clinging to the rough, nano-pitted hull of the Warlord, Dev considered his options. He wouldn't last long alone on this hellfield, and Katya Alessandro would be easy meat for the first Xeno to come along. He tried to push away the image that came too easily to mind, as a Xeno absorbed her Warlord and she became a screaming, living part of the horror closing around her.
He couldn't let that happen . . . he couldn't. She'd tried to help him, had spoken up for him at the inquiry. Dev couldn't leave her to face the nightmare of Xeno assimilation.
Scrambling up the handholds, avoiding the worst of the nano hot spots, Dev worked his way to the primary core maintenance access hatch, a circular plate set into what had been the upper surface of the main hull, just in front of the hivel cannon mount, but which now, with the Warlord on its side, was sunken into a vertical wall. Flipping open a cover marked in red and white stripes, he reached into the recess and grabbed a handle marked EMERGENCY RELEASE, and twisted hard. There was a sharp hiss of equalizing pressures and the round hatch slid aside, exposing the coffin-tight interior.
The narrow tube served as internal access for pilot, commander, and weapons tech, as well as a way to reach the strider's AI core and primary circuitry. It also served as airlock, a way to get in and out of the strider without opening the operating modules to a hostile outside environment. Lights glimmered in the darkness. His shoulders hunched to avoid snagging his backpack, he wiggled around until he could stab at the pressure plates on the small control board, sealing the hatch and flooding the compartment with anti-nano-D. The local count dropped to zero, and he keyed in the sequence that would replace the chamber's air with something breathable.
Come on . . . come on! Impatiently he counted off the seconds, waiting for the atmosphere indicator to change from red to green. He was completely blind in here, and he didn't like to think about what might be moving around outside the crippled warstrider. Green!
Awkwardly in the tight compartment, Dev removed his helmet and shrugged out of his life support pack. The air burned with the acrid taint of ammonia, making his eyes water, but it was breathable. He found the pilot's module hatch—with the Warlord on its side, it was beneath him—and unsealed it.
The chamber beyond was tight and cramped and dark; Suresh lay on his side, at right angles to the airlock tube. He hung in his restraint harness like a puppet, the jackfeeds still plugged into his helmet. The helmet was twisted back, almost beneath the body. It looked to Dev as though Suresh had been slammed against one end of the module, and the impact had snapped his neck. A quick inspection of Gupta's medisensor on his chest confirmed that he was dead.
If Dev could get him to a medical station, there was a chance. Nanosurgical techniques could reconnect or regrow severed spinal cords as easily as they could reattach a severed arm, but if his brain went many more minutes without a blood supply, so many cerebral connections would decay that nothing would bring the Earther back.
At the moment, Dev had to worry about getting the Warlord on its feet again. Suresh would have to wait.
With unsteady fingers he unsealed Gupta's cephlink helmet and slipped it off, then struggled for several moments more to release the harness straps and drag the body out of the module. What followed was a contortionist's nightmare. Gupta's body was a dead weight, the effort like wrestling with a bag of sand while lying on his side in a steel pipe as wide as the reach of his arm. He tried to be gentle—the less he damaged the already broken body, the more likely Suresh might be brought back later—but at the moment, speed was more important than finesse. For now, at least, Dev and Katya were both definitely alive, while Gupta was not. Any second now a Xeno would sense them, and then they all would be dead for certain.
At last Dev dropped into the narrow space occupied by Gupta moments earlier and, bracing the body above him with one hand, hit the hatch close switch. He was sealed off from the access tube now; lights, red, amber, and green, glowed eerily at him in the darkness, and he sensed the warm hum of the Warlord's systems all around him.
He studied the controls, finding he'd forgotten nothing. Had it only been a month since he'd jacked one of these armored monsters? He removed his glove to reveal the left palm implant, then donned Gupta's helmet, reaching up beneath his chin to snap the jacks into his sockets, one—two—three. His palm sought the interface board. Light exploded behind his closed eyes . . . and pain.
Groggily Dev fought the confused cascade of sensations surging through his brain. The Warlord's AI was configured to Suresh Gupta's cerebral patterns, not his, and it would take moments more to reset the system.
Concentrating, he unlocked the AI access codes still stored in his cephlink RAM. "Pilot replacement," he thought. "Reconfiguration, Code Three-Green-One."
"Think of a field of yellow grain," the strider's voice said in the back of his mind. "Concentrate on a flock of birds flying overhead, left to right."
He did so. Urgency gnawed at him. The mental image wavered, and he thought for a moment he was going to lose it.
No!
"Red," the AI voice told him, and he pictured the color. "Orange . . . blue . . . white . . . square . . . triangle . . . "
The list of words droned on, each a stimulus triggering an image received and recorded by the Warlord's artificial intelligence. Distantly he felt a shudder pass through his body, a heavy, rolling sensation as though the Warlord had been struck by something very large, very massive. Fear rose, a clawing darkness behind the clarity of his thoughts, urging him to reach for the manual eject key . . . but he fought it down.
" . . . the number fourteen . . . Picture a wild and rocky seacoast beneath a gray sky, with waves crashing against the rocks. . . .
"Reconfiguration is complete. Enabling cephlink, full control to Module Two."
Pause, and then, with a satisfying inner snap, light flared again in Dev's eyes, but this time it was like waking from a sound sleep. He was lying on his side, his face close to a gel of ice and mud. Something large and shaggy stood above him on silver pseudopods, its bulk obscenely distended and alive with the twist and wiggle of snakelike appendages. Dev recognized the amorphous shape, a King Cobra, slow and a bit clumsy, but one of the largest and most deadly of all the Xenophobe killer machines.
The cascade of data through Dev's senses was numbing in its length and in its complexity. He'd not handled a direct sensory link for a month, and the shock was like stepping into the thunder of a waterfall. The Warlord's AI confirmed what he already knew: Katya was alive but unable to link, Jun-i Kingfield was dead; the strider itself had sustained damage—the list of failed or failing systems was the bulk of the data cascade—but it could still move and it could still fight.
Nanotechnic disassemblers were storming at the Warlord's outer hull, degrading the armor in an invisible molecular storm. The exterior nano count was approaching point eight-four. The behemoth standing above the fallen Warlord extended one broad pseudopod like a rippling black tongue, and where it touched the strider's left weapons pod, the nano-D count shrieked into the point-nineties, approaching the one-point-oh that marked complete molecular breakdown.
Lifting a fallen strider to its feet was difficult at the best of times, especially when it had weapons instead of true arms and hands. While under attack, it was nearly impossible. Dev thrust his left arm out, levering the hull far enough off the ground that he could tuck his left leg beneath his body. At the same time, he swiveled his torso and snapped his right arm up, bringing the right-hand CPG into line with the looming King Cobra.
Lightning flashed, and the amorphous hull of the Cobra flattened beneath the assault. Dev triggered a second blast, and a pair of ropy, lancet-tipped appendages as thick as elephants' trunks broke free in a splatter of silver droplets. The King Cobra drifted back
a step, and Dev used the pause to straighten his left leg, raising the bulk of the damaged warstrider shakily erect.
The nano count on his right pod registered point six-two, point six-one on his right leg. With a thought, he triggered a countermeasures release. Smoke, like a fire extinguisher's blast, enveloped the strider, cooling the hot spots before his armor began dissolving.
Twisting right, he triggered his twin bow lasers. Red warnings flashed across his visual field. The laser circuits were out, mud-clogged and shock-damaged, and so was his left-arm CPG. The fall had broken a power feed. With peripheral vision, he saw the blue-white snap and flash of an electrical discharge at the elbow connector, and he could feel the slow but steady drain on his power reserves.
The King Cobra drifted forward with a curious rolling motion that slid the damaged areas out of the warstrider's line of fire. A black pseudopod grew like a slender head from obscenely bunched and writhing shoulders. Dev started to fire his right CPG, noted temperature warnings and a threat of power shutdown to his right pod, and reset the fire command before he'd completed it. Shifting control instead to his dorsal hivel cannon, he loosed a point-blank stream of depleted uranium, hosing the Cobra with the hammering impact of fifty rounds per second.
The King Cobra, its mantle spread to enclose the Warlord in a deadly embrace, was caught, vulnerable and exposed. The flattened pseudopod shredded in a whirling storm of fragments.
Another tentacle groped toward him from the left. Sensing its approach, Dev twisted, bringing the arcing flare of the damaged power lead between him and the enemy, then lunging sideways. The Xeno machine flinched under the sputtering crackle of Dev's impromptu electric stun gun, part of its surface sloughing off as internal magfields were disrupted. Dev fired another hivel burst, then, noting that the right CPG bore temperature had dropped almost into safe levels, he loosed another burst of protons.
The Cobra's surface crackled and sparked, part of its mass smoking into vapor as the Xeno lost control of its N-tech surface. An explosion strobed at the thing's core, sleeting Dev with Xeno fragments and tearing the alien machine into molten pieces. The largest fragments twisted and snaked across the smoking ground until, one by one, Dev fried them in bursts of nuclear flame.
Power levels at seventy-four percent . . .
Patches of armor on left side and leg depleted by twenty-seven percent . . .
Temperature warning, right CPG, nine hundred degrees . . .
New warnings flashed, and the line breakers in his right arm tripped out again. Smoke was pouring from the right Mark III—not the viscous white smoke of nano-Ds dissolving armor, but a sputtering, greasy black cloud from melting plastic and burning lubricants, mingled with green fumes from a ruptured coolant line somewhere. He tried to move his right arm and felt the mechanism grind and seize, rigidly locked and probably ruined.
Dev was rapidly running out of weapons. His systems readout indicated he could still fire the CPG, but he would have to aim it by turning his whole body, a slow and clumsy way to fight an enemy that was already quicker and more maneuverable than he was.
A wink of light on his visual display caught his attention, the electronic equivalent of his Warlord's AI tapping his shoulder and pointing. Swiveling his primary optics toward the black and ominous sky, he glimpsed a fast-moving speck skimming just beneath the overcast, crossing the ridge from south to north.
Dev engaged his telescopics, enlarging the image until he could recognize the lean-tailed shape of a VK-141 Stormwind at a range of eight kilometers.
Relief flooded Dev's mind. A Stormwind! He wasn't alone after all! He triggered the Warlord's communications laser before the ascraft could vanish into the overcast. "Stormwind, this is Assassin Leader!" It felt strange identifying himself with a company commander's call sign, but he was in the command strider, and there was no time to explain things.
"This is Stormwind Thor-Two," a woman's voice replied over the laser comm. "Tai-i Anders. Who the hell is this? What happened to Captain Alessandro?"
"I think she's okay," Dev replied. "Her link with the AI is down. I've taken over."
"I have you in sight, Assassin Leader." Anders probably assumed that he was Gupta or the Warlord's weapons tech. There was a moment's hesitation. "And someone else does, too. Bandits at your four o'clock, range three hundred!"
Dev turned, his optics zeroing in on the black and silver shapes flowing toward him across the ground. A Fer-de-Lance, an Adder, and a Mamba, all swift and deadly, were closing in for the kill.
Chapter 15
The science of information—the storage, retrieval, transmission, and exchange of data—has done more to broaden the scope and reach of Man's mastery of both his physical universe and the dark mystery of his own soul than all previous discoveries, technologies, and philosophies combined. Knowledge, as ever, is power; ignorance is damnation. Perhaps this is why we still dread that which we don't know.
—The Golden Apples of the Stars
Shelly Westegren
C.E. 2457
"Stormwind, I need ground support!" Dev yelled. "Now!"
"Get clear, Assassin Leader! I'm on them!"
Dev was already in motion as the Stormwind dipped toward the battle-torn ground, sending the Warlord lunging up the ridge with long, scissoring steps. The Fer-de-Lance put a trio of nano disassembler projectiles into his back, but he fired his nano countermeasures and kept moving. An instant later, the Xeno turned away, focusing on the approaching Stormwind.
Ascraft could not risk close passes over Xeno units. Their airspeed made AND clouds useless, and though most had layers of anti-nano-D sandwiched between sheets of armor, a hit by Threat nano could usually bring the ascraft down. For that reason, ascraft like the Stormwind relied on standoff weapons for ground support.
Dev's telescopic vision tracked the projectile as it detached from the Stormwind's hull. Then rocket engines kicked in and sent the pod arrowing toward the Xeno. He recognized it, an SK3-7E Skyray air-to-ground missile. The fat, elongated snout was a Cluster Munitions Package.
Anders hadn't been kidding when she'd told Dev to get clear.
Dev kept climbing, feeling the slushy yield of dirt and loose gravel beneath the flanges of his feet. Halfway up the slope, he turned, positioning his body so that he could bring his CPG to bear on the Fer-de-Lance, which was firing nano weapons at the approaching Skyray. Dev fired, the bolt staggering the hovering Xeno, bringing its attention back toward the escaping Warlord.
Then the Skyray was overhead, flashing eighteen meters above the Mamba and Death Adder as its dim-witted brain computed that it was now as close to the target as it would get on this trajectory.
The warhead detonated.
To Dev, it seemed that there were two simultaneous explosions, one a fireball in the sky, the second a volcanic eruption on the ground. The Skyray's micronuke warhead vaporized ten thousand cobalt slugs sealed in rhenium-tungstide cartridges; the same detonation powered a brief-lived magnetic field that stripped the cobalt of electrons and hurled the resulting plasma bolts on precisely aligned paths, filling a ten-by-one-hundred-meter footprint with white-hot bolts from the sky.
The ground beneath the fireball shuddered in a thunderous eruption of flame and pulverized rock. Caught in the center of that deadly footprint, the Mamba and the Adder were shredded; the Fer-de-Lance was holed thirty times by searing lances of starcore heat; writhing fragments twisted in white heat and died.
Dev felt the throb of the micronuke's electromagnetic pulse. A tenth second later, a hailstorm of molten fragments slashed across his back, and the twin concussions—one from the explosions, and the second caused by the thunderclap of air blasting into the vacuum left by the fireball—hurled the sixty-ton strider facedown against the hillside. Dust sucked into that hellfury boiled skyward in a roiling mushroom cloud.
Slowly Dev brought the Warlord to its feet, checking the RS-64D's damage readouts. Power reserves were down to forty-eight percent, and there were holes in his
armor where the nano-Ds had eaten clear through to the internal support struts. The CMP blast had peeled armor from the dorsal surface of the fuselage across an area one meter square. The left weapons pod was gone now, the broken joint still sparking fitfully from severed power leads.
But the Xenophobes were destroyed, their fragments smoldering in the CMP's charred and heat-blasted killzone.
He let his AI scan the sky and acquire again the distant, circling Stormwind. "Thanks, Thor-Two," Dev said. "Clean sweep. Targets destroyed."
"Copy, Assassin Leader. Listen, I don't know if Xenies talk to each other, but I'd say now would be a good time for you to hightail it out of there. I'm picking up a lot of activity in your area."
"Ay-firmative, Thor-Two. Can you link me up with other striders?" He'd not seen any other human combat machines since he'd climbed aboard the Assassin's Blade.
"They're pulling back to the second line. Didn't you get the word?"
"Negative. I was . . . ah . . . out of the circuit." He wondered what Anders would think if she knew a legger was jacking the stranded Warlord.
"Okay, no static. Here's the tacsit. The Xenos hit the Norway Line hard. The Thorhammers lost four striders in seven minutes . . . uh, make that three striders, now that you've been found. The rest boarded the transports and are falling back to the Sweden Line. The Xenos are still moving toward Midgard. They're between you and your friends now."
"Great. I don't suppose I could impose on you for a ride."
"Sorry, I can't," Anders replied. "My ship's configured for ground attack. But I'll put through a call and have a transport out here in ten minutes."
"Understood." Dev swiveled his primary optics skyward as the Stormwind passed a hundred meters overhead with a shriek of intake fans and plasma jets. He could see the strider slots beneath the stubby, canted wings, and the bulky cargo of snap-in weapons pods that occupied them. Stormwinds were designed as multiple-role ascraft, but they needed time on the ground with a maintenance crew to switch from one role to another.