by Ian Douglas
"What do you have?" For Dr. Paul Hernandez, life and work on the Altair DESREF had long ago settled into a comfortable routine. Statements like "odd" and "that shouldn't be happening" usually preceded a failure of some sort, equipment breakdown or an AI program crash, usually due to human error. A mathematician, he was a man who lived by order, reason, and the comforting predictability of numbers.
He did not like disruptions in the routine.
"Magnetic effects on the K-band," Schofield said, that faraway look still in her eyes. "Something's deflecting the solar wind, and I can't even guess what the hell it could be."
Hernandez set his coffee cup aside and frowned. "A ship?" Starships used powerful magnetic fields to deflect subatomic particles, dust, and stray molecules of gas that could pose a danger at high velocities. "We don't have a ship due in here for a week."
"No thermal effects," Schofield replied. Starships that had been locked away in the K-T Plenum tended to acquire large quantities of heat that could only be dumped in normal space. On infrared scanners they tended to glow like small suns for hours after emerging from the godsea. "No, nothing. Just a wake in the solar wind that looks . . . oh, God . . ."
"What is it?"
"Oh. My. God." The words were spaced and planted like a pronouncement of Armageddon. Schofield's thin face had gone white, eyes and jaw locked as her inner eye focused on . . . something.
"Damn it, what do you see?" He grabbed her wrist, trying to tug her palm from the interface, but he couldn't budge her, couldn't interrupt the trance that appeared to have her pinned immobile at the console.
A glance at the instrument readouts showed a solid target out there, something enormous, a kilometer long at least. He knew a thin, cold fear. There should be nothing out there. All he could imagine was that, at long last, someone had picked up the approach of a Xenophobe starship, and unfortunately, that someone was the crew of an unarmed research facility.
Paul Hernandez then performed the most heroic action of his fifty-eight standard years of life. Seating himself next to Jeanne Schofield, he sounded the station alarm, then pulled a linkjack from the console and, abandoning the predictable, plugged himself in.
"We have emerged, Lifemaster." The Third Controller secured itself to a branched projection emerging from a nearby wall. The words it chose signified completeness . . . and relief. "The Transit appears to have been successful."
"Appears?" That single, questioning word carried a great deal of meaning. "We cannot afford doubt in this mission, upon which so much depends."
"The Achievers have completed their assigned geometry and are now dead." The word would have as easily translated "empty." "We will not understand precisely what they have accomplished until we assimilate their remains.
"In the meantime, the Perceivers are attempting to confirm the new geometry. It is difficult, as always, to make sense of their initial observations. However, the target star is near and appears, as expected, to be a close match to our home sun. The Perceivers yet search for worlds. It is possible, however, that this star is barren."
The Lifemaster felt a pang of anticipatory disappointment. Barren! That word conveyed such aching loss, such futility and lack of purpose. So much had depended on discovering here the source of electromagnetic radiations that seemed to promise the presence of a starfaring civilization. Was it possible that those radiations were of natural origin after all, the product of a universe that seemed, increasingly, to mock the DalRiss philosophy that held Universe and Life to be one?
Its surroundings held no answer, filled and defined as they were by living processes. The very walls of the Ship's bridge were alive, revealed to the Lifemaster's delicate ri-sense as a pulsing, energetic enclosure. He could not perceive the Void beyond the Ship's walls, the Void that still defied DalRiss logic, belief, and experience after over eight thousand cycles. For that he relied upon the strange senses of the Perceivers, life forms designed to directly sense certain limited wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. Perceived by those wavelengths, the Lifemaster knew, the universe was turned inside out, rendered more dead—empty—than alive.
"There remains one possibility," the Third Controller said. "A heat source that appears dead but which seems to be a source of electromagnetic radiation." Two of its upper appendages twitched open, an expression of concern. "There is strangeness here. The source could be artificial."
"Draw closer then. We will reach out and taste this source."
"And if it is Chaos?"
The Lifemaster stiffened. After coming so far, and with so much at stake, failure was unthinkable. "Then we die," it said. "As will our world."
Chapter 22
In war there is no substitute for victory.
—General Douglas MacArthur
mid-twentieth century
Eight months later, Dev was far around the curve of the planet from Midgard, his Scoutstrider Dev's Destroyer standing on what might one day be the bottom of the planet's deepest and widest ocean. Now the landscape was sere and barren, an unending, ocher flatness. Once, this plain had been a sea floor, a fact betrayed by the sparkle of various salts encrusting the ground like minute diamonds. Someday, when Loki became Freyr, salt water would cover this ground again, but without the ammonia and methane and frigid temperatures that had kept this world lifeless until the arrival of Man.
He was less concerned with Loki's past, however, than he was with the activity around him. Several ascraft transporters rested on the plain a kilometer away, while a four-legged cargo rig stood a few hundred meters in front of him. A dozen men in armor were guiding a pearl gray sphere from the walker's belly as it was gently lowered by monocable to the ground.
Other foot soldiers and warstriders had set up an armed perimeter about the cargo walker and transports. Hovercraft skimmed across the monotonous desert on plumes of wind-blasted salt, while striders of the First Platoon, Alessandro's Assassins, restlessly patrolled the area, weapons locked but ready for immediate release.
A familiar-looking Warlord stalked toward Dev. The Assassin's Blade's nanoflage was inactive at the moment, and the big machine had reverted to the company's dress livery, blue with white trim.
"Hello, Lieutenant," Katya's voice said in his mind as her warstrider stalked closer. "How's number three?"
Dev gestured with Destroyer's left arm, pointing with clenched duralloy fingers at the men positioning the gray sphere. "Almost ready, Captain," he replied. "We'll be ready to release in five minutes."
"Good. Numbers one and two are set. You're the last."
"Any update on the target?"
"Negative. No movement. It looks like we caught 'em napping."
Dev studied the bomb team. They were detaching the monocable now. Ponderously the cargo rig walked away, leaving the men alone with their deadly charge.
Operation Jigoku, they called it, though the Inglic-speaking troops in Dev's team had, perhaps inevitably, managed to corrupt it to Operation Chicago, Operation Gigolo, and even the rather unlikely Gee-goke-you. Jigoku, in fact, was the Nihongo word for Hades, the underworld of ancient myth. No one had explained whether that meant the Xenophobes were themselves denizens of an underground hell, or that this was an attempt to send them there, but the name was appropriate either way.
"We're set here, Lieutenant," another voice said in Dev's mind over the tactical channel. Across the dead sea bottom, one of the armored figures raised one arm. "Chicago Three, ready to drop."
"Roger that, Sergeant Wilkins," Dev replied. "Get your people clear."
Two new weapons were being demonstrated here, Dev thought, and he was getting at least partial credit for them both.
He still wasn't sure what he was supposed to have to do with the penetrators. He'd been told that the recordings he'd made at Norway Ridge had generated the idea, but Dev was pretty sure that someone would have hit upon the notion sooner or later. All he'd done at Norway Ridge was accidentally step in a Xeno nest.
But the crustal penetr
ators, as the new devices were called, promised to be the weapon that would stop the Xeno scourge at last. Each penetrator, nano-grown from sim replicants of the captured Xeno travel spheres, carried a one-hundred-kiloton fission bomb.
A nuclear depth charge. Dev didn't really want the credit for that one.
The second idea, however, he was proud of, for the rediscovery of combined arms warfare promised to be at least as important as crust-penetrating nukes in fighting the Xenos, and could well revolutionize the art of war entirely.
Combined arms was a concept that had surfaced time and time again through the course of human history. Cavalry working with foot soldiers, archers working with pikemen, tanks working with infantry, each advance in the science of war had brought together the strengths of separate military disciplines, and ultimately, each had become obsolete as technology or doctrine evolved.
Warstriders were the modern-day descendants of the great, hulking, tracked armored vehicles of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, machines so heavily armed, so maneuverable, and so fast that infantry could do little to support them and, in fact, would only slow them down.
As a result, while armies still fielded line infantry regiments for certain restricted purposes, foot soldiers were almost universally despised as useless for serious combat. The modern battlefield, it was commonly said, was far too deadly for foot soldiers to survive on for more than a few minutes. Warstriders were the arm of decision in twenty-sixth-century combat.
But Dev had been both striderjack and infantryman, and seen the battlefield both from the vantage point of a warstrider linkage and from the dirt and blood and terror of a crunchie. One of the first things he'd done after being initiated once again into the Assassins had been to suggest the creation of special Combined Arms Groups, or CAGs.
Stalkers were deadly opponents in combat, but the greatest threat to striders were large numbers of Gammas. Men in combat armor could not face Alphas, but they could carry firepower enough to kill Gammas. Light striders, Dev had suggested in his report to HEMILCOM, machines like the LaG-42 Ghostrider or the RLN-90 Scoutstrider, could be assigned to work with line infantry platoons. To solve the mobility problem, the infantry could be transported in ascraft, Lightnings or Stormwinds, which were already part of a combined arms team when they flew close ground support with warstriders. Combat, Dev contended, might become a close-knit deployment of the three military arms—striders, ascraft, and ground troops.
HEMILCOM was still reviewing his concept, a notion that in some circles was considered heresy. In the meantime, Katya Alessandro had swung the temporary loan of an infantry platoon to the Assassins, put Dev in charge of them, and told him to give his CAG idea a try. They called themselves Cameron's Commandos.
For almost seven months he'd been working with Sergeant Wilkins and her troops, evolving tactics, and drilling, drilling, drilling. When the Thorhammers were assigned to Operation Jigoku, he'd found immediate employment for them, manhandling the new crustal penetrators into position as Assassin warstriders mounted guard.
He found it easy to work with them. They were First Platoon, Bravo Company, Second Loki Regiment, the Midgardian Ulvenvakt. Most of them, he'd already met.
The new team had already proven itself in combat, too. Dropping crust-penetrating depth charges on Xenophobe SDT complexes was safer than tangling with Xenos one on one, but it was not without a certain risk of its own.
The last of Dev's foot soldiers clambered aboard a grounded Stormwind, leaving the gray sphere alone on the ground three hundred meters away. With the shriek of turbines and intakes, the VK-141 lifted off in a swirling cloud of dust. "All personnel clear of the drop area, Lieutenant," Wilkins said in his mind.
Dev switched back to Katya's frequency. "Ready to drop, Captain. We're set for timed detonation at seventeen hundred meters."
"Thank you, Lieutenant. Stand by." Still tuned to her link frequency, he caught her side of a rapid dialogue with HEMILCOM. By agreement with the Imperials in Asgard, the penetrator warheads were inert. They could only be armed by a coded linkage initiated personally by Shotaro Takahashi, the Imperial Daihyo.
"We'd better move back ourselves, Captain," Dev pointed out when she was through. "The charts show a shallow tunnel layer here at five hundred meters. Could be a problem."
The warstriders began making their way north, toward a low ridge overlooking the plain. Other vehicles, striders, transports, and hoverscats, were already gathered there. A squad of infantry, wearing the black and red armor of Cameron's Commandos, stood and cheered as he stilted his way onto the top of the hill. He lifted his right arm, fist-heavy with its Cyclan-5K autocannon, in salute.
"Hey, Lieutenant!" Private Dahlke yelled, using his external speaker to send his voice booming through the thin Lokan air. "Let's drop it right down their damned throats this time!"
He thrilled again to the godlike power of man-become-machine, knew that it was more than the electronic TM-high of implant wired to AI.
He belonged.
"This is it, Lieutenant," Private Rosen yelled. "The big one!"
When Operation Jigoku had commenced months before, aiming the new crustal penetrators had been more art than science. Xenophobe subsurface deformation tracks could be plotted holographically by combining input from three or more DSA detector stations, but the data was fuzzy, the picture of the Xeno tunnel networks woefully incomplete.
Later, more detailed three-D maps had been AI generated, as the techs learned how to interpret the reflected shock waves from multiple nuclear detonations deep within the planet's crust. The destruction of a Xeno complex could actually yield far more information about tunnel complexes and SDTs in the area than had been known before the attack, and follow-up strikes could seal thousands of kilometers worth of underground passageways.
Now there was the promise of a whole new generation of weapons technology, meson scanners that could reveal the interior of a planet as easily as medical nanoprobes revealed the inside of the human body, and robot penetrators carrying warheads thousands of kilometers into the deepest and most inaccessible Xenophobe nests.
Well, those were still on the drawing boards, and the way things were going, they might not be needed at all. They hadn't been doing badly with echo mapping and straight-line penetration drops.
"Lieutenant Cameron?" Katya asked formally. "Will you do the honors?"
"Gladly, Captain." Code flickered past his vision. Takahashi was in the circuit, tied in through stationary orbit comsats since the Asgard Ring was below the horizon. The Daihyo was feeding down the code groups, changed daily, that would release three nuclear warheads to Hegemony forces on the surface. "I confirm weapons free. Warhead Three is now armed and ready for release."
"Stations One and Two report weapons free, armed and ready for release." The voice was that of a controller at HEMILCOM HQ, relayed through the satellite net from Asgard. He had the self-important, pedantic tone of the technician reporting phenomena, rather than of the warrior dealing in death. "All stations, stand by."
Gently, in his mind, Dev found the frequency of the inert sphere. A particular code group would activate its penetrator fields.
"All stations," HEMILCOM said. "You are clear to initiate drop sequence."
"Right," Katya said. "Let 'er go!"
Dev triggered the activation sequence and sensed a single, powerful magnetic surge as the penetrator's fields switched on, pulsed once, then stabilized. In the desert, a kilometer away, the sphere vanished, sinking rapidly beneath the desert sands.
"Chicago Three," Katya reported to HEMILCOM. "On the way."
He waited out the seconds, watching them flicker past as his implant marked their passage. With their magnetic fields full on, penetrators tended to fall through distorted rock at a steady speed of about five meters per second. The Xenophobe DSA complex was seventeen hundred meters down, which meant a time delay of over five and a half minutes.
The problem, as it turned out, was that the Xenophobe co
mplex was not a single underground path of distorted rock, but many of them, dozens of tangled mazes occurring in layers at different depths. The most shallow set of passageways, according to the three-D seismic maps, was only five hundred meters down. In less than two minutes, the crustal penetrator would pass that first Xeno nest.
No one in HEMILCOM knew what the Xenos thought about traveler spheres stolen from their own technology zipping through their subterranean realm; hell, they still couldn't agree on the question of whether or not Xenophobes thought at all, at least in ways that were meaningful to humans. What was known was that the spheres left behind a vertical highway of distorted rock. When this trick had been tried in the past, often the Xenos at the shallower layers followed the spheres' paths back to the surface, almost as if they were . . . curious.
Dev's internal clock registered two minutes.
"Ah, Station Three, we're picking up a DSA," HEMILCOM HQ reported. "Force four-three."
"The traveler?" Katya asked.
"That's negative, Three. Contact is rising, depth now approximately one-two-zero meters, force five-five."
"They're coming out to play, then," Dev said. "Stand ready, people." He ran a last check of his Scoutstrider's weapons systems, then activated the bolt on his right-arm autocannon, snicking home the first 27-mm shell.
On the sea bed, a plume of smoke erupted from the spot where the sphere had rested moments before. A shiver transmitted itself through the ground, and then the smoke grew thicker, a black pillar spreading toward Loki's perpetual overcast.
Something was moving within the smoke. "Spotter four-seven," a voice called. "I have a target."
"Captain?" Dev asked, deferring to the company commander.
"At your discretion, Lieutenant."
"Lieutenant Benson," Dev called. "The target is yours. Fire!"
To his right, a squat, four-legged Calliopede loosed a salvo of T-30 rockets, like white-hot flares streaming tails of smoke. They struck the half-glimpsed shape in a ripple of explosions that lit up the fuming, volcanic cloud and sent shock waves rippling through the ground.