by Ian Douglas
More Xenos were appearing second by second, however, rising through the channel of distorted rock and scuttling out onto the surface. In moments, every warstrider in the line had joined the fire, sending volley after volley of rockets, shells, and energy into the eldritch shapes spreading out across the salt desert.
Radio became garbled; the hunters switched to lasers, maintaining a steady flow of coordinating communications that picked targets and brought them down, quickly, cleanly, efficiently. Large Xenophobe travelers were wrecked before they could shapeshift to combat mode. Pieces writhed and squirmed on the sand until they were fried by particle beams or lasers. Two Xenozombies, a Ghostrider and a Warlord, appeared and were immediately slagged into immovable junk. Overhead, a trio of AV-21 Lightnings darted and turned and stooped on shrill turbines, adding their deadly payloads to the killing ground in crashing cascades of flame. Communications relayed from Chicagos One and Two reported that there was fighting going on at both of the other sites as well.
Dev leaned into the recoil of his heavy autocannon as it slam-slam-slammed its rapid-fire stutter, hurling explosive shells into the chaos of the killzone. He concentrated on the Alphas. His CAG troops took up positions to either side of the Scoutstrider with practice-honed precision, ignoring the thunder of the striders' artillery overhead, burning down the Gammas as quickly as they appeared.
No Xeno machine came closer to the ridge position than fifty meters.
Internally, Dev's clock continued counting down the seconds. Five minutes, forty seconds after the penetrator vanished, Dev began listening with every sense his Scoutstrider possessed, straining to detect some sign that the warhead had detonated.
He heard nothing, of course. If the traveler had exploded on cue, then in the first millionth of a second, a gas bubble had been created over a mile beneath his feet, a cavity tens of meters across filled by a seething cloud of plasma at temperatures well over a million degrees, and pressures reaching millions of atmospheres. In the hydrodynamic phase, a stage lasting for a few tenths of a second, those temperatures and pressures created a shock wave racing out in all directions from the blast's center, traveling at or above the speed of sound in rock. Just how fast that would be depended on the density of the rock, but it would certainly be several seconds at least before the shock wave reached—
He felt it, a distant shiver at first, then a hard thump against the flanges of his Scoutstrider's feet. A visible shock wave flickered across the desert floor.
"Ladies and gentlemen," the voice of HEMILCOM HQ reported in his mind, "we have had positive detonation on all three devices."
Outside, the troops of the 2nd Loki broke into cheers. Dev tried to picture what had just happened far beneath the surface, and failed. Theoretically, the blast wave melted several meters of rock around the initial cavity and turned the rock for hundreds of meters farther plastic, or crushed it into rubble. The precise effect on the Xenos themselves was unknown, but nothing physical could survive overpressures of millions of tons per square centimeter, or the shearing action of solid rock flexing like a wave flicked down a length of rope.
Dev had gone through this operation fifteen times now, and each time he was surprised that the violence unleashed in the sunless depths of Loki's crust didn't break through to the surface. There was no crater, no plume of smoke, no leakage of heat or radiation, just that tremor . . . and a legacy of aftershocks over the next few days as the blast cavity collapsed and filled with rubble.
But a vast, labyrinthine maze of Xenophobe tunnels had just been trapped between three simultaneous nuclear blasts, and eliminated. If the picture of Loki's crust the tectonics boys had been assembling over the past couple of months was accurate, it was the last nest of Xenophobes on Loki.
The war was over.
"It's over. . . ." he thought, loudly enough that his AI transmitted the words.
Outside, the celebration was continuing, soldiers in red and black armor capering about like five-year-olds, even the striders gesticulating with their weapon-heavy arms as though they were waving and cheering. Dev was . . . numb.
"Say again, Lieutenant?" Katya said.
"Sorry, Captain. Thinking out loud. It's just hard to believe it's over."
"You think it is?"
"Isn't it? Our last precombat brief said this was the last major nest. You think there're enough survivors to reconnect?"
While the Xeno DSA tunnels could be mapped seismically, no one could be certain that all of the underground Xeno paths were being picked up. Too, if they were going to nuke every kilometer of tunnel, the task would take years and leave much of Loki's crust a battered, radioactive hell. The strategy so far had been to identify and nuke the major Xeno nests, the "cities," as they were called, destroying the big ones and isolating any that might have been in the tunnels between blast areas. Were those isolated Xenos still alive? Could they rejoin with other survivors and recreate their tunnel system?
The question had occupied HEMILCOM and Imperial strategic thinking for most of the past months, but there simply were no hard answers. Human forces on Loki would not be able to relax. Who was it, Dev wondered, who'd said once that eternal vigilance was the price of freedom? On Loki the prize would be not freedom, but survival.
"Hell, I don't know," Katya said. "But I do know the war's not over for us. Haven't you heard the latest who-was? We're being shipped out."
"Huh? Where?"
"Who knows? Maybe the powers that be figure that, if we were able to beat the Xenos here, maybe it's time to take back some of the other territory we've lost. Like Lung Chi."
Dev tried to examine his own feelings about that, but felt nothing. He still felt dazed. "I thought we belonged to Loki."
"We belong to the Hegemony Guard, Lieutenant. We go where they send us. Me, I bet it's Lung Chi."
"I think . . . I'd like that," Dev said. He remembered the last time he'd seen his father alive, and felt a new eagerness. "I'd like that a lot."
But military decisions have a logic of their own that rarely meshes with the likes or fears of the personnel who carry them out. Other events had been taking place far from Loki, events that demanded a far broader strategy.
Their destination was not Lung Chi.
Chapter 23
It is the Emperor's express wish that the astounding discovery made at Altair be followed up without delay. You are hereby requested and required to organize a military expeditionary force, to be placed under joint Imperial-Hegemony command, and to be composed of the following units . . .
—Orders to General John Howard from Imperial Daihyo Takahashi
C.E. 2540
The ship was called Yuduki, a poetic Nihongo name for the evening moon. Classified as an Imperial armored troop transport, she was 330 meters long and massed 48,400 tons. Her hull was divided into three unequal sections. Running aft for half her length was the flat, bulky drives section, cluttered with sponsons, heat radiators, and K-T drive nacelles. Forward was the small, blunt wedge housing primary sensors and communications gear. Amidships, three flattened, pylon-mounted bricks, each sixty meters long by ten thick, rotated ponderously about a central core. Within the core were bridge, tactical center, life support, engineering, and cargo spaces, as well as all AI and linkage electronics; the slow-rotating spin modules, generating a carousel's out-is-down artificial gravity, had been divided into separate quarters for the ship's complement of forty-one and troop bays for her passengers.
No attempt had been made to streamline Yuduki's cumbersome lines. She was designed to navigate from orbit to orbit and the godsea in between, not the turbulence of planetary atmospheres. Nor had much attention been paid to the comfort of her passengers. Each accommodations module was divided into three levels, and those decks reserved for the Thorhammers were crowded to the point of claustrophobia, over twelve hundred men and women packed into narrow compartments with bunk beds stacked four deep. Since getting rid of heat was the number one problem of ships in the godsea, and since the
stomachs of many never did adjust to the odd sensations of spin gravity with its attendant Coriolis force and disorientation, the enlisted accommodations were widely viewed as a preview ViRsimulation of Hell.
Officers had a bit more personal space and the semiprivacy of thin-walled cubes, bunking four to a room. Most comfortable were the spaces reserved for regimental use, mess hall, Common Room, officers' lounge, and the equipment bay where the stridertechs continued to service and fine-tune their multiton charges. There was also the recreation deck, a space in the ship's zero-g core equipped with recjack slots. Since it could only accommodate fifty at a time, recjacking liberty was rationed out at four hours per person, one day in five, with officers allowed six hours of RJ every other day. The release of ViRdramas, games and sports, of mental strolls in wide-open spaces and electronic sex with partners real or imaginary, was the one factor that let so many people share so little space without going insane. The threat of curtailed recjack privileges was a better disciplinary motivation than the threat of court-martial.
Like every other soldier aboard, Dev was wearing shorts, deck shoes, and a T-shirt, but he was still hot. His clothing, fresh from the ship's nanovats that morning, clung to him unpleasantly. Why, he wondered, had he volunteered for this?
He had volunteered, he reminded himself. The day before being marched to the sky-el shuttles on Loki, the entire 5th Regiment had been addressed on parade by Colonel Varney, the Thorhammers' commanding officer. The regiment, Varney had told them all, was being redeployed—though he refused to say where or why—but anyone who wished to stay on Loki could do so, no questions asked. He wouldn't say where the 5th was being sent, or why, but he did say that the Xenophobe War was far from over, that the human success on Loki was only the first step in a very long road to victory.
Inspiring words, though Dev and the regiment's other old hands paid little attention to the speech. Rumors were circulating, each wilder than the last, and Varney's talk had not even mentioned them.
Why had he volunteered? The reason had nothing to do with bravery, that much was certain. He'd considered staying on Loki, but Katya was going, as were all of the other Assassin striderjacks. His own CAG infantry had volunteered for the deployment as well, as though they'd known that he was going.
How could he back down in front of all of them?
Besides, the 5th Loki Warstriders were far more home and family at this point than any world. Remaining on Loki would mean reassignment to the Heimdals or one of the local garrisons for the remainder of his hitch. Better, he thought, to stay with friends and family.
He wondered if he would have volunteered, though, if he'd remembered how hot it was aboard a ship in the godsea. Dev plucked his wet T-shirt away from his body, trying to air it out. He didn't remember ever being this uncomfortable during a K-T passage.
Possibly the fact that he'd never been locked up aboard a starship with over fifteen hundred other people had something to do with that.
He was standing in the Common Room, a precious enclosure of empty space that served as lounge, mess hall, and rec room for off-duty personnel. There was no furniture, but the decks were padded, and one entire bulkhead had been designed as a three-D screen for addressing the entire ship's complement. For the moment, though, it was projecting a giant, three-dimensional freeze-frame portrait of the Emperor.
The Common Room was slowly filling up. The men and women of the 5th Loki were filing in, taking seats on the padded deck tatami-fashion, row upon row facing the larger-than-life image of the Fushi-Emperor. Sitting close, side by side that way, the entire regiment could fit into the Common Room—just barely. It was used as an auditorium when announcements had to be made to the entire complement. Word had already been passed that there would be a special address at 0900 hours, ship's time. Dev consulted his inner clock. Another twelve minutes.
He studied again the motionless image at the front of the room. The Emperor's face was wizened, ancient with—some said—well over two hundred years, but either bionangineering or a flattering portraiturist had given him a strong, straight body, rigid in his navy dress blacks. His tunic was heavy with medals and gold braid; his own government's highest military decoration gleamed at his throat.
And you can keep that Star, Dev thought, remembering Katya's recommendation of months before. Wearing the Medal of Valor—the Emperor had one of those, too, Tenth Dan—had brought with it responsibility enough. He'd about decided that trying to live up to that damned medal had put him in this spot in the first place.
The Emperor's image was set against the glory of Earth as seen from orbit, white clouds twisted and feathering against the deep-heaven blue of the Pacific Ocean. That piercingly glorious backdrop reminded Dev of the godsea, and he sighed. Often he still wished he could get a chance to go up to Yuduki's bridge and plug himself in as a pilot-observer. It had been over a year since he'd last dipped into the glory of the K-T Plenum, and he still felt a wistful yearning, almost a hunger, when he thought about it now.
But the Nihonjin crew didn't fraternize with their cargo, and Dev doubted that Minoru Shimazaki, Yuduki's captain, would take kindly to any request by a hairy-chested striderjack to play tourist. Dev remembered his own opinion of striderjacks, back when he'd been convinced that he was bound for a ship's slot, and inwardly winced. It made a difference, having seen both sides.
Sometimes during the past two weeks, though, Dev had descended to Deck 3, the lowest, outermost deck of the A Mod spin habitat, and just put his hand against the gray paint of the bulkhead. There, faintly, he could feel the trembling vibration as the Yuduki made her way through the quantum sea. Katya's crew chief, Sergeant Reiderman, had laughed and told him he was just feeling the vibrations transmitted from the rotating sleeve that kept the quarters sections turning, but Dev had ridden the blue light of the K-T plenum, and he knew the feel of its muted thunders.
Dev couldn't detect the vibration now, though. Five hours earlier he'd felt the peculiar inner twist of the ship's K-T drive fields collapsing. The Yuduki was drifting in normal fourspace now, though where and why were still unknowns.
The Thorhammers had loaded their equipment aboard special cargo shuttle pods at Towerdown, then ridden the Bifrost Sky-el to Asgard, where they'd been herded aboard the Yuduki without even an hour's pass to visit the Moro. The who-was gained greater and wilder proportions: Xenos had appeared in Rainbow, and the 5th was heading there; the Fifth was preparing to invade Lung Chi—or Herakles or An-Nur II—and take it back from the Xenos; a Xeno battlefleet had been encountered—at last!—near Loki, and the Fifth had been pulled off the planet to serve as a hidden force of reserves; the Xenos had invaded Earth, the Emperor was dead, Tokyo in ruins, and Hegemony forces from across the Shichiju were being rushed back to defend the Mother World.
They were part of a fleet. Dev was sure of that much. He'd glimpsed some of the other ships through a transparency in Asgard's curved wall—a big Kako-class cruiser and, hanging in the distance, the massive, wedge-shaped shadow of a Ryu-class dreadnought, one of the largest and most powerful warships in Human space. Smaller vessels, frigates, corvettes, and sleek Yari-class destroyers drifted in the leviathan's shadow in schools, like fish.
A thrilling, compelling sight . . . but all too soon Dev had been sealed away within Yuduki's A Mod, and he could only wonder about the fleet gathering above Loki. Twenty hours later, Yuduki had ridden a tether out from Asgard and been released. An hour after that, the K-T drives had switched on and they were traveling faster than light.
That had been about two weeks ago—fifteen days to be exact. And now they were stopped. Where?
Fifteen days of travel meant—probably—about fifteen light-years, though the light-year-per-day estimate was rule of thumb only. Destroyers could travel faster, freighters and troopships were slower, and everything depended on the quality of the shipjack pilots.
Still, it was a starting point. He reached into his implant RAM, calling up data he'd not used for a year, navigatio
nal listings and X, Y, and Z coordinates for stars in the Eagle Sector. Scrolling swiftly through the columns of numbers, he added numbers, squared them, and extracted square roots from the results. He was looking for systems fifteen light-years or so from 36 Ophiuchi C. There were several possibilities. Earth itself, for instance, lay 17.8 lights from Loki. . . .
Got it. Dagstjerne/Loki to Altair, 14.9 lights.
Altair? There was nothing there. Altair was a hot A7 star . . . with a main sequence lifetime of less than two billion years and a rotation so fast, it was visibly flattened at the poles. There were no planets, only a thin accretion disk of dust and planetoids. Why would they stop there?
Dev could come up with only one answer that made sense. With an absolute magnitude of +2.2, Altair was one of the brighter stars within the boundaries of the Shichiju, an ideal beacon for a rendezvous. They were meeting someone here; they must be.
But who?
"So, Lieutenant. Why so serious?"
Dev turned and gave Katya a bemused grin. "Hi, Captain. Just wondering where we are. My guess is Altair."
Her eyebrows arched toward the line of her close-cropped hair. "Since when did Shimazaki put you on his planning staff?"
"That's the way the numbers work out." Dev looked away. Her appearance was . . . distracting. Like him, she wore ship's shorts and a pullover shirt which sweat had plastered to each curve and line of her torso. They'd never been able to repeat that evening in the comm center. Privacy had become nonexistent since they'd boarded ship.
In any case, platoon leaders could not afford to get emotionally involved with those in their command. Dev understood that, but it was hard to see her that way without remembering their linked romp on a simulated beach, or the shared tenderness afterward.
"Well, you're right," she said. He looked back at her and realized that what he'd thought was irony in her voice was surprise, and respect. "The word just came down. We're at Altair, and they're about to give us the straight hont. How the hell did you know?"