by Ian Douglas
An explosion gouted earth and rock to Dev's left. Three troopers went down, one screaming as his helmet started to dissolve. Dev pivoted, firing an AND round to blanket the area, then tracking the projectile back to its source.
Surprise stabbed at him. Just when he'd decided that the Xenos on ShraRish were all organics and relatively easy to deal with! Five hundred meters away, a huge, blunt snake-shape was morphing into the many-spined horror of a Fer-de-Lance.
Dev opened fire with both his autocannon and his left-shoulder Kv-48 weapons pack, crouching his strider to bring the rocket tubes to bear. M-22 rockets flashed and hissed, trailing white contrails through the wet air, then slamming home with a thundering barrage of detonations.
Spines and writhing tentacles snapped from the Fer-de-Lance's body. Gaping craters appeared in the soft gray of the hull beneath. Dev's strider did not possess a laser, so he couldn't analyze the Xeno's makeup, but it looked to Dev as though the core of the thing was alive . . . or at least made of something like meat. There was other material, too, rock, he thought, and possibly something like iron or lead. It was hard to make sense of it.
But sense or not, this Fer-de-Lance was easier to kill than its cousins on Loki. Dev swept the dying thing with another burst of explosive shells. Pieces were still moving, flopping on the ground like demented snakes, blindly questing like whip-slender worms.
"Wilkins!" he snapped. "Let's have some fire over here!"
"You got it, Lieutenant." Sergeant Wilkins yelled out orders. Corporal Bayer appeared, the long, heavy barrel of his steadimount plasma gun already tracking.
White-hot bolts shrieked from his weapon, blazing fire purifying everything its blowtorch breath touched. Dev continued to mount high guard from the crest of the crater rim, scanning the entire area for the approach of more Gammas. At his back, the six troops assigned to collect slugs were finishing their task. At an order from Sergeant Wilkins, the perimeter began to contract.
Gammas, organic-looking pieces of pseudolife like blindly struggling worms and rags and bloody scraps, flooded toward the top of the ridge, making for Dev and the Crab parked fifty meters away. Dev swung his hivel cannon across this new threat, but there was no way he could hit every one. Panic rose at the back of his mind. Those struggling shapes could cover the Scoutstrider, eat away nanofilms and armor, reduce the machine to a corroded skeleton in minutes.
But Sergeant Wilkins braced herself at his feet, training her heavy-duty flamer at that wriggling, living sea. Flamer chemical loads carried their own oxidizer; she triggered the weapon, sending flame searing into the Gamma horde.
"Thanks, Sarge."
"Any time, Lieutenant. Let's get the hell out of here, huh?"
"Right. Get on board." But something had caught his eye, something large and black, moving in the twisted, alien shapes on the far side of the crater. Another warstrider! Thinking it might be A Company, he engaged his telephoto optics and zoomed in for a closer look.
It was almost five kilometers away, but clearly visible as a stiff crosswind cleared the mists and acid clouds from above the white fog sea. Dev felt a shock of recognition: those curved power feeds like horns, the long and bulbous torso, the faded rising sun emblem on one armored pauldron. . . . It was an Imperial warstrider, a Katana, and it was emerging from the tortured cityscape like a vengeful demon from the mouth of Hell.
A zombie, one of the Imperial Guard striders lost in the first encounter days before. The upper works were relatively intact; the legs and lower torso had shapeshifted into something gleaming and metallic and horribly, nightmarishly other. . . .
But Dev's attention had focused on what the transformed Katana held clutched in its black-armored hands, a pearl gray sphere identical to the traveler spheres floating overhead and lining the fog sea by the thousands.
Why was the strider carrying it? . . .
Five kilometers—too far for autocannon. Targeting information flowed across his field of view . . . range, elevation, target lock . . . now! Stooping, he triggered his right-shoulder weapons pack, loosing an arrowing flight of M-22 rockets. As the last rocket cleared its launch tube, Dev whirled, throwing himself from the top of the ridge, hitting the ground in a spray of gravel and pulped, gray Xeno organics. "Cover!" he bellowed, using external speakers and radio simultaneously. "Everybody take cover behind me! . . . "
The sky lit up, outshining the white sun masked behind banks of clouds to the east. As the members of Cameron's Commandos dove for cover behind Dev's fallen, armored body, that white glare waxed brighter, stronger, in an absolute silence that had smothered every sound and dragged on and on and on. EMP surged through electrical circuits. Some failed, melted by the power surge. Others shut down to prevent damage. Dev's external view faltered, dissolved into static, then returned.
What was the speed of sound at slightly less than one atmosphere at a temperature of forty-eight degrees Celsius?
Dev's implant calculated the mathematics and fed him the answer just as the shock wave struck, a raw, howling hurricane of noise and overpressure that sheared off the upper meter of the crater rim at his back and struck him and raged at him and clawed at the armor of his hull. His nanofilm was gone in the first half second, stripped from his back by the sandblasting of heat and radiation and wind-borne grit, but he extended his arm above the huddled mass of armored troops that were snuggling against his torso. The ground shuddered beneath him; the hurricane roar filled the universe beneath a towering pillar of white cloud rising toward heaven.
Then Dev's external sensors were carried away, and he was left alone in a howling wind- and fire-swept blackness. He could sense the link systems shutting down around him as damaged circuits continued to fail. He began to initiate a disconnect. . . .
Too late. Total system shutdown engulfed his mind, plunging him into unconsciousness.
Chapter 28
There was a time when it was taken for granted that the sentient inhabitants of other worlds, if they existed, would be very much like us—different in form or color or size, perhaps, but sharing with us our perception of the universe.
Only now are we beginning to discover, once again, how very conceited our species is.
—Hearings on the DalRiss
Terran Hegemony Space Council Dr. Paul Hernandez
C.E. 2542
Dev was surprised when he woke up aboard ship. To begin with, he was weightless, and the feeling of endlessly falling pervaded his dreams as he was brought slowly back to consciousness. Yuduki's sick bay was located in the central core, and he nearly panicked when he opened his eyes to see a mass of colored tubing snaking above his face. It looked . . . alive, like the horrors he'd seen on ShraRish.
A Japanese nurse appeared almost at once, however, floating head-down a meter "above" him, reassuring him that he was safe, that an ascraft had brought him and his team back to the troopship, that his treatment was proceeding well and that he was already almost completely recovered.
He'd come close to being killed by radiation. While his Scoutstrider had screened him from alpha and beta particles and most direct gamma radiation, the atomic nuclei of steel, manganese, and silicon in the armor had trapped neutrons from the blast, creating a cascade of induced radiation that had poured through his module despite heavy screening and neutron-absorptive molecular layers.
He'd been sick, the nurse told him, almost dead, when Lara Anders had loaded him and his people aboard and dusted off from that hellfire desert five klicks from ground zero. But medical nano programmed to correct radiation damage on a subcellular scale had been filtering through his system for the past three days. His blood count was normal now, as were his bone marrow scans and thyroid levels. He now ran, he was told, a slightly increased chance of developing any of several cancers, all of which would easily be detected and treated automatically long before they became a threat. Even the higher risk of birth defects in any children he might one day have was negated by the medical nano watch now patrolling his body.
/> Dev's Destroyer had been so hot that it had been abandoned, as had the ascraft that had brought him and his troops back to orbit, the Kani APW, and the Commandos' battle armor. Of the twenty men in his command, three had died in the battle; the rest had been treated for minor radiation injuries and released.
And for the past three days the biological wizards of the DalRiss had been studying the specimens returned from Aurorae Regio with an interest that bordered on fanaticism.
"So you're a hero again," Katya said, drifting close. "What are you doing, trying for another medal?"
Dev had been nearly asleep. He started, then reached out, trying to shove the tubes aside so he could see her face. He was nude, held immobile by a webwork of restraints; the tubes, which carried nutrients for the medical nano in and a drainage system for wastes and scoured particles of radiation, branched from his neck, sides, belly, groin, and thighs, from hair-thin threads to pipelines the diameter of his thumb. He felt no pain, of course—the nerve endings around each insertion had been individually shut down—but he felt achingly hungry, as well as frustrated at his inability to move.
"I'd be happy just to get out of here," he said. "I can't tell where I stop and the plumbing begins."
"The nurse says another twenty hours and you're out of here. You'll be pulling barracks duty before you know it."
"Where? Is the regiment still on the ground?"
She made a sour face. "I wish. The Imperials have stepped in again. The Thorhammers are back in reserve. I think Aiko and Yamagata're afraid the DalRiss'll get the wrong idea if we go around detonating nukes on their planet."
"It wasn't us. Talk to the Xenos. They're the ones carrying around live nukes."
It had been pure intuition that had saved Dev and the others on the surface. There'd been no time to reason things through. But if the zombie Katana had been carrying the fission device captured earlier from the Imperials, and if the Xenos did only adapt captured equipment rather than remanufacturing it, then the chances were they'd tampered with the warhead's triggering mechanism, probably by dissolving the radio-controlled interlocks. Nuclear warheads were triggered by a conventional explosive that slammed two subcritical masses of plutonium together; by firing his salvo of M-22 rockets, Dev had induced a sympathetic detonation in the chemical explosives, and guaranteed that the warhead went off five kilometers from his command instead of closer. That zombie Katana had been heading their way.
Any closer and they all would have fried or been buried under the rubble from the blast crater.
"You know," Dev said after a moment, "I had a bit of a brainstorm down there. I think the Xenos are pretty badly limited by the stuff that they can capture. They can change its shape, but not what it's made of."
"I'm way ahead of you," Katya replied. "All that was in the report I filed with General Howard's staff two days ago."
"Hmph. Did you tell him about the opportunity this gives us?"
Her brow furrowed. "What opportunity?"
Dev thought a moment. He'd not worked all the details out himself. However . . .
"Look, GhegnuRish, the DalRiss homeworld, it's supposed to be just like ShraRish, right?"
"Sure. They . . . well, I guess 'terraformed' is the wrong word, but they modeled ShraRish after GhegnuRish."
"Then the Xeno war machines on GhegnuRish are going to be the same sorts of critters we're running up against here. Local animals that the Xenos have taken over, like those poor creatures we saw at Regio Aurorae. Maybe not even that much, if all the native life on GhegnuRish died off a couple of hundred years ago."
Katya blinked. "Say, that's a thought. The DalRiss have assumed that all life on their homeworld is extinct. They never had much in the way of machines. So what will the Xenos use for weapons?"
"Oh, there'll be something. Cobras made out of rock or crystal or the DalRiss equivalent of dead trees. They had stuff like that on ShraRish. But did you notice that it was easier to kill the Xenos down there?"
She nodded. "Back on Loki, you had to hit them eight or ten times before they'd start falling apart."
"That's because they were using RoPro fabricrete and high-tech alloys. I don't think we're dealing so much with superscience here as we are with the junk collectors of the Galaxy. They've got the tricks they pull with magnetic fields. That's probably connected somehow to their using nanotechnics to morph and repair damage. But when it comes to making alloys, layered armor—"
"Hang on a second, Dev. I want to bring some other people up here, get them in on this." Her eyes took on a glassy look as she used her link to tap into the ship's ICS.
Dev glanced down the tube-tangled length of his body. "I think I'd like to get a bit more presentable first."
The people she had in mind were Colonel Varney, the regimental commander, and Major Gennani, the regimental intelligence officer. While they were waiting, the nurse was able to provide Dev with a robe to afford him some measure of dignity, despite the tubes that sprouted from various seams and openings. She also released his hand and foot restraints so that he felt a little less like a victim of torture and a little more like a warstrider pilot undergoing debriefing.
Varney and Gennani both congratulated him on the success of his raid as soon as they swam into the sick bay cubicle. "That was fine work, son," Varney said. He was a lean, small man with hair turned silver at the temples and a white mustache. He looked as if he was in his fifties, though rumor had it that he was rich enough to have afforded the medical nano for advanced geriatric treatment. How true those stories were, Dev neither knew nor cared. Varney was wealthy, the son of a prominent Earth banking family with connections to Kyoto's financial institutions.
On the other hand, another rumor insisted that he'd passed up an inheritance to stay in the Hegemony army.
"Thank you, Colonel. We got lucky."
"I don't believe in luck. Never did. If I did, I'd have to insist that all my officers be lucky ones, and that'd look bad on the fitness reports." He pulled himself over alongside Dev's harness. Katya and Gennani floated near the door. "So. Captain Alessandro tells me you've got some ideas about GhegnuRish."
"Yes, sir." He'd been doing some hard thinking since his earlier conversation with Katya, but he still had to pause and marshal his thoughts. "I gather the Thorhammers are at loose ends at the moment."
"Hmph. You could call it that." The words were noncommittal. The expression was not.
"I would like to suggest a recon of the DalRiss homeworld, sir. This might be our best opportunity."
Varney folded his arms. "Okay. Why?"
"Point one. We still don't know how the Xenos get from world to world. Here we are, in contact with a civilization that was fighting them two hundred years ago, and they've never seen Xenophobe space fleets either."
"What's the point?"
"The DalRiss have had no contact with their own homeworld for one hundred eighty-some years. Presumably the Xenos have been at peace on that world for all that time. This might be the time to go pay them a visit."
Varney slowly unfolded his arms. "I'm not sure I see what you're getting at, son. What are you saying . . . attack them?"
Dev spread his hands. "Colonel, the one thing that's been hampering us ever since this damned war began was lack of intelligence on the enemy. We don't know how their technology works, we don't know how they think, we're not even sure we've seen a living Xenophobe. The grease blobs could be pets. Or slaves. Or juveniles, for God's sake."
"All of that's rather unlikely, given what we've seen so far," Gennani said. "But he's got a point, Colonel."
"Here's our chance to drop in unannounced and see how they really live," Dev continued. "If they have spacecraft, we'll see them. If they have large-scale manufacturing of their own, we'll see that, too. I mean, what have they been doing for two hundred years?"
"Attacking ShraRish," Varney said, his voice dry. "And the Shichiju."
"Not the Xenos on GhegnuRish, sir. As far as we can tell, every world grow
s its own crop of Xenos. We've still never seen a Xeno ship.
"Now we have DalRiss biologists who can grow and program Translators. Wouldn't it be worth the risk, just to see what a peaceful Xenophobe looked like?"
"If there is such a thing, yes."
"We've been assuming ever since the first Xeno attack that they attack humans on sight," Katya said. "That's the idea behind their name, right? They're afraid of strangers. Of aliens like us."
"That's never been proven, Captain," Gennani said. "We don't know why they attack us. In some cases, though, it's been hard to prove they were deliberately attacking us. They could perceive us as part of the landscape—"
"A source for raw materials, yeah," Katya interrupted. "I've heard that one."
"The DalRiss have given us a new example in that regard," Gennani pointed out. "Their picture of the universe, their worldview, if you will, is completely different from ours. We see . . . " He moved his arms, indicating the room, the space beyond. "We see space, mostly vacuum, some usable planetary surfaces, rather thinly populated by life-forms. They see the universe as an organic whole, a giant swimming pool chock-full of life, with inorganic matter as empty spaces in the water, and themselves as custodians doing the backstroke. If the Xenophobes are self-aware, their worldview may be more alien still."
"God, that's all we need," Varney said. "More cockeyed viewpoints."
"Who says we see things the way they really are, Colonel?" Katya asked him.
Varney ignored that. "So, you think we should zip off to Alya B to see the real Xenos. And if they attack us? Like they always do?"
"We take enough ships—as many ships as Yamagata lets us have—to cover us. If they have a fleet, well . . . isn't that worth knowing about? We still don't know what to look for when it comes to Xeno starships, if there even is anything to look for. This could give us some clues."
" 'If there's anything to look for,' " Varney repeated. He looked at Dev. "Are you one of those people who believe in invisible Xenophobe ships?"