Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  "No, sir. But I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they send clouds of nano-sized ships to the stars, billions of machines a few microns across. Maybe those machines manufacture the organic components, the greaseballs, once they land. Or maybe the ships are larger—the size of 27-mm autocannon shells, maybe. We'd be hard-pressed to detect those. Or they ride on meteorites." He spread his hands. "I gather the DalRiss have a completely different way of crossing space."

  "Achievers," Gennani put in.

  "Magic, as far as our physicists can tell. Even with comels, they don't understand what the DalRiss are talking about. Well, maybe the Xenos have something else, a way of stepping directly from ShraRish to Loki without crossing all that empty space in between. There are lots of possibilities."

  "Reasonable," Varney said. "Even if we don't see any Xeno ships at the DalRiss homeworld, the recon alone could tell us a lot about them. Just one problem. I doubt that Yamagata's going to buy in to this. Right now he's doing his best to convince our hosts that we're just along to carry the baggage. He won't like the idea of us nosing around the old DalRiss homeworld. Makes us look too important."

  "Well, there are different ways of breaking it to them, Colonel."

  "Such as?"

  "Suppose we put it to them that, ah, we had reason to believe the Xenos were going to reinforce ShraRish from GhegnuRish? Volunteer to go check it out with a squadron of warships and the Thorhammers for recon. He can't very well refuse that."

  Varney looked thoughtful. "No. No, he couldn't. There's sound military logic in that, son."

  Katya grinned. "I told you about this guy, Colonel."

  "So you did, Captain. So you did."

  "I like it," the major said. "Yamagata won't want to risk a large part of his fleet, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to get caught in orbit by an unknown war fleet from God knows where. A patrol, a recon in force. That would do it."

  "But your real idea is to try to talk with them?" Varney asked.

  Dev managed a weightless shrug that set his plastic tubes swaying. "If we can. You know, sir, we've never seen any sign of cooperation between the Xenos on Loki, say, and the ones on Herakles or any of the others. That suggests that each invasion force is pretty much on its own. Well, it's a sure bet that the Xenos on ShraRish aren't going to talk to us. But maybe their relatives back on GhegnuRish will."

  "Man oh man," Varney said, a sly grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. "What I wouldn't give to see Yamagata's face if we came back from the DalRiss homeworld with a Xeno peace treaty!"

  Dev wondered if the Xenos understood the concept of "peace."

  It took almost three weeks, with Yamagata stubbornly refusing even to consider the idea. After all, there were no indications that any hypothetical Xeno warfleet was making the crossing from GhegnuRish.

  Still, Varney had planted a seed of worry in Yamagata's mind, and Admiral Aiko was far more willing to discuss matters of strategy with the Hegemony regimental commander than was the taisho. The Daihyo was unwilling to let the gaijin anywhere near the DalRiss homeworld, but patience—and Aiko's insistence that he had to know what he was facing in order to take proper precautions—won out in the end. Yamagata agreed at last, and Takahashi was overruled. Since the question was one of military strategy rather than politics, the Emperor's liaison could be courteously ignored.

  The Emperor, after all, was a long way off.

  The operation was called Siranui. The word referred to the phosphorescent foam stirred by a ship's wake at night, but literally meant "unknown fires," appropriate for a squadron reconnoitering the unknown fires of another star. It consisted of the cruiser Sendai as flag, with Chosho Yasunari Sato in overall command; the destroyers Akatuki, Ikaduti, and Tatikaze: and the transport Yuduki. They would be accompanied by the Darwin, which numbered with her crew twelve DalRiss Lifemasters and a menagerie of bioengineered Alyan life-forms.

  While Sato had the final say over the disposition of his ships, Colonel Varney was in command of the surface-recon element of the squadron, with orders instructing him to use his discretion insofar as whether or not to approach the planet or to attempt a landing.

  His orders even included the possibility of establishing communications with the Xenos. Though Yamagata didn't relish the possibility of a political coup by the Hegemony, he was realist enough to know that a good military commander takes the chances that are offered him. A chance to meet the Xenos, to talk with them, or simply to learn about them, was simply not to be passed up.

  Dev was surprised that Yamagata had been that open to the idea. Varney thought it likely that the Imperial admiral had weighed the possibility that the Xenophobes at GhegnuRish would be friendly, and discounted it.

  Whatever the politics of the decision, three weeks after the battle at Regio Aurorae, Siranui Squadron entered the godsea for a short transit of just five light-days. They emerged in the A7 star's system and spent two days more maneuvering inward, surveying the planets and monitoring the electromagnetic spectrum for . . . anything, radio messages, radar, any evidence at all that the squadron had been sighted or that the system was even still inhabited.

  There was nothing.

  GhegnuRish did not look promising from space. As the squadron fell around the curve of the planet toward the sunlit side, the difference was striking. Absent were the reds and oranges and golds of ShraRishian vegetation. There were clouds here, and violet seas, but the land appeared barren, with an albedo far lower than expected. It was as though the entire land surface of the world had been scorched and blackened.

  With no challenge, no sign of enemy ships, the five ships dropped closer, finally taking up orbit at two hundred kilometers.

  And still there was no sign that the Xenophobes were aware of them, no sign that there was any life on the planet at all. Orbital scans showed that much of the land surface had been covered by complex shapes that seemed to rise out of the ground to engulf each former DalRiss population center, then spread out across the open ground like vast, malignant growths.

  Those growths, black and dark gray, wrinkled, convoluted, drank the light of Alya B, and were responsible for the sharply decreased albedo.

  Albedo was a measure of reflectivity, of how much light was bounced back into space by a given terrain feature. It used a scale of zero to one, with one indicating total reflectivity of light, and zero total absorption. Darwin's astrophysical team reported that the blackened portions of GhegnuRish's land surface had an average albedo of .01, about the same as the maria of Earth's moon.

  If GhegnuRish was absorbing a lot more light from its sun, however, it was also giving off a lot more heat. The planet glowed in the infrared bands, and the surface temperature averaged ten degrees Celsius higher than expected. Industrial waste heat, someone had suggested, but there was no sign of industry, of factories, of any life at all. Some of the expedition's officers speculated that the Xenos died off once they'd subjugated a world.

  Dev doubted that. He felt the enemy down there, waiting. They'd never yet attacked a ship in orbit. Maybe they were waiting for the Thorhammers to land. Maybe . . . maybe . . .

  After two days of orbiting, during which time survey teams completed their photo mapping of the surface and the DalRiss biologists aboard the Darwin completed work on a new species of Translator, the decision was made. The Thorhammers would attempt a landing on the DalRiss homeworld.

  Final preparations were made, weapons, ascraft, and warstriders all checked and prepped for landing. Dev, fully recovered now, was issued a brand-new LaG-42 Ghostrider to replace the Scoutstrider abandoned at Regio Aurorae. The regiment was already shorthanded, though, which meant he would have to jack the two-slotter solo. He worked twenty-five hours straight with the Thorhammers' maintenance techs, breaking the machine out of storage, bringing its AI core on-line, powering up its fusion reactor, supervising the integration of a jet-pack hotbox, checking out the systems, and tuning its link hardware to his own.

  The name Dev's Destroyer ha
d been a wry joke, and for a time he considered naming the LaG-42 Dev's Destroyer II. Sergeant Wilkins suggested Strider-man, the nickname he'd been known by during his hitch with the Wolfguard, but he settled at last on Morgan's Hold. Not many of the other striderjacks caught the reference, but the members of Cameron's Commandos cheered when they heard.

  After a too-short ceph-induced sleep, he was up again, briefing the Commandos on their part in the upcoming drop.

  And to think, Dev thought wryly as the final moments before drop clicked away, that this was all my idea!

  Chapter 29

  . . . temperature range (equatorial): 45° C to 55°C; Atmospheric pressure (arbitrary sea level): .85 bar; composition: N2 82.3%, O2 9.7%, O3 2.1%, SO2 3.5%, Ar 1.1%, H2O(mean) .1%, CO2 570 ppm. H2SO4 (mean) 140 ppm . . .

  —Selected extracts from science log

  Alya B-V

  IRS Charles Darwin

  C.E. 2541

  They'd landed on the outskirts of what the DalRiss said had once been the largest of their homeworld's cities. The place was preternaturally still and quiet, with no indication that their arrival had even been noticed.

  The Thorhammers had landed in full regimental force, establishing a perimeter around the big Typhoon transports, then extending a platoon-strength line to sweep through the tortured, blackened landscape in search of . . . anything.

  The city had been alien to begin with, a vast and geometric sprawl of dwellings grown rather than built, with materials that ranged from stuff with the texture of sponge to something like a seashell's slick, opalescent hardness. Most of the DalRiss structures had hugged the ground, part of the terrain they rested on. Now, though, the nightmare shapes and surreal forms that cloaked the ruined city added layer to machine-blind layer, utterly transforming the original shape and feel and logic of the place. The surfaces were smooth, bloated . . . obscene, as though some vast and intricate work of art had been desecrated, twisted from one design of rational purpose into something irrationally different.

  And that, Dev reflected as he scanned the dead cityscape through the senses of his Ghostrider, might very well be what had happened. Most of the old DalRiss buildings had been converted, eaten or mutilated or simply buried by the coal black Xeno growths that covered everything like a sea of once molten lava.

  From what he'd seen on ShraRish, DalRiss architecture usually presented smooth surfaces and curved shapes that fit together in strange but aesthetically pleasing ways. Most of what he saw now, though, had the look of something excreted . . . organic, but unspeakably foul, and with a randomness that suggested the builders had been blind . . . or simply completely unconcerned with anything a human or a DalRiss would have called beauty. Most surfaces were covered with massive, tangled coils of glistening tubes that reminded Dev of heaped entrails. Here and there, bizarre forms, some smooth, some spiked and angular, rose from the organic tangle, jet black in the light of that blazing sun.

  "Delta Leader, this is Delta Four," Dev called over the tactical net. "Katya? You scanning anything?"

  "Kuso, Dev, this place is dead," Katya replied. "Like a tomb. I don't think there's been anything alive here for a century at least!"

  Glancing to his left, Dev could see other members of Group Delta, Katya's Warlord and four striders of First Platoon. To his right, a Kani APW stilted along on spidery legs, pacing the warstriders' recon sweep.

  It was eerie, and lonesome despite the presence of the other striders, with a graveyard stillness as oppressive as the obscene growths surrounding them.

  "Delta Leader, Delta One," Hagan called. "I'm picking up some interference on the radio. G and H bands . . . "

  "Spooky, ain't it?" Nicholsson added. "Like the city's singing to us . . . "

  When Dev shifted bands, he could hear the interference, too—not the usual hiss and crash of static, but a modulated thrumming, like the plucking of some bass stringed instrument. "Yeah," he said. "But what's doing the singing?"

  They came to a gulf, a canyon with sheer walls carved through solid rock, spanned by vaulted arches and the limply hanging tubiforms of the Xenophobes, many running straight up and down the walls. The depths were lost in shadows. Dev probed with a ranging laser and found the bottom almost two hundred meters down.

  "Delta Leader, Delta Four. We're crossing."

  "You're covered."

  Dev flexed his legs and jumped, sending the Ghostrider soaring above the chasm. Mentally he shrugged his shoulders, cutting in the strider's hotbox, feeling the surge of thrust catch hold, extending his leap across the gulf. His flanged feet struck the hard surface on the other side, striking sparks, as his knees flexed to absorb the shock.

  "Down and clear!" he called over the net. Data flowed across his visual field. Jump reserves down thirty-eight percent. Full power in another twenty-eight seconds.

  Dev scanned the surreal terrain, wondering if he would recognize a threat in this strange landscape of meltingly soft, malformed shapes if he saw it. Nothing looked normal, nothing looked right. Even the sky had an aching, hollow feel to it. Atmosphere readouts showed the same general composition as Alya A-VI, though it was much drier. The temperature hovered around forty degrees Celsius. Acid concentrations in the air were no worse than in a pre-nano industrial park on old Earth, the result, possibly, of the extinction of all native life. In the hours since they'd landed, in the days they'd been orbiting the planet, there had been no sign at all of biological life on this world.

  His audio sensors picked up the roar of the Kani APW touching down with a crash in a billowing cloud of superheated steam sixty meters away. Seconds later, Hagan's Manta landed a hundred meters to the left.

  "I'm getting a heat plume up ahead," Hagan reported. "Three-five-oh, range forty-two hundred."

  "I see it," Dev replied, catching sight of the geyser of heat on an IR scan. "Let's check it out." The cityscape was so still and dead that anything as energetic as a warm exhaust from some subsurface pocket was a welcome event, and worth checking out. Was the infrared leakage from this world a natural effect, or the result of some kind of industry?

  Together, then, Dev's Morgan's Hold and Hagan's 'Phobe Eater advanced, adopting a bounding overwatch through the twisted terrain that sent first one strider, then the other ahead, each covered in turn by the other. The APW followed. A kilometer to the west, Katya and the rest of 1st Platoon continued the sweep toward the center of the city.

  Everywhere Dev saw the stark, bleak evidence of older DalRiss buildings dismantled . . . no, digested by the Xenophobe invaders, replaced by the Xenophobe excretions. Haphazard mounds of tubes, some of them tens of meters across, lay in tangled masses, some heaped into artificial mountains hundreds of meters high.

  It must have taken armies, Dev realized, to so completely wreck a flourishing civilization. Where had those armies gone?

  Uneasily he glanced up into the deep violet sky. The Expeditionary Force was watching all wavelengths, all radar bands. Nothing could move on this world's surface without Captain Sato's immediate knowledge.

  But what about under the surface? Many of those obscene-looking tubes were open, gaping blindly at the sky. Tubes descended into the bowels of the planet everywhere, spreading and burrowing between and through the remnants of DalRiss foundations like the massive roots of ancient trees.

  Always the Xenophobes emerged from underground. Had their armies emerged to devour the DalRiss civilization here, then returned to those black depths?

  He checked his weapons system readouts again. This time he mounted a Taimatsu Type-50 on his right-arm hardpoint, a strider-sized version of the man-portable chemical flamers. A rocket pod was mounted over his left shoulder. Less than adequate if the Xenos should decide to emerge and—

  "Target!" Hagan cried. "Bearing three-three-one! Firing!"

  Dev turned just as the Manta opened up with its Kv-70 weapons pods. Streaks of fire sleeted like machine-gun fire across the twisted landscape, smashing into a tower a kilometer away.

  There was
no response from the structure, which exploded as Hagan's rockets tore through it, then collapsed.

  "Kuso!" Hagan snapped. "It's already dead!"

  Dev summoned an image of the tower from his Ghost-rider's memory, zoomed in, enhanced. . . .

  It had been a stalker. Hagan's first instinct had been right. It looked something like a Fer-de-Lance, round and squat and covered with spines. But the thing was an empty shell, a corroded torso as lifeless as its surroundings.

  "What the gok are you shooting at, Vic?" Katya's voice said over the tacnet.

  "Sorry, Captain," Hagan said. "I thought—"

  "Forget it. But let's cruise easy, huh? We've got a long way to go."

  They found more machines after that, hundreds of them, scattered across the city ruins. All were dead, abandoned centuries ago.

  Why?

  Dev stepped closer, scanning the silent ranks with his optics. "Hey Captain," he called. "You getting this?"

  "Affirmative, Four." He heard her shift channels. "Starlight, this is Delta Leader calling Starlight. Come in, please."

  "Starlight copies." It was Colonel Varney, still aboard the Yuduki, but personally supervising the deployment. "Go ahead, Delta Leader."

  "I'm relaying transmissions from Delta Four. Do you copy this, Starlight?"

  Dev continued to pan the derelict Xeno machines so that the mission officers aboard the Yuduki could see the full, grand sweep of the scene. It was eerie, like an army of skeletons, waiting to be summoned to rise. . . .

  "Affirmative, Delta Leader, Delta Four. Your signal is clear."

  "It's like they all just packed up and left," Dev said.

  "Roger that." There was a pause, filled with the singsong cries of radio interference, the background hiss of static. "Ah . . . Delta Leader, this is Starlight. Be advised that Intel believes that the Xenos might be underground. They recommend caution."

  Cheerful thought.

  "We copy," Katya replied. "Starlight, we are investigating a heat source, map reference Alpha Delta One Seven Niner. Do you see it?"