Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  "Affirmative, Delta Leader. Orbital scans show IR source, probable venting from subsurface structures. Watch your step."

  "Rog."

  "Dev, you heard that?"

  "I copied, Captain. Vic and I are moving closer now."

  The heat plume was clearly outlined against the sky under IR scan. Another chasm yawned ahead, where some ancient DalRiss structure had been cleared away all the way to its roots far underground, leaving gaping-mouthed tubes and shafts plunging down into darkness.

  Dev kicked off, then triggered his jump pack once . . . twice . . . a third time, holding the jump as he aimed for an invitingly clear area on the far side. His strider's feet came down . . .

  . . . and then he was falling as the ground disintegrated beneath his weight. What he'd thought was steel plate shredded like foil as his warstrider plunged through. Forgetting himself, he almost triggered his left and right weapons pods as he tried to fling out his arms and grab the edge of the pit as he fell. Warnings flashed across his vision and he aborted the accidental aim-lock-fire order, then fired his jets.

  Morgan's Hold had twisted sideways as it broke through, and the thrust slammed him into an arching strut. Then he was falling. "Mayday! Mayday!" he cried, using the ancient call for help. "Delta Four calling mayday—"

  The pit opened up around and beneath him, a webwork maze of girders and steel scaffolding. Dev twisted himself in midair, swinging the Ghostrider into a feet-down attitude, then mentally shrugged his shoulders, firing the twin jets. Warnings flicked through his consciousness. The fusion jets had not yet recharged; their combined thrust was a fraction of what was necessary to even slow his fall.

  He banged into another projection . . . and another. He was falling down a well of some kind. . . . No! It was one of those tubes, he realized with a horrid crystal clarity, a tube twenty meters across, roofed over by a flexible sheet of metal foil too thin to support his strider's twenty-five-ton weight. The walls consisted of recognizable bits of technology fused into a random hodgepodge of organic-looking struts, girders, braces, and bits and pieces crushed together into a nightmarish tracery of interlocking jackstraws. Laser rangers probed the darkness below as he fell. Fifty meters more and he would strike bottom. . . .

  Dev's attention focused on the swiftly dwindling range numbers flashing through his mind. Time seemed suspended, his senses and the workings of his brain itself working with a computer's speed. He tensed himself . . . then flexed his shoulders at the last possible moment.

  This time the jets fired at full power, and kept firing, slowing him with a savage deceleration that would have been crushing had he been able to feel his body. Clouds of superheated steam billowed around him. His feet struck bottom and his torso kept going, slamming into a duralloyhard pavement as his legs folded on either side. There was a thunderclap of noise, a spray of debris from overhead as part of the wall collapsed, and then . . . silence.

  For a long moment Dev remained there, unmoving, not even daring to acknowledge the warnings flashing through his mind. The Ghostrider had been hurt—the actuator links and shock supports of both legs damaged—and a power drain from his lower right torso probably meant a bad short. For a moment he'd thought he was about to be buried alive as the weakened tunnel walls collapsed, but the cave-in had only been partial. Slowly, gingerly, he tested systems, opened circuits . . . then eased the machine into a wobbly upright stance. Pieces of tunnel wall, like smoothly rounded tree trunks, spilled to the floor in a cascade of rubble, dust, and gravel.

  He was down, and he was safe, at least for the moment. The big question was . . . where?

  It was pitch-dark at the bottom of that well. The Ghostrider's AI calculated a fall of 103 meters . . . a drop that had carried him well past the shell of machines and reworked buildings on the surface and into the dark, stonewalled crust of the planet itself.

  Looking up, he could see the partial blockage of the well. He thought he could probably see the tunnel opening far above if he moved, but he didn't want to move yet until he was sure the strider's systems were all working.

  In any case, he wasn't getting out that way. The Ghostrider's jets had been barely up to slowing his fall; they'd never lift him up that sheer drop, and he knew that he couldn't climb one hundred meters.

  With escape ruled out for the moment, he decided to investigate his surroundings. Had anyone heard his earsplitting entrance? Was there anyone to hear? On infrared his surroundings took on the irregular, smooth-surfaced look of cavern walls, glowing with radiated heat. To his left, though, he could see a definite regularity to the rock. He might be standing on the foundations of some extremely old stone buildings, ancient DalRiss structures, though their architectural purpose had long ago been lost, or possibly the rock had been somehow reworked according to a different plan.

  A Xenophobe plan, perhaps.

  "Delta!" he called, opening the tactical frequency. How the hell was he going to get out of here? "Delta Sweep, this is Delta Four! Do you copy?"

  A burst of static was his only answer, one shot through with alien twitterings and (Flutings and high-pitched piping sounds that set his imagination crawling. Radio interference from the surrounding walls, he decided, and the blockage overhead, possibly mixed with assorted local transmissions.

  Transmissions by whom? Imagination gave texture to the heat-glowing semidarkness around him. Dev tried to pierce it, tried to resolve some sort of images from the midnight blackness. He could make out walls, but he decided that his IR feed had been damaged. The walls seemed to be moving with that vague crawling sensation one senses when focusing on shadows in the dark in the middle of the night.

  No, it was not his imagination. The walls of the cavern were alive . . . and moving.

  He tuned his IR receptors, trying for better resolution. There was almost no visible light at all, and his infrared feed gave indistinct images at best, because the walls and what seemed to be covering the walls were very nearly the same temperature.

  At last, though, he was able to resolve those masses of color marking sources of heat, letting the AI filter the images in such a way as to pretend that the cavern walls were cool, with warmer masses covering them, patches of yellow against green and blue.

  It was impossible to see any detail. Through linkage, Dev's senses could receive infrared data, but his brain could still only interpret input in the hunorm range. Anything else was a translation, and subject to interpretation. At first Dev thought that the walls were wet, that water was flowing across rock surfaces, but as he watched, he became convinced that he was looking at something more complex than that.

  Impulsively he switched on the strider's outer lights, flooding the cavern with harsh brilliance. At visual wavelengths the walls retained their glistening, wet-smooth look, like the walls of a limestone cavern sculpted by a million years of flowing water.

  But they were moving, rippling beneath the lights like the flutter of a jellyfish.

  It took several minutes for Dev to understand what he was seeing well enough to even attempt to describe it to himself. There were . . . things hugging that wall, each a meter square or more, each rounded, smooth-surfaced, and shapeless.

  He was sharply reminded of the greaseballs, the organic, sluglike creatures he'd seen before. These were similar, but each hand-sized bioform was imbedded in a gelatinous ooze, an ooze that extended across the rock wall like amoebic pseudopods, each arm touching the others around it. Each was dark-colored, almost black, but under direct lighting they turned a murky and translucent gray in which he could make out bits and pieces of debris imbedded within the jelly.

  Or were they internal organs of some kind? Or lumps of undigested food? Or unborn young? He didn't know what it was he was looking at, but it/they indisputably was/were alive. The smooth-bodied masses were flattening, stretching as he watched, as though spreading themselves beneath the light. He wondered if it was the light that was attracting them, or his own presence.

  He glanced at his readou
ts, checking for the nano count, but there was none. The absence of nanotechnic disassemblers was only mildly reassuring. Dev was trapped in a well a hundred meters deep . . . completely surrounded by Xenophobes.

  And yes, they were definitely reacting to his presence, stretching out from the walls to envelop him. . . .

  Chapter 3O

  At first, all the One sensed was heat, a warmly glowing mass that dropped into the One's midst, as dazzling as the ignition of a flare in the depths of a cave. Reacting with an instinct inherent within the One, individual components began closing on the object, spreading their receptor surfaces to the fullest extent to drink this bounty which had appeared so unexpectedly, at levels so far above the comfortable Depths below.

  After a moment, as the One considered the heat source, emotions surfaced from somewhere deep within its being . . . surprise at this unexpected gift, and . . . curiosity.

  Those ancient twistings of the Self's mind had not been lost or forgotten after all.

  The One knew nothing of humans, of course, knew nothing of the oddly formed, strangely bilateral machine that was the source of so much radiant heat. In the trinary logic of the One, there was only Rock, Not-Rock, and Self. From the One's point of view, the Universe was an unimaginably vast cavern, an empty gulf of Not-Rock sealed in Rock, which was itself surrounded by an endless, semimolten sea of life-giving heat.

  The One occupied one minute piece of that Cavern, between the heat-sea and the temperature fluctuations of the Gulf. Elsewhere in the Great Cavern, it knew, other Ones dwelt, parts of Self, though many were still Children of the Dark, primitive and mindless.

  This glowing apparition was neither the comfortable, data-rich recognition of Self, nor the empty blankness of Not-Rock. It must be, therefore, Rock . . . but that strange subset of Rock that moved of its own volition, like Self, but which was decidedly Not-Self.

  The concept was almost unimaginable, but the One had run into such paradoxes before. Among the Children of the Dark, long ago, during the first dim stages of consciousness as Children, memory was passed as genetic coding from Child to Child with each tripartite conjugation. The One possessed memories extending back to the Beginning, eons past, and within a portion of the Great Cavern far removed indeed from this place where it found itself now. It remembered the Selfs-that-were-Not-Selfs that had threatened the Children of the Dawn . . . and that had appeared in different forms during many of the Cycles since. It remembered the Selfs-that-were-Not-Selfs that had threatened this cycle.

  Always, those Selfs-that-were-Not-Selfs had been threats.

  Protection from such threats, of course, was the duty of the Children, necessary if the Cycles were to continue. The concept of "death" was alien to the One since the One would effectively live for as long as the heat sea endured. But it did comprehend the extinction of individual Children, a kind of transformation into the void of Not-Rock, a timeless hell of nonexistence.

  Never in all its memories had the One itself been threatened with extinction . . . but never in all its memories had the One been threatened after the Children had become One.

  This cycle, it seemed, was different, horribly so. . . .

  Chapter 31

  The Nihongo word for 'nightmare'—akumu—and for 'demon' or 'devil'—akuma—obviously have linked etymologies. The image is of the demons that haunt our sleep.

  —The Gods Within

  Viktor Sergeivich Kubashev

  C.E. 2314

  "Captain! We've lost Delta Four!"

  Hagan's call caught Katya as she completed a rocket-assisted leap across a narrow chasm. Somehow she maintained her concentration, coming to a halt with a metallic clash of actuators, hydraulics, and armored flanges.

  "What happened?" she snapped. Swinging the Warlord right, she acquired Hagan's Manta visually, then broke into a ground-eating lope across the tortured landscape. "Where is he?"

  "Landed on a thin surface, like ceramic, stretched across the mouth of a big tunnel. Surface gave way, and down he went. Watch yourself, Captain. There may be more covered holes like that."

  Cursing her careless impatience, she slowed her pace, selecting each piece of ground before she trod on it. This part of the alien city was so completely covered over with Xenophobe forms that each step was still a matter of guesswork and luck, but by avoiding flat, circular patches that looked as if they might be the masked openings of vertical tunnels, she swiftly reached the Manta's side.

  Dev's Commandos were already clambering out of their Crab APW, seventeen men and women cumbersome in black armor and slung weapons. Beyond, the shattered surface Dev had landed on revealed the gaping, night-black maw of a pit, the ruin slick and smooth as though polished by wind and water across the centuries.

  Katya had wondered at Dev's decision to include Cameron's Commandos in this recon but hadn't questioned him about it. He had proven himself right at Regio Aurorae: there were things men in armor could do that were impossible or difficult for a warstrider, and men and striders could complement one another on a mission.

  Katya approached the pit, where troops in black and red armor were breaking out strands of monofilament from external stores compartments on the Crab. Gingerly she edged past the crunchies to peer down the open shaft. Blackness yawned half a meter in front of her feet. The singsong wailing on G and H bands was particularly strong here, but once she thought she heard a human's voice, Dev's voice, filtered by the blasting of static. She probed with a ranging laser. Eighty-five meters, a long way to fall. She shifted to her communications laser, opening the beam wide to tag the entire bottom of the well, praying for a response, any response.

  Nothing. Which could mean that Dev was dead, his strider a twisted mass of wreckage at the bottom of the well.

  Or it could mean that his lasercom gear was damaged, or that he was alive but unconscious or disconnected or that he'd moved into a side passage and the laser line of sight was blocked, or any of several other possibilities. If the lasercom gear was working and the Ghostrider was in the L-LOS, though, she ought to be able to establish a link with the LaG-42's AI, even if Dev was out of the link.

  "We thought we might have picked up some light down there a moment ago," a woman's voice said in her mind.

  She turned her attention back from that dizzying partial circle of night, focusing instead on the armored figure standing beside her. "Who're you?"

  "Sergeant Wilkins, sir. Lieutenant Cameron's team leader."

  "You think . . . he's still alive?"

  "He could be. If he was able to orient himself and use his jets for the landing. We're getting ready to go down and check."

  "Check? How?"

  Wilkins jerked a gloved hand over her shoulder, toward the Crab. "Buckythread. We have enough to lower five people down there. I'll take an armed team down, and we'll see if we can find him."

  Katya swiveled her sensors back to the pit, probing the depths once more with her ranging laser. Eighty-five meters. No . . . on the far side she got a reading of one hundred three meters. Dev's crash must have caused a partial cave-in. She could imagine the descent blocked by debris hanging from one wall of the tube, tangled in the blackness.

  Blackness. She suppressed a shudder.

  "There could be Xenos down there, Sergeant."

  "Yes, sir." She hefted her subgun. "That's why me and my four guys'll be going in armed."

  "Three guys, Sergeant."

  "Beg pardon, Captain?"

  "You and three of your guys. I'm coming with you."

  Wilkins hesitated. "That might not be such a good idea, sir."

  You're right about that, Sergeant, she thought. She felt exhilarated, even a little crazy, and she could feel the terror of the blackness beneath her feet.

  But Dev was down there, and she was going to get to him. If he was unconscious in a damaged warstrider, a striderjack might be necessary to talk with the AI and help pull him free. She had to go.

  Into the dark.

  "No arguments, Sergeant,"
she said. "Break out an extra subgun for me. Torolf? You've got my baby until I get back."

  "Sure thing, Captain."

  She began severing her link with the Warlord.

  Chapter 32

  Within the past century, akuma has evolved a secondary meaning born of this linguistic relationship. As researchers continue to use cephlinkage and implant technology to delve into the unfolding mysteries of the mind, akuma has come to refer to those very special, personal demons of our own creation, those that drive us from within to greatness . . . or to catastrophe.

  —The Gods Within

  Viktor Sergeivich Kubashev

  C.E.2314

  Dev tensed, ready to twitch the muscles that would trigger his Ghostrider's flamer. At such close range he would kill hundreds of the monsters.

  But he hesitated to fire.

  First, of course, there was no escape from this cavern that he could see. The backblast would certainly bring down the crumbling tunnel walls, destroying Morgan's Hold as well as the Xenos.

  But there was more to it than self-preservation. Never, so far as Dev knew, had Xenophobes ever been seen living within the black labyrinths of their tunnels . . . never. Robots and striders both had attempted to penetrate openings on various human worlds, but communication was impossible and none had emerged. These creatures, bathed in the radiance of his lights, were exhibiting behavior strikingly different from the individuals he'd seen before. Those others had appeared to be interconnected as they crawled free of their opened travel pods, but these seemed to be woven together, moving but permanently connected, a living network that reminded Dev of individual cells tied together as parts of a single, larger organism.

  Was that the answer? Were the Xenos part of a group mind, one that Man had not yet learned to communicate with? That didn't seem likely. Xeno efforts, while sufficient to kick humans off eleven worlds so far, had been victorious more because of the strength of numbers and the inaccessibility of their deep subsurface nests. Individual masses of Xenos had seemed disorganized, even chaotic in their attacks. He remembered human attempts to analyze their attack plans, and smiled inwardly at a dawning truth. There had been no attack plans to analyze.