Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

Dev let part of his mind scan the local broadcast frequencies. With a crowd that large, the speakers must be using some sort of radio transmission.

  There it was! Dev heard the usual political blather, the same stuff he'd been hearing for weeks until Prem had ordered the media censorship to begin. Something about the New Constitutionalists . . . and taking power back from the tyranny that was grinding them beneath its duralloy boots. . . .

  The warstriders entered the Concourse, spreading out in a single line, keeping the mob before them. Behind the strider line, the hover APCs grounded, their opening hatches disgorging ranks of armed and armored Hegemony leg infantry.

  A shrill warble sounded in Dev's ear and he switched off his monitor; Duarte had just started jamming the transmission frequency. Seconds later, he heard Duarte's voice booming out over the crowd, relayed through the Ghostrider's external speakers.

  "Citizens!" the voice thundered. "This is Colonel Duarte of the Hegemony Guard. This is an official order to disperse! Martial law has been declared in all portions of Winchester and its satellite domes. You are to disperse and return to your homes immediately. . . ."

  It began as a low, rumbling sound, interspersed with catcalls and wild yells, but it grew, swelling rapidly to a pounding, chanting roar like the crash of waves on a rocky seacoast: "No! No! No! No!"

  More soldiers were running into the square, men in red-and-green uniforms with ferriplas cuirasses. They were locals, Dev knew, members of the 1st Eridu Legion, a militia force quartered in a satellite dome on the west side of the city opposite the Armory.

  He sensed the increase in tension. The Hegemony troops behind the warstrider line didn't trust the militia, and Dev was sure the feeling was mutual, but for the moment at least they were still following the government's orders, deploying in a thin, colorful line between the mincie crowd and the Hegemony Guard forces.

  "No! No! No! No!"

  From where his Scoutstrider was standing, Dev had a good view of Duarte's Ghostrider, just ahead of him and a little to the right. Something was happening there, movement up on the strider's dorsal surface. An access hatch popped open, and Duarte himself rose into view astride his machine.

  He must be trying to overawe them, Dev thought, like a man on horseback confronting a man on foot.

  "I say again," Duarte's voice roared, drowning out the crowd. His link with his strider broken now, he was using a throat mike to transmit his words. The green Hegemony banner hung limply behind his bare head. "Go home! Go home! Governor Prem has declared martial law in Winchester and its satellite communities. . . ."

  "No! No! No! No!"

  From half a kilometer away, in a window high up in one of the buildings beyond the Assyrian Concourse. Gunso Isamu Kimaya, 3rd Imperial Marines, saw that his opportunity had arrived at last. He'd been watching for such a chance for weeks now, but not since those Hegemony soldiers had offered themselves to him in Memphis had his target been so perfectly available.

  He raised his weapon, an Ishikawajima Type-83 sniper's rifle, a rugged, heavy weapon that fired explosive 15mm rocket rounds almost as long as his thumb. The interface in his left palm was already resting against the contact plate in the weapon's forward grip. As Kimaya peered through the weapon's optics, targeting data was relayed directly to the marine's cephlink. He zoomed in on the Hegemony taisa's bare head, bracketed it, locking in the chambered round's tracking computer.

  Kimaya let out his breath partway, letting his mind focus on a kokorodo mantra that focused his concentration on the target: Shi-da!

  I am death.

  The Type-83 had no trigger. Instead. Kimaya's mind gave the order to fire, gently, without the misaligning tug of a trigger pull. The shot, muffled by the weapon's sound-suppressor barrel, was no louder than a harsh cough.

  An instant later, in Kimaya's optics, the bracketed head of the Hegemony colonel disintegrated in a spray of blood and fragmented bone, splattering the green banner behind it. . . .

  Chapter 7

  O judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason!

  —Julius Caesar

  Act III, scene 2

  Sheer, raw chaos had engulfed Winchester's city center. As Duarte died, the mob's roar faded, then resurged, a rolling wave of sound echoing across the plaza.

  Dev watched, horrified, as Duarte's bloody, headless body sagged backward, legs still caught in the strider's open dorsal hatch, outstretched arms dangling over the Ghostrider's hull above the primary heat exhaust manifold. Almost automatically, he replayed the instant of Duarte's death in flashing, freeze-frame images fed from his Scoutstrider's AI to his cephlink RAM; a trained portion of his right brain calculated possible vectors for the explosive shell based on the snap of Duarte's head and body as the projectile struck.

  The round had come from that direction, high and to the right. Dev pivoted his upper body, enhancing the visual scan image, zooming in on row upon row of windows.

  Infrared. Overlay.

  Smeared colors, warm reds and yellows, cooler greens and blues, blurred his vision. Literally hundreds of shapes were visible in or behind those windows, people watching the mass demonstration below. Only one heat-glowing shape was moving, however, shifting with remarkable speed as it faded back into the cooler depths of the building.

  That particular window vanished in a sun-bright dazzle of heat, and Dev's strider AI cut out the thermal visual component to preserve its optics. Lieutenant Muirden, jacking Duarte's command strider, had performed the same trajectory scan-and-track as Dev, spotted the same moving figure, and cut loose with a pulse from the Ghostrider's chin laser.

  One hundred megawatts of laser energy discharged in a hundredth of a second was the equivalent of the detonation of perhaps a quarter of a kilo of high explosive, fractionally less than a single stick of old-fashioned dynamite. The window shattered, spraying out from the face of the building in an avalanche of debris.

  "Cease fire!" Dev snapped over the tactical link. "All units, hold fire!" Prisoners would be better than charred bodies . . . but in any case, the half-glimpsed heat source had been moving quickly the instant before the laser hit. Had Muirden nailed the sniper? There was no way to tell, at least until someone searched the wreckage of that apartment. Switching to thermal again, Dev saw that the hole in the building's facade was now a white-hot mass of thermal radiation. It was impossible to see anything.

  And the Rangers had other, more pressing problems now. The mob was surging forward against the red-and-green line of militia troops, a tide pounding against the shoreline in an attempt to reach the higher ground beyond. The militia line was struggling to hold its position . . . was sagging dangerously in a dozen places. . . .

  "All units! This is Cameron, taking command." The decision was effortless, completely automatic. He was now the senior officer present, and it was vital to avoid confusion in the transition of command. "Set weapons pods for DY-30C, wide dispersal, air burst. One from each strider, on my command . . . Fire!"

  The DY-30C gas grenade contained a binary chemical charge with a white smoke marker. On bursting it released an allophenothiazine derivative—or APT—an incapacitant with a powerful tranquilizing effect.

  Unfortunately, tranq gas took time to take effect, sometimes as much as three or four minutes. The other gases in the warstriders' magazines—hallucinatory psychotomimetics, temporary optoinhibitors, phobinducers that caused attacks of acute fear, and irritants like tear and vomit gas—were all faster . . . and in this instance, far more deadly. With a crowd this large, widespread panic would inevitably lead to tens, maybe hundreds of people being trampled to death. Dev could see kids in the crowd: a few infants in parents' arms, many older kids obviously caught up in the excitement of the mob. He didn't want to be responsible for a massacre of innocents.

  The gas grenades exploded with deceptively gentle pops above the heads of the demonstrators, eliciting screams and a momentary surge of the very panic Dev wanted to avoid. Clouds of white smoke descend
ed across the plaza.

  He switched on his external speakers. "Citizens!" he called, his voice echoing back from the face of the Guild Hall. "The demonstration is over! Go home! You will not be harmed! Go home!"

  Like a frayed rope stretched too tight, the red-and-green line dissolved and the crowd surged through. Someone in the vanguard brandished a laser rifle wrenched from the grip of a militiaman, shaking it above his head. Then, horrified, Dev saw that many of the militiamen had actually turned around, joining the front ranks of the mob as they closed with his own forces. "It's the revolution!" someone was screaming over and over again. "It's the revolution!"

  "Kill the Impies!" The yells were shrill, mindless, like the bellowing of animals.

  "Lieutenant!" It was Koenig's voice, quavering at the edge of panic. "Can we shoot?"

  "DY-30As only!" Dev snapped. The 30A was a smoke grenade. If he could create a forbidding-looking wall of smoke between the Guard forces and the mob . . . "Two grenades each! Target the front of the crowd. Fire!"

  White smoke blossomed, mushroomed, spread . . . and the front ranks of the advancing crowd staggered to a ragged halt, not knowing whether they faced smoke or something more dangerous.

  "Company C!" Dev called over the tactical net. "Sonics only! Advance and fire!"

  In situations such as this the towering bulk of the warstriders was actually a disadvantage. Almost anything a strider did to defend itself would result in mass death and destruction; the support infantry, however, armored against the mob's weapons and armed with sonic stunners, were better equipped to break the mob's charge.

  As the central mass of the crowd kept pressing ahead, the vanguard was catapulted forward, into the smoke. Guard foot soldiers, each in full combat armor, trotted past the line of warstriders, their lasers and heavier weapons slung over their backs, sonic stunners at the ready. As sergeants barked orders over the tac frequencies, each trooper dropped to one knee, aimed into the swirl of smoke, and fired.

  Caressed by ultrasonic pulses, dozens of charging civilians faltered, stumbled, and collapsed.

  A warning flashed across Dev's vision. Forty megawatts of laser energy had just washed across his left leg, scouring the nano coating of his armor but otherwise causing no damage. Turncoat militiamen, or civilians with captured rifles, were firing at the warstriders towering above the smoke. Another pulse of coherent light smoked from his right shoulder, melting some of the armor and leaving a small, puckered crater.

  The leggers of Company C continued firing, gradually wearing away the front ranks of the mob. Why hadn't the warstriders been equipped with sonic stunners? Even a makeshift job, like the strap-on flamers, would have been better than nothing. The unconscious bodies were stacked now three and four deep on the pavement. Behind that wall, the rest of the mob hesitated like some huge, confused beast, unwilling to press forward, unable to turn back. The question was whether they would break before the battery packs in the troopers' stunners started giving out.

  There was a swirl of color and motion to Dev's right. Turning, he saw a new threat, an arm of the mob spilling around the Guard unit's right flank, running, turning inward, colliding with the kneeling line of legger troops in a wild hand-to-hand melee.

  Then they were everywhere, bearing down the Guard troops. "Company C, fall back!" Dev ordered. Those who could retreated. Others continued to fight, surrounded now by the tide of rioters. Sheer weight of numbers had knocked several troopers to the ground, where they were helplessly pinned and stripped of their weapons. "Warstriders on the right!" Dev called. "Forward!"

  Each Scoutstrider and Fastrider was twice as tall as a man. They advanced slowly, sweeping forward with relentless power. Few rioters were able to stand unmoving before the approach of a twenty-ton monster, however determined they might be. Dev glimpsed Bev Schneider's Fastrider alongside Koenig's Scoutstrider, wading into that human sea. The mob's charge was broken, the demonstrators beginning to turn and flee back toward the Guild Hall.

  But ten meters away, the crowd had engulfed Duarte's Ghostrider; several men had clambered up on the torso, clinging to the hull fittings, groping past Duarte's corpse for the bloodstained green banner still hanging from its mast. Muirden was trying to pivot the Ghostrider to throw his attackers off, but there were too many of them. Even a warstrider could be overwhelmed by enough sheer mass and determination. Dev saw the LaG-42 shudder, then visibly tip as a hundred rioters hurled themselves against Muirden's legs.

  Turning, Dev moved forward, plowing into the mob, parting it before him like a steel-and-duralloy Moses. The noise was deafening, a thunderous roar of chanting voices filling the entire volume of the huge city dome. Targeting the Ghostrider, he fired another smoke grenade. It detonated against the LaG-42's hull, the burst of choking white smoke panicking the climbers, sending them tumbling back to the ground or on top of their fellows. Others crowded back as Dev's machine approached, a towering blue shadow in the thick mist that was beginning to envelop everything at ground level.

  One determined young man clung to the top of the Ghostrider, still tugging at the green banner. He wore a gas mask, which let him ignore the smoke, and Dev guessed he might be one of the leaders of this insurrection. Swiftly, delicately, Dev reached out his left hand, opening duralloy fingers. The man, half blinded by the smoke, had not noticed Dev's approach, but he heard something now and spun, eyes wide behind the transparency of his mask. Gently, but irresistibly, Dev closed his fingers around the man's waist, plucking him off the Ghostrider's hull like a grape from the stem. The man shrieked and struggled, arms flailing, legs kicking wildly, but Dev swung him effortlessly above his head, holding him well above the crowd below.

  "Thanks, Lieutenant," Muirden's voice said over a private channel. The Ghostrider's upper torso spun, free now, and he took a careful step forward. "I'm clear now."

  "Pull back," Dev said. He shifted to the primary tac channel. "All units, pull back slowly! Give them room!"

  The noise was dwindling, and so too were the movements of the crowd. It seemed as though the entire mob had somehow had a change of heart. At the perimeters, people were beginning, to break away and wander off, straggling clear of the riot.

  The tranq gas was beginning to work.

  "HEMILCOM," Dev called, switching to the command frequency. "HEMILCOM, this is Blue Lancer Leader."

  "Go ahead, Lancer," a voice replied in Dev's mind. "We've been monitoring your situation."

  He'd known they would be. "Roger that. The DY-30C is starting to take effect. We're going to need medics in here, and fast."

  "Affirmative, Blue Lancer. Medical personnel are on the way."

  The effects of tranq gas varied widely, depending on the age, physical condition, and size of the victim. The instant "knock-out gas" popular in adventure sims simply didn't exist; what would render a twenty-year-old male in good condition unconscious would probably kill a man of ninety . . . or an infant. Tranq gas didn't knock people out. Instead, it inhibited dopamine receptors in the brain and central nervous system, blocking emotions, slowing thought and memory, sometimes interfering with the victim's motor response.

  As a result, most of the rioters forgot they were angry and began wandering about, dazed, confused, even lost. Some would suffer amnesia. Others lost consciousness and slumped to the pavement, or responded in unexpected ways, panic or hysteria. A few lay on the ground, twitching helplessly or jerking uncontrollably as they were wracked by convulsions.

  Dev felt a dark and bitter anguish rising within. There were certain to be casualties; damn it, when hordes of screaming, unarmed civilians charged ranks of armed troops and warstriders, there were going to be casualties! He'd tried to minimize them, but . . .

  "Company C," he ordered. He scanned the dissolving crowd, looking for the infants he'd spotted earlier. They might need help, too. There was an antidote for tranq gas, but it had to be given quickly. Where were the medics? "I want one man in three to holster weapons and go try to help those people." The ones
going into convulsions might swallow their tongues or injure their heads; some of the unconscious rioters at the bottom of that human wall felled by the leggers' stunners might be suffocating. Glancing up, Dev saw that he was still holding the body of the rioter he'd plucked from the LaG-42, now as limp as a rag doll. The guy had fainted.

  Gently, Dev lowered him to the ground. "Sergeant Brunner," he called.

  A squad gunso trotted up in front of Dev, saluting. "Yes, sir!"

  "Take charge of this man. I think he was one of the mob leaders. Intelligence will want to question him."

  "Yes, sir!"

  Dev was tired, the inevitable aftermath of combat.

  Of all the battles Dev had fought in his life, this was one of the hardest, facing men and women, civilians, most of them unarmed, all of them determined to get him and his people, with him not wanting to hurt them in return. Warstriders were marvelously flexible war machines, but they simply were not designed for this type of action.

  Suddenly, Dev wanted to unplug, to immobilize his strider and climb out, to join the leggers moving now among the hundreds of victims lying on the pavement of the plaza. He could not, however. By assuming command of the unit, he'd assumed the responsibility to stay where he could monitor communications, tune in on orders from HEMILCOM, or assess developing threats.

  Where were the medics?

  Three days later. Dev stood again in Governor Prem's office, describing the events of the clash in the Assyrian Concourse. Prem had conducted the interview, but a third figure, Omigato, stood silent in crimson robes in a far corner of the room.

  "The final count was twelve dead," Dev was saying, "and perhaps fifty who required hospitalization." He glanced once at Omigato, then fixed his eyes steadily on Prem. "The medical assistance never did arrive from HEMILCOM. Your Excellency. I patched a call through to a hospital in Winchester, however. They dispatched trauma techs and ambulance flyers to the Concourse."

  "Hmm. A mix-up in communications. I expect. And casualties among your troops?"