by Ian Douglas
"This," she told the assembled group of recruits, "is a warstrider. It is bigger than you, faster than you, one hell of a lot stronger than you, and it's heavily armed enough to take on an army all by itself. Nonetheless, any one of you can take one of these things down solo, if you know how to go about it."
They were gathered in a clearing outside of Emden's main dome, in front of the hulking, unmoving statue of a LaG-42 Ghostrider. Nanoflage netting, designed to screen them from the prying eyes of HEMILCOM almost directly overhead, cast a pool of welcome shade, but it was still stiflingly hot. They all wore breathing masks and life support packs, of course, but most, men and women both, had stripped down to briefs and boots in the steamy, early morning heat. Part of the training was getting these kids used to living and working outside, whatever the climate, and working with machines too big to demonstrate inside was a good excuse. But as the long morning wore on, they would be forced to move indoors. Eridu's sun, which the locals called Marduk, was too intense to take unprotected for long.
As she stood in the clearing lecturing her class on the weaknesses of warstriders, her T-shirt already plastered unpleasantly against her skin, it occurred to Katya that a little terraforming on this hothouse might not be such a bad idea. Eridu, baked by a hotter sun in its early history, had less water overall than Earth, with shallow and land-locked seas, but the humidity still hovered around ninety percent in the equatorial zone. The vegetation surrounding them was a riot of red and orange; the molecule that served as chlorophyll on this world, transforming sunlight to energy, was a sulfur compound that stained the vegetation with its characteristic golden hues. It was a strange world, and a hostile one; humans could not walk abroad without respirators and masks. Chi Draconis—Marduk—provided energy enough to create an amazingly active local flora, including species that moved fast enough to be considered hunters in their own right.
But Katya knew that of all the life forms encountered in Eridu's jungles, the deadliest was certain to be Man.
"We've had warstriders now since the twenty-second century," she lectured. "There've been God knows how many designs since they first saw service, but their basic appearance and function haven't changed much in three hundred fifty years."
She knew the history of combat machines cold, the way any good craftsman knows his tools. She did not have it loaded into her RAM, however, which was why she had to pass the data on through lectures rather than palm-to-palm 'facing. Besides, Katya was old-fashioned enough to feel that knowledge acquired by more traditional means—through Mark I eyes and ears, especially—was somehow more a part of a person than data downloaded through nano-grown circuitry into personal RAM.
It just might be the difference between artificial and natural memory that saved a trooper's life someday, especially if he was on foot and facing a twenty-ton, two-legged behemoth.
Tanks—those lumbering, treaded, steel monsters of the twentieth century—had been rendered obsolete early in the twenty-first century by the worldwide proliferation of shoulder-launched AP rounds and smart missiles that could penetrate any armor. It had been another century and a half before materials science had produced lightweight armor that could survive the modern battlefield, leading to the revival of armored combat machines.
The first warstriders had been bipedal construction and freight vehicles that could traverse nearly any terrain. Jury-rigged with armor plate and light laser weaponry, the warstriders of the 1st Dai Nihon Mechanized Cavalry Division had been irresistible at Seoul and Shenyang, during the Manchurio-Japanese War of 2207.
Even after three centuries, though, warstriders were still controversial. Their critics liked to observe that, like the tanks of an earlier era, they were slow and cumbersome compared to aircraft or airspace vehicles; their advocates insisted that basic infantry combat still required ground forces capable of crossing a battlefield, taking the high ground, and holding it, tactical doctrine unchanged since the armies of Sumer and Egypt. And warstriders were infinitely more survivable on the modern battlefield than armored infantry, as well as being more mobile in varied terrain, better armed, and more terrifying to any nonstrider adversary. During the past three centuries they'd done far more than survive the modern battlefield. They had transformed it.
Yet throughout those centuries, warstriders had only rarely faced one another in combat.
That was one aspect of the Rebellion that had been troubling Katya since before her arrival on Eridu. Save for the simulated reality of training exercises, striderjacks rarely had to think about strider-to-strider tactics. Not many planetary militias could afford even one warstrider regiment, though most had a few old-model clunkers for show. More modern designs were restricted to Hegemony units, while Imperial forces were equipped with the very best—the fastest, smartest, and deadliest war machines in human space. In theory, at least, the distribution meant that planetary militias could never challenge Hegemony forces militarily, while Hegemony units would not be able to win against Dai Nihon Imperials. Long ago, the threat of striders fighting striders had become as improbable as . . .
. . . as improbable as the collapse of the Hegemony. That, she realized with a start, was a large part of what had been troubling her these past few weeks. If the gathering anti-Imperial movement triggered war, it would be a civil war, rending the Shichiju and setting former Hegemony strider units against loyalist and Imperial forces together. The thought terrified her, but it took her a moment to recognize why.
It wasn't the fact of armored combat alone, certainly. Katya had faced warstriders of a sort in battle before; Xeno Betas were human combat machines captured and nanotechnically reworked by the Xenophobes into parodies of their former selves, shattered, half-melted hulks known with biting black humor as "Xenozombies." But in a civil war things would be terribly, gut-twistingly different. Colonel Schneider might find himself up against his own daughter on the battlefield.
She might find herself jacking a rebel strider in combat against an identical machine jacked by Dev.
The thought, when she let herself examine it, carried with it an almost paralyzing depression. Could she fight Dev, if she had to, in the dirty, thunderous, close-ranged exchange of an armored clash? She honestly didn't know. Hell, could she face any warstrider in combat, knowing that the pilot might be an old friend, a fellow New American maybe, someone who'd trained with her or maybe once jacked a Ghostrider in her platoon?
She didn't know, and that shook her worse than anything she'd ever had to face.
Since arriving at Emden, she'd learned more about where Dev was and what he was doing. Network Intelligence had confirmed that he was a company commander now, stationed with the 4th Terran Rangers in Winchester, further that he had been the one responsible for shutting down Network operations in the capital by breaking up a mass demonstration and personally capturing a rioter who, unfortunately, had known most of the Winchester Network's organization.
Dev Cameron, damn him, was still taking his loyalty to Hegemony and Empire seriously.
"So the weak points in any strider under twenty tons." she was telling her class, "are the leg joints—ankles, knees, and hips. No matter how the armor shields are arranged, those spots are going to be vulnerable to satchel charges or point-blank energy discharge."
A faceted, mag-levitated sphere drifted toward Katya from the direction of Emden's main dome, and she interrupted her lesson. "Captain Alessandro," it said with Sinclair's voice. "Sorry to intrude, but I need to see you in my office, ASAP."
Damn. "Right away, sir," she said, and the teleoperated speaker bobbed once and departed. She turned back to the class. "Okay, people. It's getting too hot to work out here anyway. Lieutenant Chung is waiting inside to go over combat field nanotechnics. Dismissed."
Five minutes later she was in Sinclair's office, a small, spare compartment that had once been a Dahlstrom purchasing agent's cubby.
"You weren't wearing your compatch," Sinclair said as she walked in. His face was back to normal now, a
nd his beard was slowly reverting to its original color.
"Sorry, sir," she said. Katya's cephlink equipment didn't include a radio, something for which she'd always been grateful. Soldiers and officers alike usually wore compatches, small adhesion disks that either stuck to the skin behind the ear and jacked into a T-socket, or plugged in directly. In Eridu's climate, though, the adhesion patches made her skin itch and she didn't like wearing them.
Which meant that Sinclair had had to send a speaker hunting for her.
"Our position out here is precarious," Sinclair told her. "Suppose a Hegemony attack had gone down? I would've needed to be in immediate communication with all my officers, instantly."
"Yes, sir," she said, feeling her face burning. Damn, but that had been stupid. "It won't happen again."
He raised a hand. "Easy, Katya, no static. I didn't really call you in here to dress you down. I've got some news for you. We may have a comel spotted."
Katya shivered, but put that down to her sweat-soaked T-shirt cooling in Sinclair's office. A comel! "It's on Eridu? With Dev?"
Sinclair scratched at his beard "Not quite. The situation is complicated . . . and we suspect that there are some strange political maneuverings going on behind the scenes. The word we've been given is that at least one comel was aboard the Tokitukaze all along, and that it's now coming down the sky-el. It'll be in Babel in another thirty hours. After that, it will be loaded aboard a monorail and shipped to Taisa Ichiro Ozaka at Karnak. Ozaka is the commanding officer of the Imperial Marines on-planet."
Katya's brow furrowed. "It sounds like they're cutting Dev out of the circuit."
"Could be. There's a power struggle going on behind the scenes right now on Earth. The Kansei Faction—that's a group of very powerful military and civilian traditionalists, including Omigato and Chuichi Munimori himself—is moving to block the appointment of gaijin like your friend Cameron from high-ranking posts in the government or in the military. Cameron could be heading for a big fall."
"But why comels? I thought the Impies were nuking the Xenos, not trying to talk to them."
Sinclair's mouth twisted unpleasantly. "Um Everyone's been damned excited about how comels improve communication between human and alien, with the DalRiss or the 'Phobes. Have you ever thought what they might mean to communication between human and human? Especially, ah, involuntary communication?"
"Interrogation."
"That's what we believe."
She let a hiss of air whistle tunelessly through her teeth. DalRiss comels probably wouldn't allow true telepathy between people, but they would certainly pick up memories, emotions, and impressions. The things would be unparalleled as lie detectors, and they might help an interrogator determine what his subject was most afraid of. There were other possible uses—screening large numbers of people being herded into an internment camp, for example, searching out Network activists or fugitives. All a comel-wearing guard would need to do was touch each person as he or she filed by.
"So our original operation here is on again," Sinclair said. "I want to grab that comel, not only because we can still use it to talk to the Xenophobes, but because of what the Imperials could do with the thing if they get it. Interested?"
She considered. It wouldn't be easy, and her original question remained: Would it even be possible to find an isolated Xenophobe and approach it closely enough to touch the thing without getting killed in the process? Now that the Impies had started nuking them, would humans be able to approach the Xenos at all? If her work with the rebel recruits these past few days had taught her anything, though, it was that they needed help, allies, and fast, and maybe the Imperial attacks could be used to convince the Xenos to join the rebel cause.
Maybe. Did she want to try? "Yes, sir!"
Chapter 12
Strike where you are strong and the enemy is weak, says the Master, Sun Tzu. Warstrider combat is exquisitely tailored to this basic law of war. The keys to warstrider combat are surprise, firepower, and mobility.
—Kokorodo: Discipline of Warriors
Ieyasu Sutsumi
C.E. 2529
Katya pressed forward through almost impenetrable brush, her Ghostrider's outer hull reflecting the warm golds and reds of the surrounding vegetation. Her machine's nanoflage was spotty and imperfect; the molecule-thin layer of reflective nanotechnic units—"nanits" was the popular term—needed to be replaced frequently, for normal wear and tear on a combat strider quickly abraded the surface and weakened the camo effect. The jungle was thick enough, however, that camouflage was only marginally effective anyway. This operation would depend far more on speed, timing, and sheer luck than on technological flourishes like nanoflage.
It did feel good to be back in harness again. Katya had been given the Freestrider's lone LaG-42, which, until then, had been operated by a pool of five or six young jackers, none of whom had been in combat before. "It's not the machine, it's the man." ran the old military maxim, but, by God, it would help if the men knew how to use their machines in the first place! This op would give a few of them a bit of that seasoning they needed.
They were in the jungle southwest of Babel—the Outback, as New Americans thought of the wilderness beyond the tamed and civilized reaches of a world. Her Ghostrider was the only two-slotter in the rebel arsenal; jacked in with her was one of the rebel recruits, a pale-faced kid from Eridu's Euphrates Valley region named Georg Lipinski.
Three warstriders followed closely: Lee Chung in one of the Scoutstriders, Rudi Carlsson in the Swiftstrider, plus Roger Darcy, the Hegemony sho-i deserter she'd met her first day in Babel, manning the Fastrider. Bringing up the rear was one of the jury-rigged constructors, a slow, four-legged beast with Karl Braun jacking and Simone Dagousset riding as cargo.
Vic Hagan had been furious when Katya had pulled rank and ordered him to stay behind, but he was the second most experienced member of their team, and if this op went wrong, she wanted him to survive, to carry on with the Thorhammers' training program. The memory made Katya chuckle to herself. Could she still pull rank, on Vic or anyone, now that they were no longer working under the Hegemony chain of command? Vic had backed down without raising that point: she would have to talk to Sinclair later about ranks and command authority within the fledgling Eridu Freestriders.
"Did you say something, ma'am?" Lipinski's voice came through her internal link, nervous and quick.
"Negative, Georg," she said. "Stay alert on that laser."
"Y-yes, ma'am."
Warstrider control circuitry could be divided up between the commander, the second slot, and the strider AI. Katya didn't yet fully trust the LaG-42's rebel-maintained AI, though it had functioned fine so far, so she'd reserved both weapons and maneuvering functions to herself. The exception was the Ghostrider's chin turret with its 100-megawatt laser. That she had assigned to Lipinski, though she retained control of the weapon's arming circuits. The laser, in serious need of routine maintenance, had a nasty tendency to overheat when powered up, and she'd ordered Lipinski to monitor the temperature closely and to engage the coolant flow each time the core jacket temp crept above two hundred.
"Temperature's at one-eighty-five," he said—needlessly, since Katya had put the temp readout on her visual display so that she could keep an eye on it as well. "It looks stable."
"When we get back, we're going to have to rebuild that heat transfer system," she said. "It's leaking. I think it needs new coolant seals."
"Yes, ma'am." She could sense the relief in his thoughts, the unspoken echo: when we get back!
The jungle was starkly beautiful, a blaze of gold-and-crimson fronds, tangles of slow but visibly moving vines the locals called kriecherweed, and impenetrable masses of orange anemone plants. Gauze-winged flyers flitted among the scarlet branches of towering rotfarns, and larger, unseen somethings crashed about in the thicker masses of brush. The harsh, almost actinic glare of Chi Draconis filtered down through the canopy in rippling flashes and dapples of glorious light,
turned golden by the foliage. It was gorgeous—and deadly. The oxygen content outside would keep a human alive for perhaps eight or ten painful, gasping minutes, until either anoxia or CO2 poisoning finally killed him.
The outside temperature, at least, wasn't too bad today—only forty degrees Celsius, but then it was still early morning in the long Eriduan day.
The jungle opened up so suddenly Katya nearly took a misstep and stumbled. Catching herself, she swung her visual scanners up and down the long, wide slash burned through the forest.
Most places along the monorail line, the maglev rail ran well above the forest canopy, supported on the smooth, angled struts of duralloy pylons, but here, where the land rose sharply toward the foothills of Eridu's Transequatorial Mountains, it had been easier to burn out the jungle and let the track run a meter or so above bare rock. The ground was rubble and bedrock, still showing black, flamer scorch marks. The rail itself was bathed in harsh sunlight, a gleaming silver rail the thickness of a man's leg, held above the ground by stubby pylons positioned along every fifty meters or so of track. Katya was pleased to see that her navigation through the jungle—and the navdata she'd been programmed with—had been accurate. Their goal, a power relay station and switch house, rose above the trees some thirty meters beyond the rail.
Katya's scan verified that they were alone. Power was flowing through the rail, of course, and within the dome-shaped switch house, but there was no sign of life or movement here, save for the restless background motions of the jungle itself. She took three swift strides into the clearing. "Rudi! Lee!" she called. "Perimeter defense! And check that building. Darcy! You're with me."
"Yes, sir." Darcy's voice sounded sullen over the tactical link. Katya was trying not to form judgments of the Freestriders' personnel until she'd had a chance to see them in action, but she'd definitely detected a measure of resentment in the Mech Cav deserter. Darcy was the dark, mustached man she'd first seen at the sing-along in Babel's Underground, and she still didn't fully trust him. According to Creighton, he'd been accused of theft and had elected to take his chances with the rebels instead of facing a HEMILCOM tribunal.