by Ian Douglas
He broke off as Lara's Stormwind touched down, her squat and ugly ascraft momentarily obscured by the blizzard of whirling dust. The keening whine of the engines spooled down the scale until he could hear her voice again.
"We got Imperial Marines in the van, fellas, and not just crunchies, either. I saw at least five of the big Katana jobs, and a couple of big monsters that might have been Daimyos. Vic, when those bastards show up, you might not get the chance to explain anything. They'll shoot you and claim they nailed a Xenozombie Beta!"
She was right, damn it. But he couldn't just leave, not when there was even the faintest chance . . .
"Watch it!" Lipinski yelled over the tactical circuit. "Something's coming through!"
Hagan whirled his Scoutstrider to face the puckered, soft black dimple at the crater's center, where something was rising like a bubble from hot, liquid tar. Sunlight gleamed from an opalescent surface; it was a bubble . . . one of the travel spheres, but it was larger than any of the strange constructs that Hagan had ever seen before, over two meters across. Breaking free of the embrace of the ground with a dull, watery plop, it moved toward the striders, dragging in the dust.
Lipinski twisted, his chin turret laser swinging to center on the approaching Xeno pod. The turret on the belly of the Stormwind swiveled about with a whine, bringing Lara's high-velocity Gatling cannon to bear, as Hagan snapped to targeting mode and raised his Cyclan 5000. Travel spheres had never been known to attack, but still . . .
As though melting under a blast of intense heat, the upper half of the globe shriveled away, exposing a human figure slumped inside. Hagan's breath caught in his throat, choking him as he tried to blurt out the name.
"Katya!"
There was no response as the sphere dissolved away almost completely, leaving Katya limp on the ground. She was alive—the Scoutstrider's sensors proved that much almost at once—but she seemed dazed. She was wearing her mask and life support pack and, impossibly, she was breathing, though it was possible that she'd been hurt in some other way. Hagan froze the RLN-90 and broke his link with it, fumbling with in-the-dark clumsiness to remove his VCH and pull on his own mask and chest pack. Katya was standing by the time he'd cracked his hatch and vaulted the Scoutstrider's ladder to the ground, but she responded to his touch like someone walking in her sleep.
"Katya!" he yelled again, his voice muffled by his mask. He placed his palm on her life support pack interface, then read the cascade of data flowing into his cephlink. The air tanks were almost full, the regulator functioning perfectly. Somehow she'd recharged her tanks, and Hagan felt a cold chill prickle at the base of his neck as he realized what must have happened.
His first thought, a twisting, sick memory, was of Xenozombies he'd fought on Loki, human machines absorbed by Xeno nanotechnics and converted into . . . something else. A weapon. On Alya A-VI, he'd seen living DalRiss "machines" taken over the same way.
Was it possible that the same thing had happened to Katya, that she'd been killed, then reanimated by those amorphous horrors?
Some cold and hard, rational part of him was shouting that since Katya couldn't be alive, she wasn't alive, that she must be something else. Kill it! Kill it!
But instinct told him she was still human, and the data coming through the datalink confirmed that. Katya's bodysuit was disheveled but intact, save for her left sleeve, which was still rolled up above her elbow. The comel was still in place. He touched it. . . .
It's inside me oh God it's inside me, reading me reading me and it's dark so dark and it doesn't understand what it sees oh please don't let me go mad don't let me die here in the dark—
The shock of touching Katya's mind through the comel rocked Hagan so hard he nearly fell. Somehow, he hung on, detecting levels of emotion and impression and memory flowing through the comel, knowing that it was Katya and terrified of that raw, naked emotion bridging the gap between them.
"I'm here. Katya! I'm here!" God, I love you . . . had she heard that? He'd never so much as admitted it, even to himself.
Her eyes snapped open behind her tinted UV goggles. "Vic?"
"Right here. Captain. You okay?"
"I'm . . . fine. A little shook." The eyes closed and she shook her head. "Oh, Vic! Tell me you're real!"
"I'm here. Katya, and I'm real. It's all over now. You're safe."
"Safe . . ." The eyes closed. "I . . . talked to them. It . . . I mean, there's only one." A shudder passed through her body and Hagan held her close. "It . . . it read me. . . ."
Lipinski arrived at Hagan's side.
"Help me get her into her slot," he said, and the two of them supported Katya as they guided her back to the Ghostrider, which was crouching, legs folded beneath it, a dozen meters away. Together, with some difficulty, they got her up the ladder to the dorsal hull, then helped her clamber through her hatch.
"I've got Impie striders in sight," Lara warned. Her Stormwind was grounded now, but she'd released a small, high-flying remote that was still circling the battlefield, scanning the surrounding area and transmitting the results to Lara's link. "They're coming through the jungle from the east, range, three klicks. I'm also picking up ascraft now, forming up over Babel. You guys've got five minutes, max."
"Almost set." Hagan completed hooking up the strider connections to Katya's bodysuit, as Lipinski scrambled over the top of the Ghostrider's fuselage and reentered his own slot. The LaG-42's AI would assess her injuries and physical condition far more quickly and completely than Hagan could, and stabilize her until they could get her to a med center and a staff of somatic engineers. He didn't remove her mask—he couldn't seal the Ghostrider's hatch and recycle the pod's atmosphere while he was still leaning in through the access—but he got her helmet on and jacked in, then switched on the Al-governed link enabler. He pulled back out of the hatch and closed it; he could hear the hiss of pressurization as he slid down off the machine's hull.
Linking in once more aboard his own warstrider, he heard Lara on the tac channel with word that the Imperial striders were approaching the edge of devastation several hundred meters to the east of the crater. Engaging his strider's maneuver systems, he lurched toward the waiting Stormwind, which crouched on the crater floor like a great, ugly bird of prey. The Ghostrider, jacked by Lipinski, was there ahead of him.
Huge, padded grippers within the VK-141's riderslots secured the warstrider about its midsection, drawing it partway back into the slot's recess. It took less than thirty seconds for Hagan's Scoutstrider to be secured. The jets shrilled to full power, stirring again a swirling dust storm that cloaked the slow-rising ascraft, and then they were soaring into the sky, with the crater and the battle-seared scar in the jungle looking like an angry, gray slash against the red-and-orange foliage. Just visible now as a line of black specks, the first Imperial warstriders stepped from the jungle, deploying across the plain in open battle formation. Behind them, a quintet of black specks above the horizon marked a flight of swift Imperial Marine Hachis approaching at just below the speed of sound.
"Are we gonna outrun those ascraft?" Lipinski wanted to know.
"Outrun 'em?" Lara replied, voice tight. "Not if they chase us, no way. Whether or not we get away depends on whether or not they're interested in us."
Apparently, they weren't. The Imperial flight began circling above Red One, providing air support for the approaching striders. The Stormwind dropped until it was skimming the jungle top, then slid smoothly across the crest of Henson's Rise to block itself from marine scanners and radar.
"Vic?"
Hagan was surprised to hear Katya's voice, relayed through her strider's link with the Stormwind. He'd thought she'd be unconscious by now. "Yeah. Kat? You okay?"
"I'm fine." There was still a faraway gentleness to her voice, but she did, in fact, sound all right. "Listen . . . we've got to find Dev, get to him."
"Cameron?" Hagan gave a mental scowl. He had no use for the man. "Why?"
"I think I understand now
what happened to him, back on Alya B. I need to . . . to talk to him."
She didn't hear me, after all. Maybe that's a good thing. "That might be a bit difficult, just now." Hagan wondered if she'd slipped into delirium. He checked her health readouts and saw that they were approaching normal, though there were clear signs of psychological shock. What had happened to her down there?
The Stormwind shrieked low across red-and-orange jungle toward the rebel base.
Chapter 21
I do wonder what the Xenos think of us. Two sexes, a bewildering variety of races, myriad ideologies, cultures, languages, religions, worldviews. It's not enough to say we're as alien to it as it is to us. It could be that humans, who are already used to diversity in a diverse universe, are better prepared to understand the Xenophobes than they could ever possibly be prepared to understand us. I suspect the Xenophobes are more intelligent than we are in absolute terms . . . but less adaptable.
—from a report given before the
Hegemony Council on Space Exploration
Devis Cameron
C.E. 2542
Yoshi Omigato contemplated the virtues of gaman—of patience. The ViRsimulation surrounding him was the creation of Masaru Ubukata, the twenty-third-century Buddhist artist who'd used the themes of cherry blossoms floating on the surfaces of still ponds to communicate the perfect peace that comes with recognizing one's place in space and time. Omigato floated, silent and invisible, one with the blossoms, one with the pool. . . .
The inner alarm broke his reflection and he scowled his displeasure. His analogue had been instructed to handle all communications from the outer world. What event warranted an interruption of his meditations?
"Forgive this intrusion, my Lord," his analogue's voice whispered in his ear.
"I very much hope this is important." He wondered if analogues were self-aware enough to appreciate pain.
"It falls within the parameters you set for me, my Lord. The demonstration has begun at Tanis."
"So!" Omigato's anger vanished. He'd been expecting this news, of course, but not this quickly. His mind leaped to the one incident that might upset his carefully prepared timetable. "And the Xenophobes at Babel?"
"Decisively beaten, my Lord. All were destroyed at the second barricade a few hours ago. There was no damage to the space elevator, and casualties were light."
"Excellent!" He'd been less interested in the Xeno attack than in the news from Tanis. It helped, however, that the threat to Babel had been eliminated before his plan went into its final phase. More of Eridu's population would be grateful to the Imperial forces for coming to their aid. "What is HEMILCOM's assessment of the Xenophobe situation?"
"HEMILCOM estimates that it will be some time before there is another assault. The Xenophobes, when beaten, appear to require considerable periods of time before they renew their attempts to surface. We may have as much as two to four months before another incident occurs."
"It is time, then, to execute our move against the gaijin."
"Yes, my Lord."
"Alert Nagai. We may need his marines."
"And the gaijin, Cameron?"
"I will compose his orders myself."
"As you will, my Lord."
The analogue vanished from Omigato's mind, leaving him alone. With a thought, the cherry blossoms and pond vanished, leaving a gray, inner emptiness. Kanji characters began appearing in the air, brush stroke by graceful stroke, as Omigato started composing his message. It would be translated later, of course, and cast as official orders from the Governor himself, but Omigato thought more clearly in Nihongo.
There could be no chance that Devis Cameron, hero of the Empire, would misunderstand them. . . .
Chapter 22
Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty.
—Louis D. Brandeis
U.S. Supreme Court Justice
C.E. 1927
Spread apart at twenty-meter intervals, the warstriders of the 4th Terran Rangers moved through the forest single-file, their hulls repeating the reds and oranges of the surrounding vegetation. On point was Bev Schneider's Fastrider Nothung, following the track of one of the old construction trails that crisscrossed between the Eriduan cities. Eleven more striders followed, LaG-17s, Ares-12s, and RLN-90s. It was an impressive force, fast-moving and hard-hitting.
Dev's machine was Duarte's command Ghostrider. His maintenance crew had transferred the name Koman-do from his old strider to the new when he'd returned to the Armory from orbit with his promotion and new orders. Officially, he was still listed as an advisor, but for all practical purposes he was no longer a koman, but a full-fledged member of the 4th Terran Rangers.
He was trying not to think of it as a kind of demotion, as getting broken from Imperial staff officer back to Hegemony striderjack. His position on the staff had always been predicated on his expertise on Xenos, and when that expertise no longer applied, it was only natural that his superiors slot him in someplace where he could be useful.
But the reassignment rankled nonetheless, his brevet promotion to tai-i not withstanding.
He'd feared morale problems with his takeover of the unit, but so far there'd been no complaints and few problems—none, at any rate, that hadn't been handled by a quiet talk in the privacy of his office. There'd been some of the usual soldiers' grumblings, of course, but Dev's prestige—the striderjack who'd once talked face-to-face with the Xenos and lived to tell about it—had proved to be both ID and authorization. It had become a special mark of distinction for the men and women of A Company: "Yeah, but our skipper knows the creep-crawlies personal, on a first-name basis!" More than that, Dev knew each of his men personally, and they liked and respected him for it.
For several days, he'd immersed himself in A Company's records, familiarizing himself with the myriad details of supply, maintenance, and logistics vital to the functioning of any military unit. It had been a colossal and thankless task, and he'd used his cephlink to bypass sleep for four nights running. The effects were starting to catch up with him now. He was going to have to let himself get some sleep soon.
"Hey, Tai-i," a voice called to him over the tac channel. It was Sho-i Gunnar Kleinst, a kid from Eridu's Euphrates Valley who'd enlisted with the Rangers shortly after they'd arrived on-planet. The kid barely spoke any Inglic at all, but over the Al-coordinated tactical com link, his German was translated as smoothly as if Dev had taken a Deutsch RAM implant. "Think we can stop off for some R&R? My mother lives in a little farm outpost just over that hill."
"Not this time. Gunnar," Dev replied.
"Aw, let the kid go see his momma. Tai-i," another voice suggested. It was Chu-i Giscard Barre, from the state of Gascony in Terra's European Federation. "We'll cover for him."
The Rangers. Dev had found, were unusually close, surprisingly so given that they'd been drawn from a dozen Terran nations, including both Europe and the American states. Old national rivalries died hard sometimes. Half of the states of the European Federation hated the other half, and animosities were still close to the surface in some parts of the continent despite the Teikokuno Heiwa, but those nationalistic divisions vanished, for the most part, within a tight-knit group of men and women stationed light-years from their homes.
That closeness was rarely extended to the locals, even though the colonists were also mostly from north-central Europe and from eastern North America. The Terran-born troops didn't like the mincies—hated them after Duarte's death, in fact, because Duarte had been popular with his men—but after a suitable probationary period they tended to think of recruits like Kleinst as fellow jackers, not as mincies or locals. It was an odd twist of human psychology, Dev thought, that European-born troops could hate European-descended locals, yet accept one of those locals as a fellow comrade-in-arms to the point that they even thought of members of his family as "people" instead of mincies.
"Sorry, guys
," Dev said, replying to Barre's suggestion. "We have our orders and we're on a short leash. No time . . . and somehow I don't think HEMILCOM would approve of consorting with the enemy."
He meant it lightly, as a joke, but it fell flat. "My mother is not an enemy," Kleinst said.
"Aw, gok HEMILCOM," an unidentified voice added. Dev thought it might be the big Dutch chu-i. DeVreis.
"Yeah, the dissies are all back in the city." another voice said. "Out here, it's just folks."
"Quiet, people." Dev ordered. "Open circuit."
He hoped HEMILCOM hadn't been listening in. He doubted that the Hegemony brass would understand, and Imperials like Omigato would be downright peeved at any hint of fraternization between the troops and the locals. So far as his troops were concerned, the enemy was any outsider, whether he was a local, an Imperial, or some fat Hegemony gensui in his comfortable office up in Eridu synchorbit.
They were moving down a gentle hill into the district known as the Euphrates Valley. The region was nothing like its Terran namesake. The land was lush and fertile, the forest open and airy, the sky showing through the canopy alive with sparkling light. This close to the south pole, Marduk barely rose or set at all. The land was in perpetual twilight, with the sun always either just above the horizon, reddened by the atmosphere, or just below, with aurorae filling the sky with eerie, pearl-luminous shafts and curtains and sprays of light. The trees around them were the characteristic, multitiered mushroom shapes of Eridu's trees, some reaching fifty meters in height, but the ground was more open, less choked with saprophytes and walkers than in the equatorial regions. Eriduan flora was not as active at the poles as it was near the equator; the low angle of the sun eliminated most of the harsh ultraviolet, making both temperatures and UV levels pleasantly temperate.
The Euphrates was one of the largest rivers on Eridu, sinuously winding across some three thousand kilometers from one side of the south pole to the other, before emptying into the Clarke Sea. The names of cities, towns, and outposts in and around the river delta region echoed the placenames of Terra's ancient Near East: Ur and Lagash; Assyria and Sidon; Karnak, Tanis, and Valley-of-Kings.