Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  But a point-blank refusal to follow a direct order could be worked into a court-martial as well. By the time the record had been rewritten, it would look as though Cameron and his whole mutinous company had been conspiring with the enemies of His Majesty.

  Either way, Omigato would be able to report that the gaijin hero had disgraced himself—as had his father before him. The practice of allowing non-Japanese to rise to high positions in government and the military would cease, the advisors closest to the Emperor would be discredited, and members of Omigato's own Kansei Faction, the Men of Completion, would stand at the Emperor's side, advising him, guiding the Imperial hand through the difficult times that lay ahead.

  It would be a first step toward erasing the disgrace still born by Dai Nihon's Emperor. It would be the first step toward direct Imperial control of every world in the Shichiju.

  And, almost as an afterthought, it might also open the way to allowing direct Imperial control of Eridu. Obviously, if the local Hegemony troops couldn't handle the situation properly . . .

  But Cameron had warned the city; worse, the traitor had arranged for a copy of his CORAM-secret orders to be broadcast to every person in Tanis. The rebels there would see to it that every populated dome on Eridu would hear about those orders. It would mean open rebellion.

  Why had Cameron done it? Had the man already secretly joined the rebels? Omigato didn't think that could be the case, not when Cameron surely knew that his father's rehabilitation depended on his good behavior. He should have either followed orders . . . or ordered his men back to base, hoping to argue or plead his way out of the inevitable court-martial. Quietly accepting the trial might preserve his career and it would not affect his fathers rehabilitation. Treason would end both.

  It didn't make sense.

  Briefly, Omigato allowed himself to consider the possibility that he had made a mistake. Westerners, Americans in particular, did not share the Japanese reverence for their parents, but Omigato had studied Cameron's case closely; he'd been certain that the young man would do anything to save his father's name!

  What could have been more important in his life than that?

  Gaijin. Omigato shook his head bitterly. Animals! There was no understanding them.

  "Sandoval!"

  The shosa in charge of the HEMILCOM communications center turned in his seat, eyes wide. "Sir!"

  "Open a secure channel to Captain Nagai."

  There was still one chance of salvaging the situation. Nagai and his marines were standing by at Luxor, waiting for orders to move in and support the 4th Terran Rangers in their raid on Tanis.

  If Omigato played it right, it might yet look as though Cameron and his gaijin warstrider unit had run amuck and sacked the town.

  Chapter 25

  How much longer must we suffer the yoke of Japan and her Hegemony puppets? How much longer must we slave for others, sending the product of our toils to Earth for Dai Nihon's social welfare programs while our own children go hungry?

  —from a speech given at a public rally in

  the Tanis dome, just before the battle

  Jamis Luther Mattingly

  C.E. 2542

  Nearly two full hours after Tanis had been warned by Gunnar Kleinst's arrival, the first Imperials began touching down on the orange-yellow sward outside the main dome. The air cover arrived first, a flight of four Taka, or "Falcon," ground support tilt-jet aircraft. The Falcons were closely followed by a dozen lumbering magflitter APCs, bulbous, black-hulled machines that settled to the ground, their gullwing access doors already rising.

  The attacking warstriders appeared with devastating swiftness, emerging from the black interiors of the APCs with long-legged steps, accompanied by almost three hundred legger troops.

  They were late. Though one company had been standing by in case the Hegemony unit assaulting Tanis needed backup, the orders for a full battalion deployment had come as a surprise, and their transports had not yet been prepped or moved out of their maintenance bay hangars.

  As it was, by the time their magflitter APCs were landing beside the Tanis dome complex, a sizable number of locals were already outside, protected by stolen military armor or the heavy E-suits used in the mines and armed with weapons taken from the local armory. Five monorail ore cars had been hauled from the processing yards to the open fields north and west of the town, and there tipped onto their sides, forming a chain of crude but effective redoubts.

  The two hundred men and women of René Duchamp's Tanis militia had taken cover behind the ore cars and among the crags and rocks of the Sinai Heights. Despite the reports of hidden arms caches in Tanis, the militia had little in the way of modern weapons. Most of the legger troops carried laser pistols or carbines: squad support weapons had been jury-rigged from 200-MW Mogura mining lasers.

  Tanis also possessed six warstriders: an RLN-90 Scout-strider, three constructors with makeshift weapons, and two ancient LaG-3 Devastators. The Devastators were both almost two centuries old and had been purchased stripped, without their original armament. They clanked into flanking positions on the Tanis defensive line now, massing fifty tons each but mounting only machine guns and light lasers. There was one new addition to the defending strider force, an Ares-12 Swiftstrider still wearing the blue-and-white markings of the 4th Terran Rangers.

  Facing them were thirty-four Imperial warstriders, three full companies of the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Imperial Marines, better known as the Obake, or "Black Goblin," Regiment, under the command of Shosa Nobosuke Nagai. Half of the marine striders were Tachi and Tanto recon striders similar in speed, armor, and weaponry to Hegemony LaG-17s. Of the rest, ten were Nak-232 Wakizashis and six were Mitsubishi Katanas, while Nagai's command strider was a lumbering three-slotter Daimyo. They were accompanied by two companies of foot soldiers in full do combat armor.

  Though Imperial warstriders were of distinctive design, it was not immediately clear that these were, in fact, Imperial machines. Marine warstriders usually went into combat with their nano surfaces set to a gleaming jet black, and unless stealth was specifically required for the mission deployment, each strider often flew its own sashimono, a small vertical banner displaying the mon, or family badge, of the unit's commander.

  Nagai's striders deployed outside of Tanis, however, without banners and with their nano surfaces set to reflect their surroundings. This was less a serious effort at camouflage—hiding a five-meter-tall warstrider on an open field in daylight is simply not possible—than it was a simple misdirection. Tanis was a civilian city; few civilians knew the technical differences between the various classes and models of warstriders or would think to record their images as they stormed the city, and those who did would probably not live to download them to anybody else. If there were survivors—and Nagai's orders were explicit that there were to be none—their impressions would be of varicolored combat machines, big, deadly, and wearing shifting, reflective nanoflage patterns in golds and oranges.

  That would be enough like the description of typical Hegemony striders to confuse the issue, especially since HEMILCOM already controlled Eridu's news and communications networks.

  The Battle of Tanis began even before the Imperial forces had deployed from their transports. Taka ground support aircraft and Hachi assault ascraft shrieked overhead, circling, threatening, and the Devastators opened fire with machine gun fire, their cumbersome upper torsos pivoting as they tracked the incoming aircraft, sweeping them with stuttering bursts of 12mm Armor-Piercing Explosive-Core rounds. A Hachi ascraft staggered, multiple APEC rounds punching through the relatively light armor on delta wing and stabilizer surfaces, then exploding inside with the force of small antipersonnel grenades. There was a flash and a shower of flaming debris from the ship's port side as a hydrogen fuel storage tank detonated. Somehow, the pilot killed the fire, brought the Hachi around, and nursed it off toward the north, still trailing smoke.

  Seconds later, two surface-to-air missiles hissed skyward from shoulder lau
nch tubes. One was decoyed by a flare, but the other locked onto the heat plume of one of the Falcon tilt-jets and slammed home with a flash and a puff of white smoke. The Taka began losing altitude, managed to level off, then suddenly stalled and plunged into the forest, its impact marked by a rising mushroom of flame and black smoke.

  The other aircraft, too lightly armored to tangle with warstriders or heavy weapons, pulled back out of range just as the Imperial forces hit the first redoubt.

  The outcome of that first clash was never in doubt.

  Tightly coordinated and disciplined, the Imperial warstriders moved and fired as a unit, combining their fire on the biggest rebel machines first. The Devastators were heavily armored; when they'd first been introduced in 2332 they'd been the most powerful combat machines ever seen, fifty-ton monsters equipped with heavy plasma guns and 250-MW lasers that had made them undisputed monarchs of the battlefield for almost sixty years. But their weapons now, mining lasers and machine guns, were all but useless against the advancing ranks of Katanas and Wakizashis.

  One LaG-3 struck a Tanto with a lucky burst of explosive shells that sheared off its left weapons pack, but the concentrated laser and plasma gun fire of seven Imperial striders caught it an instant later, searing through its slab composite armor in seconds, gutting the big machine with multiple blasts that splattered huge globbets of molten steel for meters across the ground and spilled internal wiring and circuitry in great, smoking, half-melted tangles. For an instant, steel and ceramic burned with a white-hot blaze fueled by the stricken machine's O2 life support reserves; then its high-explosive ammo stores ignited, and the rippling internal blasts completed the destruction the Imperial fire had begun, ripping arms from body and shattering the squat, massive torso in a cascade of smoking debris.

  The second Devastator scored three direct hits on a Katana with its pair of 50-MW popgun lasers, none of which slowed the target. Then a volley of M-490 rockets slammed into its legs and torso, savaging armor, weapons, and hull fittings, filling the air with whining shrapnel. Stricken, the LaG-3 took a hesitant step forward, faltered, then crumpled as its right leg actuator failed. Fifty tons of dead steel-ceramic composite hit the ground with an earthquaking thud, abruptly silencing the shrieks of the militia troops unlucky enough to be sheltering beneath the huge machine.

  With machine precision, the advancing Imperial striders shifted their aim. One of the constructors, damaged an hour earlier while dragging ore cars into defensive positions, exploded before it could fire. The other two were cut to pieces by rapier-swift bolts from three directions at once. The RLN-90 Scoutstrider stood its ground, its Cyclan-2000 autocannon hammering away at the advancing Imperials until a Starhawk link-homed missile slammed into its torso and detonated its micronuke warhead.

  Kleinst's Ares-12 scored the only rebel warstrider kill, blasting away at a Tanto with a stuttering volley of 18mm HE rounds that shattered its right leg and left it smoking on its side. Then a proton bolt from a Wakizashi's charged particle cannon tore through Kleinst's machine, turning its Y-51D fusorpak to slag and sending jagged, blue-white lightnings arcing between the Swiftstrider's ruptured electronic entrails and the ground.

  Gunnar Kleinst died screaming as the Ares-12's short-circuiting AI downloaded 1,200 volts directly through his cephlink's feeds into his corpus callosum.

  The Tanis Militia's leggers held their ground for perhaps ten seconds more. Antiarmor missiles and mining lasers fired at point-blank range damaged four of the attacking warstriders, killing the pilot of one of the Katanas. Then, as laser and high-explosive rounds began to sweep through their ranks, they broke and ran. Plasma bolts scratched white fire across the sky as the more delicate traceries of laser ionization flicked from target to target, rending them in sprays of blood and steam-blasted tissue. René Duchamp died trying to rally his men behind one of the ore cart redoubts, burned in half by an 88-MW pulse; his second-in-command was crushed beneath the foot pad of a Wakizashi as she fought to reload a shoulder-fired missile launcher.

  Leaderless, the militia forces lost all coordination. Some fled for the Sinai Heights beyond the town, where snipers were keeping up a steady fire on the advancing legger marines. Others bolted for the wide-open cargo locks in the city dome, and were still struggling to crowd in when laser fire began slashing through them from behind. A pair of Starhawk missiles, teleoperated from the Katanas that had launched them, struck the side of the Tanis city dome and detonated with twin, savage thunderclaps. The city's air began shrieking out into the thinner Eriduan atmosphere, raising a howling vortex of swirling sand and dust. The air pressure in Tanis began dropping, though it would be hours yet before outer and inner pressures matched and the windstorm stopped.

  Legger marines, supported by Tanto and Tachi warstriders, broke into small strike groups, deploying swiftly across open ground to targets already mapped and loaded into tactical operations memory. One team seized the monorail head and the pressurized station lock, where civilians were still crowding aboard a three-car train. Striker missiles breached the station walls, while flamers took care of the screaming, frantic minshu.

  Other teams secured the mining facilities and the domes housing the separator and processing plants, although, because of the demonstration in the Tanis town square, there were only a handful of workers present, and none of them were armed. All were rounded up without incident and herded into an airlock "for safekeeping." Opening the outer lock door eliminated the need for keeping them under guard, as marines proceeded to secure the plants and their equipment.

  But the real slaughter occurred inside Tanis proper.

  Gunso Isamu Kimaya was not proud of what he was doing, but he was determined to carry out his orders with a true samurai's devotion to duty because to do less would dishonor him and the Imperial daihyo who had issued them. He was glad, though, that he and his sensono kyodai, his war-brothers, had been ordered to drop the black-hulled livery of the Obake Regiment, that they were not displaying the regiment's white-on-black sashimono.

  He'd guided his KY-1180 Tachi through the gaping rent in the town dome, formed up with the rest of his section, then advanced into the town square. His dorsal turret with its twin Toshiba 88-MW lasers panned back and forth, killing lone targets and using them to set buildings on fire. For the dense crowds of people stampeding ahead of his advance, he used a different weapon, the sempu.

  The word meant "whirlwind." though that hardly described the thing in action. Heavy-caliber shells fired from his Tachi's Mark III weapons packs exploded as they cleared the stubby muzzles, hurling a cluster of lead balls at the targets with a shotgun's dispersal pattern. Unlike shotgun pellets, however, these balls were strung together by several meters of monofilament, molecule-thin wire that sliced through light armor, cloth, breather packs, flesh, and bone alike with appallingly bloody ease.

  In places the dead—and the neatly sectioned body parts of the dead—were piled up four and five deep, especially in the killing fields around airlocks and building entrances, and blood was ankle-deep on the legger marines moving across some of the sunken walkways. Flamers designed to incinerate Xenophobe Gammas worked equally well on flesh. Long before the air thinned to the point where humans could not have breathed it, the dome's atmosphere was choked by foul, low-hanging clouds of greasy smoke.

  Kimaya used his machine guns to cut down a man and a woman fleeing together, then waded forward through a wall of bodies. Rigidly, employing every kokorodo discipline at his command, he held his emotions in check. In a way, the high-tech linkage of the individual marine striders helped. Under infrared imaging, with computer targeting interlock, the fleeing minshu were reduced to rapidly scattering patterns of colored light, faceless save for gaping holes that might be screaming mouths, nonhuman targets no more meaningful than the robotic ningyo used in training exercises. Calls over the tactical frequency heightened the practice-exercise feel of the situation.

  "Red Three, Red Three! Come left ten meters. Maintain your spacing."<
br />
  "Green Five, targeting at three-one-five, range two hundred meters."

  "Orange Two, stand clear. I am employing whirlwind."

  "I think some targets have moved behind the building on the left."

  "Nagumo! Sato! Neutralize that threat!"

  "I have a lock. Stand by. Target neutralized".

  Still, he did not feel good. The slaughter seemed to take forever, as Imperial warstriders dispersed through the city. Building after building was set ablaze. Honored ancestors! He'd not given thought to the possibility that there were women and children in here!

  "Red Leader, this is Red Two. Objective secured."

  "Affirmative. Red Two. Proceed to objective Blossom Four."

  "Yoshitomi! Take your squad and check those buildings on the left!"

  He had his Tachi's recorders on, of course, and was able to let the strider's AI capture the images he'd been told to get. Why were his superiors so interested in the details of this butchery, he wondered?

  Movement captured his attention and he swung to the left. A civilian was approaching the Tachi, a breather mask over his face, a white rag waving in his right hand. He was shouting something, and Kimaya cut in his strider's external mikes to hear what he was saying.

  "Hanashi-o tsuzuke-yo!" the man called. "Hanashi-o tsuzuke-yo!"

  The words made no sense. "Let us continue to talk"? The man was repeating the phrase over and over, and it occurred to Kimaya that it sounded like a code phrase, maybe a password of some sort.

  But the man was gaijin and Kimaya had been given no passwords or special authorizations beyond the call signs of the assault group. His orders were to take no prisoners. With a twitch of what, in his physical body, would have been his left hand, he depressed his left-side Mark III weapons pack and triggered a single sempu blast. The gaijin fragmented into a dozen neatly sliced pieces, the face on the severed head still showing shocked surprise as it wetly plopped to the ground.