Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  "Yes, sir."

  "Quillier and Sung, you're with me on the center. Creighton, you're on the left. Foot commanders, get your people well dispersed and well dug in. We're going to be counting on them to even up the odds a bit."

  As Sinclair continued to rattle off orders. Katya turned her attention to the forest treeline, seven hundred meters to the south. A number of Hegemony Guard warstriders were already in sight at the bottom of the hill, secure in the knowledge that the rebels wouldn't start firing at them randomly. Ammunition, rockets and explosive shells, was too tight to waste it. She was tempted to try probing those ranks with her laser, but resisted the urge. All it would do would be to start a firefight now, before the leggers were in place. Well, if they were willing to stand around in the open waiting for the party to start, so was she. The cocky bastards even had banners up, she saw. Two stylized yellow stars and a centaur on a dark green background: the Chiron Centurians. She wondered if any of the people over there were New American Mech Cavs or 4th Terran Rangers, and what it would be like fighting someone in your own unit.

  You ought to know, girl, she told yourself. Just like Dev, all over again. The only difference is that this time you're trying to kill him before he kills you.

  She was suddenly very glad that Dev had joined the rebellion.

  With brief, crisp orders, she deployed the striders in her squad, making sure they had at least fifty meters spacing between them and that their fields of fire overlapped. Chung, Hagan, and Jacobsen took up positions in a rough diamond pattern with her; Darcy, with his recon warstrider, went on the far right flank.

  She glanced again into the sky. Where was the enemy's air? The rebels had a few ascraft—too few to challenge the government's air superiority. She'd expected them to use that advantage . . . one reason that she'd argued during the initial planning sessions that if they had to defend Babel, they'd be better off doing it inside the domes. She'd been overruled by Sinclair, however. They couldn't save Babel's population by killing them in the fallout from a strider-to-strider armored clash. Katya understood that, though she felt as though they were giving up one of their very few military advantages, the defensive cover provided by the domed structures. Out here on the open hilltop, they still had the advantage of position, but not of cover.

  Sinclair had also overruled her on the suggestion that they try to summon the Xenophobes, using the code they'd imprinted on Katya's comel during her contact with the Self."Katya," he'd said, "we need allies we can trust!"

  And she'd not been able to press the point.

  Explosions, many of them, set deep in the rock and repeating quickly, the comel had seemed to whisper in her mind after her return from the Xenophobe cavern. Powerful magnetic fields, masses of pure elements grouped together. It will be felt. It is how Self tastes the interface, and what it hungers for. Self will come. . . .

  Dev had laughed when she'd told him. "How about that?" he'd said when he could breathe again. "Here we are stomping around on the surface of a planet in our warstriders, twenty, maybe forty tons of duralloy and steel and 'pure elements,' with magnetic fields in our skimmers and ascraft, explosions, noise . . ."

  He'd laughed again. "Don't you see? Every time we used to gather all our striders together to go hunt for the Xenos, we were saying. 'Hey, guys! Dinnertime! Come and get it!' "

  It wasn't as simple as that, of course. She thought that the "explosions, set deep in the rock and repeating quickly" ruled out the possibility that the Xenophobes would simply pop up in the middle of a battle. The sense she'd received from the comel had been of a deliberate signal, something that the Xenophobe would definitely hear in its deep lair, and respond to.

  But Sinclair refused to even consider using the Xenophobes. "Too dangerous," he'd said, "especially this close to the sky-el. We'd be inviting disaster, bringing those things up on the surface anywhere near Babel."

  Katya had understood, and in a way she'd been relieved. Ever since her return to the light of the surface, she'd tried not to think about those dark, close moments in the Xenophobe's belly, and she was not eager to see those crawling horrors again. Sinclair might be thinking of Babel and the space elevator, but she didn't want to bring them in because, she realized now, she was afraid for her own sanity.

  One by one, the legger squads called in, reporting that they were ready. Robot guntowers had been deployed, trenches dug by constructors. Unfortunately, they'd not had time to grow any defensive walls.

  In fact, they were still deploying the last of the troops when someone shouted over the general frequency. "Look there! More of the bastards!"

  It was true. She'd counted five light Guard warstriders before, a single squad of LaG-17s and Ares-12s, clearly either a reconnaissance unit or a cavalry screen for troop movements farther back in the woods. Now she could see other light striders moving out from the trees, deploying in a long line of machines made hazy by the shimmer, of nanoflage. Behind them, bigger, more powerful machines were lumbering from the woods, smashing their way clear of mushroom trees and thick foliage.

  There were Ghostriders and Scoutstriders, of course, but she also saw the flat, twin-horned torsos of KR-9 Mantas, forty-two-ton medium assault striders with twin 100-MW lasers, missile packs, and automatic cannons. Behind them came four RS-64D Warlords, at least one Qu-19E Calliopede, and the ponderous, fifty-four-ton bulk of a Kr-200 Battlewraith. Skimmers spilled from among the trees, each carrying at least a squad of armored infantry.

  The sight was shocking . . . and terrifying. Katya was counting striders as quickly as she could and had reached thirty-eight when Sinclair ordered all units to arm weapons and prepare to fire. The rebel defenders were outnumbered . . . and where their heaviest striders were three Warlords and four creaking Devastators, the enemy had at least twelve striders massing more than forty tons each.

  Unless Sinclair decided to lift his restriction on Xenos or on retreats into the city, it was going to be a short fight, and a lopsided one.

  A missile arced across the rebel lines, trailing smoke, striking behind the lines with a flash and a loud bang. With a roar like thunder, the government line advanced.

  And Katya was fighting for her life.

  His first crisis of command had been the problem of an unknown number of Imperials still loose aboard the Tokitukaze, men isolated in the aft part of the ship and more than able to mount an attack on Dev's handful of boarders, or worse, to tinker with the ship's drives or power source and leave the destroyer helplessly adrift.

  The problem had been easy enough to solve. Seconds after dropping clear of Shippurport, he'd passed a warning to those of his crew not safely strapped into jacking tubes, giving them a chance to find acceleration couches, then applied four Gs of acceleration for over a minute. Anyone standing when the drives had kicked in would be on the deck now, probably with broken bones. Dev was gambling that anyone smart enough to find acceleration couches after that was smart enough to stay there. Periodically, he kicked in a short burst, just to keep his unwanted passengers aft cautious.

  Now. Dev was looking back at Eridu, distant enough that Babylon and the space elevator were invisible, the world a peaceful-looking orb of brightly colored splendor. What was happening back there, he wondered? What was happening to Katya? He wished he could have stayed with her.

  He sensed that his relationship with Katya had changed, though he still loved her. She'd drifted away from him in the past few months . . . or had he drifted from her? Hard to tell. Perhaps, when this fight was over, they could explore growing closer once more. He was willing, if she was.

  If they survived. He didn't like thinking about that. The two Imperial frigates were less than fifty thousand kilometers away now, still well out of range, and Tokitukaze had begun maneuvering clumsily for an intercept. Perhaps eight minutes remained before the two sides came within extreme missile range.

  Meanwhile, there was time for thought. Too much time.

  Dev had always, always wanted to be a ship captain
, a dream that went back to childhood and his unquestioning worship of a ship captain father. The sight of the Eridu space elevator from space as he'd backed the Tokitukaze clear had filled him with a sudden, an unexpected rush of emotion, of guilt that he'd not seen his father before Michal Cameron's suicide, of understanding that this was what it must have been like, commanding an Imperial destroyer at the spaceside terminus of a planetary sky-el.

  It was ironic, and it hurt to examine it. They'd called Michal Cameron a traitor because he'd destroyed the space elevator, stopping the Xenophobes of Lung Chi from reaching synchorbit and the refugee fleet docked there. Faced with a difficult choice and no time in which to choose, he'd acted. A hero.

  Now Dev, once hero of the Empire, was committing treason, hijacking an Imperial destroyer to keep it from being used against rebel troops on the planet below.

  I think you would ve understood. Father.

  For the first time in years. Dev wished his father was here to tell him what to do. He felt completely inadequate, jacked in as captain of a damaged ship, facing impossible odds. The original idea had simply been to keep the Imperials from using the Tokitukaze against the rebel defenders at Babel; now he was forced to take her into combat, shorthanded and with a hole in her side.

  Imperial warships had large crews in part to provide frequent relief from duty, but particularly because more weapons links meant that greater numbers of teleoperated missiles, decoys, and sensor drones could be employed at one time. A jacker could only operate one missile at a time, and over typical ship combat ranges, that could tie up the operator through a large part of the battle. Dev had just nineteen men and women at his command, and nine of those were caring for the wounded or guarding prisoners or guarding the bridge. Four of those left were going to be busier than they could really manage handling the ship's maneuvering thrusters engineering, while Simone communed with the ship's AI and, perhaps most important now, kept watch on survivors of the Imperial crew who might now be burrowing into the destroyer's vitals, looking for ways to sabotage them.

  That left Dev and four others. Bondevik and Nicholson from the old Thorhammers. Schneider and DeVreis from the 4th Terran Rangers, to handle all of Tokitukaze's weapons.

  It wasn't enough, not by a long shot.

  Well, you always wanted to be a ship captain, he told himself wryly. Now that you got your chance . . .

  In his mind, he shifted to Japanese, punning with the slippery word kancho.

  Perhaps you're just an enema, and not a warship captain after all.

  "Missile launch!" DeVreis warned. Dev saw it, a point of light bracketed in red by the ship's combat AI.

  "Here we go; boys and girls." he said, his thoughts surprisingly steady. "Let's see just how much hell we can raise."

  Chapter 32

  When you try something on an adversary, if it doesn't work the first time, you won't get any benefit out of rushing to do it again. Change your tactics abruptly, doing something completely different. If that still doesn't work, then try something else.

  Thus the science of the art of war involves the presence of mind to "act as the sea when the enemy is like a mountain, and act as a mountain when the enemy is like a sea."

  This requires careful reflection.

  —"Fire Scroll"

  The Book of the Five Spheres

  Miyamoto Musashi

  Seventeenth century B.C.E.

  The Hegemony warstriders advanced up the hill, struggling to cross seven hundred meters of fire-swept ground, leaning forward into the storm of laser, cannon, and plasma gun rounds as though pressing ahead in the teeth of a gale. Katya picked as her first target one of the Warlords, a dangerous strider with heavy armor and twin Ishikawajima charged-particle cannons. Three direct hits, and the big machine was still advancing, smoke curling from a ragged scar on its dorsal armor where one of Katya's shots had actually penetrated.

  "Targeting!" Lipinski shouted warning. "On the left! Paint him!"

  Katya snapped another laser bolt into the RS-64, then killed the pulse cutout, switching from hard-hitting punch to a diffuse beam. She kept the laser centered on the moving Warlord, tracking the vulnerable joints at thigh and hip. With a shuddering roar, the Ghostrider's left-hand Kv-70 weapons pack loosed a rippling salvo of rockets, shaped-charge warheads with laser-homing and impact fuzes. Tracking the backscatter of reflected laser energy, they slammed one after another into the Warlord in a succession of eye-searing flashes. Chunks of armor were blown thirty meters behind the lurching machine, which staggered, pivoted to the left, and then collapsed in a tangle of twisted duralloy legs.

  Almost before she'd registered that she'd scored a kill, Katya's Ghostrider was slammed from the left, hard. Warning discretes flared across Katya's vision . . . fire in section five . . . power failure in the primary energizing coils . . . pressure failure in the core housing . . .

  She dropped the LaG-42 into a crouch, twisting to the left to track her attacker. There . . . one of the Mantas, advancing up the slope. The KR-9 had just downloaded both 100-MW lasers into Katya's hull, and the blast had nearly stripped the Ghostrider's armor and holed the power plant.

  Laser inoperative . . .

  Weapons packs inoperative . . .

  Recommend full power shutdown sequencing . . .

  Override! They weren't dead yet! "Georg! Can you damp down that fire in section five?"

  Fed by oxygen leaking from the life support reserves, that blaze could melt through to the main distributor circuits and maybe take out the AI logic as well.

  "Working on it!"

  "And bypass the secondary power feed to the Kv-70s!"

  "You got it!"

  A discrete flashed red to green. She had one missile launcher working again . . . and five M-490 rockets remaining in the left-side pack. Her chem-flamer was still fully charged, but that was a ten-meter weapon, knife-fighting range for a strider, and there were still friendly legger troops to Katya's front.

  "Targeting!" The Manta was nearer now, forty meters and coming closer with a grim, step-by-step determination. Rocket fire and explosive high-speed cannon rounds were slashing into that flat, round hull, but it shrugged the fire off like rain and kept on coming. The ground beneath its heavy, flanged feet had been ripped and torn and churned into tortured hellground. "Fire!"

  With her laser out, there was no way to guide the volley, but at forty meters she scarcely needed a smart-guided launch. Four of the five rockets slammed home, twisting one of the laser "horns" on the Manta's torso back and punching a hole in the glacis armor.

  "Okay, boss! Fire's out!"

  The temperature in section five was dropping. Power levels came back for the laser, though it would take precious seconds to build to full charge. Thirty meters away, a Fastrider loped past the slow-slogging Manta and stepped across one of the hastily dug front-line infantry trenches. Katya could see armored men scattering to avoid the machine's twelve-ton step.

  Chin turret laser at seventy-five percent power . . .

  It would have to do. Shifting her aim to the Fastrider, she locked in on the humped portion of armor that she knew shielded the pilot. The operator's jacking slot was always the most heavily armored portion of any warstrider, but LaG-17s didn't have that much armor to begin with. She tracked, slewing the Ghostrider's chin turret, then triggered the shot.

  Armor exploded from the Fastrider's back, fist-sized chunks of shrapnel spinning across the slope. The strider took two more steps, hesitated . . . and then with a metal-rending groan it crumpled to the ground, burrowing its nose in churned-up earth. Katya swung back to loose another bolt at the Manta . . . and saw that it was withdrawing, retreating . . . and so were the other Hegemony striders. Eight of their machines lay scattered across the lower half of the slope, hulls ruptured, smoke billowing into the thin air and chasing its own shadows across the ground and into the forest.

  "We got them on the run!" someone yelled, and several rebel striders started forward, firing into the retre
ating foe.

  "Hold your ground!" Sinclair snapped. "Hold your position, damn it!" Let the government forces lure them into the jungle and the rebels would be cut to pieces. "All units, report! Who'd we lose?"

  Three warstriders dead out of thirty-three. Two more badly damaged, but still fighting. Twenty-eight men KIA on the ground, all in exchange for eight kills, an unknown number of Hegleggers killed, plus several striders like that KR-9 hurt bad but still moving.

  "Not bad, people," Sinclair's voice said, calming, reassuring. "We held 'em. We held 'em good!"

  "I have movement on the front, range seven hundred . . ."

  They were coming again, smashing out of the forest, some of them limping, some still trailing smoke from the last exchange, but all still coming.

  Katya was already so tired she felt as though she was trembling, even though her LaG-42's reactions and movements remained iceworld-cold and engineer-precise. She was out of rockets, though, which left her with only the laser and about twenty antiarmor grenades, short-range weapons better for fighting infantry than warstriders.

  And it didn't look as though the government forces were even thinking of letting up.

  Gritting her mental teeth, Katya targeted a damaged Calliopede and downloaded her laser into its duralloy carapace.

  "They're decelerating . . . must be three Gs," Bev Schneider warned. "They want to make it a stand-up fight."

  Dev rotated his mental view of the ship dispositions, which showed the Tokitukaze, both frigates, Eridu and the Tower of Babel, and the sweeping, slightly curved lines representing ship vectors and orbits. The enemy had loosed a small cloud of missiles, now dispersing across the narrowing gulf between them and their prey. By shifting his perspective, Dev was able to see past the missile salvo and study the frigates themselves. According to the navdata glowing next to the tiny ship-silhouette images, they'd flipped over to present their sterns and were decelerating hard on fierce-driven torrents of plasma from their main thrusters.