Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  At least it looked as though he wasn't going to have to put the chewing gum idea to the test. His warfiyer, an aging DR-80, was battered and chipped and scoured, with mismatched patches showing a long history of past field-expedient repairs, but its pressure hull was tight, its circuits checked out operational—with the possible exception of that glitchy nav interlock—and the RM tanks were holding pressure. Van'sGuard was ready for launch.

  Warflyers were themselves the product of field expediency. Though they'd been designed originally as tugs and high-mass manipulators for construction jobs in orbit, local planetary militias had found them useful as space-maneuverable weapons platforms . . . a fancy term for cheap space fighters. The young Rebellion, with access to few modern air/space fighter craft, had seized on warflyers as a means of addressing the Imperium's superiority in both technology and numbers. They were slow, they could neither operate within a planetary atmosphere nor achieve escape velocity, and many were so old that their pilots proudly claimed that stranger things than chewing gum maintained pressure and hull integrity.

  Van'sGuard was a prime example of the type. She was a Mitsubishi DR-80, originally an orbital constructor modified for a military role under the name Tenrai, the "Heavenly Thunder." With the new Emperor taking Tenrai as his Nengo era-name, however, Confederation pilots had taken to calling the DR-80 other things, few of them complimentary.

  "Warhawk" was perhaps the most consistent name out of many, though, one without obscene or scatological implications and bearing a long tradition in the history of military aviation. A propeller-driven fighter called the Warhawk had fought with distinction in the Second World War; a nuclear-powered transatmospheric craft had been dubbed Warhawk during the Third American Civil War.

  This Warhawk was an inelegant contraption, a squat cylinder three meters long stacked atop a pair of cryo-H storage tanks and a massive fusorpack and thruster. Bulky, round-ended sponsons mounted port and starboard housed weapons systems, maneuvering jets, and manipulators. The ungainly craft was, in fact, little more than a conventional warstrider with the leg assembly replaced by a thruster and six tons of reaction mass. Nose art graced the craft's stubby and debris-scarred prow, a naked woman flying above the script-written name Van'sGuard, her back arched and her head back, her arms outstretched like wings and her prominent breasts thrust forward in blatant mimicry of the Warhawk's paired weapons sponsons.

  The warflyer, massing eighteen tons fully fueled and loaded, was suspended from an overhead rack in Bay Seven of Hangar Deck One aboard the Confederation carrier Tarazed. The former hydrogen tanker had been converted years before into a carrier; her complement of eighty-two warflyers—six squadrons of twelve plus ten in reserve—was roughly equivalent to an Imperial air-space wing aboard one of the big dragon-carriers. Most were converted constructors like the DR-80. A few were genuine ascraft fighters, sleek darts that were all wing surface and streamlining, but even the best of those were obsolete compared to the Imperium's faster and more maneuverable Se-280s. Van had been flying the Warhawk exclusively now for over a year, and with good-natured scorn grudgingly preferred it to anything else in the rebels' flight-capable inventory.

  The hangar deck was a clashing, clattering, deafening place, a steel-walled cavern in which several hundred men were hard at work on dozens of warflyers of different types. Battle stations had sounded before Tarazed had come out of K-T space the first time, but the activity in the fighter bays, though chaotically loud, was smooth and purposeful. A tractor growled past below the catwalk, towing a DY-64 on a wheeled cart. Julio called something to him just then, but the words were lost in the shrilling of the tractor's horn.

  He leaned against the catwalk's railing, taking some of the weight off his aching feet. "What'd you say?" he shouted back.

  "I said, have you heard the who-was about Deadly Dev?"

  "I make it a point never to listen to gossip about my superior officers. What'd you hear?"

  "Word is he's already made contact with the Alyans through that mess of RD-40s." He pronounced the name "aliens," as did most of the Confederation's Inglic-speaking rank and file. "The whole gokin' Alyan fleet's comin' out to take the Impies in the rear."

  "I'll believe that one when I've got 'em pegged and IDed in my primary scan," Van called back. Who-was and rumor defined military shipboard life as much as overcrowded quarters and monotonous food. There were always a dozen prime bits of who-was floating around, and both the number and what Van liked to call the disbelief factor tended to shoot up astronomically just before an action.

  Julio rode a levitator strap up to the catwalk. "Maybe you're right, Lieu," he said cheerfully. "Just the same, be damned sure of what you're shootin' at out there. I'd hate you to take out one of our new allies by mistake!"

  A touch of his palm to an interface panel opened the Warhawk's command slot, a padded, coffin-shaped recess buried within the warflyer's main hull. With Julio's help, Van lowered himself in, careful not to let himself drop and injure a tailbone or an elbow. He was already wearing a shipsuit, a gray, skintight garment that covered everything but his hands and his head. Gloves and helmet were waiting for him inside the command slot. The gloves sealed over his cuffs, and the left one possessed circuitry that matched the cross hatching of gold and silver threads embedded at the base of his thumb, allowing him to touch an AI interface panel even with his shipsuit sealed.

  The helmet possessed three internal jacks on short leads. Again with Julio's help, he snicked the jacks into his cervical and temporal sockets, then carefully seated the helmet on his suit's self-sealing collar. Life-support feeds snapped home in connectors on his right chest and side. Data feedback from the suit's intelligent circuitry projected a status report against the upper left corner of his vision. Air . . . pressure . . . gas mix . . . physiology . . . all within normal parameters.

  Carefully, Van lay down in the slot, stretched out full length on the padding. He could hear Julio's harsh breathing as the crew chief leaned over him, jacking the data feed cables inside the slot home in the receptacles in Van's helmet.

  "Luck, sir!" Julio shouted, raising his voice unnecessarily. Despite the racket in the hangar bay, the pickups in Van's suit were working fine, but even people familiar with the technology tended to assume that someone swaddled head to toe in a sealed shipsuit was cut off from the rest of the world. "You bring my baby home, y'hear?"

  Van touched his right forefinger to his visor in ironic salute, as Julio gave him a cocky thumbs-up, then thumbed the control that closed the Warhawk's pilot slot. There was nothing so fancy—or as expensively complex—as a nanotechnic dissolving accessway. The hatch slid shut with a squeak and a bang, sealing Van in a stifling, close-in darkness.

  He brought his left palm down against the interface panel positioned close by his hip. There was a flash of static . . .

  . . . and suddenly, again, Van remembered just how cut off from the rest of the world he had been. Walking around in your skin you tended to forget how sharp your senses could be, how clear your vision, how complete the array of data available through a full-socket feed in your cephlink. From his point of view, Van now was the DR-80, hanging from its cradle above Tarazed's hangar deck. He could see now in a three-sixty arc all the way around and top and bottom as well, though he tended to focus in one direction at a time, just as if he were still seeing with human eyes. His view in one direction—directly aft—was blocked by the slush hydrogen tanks and fusion thruster, but he could see the other warflyers of his squadron—Third Squadron, the Gold Eagles—resting in their cradles around him, could see the vehicles and individual maintenance personnel and pilots by their ships, could see Julio riding a strap back down toward the deck.

  "Gold Eagle Lead, this is Three-five," he announced over the tactical circuit. "Logging on."

  "Copy, Three-five," a woman's voice replied. Lieutenant Commander Jena Cole was the Gold Eagle squadron CO. "Welcome aboard. Ready for tacfeed?"

  "Hit me."

  Data
sluiced through the cephlinkage as a new window snapped open, covering half of Van's view of the hangar bay. Readouts showed the readiness of each of the ascraft and warflyers of the wing, four squadrons readying for launch, with the other two as backup on a five-minute hold. A 3-D, over all tactical view showed Tarazed and the transport Vindemiatrix running side by side, with Eagle and the smaller ships of the squadron spreading out in a broad, arrowhead shape ahead. The Imperial squadron, each ship neatly tagged with an identifying code and block of data, was coming to meet them, accelerating out from ShraRish at 3 Gs.

  "Looks like the welcoming committee's on its way to meet us," Van said. He looked, but he saw nothing that might have been Alyan starships maneuvering behind the enemy ships.

  "You've got that right, Three-five," Cole replied. "Current plan calls for a four-squadron release in . . . one hundred thirty-two minutes. In the meantime—"

  "We're gonna run sims," he interrupted.

  "How'd you guess?" That was Sublieutenant Gerard Marlo, Three-seven.

  "Hey, if we have time to kill, let's do some flying."

  "Yeah, we're hot," Sublieutenant Lynn Kosta, Van's wingman, chimed in. "Let's burn some mass!!"

  "Here comes the feed," Cole told them. "We'll start with polishing our close-assault SCM."

  And he was in space, bearing down on an Imperial light destroyer.

  Chapter 15

  Though the term "military intelligence" has been considered an oxymoron ever since it was first coined, the fact remains that the gathering of intelligence—about terrain, climate, enemy strengths and dispositions, and anything else of either strategic or tactical value—remains the most important facet of military planning. Without solid intelligence, the best generals keenest evaluations remain guesswork, his shrewdest guesses little more than wishful thinking.

  —Juggernaut: A Brief History of Armored Combat

  Chujo Aiko Hayashiya

  C.E. 2525

  Still linked with Commander Duryea and the probes' data simulation, Dev watched as the globe of ShraRish expanded in his vision, as complete and as gloriously complex in the details of cloud patterns and mountains and rugged, islandedged coastline as it would have been had Eagle already entered low orbit. The tracks of a number of probes showed as green lines curving in toward the cloud-wreathed sphere. Special targets were known DalRiss cities, as well as any clusters of buildings, nuclear power plants, grounded ascraft, or other anomalous structures that would indicate the presence of humans on the planet's surface.

  The lead group of probes, the ones that had slammed through the Imperial fleet, were all destroyed now, or else they'd long since passed the Imperial squadron and were headed now into deep space, out of fuel and beyond the range of their jacker links. The second group, however, had been decelerating for some time now, until their speed was measured in only kilometers per second . . . instead of hundreds of kilometers per second.

  As the second wave of RD-40s neared ShraRish, the almost featureless globe in the data simulation began to take on more and more detail—a rugged band of upthrusting mountains stretching along the equator between two golden seas, a vast expanse of red-ocher desert near the south pole, gleaming pinpoints that might be DalRiss cities, the precise positions—and, moments later, as their movements were assessed, the precise orbits—of all of the Imperial ships. The remote probes were programmed to assimilate a wide range of data, including scans of every available electromagnetic wavelength, of neutrino flux, and of mass and gravitational anomalies such as those linked to QPT plants. RF leakage from communications systems and computers gave hints regarding the Imperial commander's tactical frequencies, his weapons status as lasers powered up and missile batteries were readied for firing, and his ships' engineering status as fusion power plants were brought to full output. Both of the Yari-class destroyers were tracked as they broke orbit, and the telltale gravitational ripples emanating from them indicated that they were bringing their power taps on line.

  Faster and faster, the probe data rippled through the simulation's framework, expanding, adding detail, revealing new targets of opportunity. The globe representing ShraRish grew from empty translucence to a globe as clear and as detailed and as beautiful as any visual image of the real thing seen from orbit, complete with swirling clouds and the eye-aching glare of sunglint off the surface of a gold-brown sea.

  "We're starting to get some good feeds from inside the atmosphere, Commodore," Duryea told Dev.

  "How many do you have targeted on the main Imperial base?"

  "We had three, but only one's made it through. Five-nine."

  "We're going to need that download, top priority."

  "Yes, sir. Ah! Looks like the Dojinko feed's coming through now. Pull down a window and enjoy the show."

  Dojinko . . . the DalRiss city where the primary Imperial surface base had been attacked. The scurrilous name grated at him, but he uplinked the appropriate codes, then watched as a secondary ViRsim display opened inside his mind, overlaying his view of ShraRish. This new scene was a feed from Probe Five-nine, now at an altitude of less than fifty kilometers and angling steeply down toward Dojinko.

  The image was trembling violently despite the system's valiant attempts to hold it steady. Warning discretes flashed and scrolled at the edges of Dev's vision. Despite the deceleration, the probe still had tremendous velocity, was still traveling so fast that the outer layers of its duralloy hull were vaporizing, creating an ionization trail that made holding even a lasercom lock with the craft difficult.

  Too, the high speed of approach guaranteed that its initial transmissions would mean little to human viewers. To Dev, the probe's motion rendered the view little more than a confused and vibrating blur of color, the white of clouds, the gold and russet and ocher of what might have been vegetation or simply desert sand . . . and then the picture tilted wildly and vanished in a burst of static.

  "Probe Five-nine destroyed," Eagle's AI reported. "Probe Seven-eight destroyed. Probe One-two destroyed. . . ." The list was growing longer, the reports of destruction coming in now faster and faster. According to the tally board, fewer than two dozen of the RD-40s were still transmitting.

  "That went by too fast for me to make anything of it," Dev admitted. "Can I have a playback?"

  "Absolutely. Set time factor at fifty to one."

  This time, Dev could see the clouds and the wrinkled expanse of golden ground clearly, surrounded by the glowing haze of the probe's reentry trail. As the probe plummeted toward the ground, he became aware of terrain features spread out below him like a map, while the horizon curved gently away beneath a gold-and-violet haze. The AI added graphics to orient him. There was the Imperial base, a tiny, quadrangular gray scar against the golds and browns of the surrounding landscape. A pair of brackets winking just to one side of the quadrangle marked where the DalRiss city ought to be.

  "Enhance," Dev said, staring hard at the brackets to tell the AI what he was interested in seeing. "Max resolution." The quadrangle seemed to rush toward him, expanding to fill half the display, edges blurred by distance and atmosphere suddenly sharpening into computer-drawn crispness of line and detail.

  The terrain within the brackets was pockmarked and broken, but otherwise empty. Abruptly, the scene rolled away to port, was replaced by a brief flash of sky, and then the display filled with static. According to the transmission data, Five-nine had not been hit by enemy fire but had simply broken up in the atmosphere during the final, fiery instant of reentry.

  "Odd," Dev said. The DalRiss city wasn't there anymore. He ordered a repeat of the imaging sequence, shifting his attention this time to the Imperial base.

  The facility looked fairly typical and had probably been grown on the site from standard nanofabrication programs. The pavement had most likely been laid down with Rogan molds, while the gun turrets perched on their ten-meter towers looked like ordinary ship weapons installed in standardized hardpoint mounts. Two big transport ascraft were parked on the black
surface of the landing field that roofed over the large, central structure. A perimeter fence—a high-voltage, high-amp barrier fence to judge from the design of the support struts—surrounded the entire facility.

  No . . . that wasn't quite accurate. The fence encircled the base perhaps halfway, but as Dev froze the display in place and again enhanced the resolution, he could see that the entire eastern and southern sides of that barrier had been knocked down. Checking the data readouts, he noted that the probe had detected no power flow through the barrier; the thing was dead. Mixed in with the wreckage were a number of bulky, gray-white, and wrinkled objects that he couldn't resolve well enough to identify. DalRiss buildings? Plant life of some kind? Vehicles?

  Interesting. Some of those objects had obviously broken through into the perimeter, and they'd brought some of the gold-brown-ocher ground cover with them. The vegetation had spilled through the wreckage and taken root on the pavement inside, giving the facility the look of age-old ruins abandoned by its builders long before. Some of those buildings, he saw now, showed extensive damage. A lasercom mast leaned at a drunken angle, and a gun tower had been snapped off near its base and now lay full length on the pavement where it had fallen, the quad barrels of its 80mm lasers pointed uselessly at the sky. Nearby, an outlying dome had been torn open and its contents scattered. Dev couldn't get resolution enough out of the system to make out what those contents might be, but they looked like crumpled paper or rags. Bodies? He couldn't tell. Probably not . . . unless fighting had been going on recently. He had to remind himself that the original reports of fighting on this world were now eight months old.

  Eight months, and the Imperials had not rebuilt the fence or repaired the damage to the outlying buildings. Dev searched the image for signs of recent repairs or building but found nothing obvious.