Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  Riderslot: Opening in an ascraft or other transport's hull designed to receive striders. Usually equipped with grippers, magnetic locks, and autoplug ICS and datafeed connectors.

  Sekkodan: The Imperial Scout Service, tasked with exploring and cataloging new worlds, as well as operating high-speedcourier ships between the worlds of the Shichiju.

  Shakai: "Society." The elitist, upper-class culture of Imperial Earth.

  Shichiju: Literally "The Seventy." Japanese term for the seventy-eight worlds in seventy-two systems so far colonized by Man.

  Sky-el: Elevator used to travel between a planetary ring and the surface of the planet. A cheap and efficient way of moving people and cargo back and forth from surface to orbit.

  Slang, profanity:

  brain-burned: Someone addicted to direct stimulation of the hypothalmic pleasure center (PC-jacking). Also jolted or jolt-rider.

  easy feed: Slang expression for "No problem," or "That'sokay."

  gok, goking: Sexual obscenity. From Japanese goku, "rape."

  iceworld: Military slang. "Stay cool. I'm cool."

  I'm linked: "I'm with you." "I'll go along with that."

  jackin'Jill: Girlfriend, especially as a casual RJ sex partner.

  null, nullhead: Stupid. Empty-headed. By association, crazy. Also, people without jacks, unable to interact in technic society.

  odie: Let's odie = "Let's do it." "Let's move." From Japanese odori, "dance."

  yuji: From Japanese yujo. Comrades-in-arms. People sharing a warrior's bond.

  Slot: 1) Linkage module for human controller. Warstriders have one, two, or three slots; a three-slotter strider has places for a commander, pilot, and weapons tech.

  2) Space for equipment aboard transport. Ascraft have "slots" to carry four or six warstriders. (Slang) By popular usage, a place for a person in an organization, e.g., a "slot in the infantry."

  Synchorbit: That point, different for each world, at which a satellite has an orbital period exactly matching the planet's rotation. Planetary sky-els rise from a world's equator to extensive constructions—factories, habitats, and other orbital facilities—in synchorbit.

  Synchorbital: Facilities built at synchorbit.

  Tacsim: ViRsimulation used to plan or coordinate combat.

  Tacsit: Military slang for "tactical situation."

  Teikokuno Heiwa: "The Imperial Peace." The Pax Japonica.

  Teikokuno Hoshi: "Star of the Empire." Imperial medal for supreme service to the Emperor.

  Tenno Kyuden: "Palace of Heaven." Seat of Imperial government, located at Singapore Orbital.

  Terraform: Also T-form. Converting an existing planetary atmosphere and environment to one that supports humans.

  T-socket: Temporal socket. Usually paired, one on each side of subject's skull, in temporal bone above and behind the ear. Used for full-sensory, full-feedback jacking in conjunction with an AI system, including experiencing ViR, full-sensory communications, and computer control of ships or vehicles.

  ViR, Virtual Reality: Made possible by cephalic implants, virtual reality is the "artificial reality" of computer interfaces that allows, for example, a human pilot to "become" the strider or missile he is piloting, to "live" a simplay, or to "see" things that do not really exist save as sophisticated computer software. An artificial world existing within the human mind that, through AI technology, can be shared with others.

  ViRcom: Full-sensory linked communication. Linker enters a chamber and plugs into communications net. He can then engage in conversation with one or more other humans or their computer analogues as though all were present together.

  ViRdrama: Recreational jacking allowing full-sensory experience through cephlinkage. Linker can participate in elaborate canned shows or AI-monitored games. Two or more linkers can share a single scenario, allowing them to interact with one another.

  ViRlinked: Connected mind-to-mind through interface software, cephlinks, and an AI.

  ViRpersona: The image of self projected in virtual reality dramas or communications. Clothing styles and even personal appearance can be purchased as a cephlink program, much as someone would buy new clothes.

  Warstrider: Also strider. Battlefield armor on two or four legs, giving it high mobility over rough terrain. Generally consists of a fuselage slung between two legs, and equipped either with two arms mounting weapons or with interchangeable weapons pods. Sizes include single-slotters (eight to twelve tons), dual-slotters (ten to thirty tons), three-slotters (twenty-five to seventy tons), and special vehicles such as Armored Personnel Walkers that carry large numbers of troops.

  Who-was: Rumor, scuttlebutt. Corruption of Japanese uwasa.

  Xeno, Xenophobe: Human name for the life-form that first attacked the human colony on An-Nur II in 2498. So-called because of their apparent hatred or fear of other life-forms. Investigations within the Alya system in 2541 proved Xenophobes are machine-organic hybrids evolved from fairly simple organisms billions of years ago. Later referred to as "Naga" from a Hindu serpent deity.

  Warstrider:

  NETLINK

  by

  Ian Douglas

  Originally published under the

  name William H. Keith

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  Prologue

  The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapt in awe, is as good as dead.

  —ALBERT EINSTEIN

  mid-twentieth century C.E.

  Star stuff spiraled into emptiness, the thunder of its passage a shrill keening in his mind. >>DEVCAMERON<< watched that ruby-glowing cataract . . . and wondered.

  He was no longer human, not entirely, anyway. He retained his memories of being human, certainly; and much of the intelligence and adaptability, the lust for knowing, the self-deprecating wit that had shaped his personality when he’d been alive remained intact, but his physical body had been lost . . . how long ago? Twenty standard years? . . . thirty?

  It was hard to know with any certainty. His internal RAM, the nanogrown hardware with its highly accurate timekeeper function, had been vaporized along with his physical brain at the Second Battle of Herakles, and he no longer knew how to measure the passage of time objectively.

  It didn’t matter much, one way or the other. The DalRiss had a somewhat different concept of time, more relaxed than that of humans, while the Naga experienced time by events, an alien way of thinking that guaranteed they would never be bored. >>DEVCAMERON<<, in his new incarnation, tended to use the subjective time-measuring faculties of his hosts.

  There were times when he brooded about the loss. The human mind and the human body went together, interlinked, interdependent in ways that even the best human somatic engineers and medical AIs didn’t yet fully understand, and he had lost that link. He was a ghost, mind alone without body. The mind could be pictured as a self-correcting program running on an organic computer. When the DalRiss-Naga starship to which he’d been physically connected at Herakles had been destroyed, the program had continued to run on the interlinked nodes of the other living DalRiss ships. Same software, different hardware. Existence . . . awareness continued.

  In cou
ntless ways his senses were far more subtle than they’d been before, possessing both the keenness and the range of the far-flung sensory web of the DalRiss fleet. As his human-evolved programming interpreted the inflowing data, he heard the hiss of particulate radiations cascading along the Galaxy’s magnetic fields and the symphonic tunings of distant radio sources, felt the tickle of dust motes adrift in emptiness, tasted the bite of gamma rays and X-rays announcing the long-ago deaths of suns. A planetoid, eight-billion-year-old relic of stellar birth and death, tumbled through blackness twenty million kilometers to the left of >>DEVCAMERON’S<< disembodied point of view.

  Straight ahead, two million kilometers distant now, lay Wonder . . . and a piercing, scintillating Beauty.

  The stars, both of them, were tiny remnants of a vaster, ancient glory, degenerate suns larger and more luminous by far than traditional white dwarfs but shrunken nonetheless. >>DEVCAMERON’S<< new brain registered that the two objects were separated from one another by just less than 800,000 kilometers—about twice the distance between Earth and Earth’s moon—and that their mutual orbit had a period of three hours, twenty minutes.

  So fast did they rotate about their common center of gravity that the movement was easily discernible to the eye; both suns generated visible shock waves in the mist of gases and churning star-stuff through which they moved. Mass was the secret behind their speed, of course; each semi-collapsed star still massed as much as Earth’s sun, despite the fact that each was scarcely the size of the planet Neptune, a scant 48,000 kilometers in diameter or less.

  The strange system, the twin dwarfs and the sea of churning stellar debris surrounding them, had a combined absolute luminosity of about twice that of Earth’s sun. Human eyes would not have been able to make out any detail, but to >>DEVCAMERON’S<< heightened senses it appeared as though those two radiant spheres were enmeshed deep within swirling shrouds of blue and ultraviolet light; each sun was ringed by an accretion disk, spiraling gasses glowing red and orange against the fierce blues and blue-whites of the parent.

  Here, at least, was one area where >>DEVCAMERON<< knew that he’d not entirely lost his humanity. The two suns glowed with a haunting, a riveting splendor, sheer beauty in gas clouds, mass, and the outstretched hand of Newton. His hosts could not fully comprehend the feelings that moved him. The Alyan DalRiss thought of beauty solely in terms of efficiency and utility; the Naga were different enough that the very concept of beauty was as alien to them as was the concept of individuality.

  >>DEVCAMERON<<, however, could look on those two tiny suns embedded in liquid currents of light and feel the old stirrings and appreciation of color and splendor that proved there was humanity in him yet.

  “It’s beautiful,” he thought, directing the comment into the matrix of living machine and intelligence that surrounded him.

  “It is impossible,” the mind of his host replied. “The laws of physics are subverted here.”

  >>DEVCAMERON<< was amused by the bafflement he sensed in the host’s thought. DalRiss and Naga both, he realized by now, had a more direct, less emotional response to puzzles than did most humans. Both, like humans, could feel awe, but mysteries, impossibilities, miracles were for them sources of frustration more than of wonder.

  He could feel the trickle and splash of numbers moving at the fringes of his awareness, the host grappling with measurements that violated not only physical law but common sense. Something strange was at work here. There was mystery in those paired suns as well as beauty, and, for >>DEVCAMERON<<, at any rate, a special wonder born of awe.

  Possibly there’s more of the human left in me than I thought. . . .

  In the face of such strangeness, the thought was oddly comforting.

  Generally, accretion disks were the sweepings of dust and hot gas collected by an astronomical object with a respectable gravity and compacted into a spinning, flat wheel as they spiraled inward. This, however, was the reverse. Ultraviolet-hot plasma was spiraling up from each star’s equator, arcing across empty space in a vast, S-shaped curve. Each dwarf and its thread of uncoiling star stuff mirrored the other in its reach; the ribbons, cooling to near invisibility halfway between the paired dwarf suns, grew hot and brilliant once more as they mutually spiraled into a tight, glowing pinpoint of dazzling light midway between the rapidly circling stars, a something that gave >>DEVCAMERON<< the uncanny feeling that it was devouring the substance of the dwarfs, a cannibal . . . a vampire feeding on the lifeblood of dying suns.

  The DalRiss-Naga fleet was studying that something intently now with every sensor and instrument at its disposal—including >>DEVCAMERON’S<< once-human intelligence. At first, the communal mind of the widespread fleet had assumed the devourer was some traditional astronomical object, a black hole or neutron star whose gravity outpulled that of both orbiting stars and dragged parts of their atmosphere into itself in stellar gluttony.

  Now, though, as they moved cautiously closer, >>DEVCAMERON<< knew that the reality was not so simple . . . and was far stranger. They could sense mass down there at the cusp where the gravitational fields of the two stars balanced, but it was not the mass of a third star. The period of the two circling dwarf stars was precisely that expected of Sol-massed stars in an orbital embrace at that distance; had there been a black hole of stellar mass at the system’s center, their period would have been shorter by far.

  No, the mass they felt balanced between the stars was scarcely that of a single world, yet energies were being wielded there at the central focus of light sufficient to tear gigatons of material each second from the surfaces of each star, channeling them in vast and ever-tightening interwoven spirals into a maw of strangeness, of otherness where, silently and with no fuss whatsoever save that diamond-brilliant gleam of radiant energy, they simply disappeared.

  Together with the intermingled consciousnesses that made up the DalRiss fleet, >>DEVCAMERON<< watched . . . and wondered.

  Not until later was that wonder transformed to an emotion all three species—DalRiss, Naga, and human—could equally share.

  Terror, it seemed, had always possessed more value as a survival trait than wonder. . . .

  Chapter 1

  By the early twenty-first century, the lines between the biological and the machine, between natural intelligence and artificial, between physics and chemistry, between life and lifelessness, were already becoming blurred.

  —The Golden Apples of the Stars

  SHELLY WESTEGREN

  C.E. 2457

  A flight of missiles shrieked in from the northwest, barely clearing a sand dune before plowing into ocher desert in a thunderous cascade of smoke and flame and dirt. Lieutenant Kara Hagan ducked and pivoted, leaning into the detonation’s shock wave as stones and grit clattered across the outer hull of her warstrider.

  “Air attack!” she yelled over the squadron’s tactical channel. A threat warning winked at her from the lower right portion of her visual field, responding to the caress of hostile targeting radar and ladar sensors. Her strider’s nanoflage coating was still absorbing most of the radiation, but the bad guys were close enough now that they almost certainly had the assault squadron pinpointed. “Kim! Daniels! Watch the sky!”

  Seconds later, a pair of Imperial sky-ground attack drones screamed through an azure sky, banking sharply left above the sea at the warstriders’ backs and vanishing behind a line of Martian palms along the beach.

  “Kuso!” Sergeant Jack Hayden’s voice said in her mind. “Where the gok did those come from?”

  “They didn’t tell us we’d be facing hunter hawks!” another voice added.

  “Freeze it, people,” Kara snapped. “Keep it iceworld! Nobody promised you easy!”

  As if to underscore that thought, another barrage of explosions tore through the sandy soil to Kara’s left as the two ryoshitaka attack craft reappeared, low above the horizon to the east. She rode with the blast, her combat machine’s legs giving to absorb and distribute the impact. Before the dirt had s
topped falling, her KS-1090 Cutlass had pivoted, its hivel cannon flipping out of its foldaway recess in the mirror-slick black shell, its sensors locking onto the nearer of the Imperial fighters and highlighting the machine in flashing red. The hivel screamed, slashing into the banking aircraft with a white-hot scythe of depleted uranium slugs. There was a blinding flash as the hunter hawk’s fusion containment fields collapsed . . . followed an instant later by a second explosion as Warstrider Kim hivel-popped the other one.

  She checked her systems readouts. Everything was still online, still well in the green. Warstriders were tough. . . .

  Shrugging off the last of the gravel spilled across her back, she moved forward, cresting a low rise. The objective was in sight now, a sprawl of domes and fortress turrets several kilometers distant.

  From Kara’s point of view, she was the Cutlass, black-hulled, humming with power as she drifted over the mist-cloaked terrain. Just three meters long, the warstrider had an egg-sleek surface, with an organic look reminiscent of some living DalRiss machine. The only violation of its light-drinking nanoflage surface was the grinning shark’s mouth on the prow, and the flyer’s name in gold script—KARA’S MATIC. Earlier generations of warstriders had been ponderous, heavy-limbed, walking targets by comparison. The advent of Companions and Naga-DalRiss biotech had made possible new levels of control in the man-machine interface.

  And advances in nanotechnology—the technology of the very small—had transformed the ancient art of war as well.

  “Okay, boys and girls!” Kara snapped off the Companion-linked order. “Time to pick up your feet!”

  She’d already loaded her warstrider’s main grenade launchers with QEC projectiles. She extended her arm . . . and the strider’s AI interpreted her thought as a command, cutting loose with a long, thumping staccato of rapid fire. White smoke exploded from a dozen points around and ahead of Kara’s strider, a thick and heavy mist that refused to rise or billow, that flowed across the uneven ground more like a liquid than a gas. The other striders in Kara’s squadron joined in, lacing the ground with the milky fog. In seconds, the entire area for kilometers around was covered, the fog swiftly seeping away into the ground. A green light winked against her vision, indicating the presence of an active floater field.