by Ian Douglas
"Scratch one Echo!" Vaughn shouted, using the alphabetic shorthand for an enemy combat machine.
His Gyrfalcon was already lining up on a second Hojo ascraft. Kill it! he thought… and his strider shuddered with the insistent slam-slam-slam of his high-velocity KK cannon as it sent a stream of depleted uranium slugs ripping through Hoshi armor. The enemy craft was in a steep climb, going vertical, and pieces of wing and computronium armor began streaming off behind it in a glittering contrail. Seconds later, g-forces ripped the ascraft to pieces. "That's two!"
The battle lasted only seconds… a long time in combat. Wheeler shot down one, while Hallman took out two in rapid-fire succession. Lance Corporal Kiel got one… but then a pair of Hojo striders dropped onto his tail, boxing him in, slashing at his machine with laser and particle gun fire. Kiel twisted hard to the left, trying to escape, and slammed into the cliff.
It was now four against… how many? Six, Vaughn thought. There'd been twelve Hoshi striders at the beginning and the Griffins had taken down six. The survivors were scattering, though… and a moment later thirteen more Black Griffins descended from the sky… the rest of the squadron.
"About time you shitheads put in an appearance!" Vaughn yelled, but it was pure adrenaline charging the words, not anger or fear. Vaughn was riding on pure yokie battle lust now. The Nihongo phrase was sento yokubo, shortened by New American military slang to yokie… the wild, hot insanity of combat.
"The bastards had us pinned down, Tad!" Sergeant Benton Pardoe told him. "They scragged Dalton.…"
"Can the chatter!" Vanderkamp ordered. "Get down on the top deck of that fortress now!…"
Vaughn arced down out of the sky above the mobile fortress, his warstrider morphing from ascraft mode to walker. Legs extending, wings folding, he hit with a solid, brain-rattling jar. A Hojo strider dropped from the sky twenty meters away and Vaughn pivoted, tracking the machine, then fired a burst of deplur slugs, the recoil of that much mass accelerated at high speed knocking him back a step. Other Hoshi ascraft continued to circle overhead, like ungainly, delta-winged buzzards.
"Blue Squadron!" Vanderkamp bellowed over the tactical channel. "Keep those ascraft off the rest of us! Green and Red… find the barn door!"
"Let's see if we can pick up some intel," Vaughn suggested. "Koko! On your right!"
An enemy ascraft had just dropped to the upper deck of the fortress, morphing from ascraft flier to legged strider and unfolding an impressive array of energy weapons as wings shifted into arms lined with hardpoints. Wheeler spun her strider and opened up at almost point-blank range with her autocannon. Vaughn took three long steps to get a clear shot at the enemy past Wheeler's machine, then triggered both particle guns in a searing display of electrical pyrotechnics.
"Careful!" Vaughn warned. "Don't hole the meta tank!…"
The enemy craft collapsed in a twisted tangle of black wreckage, the fuselage partly smashed and with greasy black smoke pouring from drive unit. A portion of the armor—Naga computronium—oozed like black tar.
"Cover me!" Vaughn snapped. He strode purposefully ahead, reaching the smoking wreckage and crouching above it. With an effort of will, through his implant he extruded an interface tentacle… a bright silver tendril uncoiling from his machine and dipping into the wreck's ooze.
The tendril was a part of his strider's own computronium matrix, and could pull data from another system like soda through a straw. It was bad news—very bad news—that the Hoshi were using Naga-enhanced warstriders now, but the Confederation had been expecting this development for some time now, and taken the technical steps necessary to take advantage of it when the time came.
And the time, it seemed, was now.…
"What've you got, Vaughn!" Vanderkamp demanded.
"Not sure yet, Lieutenant." Data was dancing through his implant, displaying itself as cascades of numbers flitting through his brain too quicksilver-fast to translate. He glimpsed file names… code books… language translators. He couldn't read any of them because they were encrypted, but G2 would be able to use the big codebreaker AIs back at headquarters to crack them.
He hoped. The Confederation had paid a painfully high price for this intel already… and the dance wasn't over yet.
"Looks like we found the barn door," Hallman called from fifty meters away. "Barn door" was slang for the large hatchway or hangar entrance on planetary defense bases, carrier spacecraft, and other large structures that were used for the launch and recovery of ascraft or troops.
"Burn through it!" Vanderkamp ordered.
"Lieutenant," Vaughn called, "I think we have what we came for." He retracted the data siphon, its substance merging smoothly with the Naga matrix of his strider's armor. Unreadable data continued to sing through his mind. "We can get off this thing and let the big guys in orbit take it out."
"You zap that shit back up to orbit, Vaughn," Vanderkamp told him, "and then get into close-assault line. Do not tell me how to run my squadron, whack it?"
Whack it, from the Nihongo wakarimase, was asking him if he understood.
"I whack it, Lieutenant."
"Good. Get your ass in gear, Mister."
Vaughn grew an antenna on the upper portion of his warstrider's hull, searching for one of the Confederation's orbital assets. He found it—the frigate Andrews, which had a direct laser line-of-sight to the cruiser Independence. Enemy jamming might prevent teleoperating warstriders on the ground from orbit, but a burst transmission at optical frequencies would be all but impossible to block.
He waited until the receipt ping came back down the line from the Indie, then folded up his antenna and moved toward the cluster of rebel striders on the fortress main entrance.
Hallman and Jackowicz, a sergeant from Red Flight, were unfolding a nano-D collar. When open, the ring stretched some three meters in diameter, attached to any smooth surface, and was charged with nano-disassemblers—trillions of sub-micron-sized nanobots programmed to take things apart, molecule by molecule.
"Clear!" Jackowicz called, and he transmitted the initiate command. Smoke rose from the ring, and seconds later a three-meter disk of hardened plasteel armor dropped away into the dark interior of the fortress. Vaughn heard the sharp clang as it struck the deck far below.
"Bombs away!" Hallman shouted, dropping a grenade down the yawning hole. The darkness below lit up in a stark flash, and the fortress shell slammed against the strider footpads.
"Okay," Vanderkamp said. "Carter! Pardoe! Hallman! Go-go-go!"
The first three warstriders in line entered the pit, disappearing from view. Vaughn could hear the crisp sizzle of high-energy lasers, however, and the sharper crack of charged particle beams. More striders moved to the opening, dropping in one after another. Vaughn took a last look up at clouds and sky, noted that the enemy ascraft appeared to be retreating, and jumped in.
Firing a brief burst from his meta thrusters, he touched down on the fort's hangar deck some twenty meters beneath the still-smoking hole. The place was pitch black save for a bit of illumination filtering down through the smoke and he switched to IR for a better view. More striders were dropping into the pit, now, and he moved quickly to get out from under. A flash from a far wall and a burst of light marked the discharge of a Hoshi warrior's CP beam; the return fire from the assault force tore a gaping hole in the wall and obliterated the enemy sniper.
A dozen Imperial warstriders hung from a rack nearby, empty and without life. "That could be a Taifu," Vaughn said, indicating the nearest empty strider. "But it's been modified to hell and gone."
"The one next to it is a Hariken two-seater," Hallman said.
"Take 'em out!" Vanderkamp ordered. "I don't want the bastards teleopping them while we're down here! Vaughn! Talmand! Look for a data jack! Try that console over there!"
"Yes, Lieutenant!"
The console, Vaughn noted, was probably part of the fortress's strider deployment system, a means of linking through to warstriders while they were depl
oyed outside. Several men in black uniforms lay sprawled in front of it, killed by the grenade blasts when the striders had broken in.
Moving to the console, Vaughn extended a data probe, letting the Naga matrix configure the tip to mate with the console receptor. Again, data flowed, and Vaughn recorded it all. And within the data was an unencrypted tactical update.
Enemy reinforcements were on the way.
* * *
Tai-i Shunichi Yamatami downloaded the tactical update, then barked out his orders. "Flights One and Three… attack the main hangar! Flight Four, move to the hangar galleries and take up firing positions! Move!"
Flight Two was outside the fortress, hard-pressed, its numbers dwindled now to four… no, three. "Socho Ishiba!" he called. "Break off and retreat! You can do no more out there."
"But Ta'i—"
"Inside! Now!"
"Hai, ryoshu!"
Yamatami strode down the broad and echoing corridor toward the fortress's main hangar, along with the other striders from Flight One. A thought through his implants opened the main doorway, and he screamed the command to advance.
Laser and particle beam fire snapped and hissed through the air, burning into Suga and Takaichi the moment they tried to move through the open door and forcing them back from the doorway. The assault force wavered in the face of devastating fire.
"Front shields!" Yamatami called, and the massive Taifu Mod 2 warstriders reshaped themselves, their Naga matrix flowing to reinforce their forward quarters. He felt the… the crawling in his skull, and grimaced.
Shunichi Yamatami still didn't like the idea of Naga symbiosis, and doubted that he would ever get used to it. Having an alien life form, even an artifical one created millions of years ago by a galactic super-intelligence, growing inside his brain and body like some kind of parasite seemed like a denial of his own humanity… a terrifying descent into the barbarism, the animalism of non-Japanese peoples.
Chujo Hojo had spent a long time convincing Yamatami of the absolute need to accept the symbionts. The Confederation's rabble of a military was poorly organized, poorly coordinated, poorly supplied, and drastically outnumbered… but they possessed a startling military advantage over the forces of Dai Nihon in the form of the Naga symbionts. The Naga themselves didn't seem to care which side they helped; they were so alien in their view of the cosmos that the political divisions within Humankind were to them completely incomprehensible.
The tough part had been getting Japanese warriors like Yamatami to accept the things inside their own bodies. The very thought still made him feel somewhat ill.
But if accepting the black ooze meant defeating the gaijin rebellion once and for all…
"Forward!" Yamatami yelled, and he launched himself at the door.
3
"One of the serious problems in planning the fight against American doctrine is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine."
—From the notebook of a Soviet junior lieutenant
20th Century
96
"Here they come!" Vanderkamp yelled. "Pour it on, people!"
The doorway was a choke point, an opening so narrow that only a single Japanese warstrider could enter it at a time. By concentrating their fire, the New American forces could pin the first strider in line in a web of white fire and savage explosions, tearing into its forward armor with high-energy beams and hivel KK rounds in a devastating crossfire.
The enemy Taifu war machines possessed a curiously organic look to them, stalking forward on articulated, digitigrade legs that gave them the look of ungainly, tailless tyrannosaurs. Their bodies, originally flattened egg-shapes, had taken on the form of immense black mushrooms as they shifted the majority of their Naga computronium forward to act as shielding. That armor was tough; it rapidly dissipated heat, and could flow into any craters blasted out of the matrix and heal them in an instant. But hit it often enough, hard enough, and quickly enough and head-sized chunks began flying off or vaporizing in bursts of greasy smoke.
For their part, the enemy war striders could only continue to try crowding through that choke point. If they could get enough combat machines inside the main hangar and shooting back, they would be able to overwhelm the Confederation assault group with sheer weight of numbers.
Unless…
Vaughn turned his optical sensors onto the railed walkway halfway up the hangar's walls, mentally tagging doors and access hatchways, and trying to gauge the strength of the catwalk's steel supports. Well… the worst that could happen was that it would collapse under his weight.
He jumped, firing his meta thrusters, sailing in a long, flat arc that brought him into a scrambling collision with the railing. He extended tentacles to grapple with the structure, hauling himself upright as the walk creaked alarmingly beneath his massive feet.
"Vaughn!" Vanderkamp yelled. "What the hell are you doing?"
"Just getting a different perspective, Lieutenant," he replied. From up here, he had a good line of sight on the door where the Hoshi striders were trying to force their way through. More important, the enemy machines were facing Vanderkamp and Hallman and the rest of his squadron, which meant he had a clear shot past the armored mushroom caps protecting their prows. Locking on to the lead target, he triggered his particle cannons, sending sheets of artificial lightning slashing into the Hoshi war machine below.
The lead machine staggered back, colliding with one of its fellows. Vaughn opened up then with a stream of high-velocity deplur slugs, and the enemy strider's Naga armor matrix began to shred. It spun, elevating its prow, searching for Vaughn… and exposed its right side to a fusillade of deadly fire from Hallman and Talmud, firing side by side.
The fire pierced the enemy strider's power plant, and the machine exploded in a white blast of savage noise and flame.
Warstrider combat had never been intended for the confines of manmade structures, the inside of a building however large. The surrounding walls, solid steel and ferroplas, were becoming heavily cratered and pocked, with massive scorch and burn marks.
"Heads up, everyone," Vaughn called. "I'm going to nano-D!"
"Negative, Green One!" Vanderkamp shot back. "The space is too enclosed!"
"Best place to use it, lieutenant!" And he opened fire.
"Damn it, Vaughn, that's against SOD!"
SOD—Standard Operational Doctrine—was holy writ for warstrider squadrons, the basic rules of engagement. Other than for a few specific exceptions, the use of nano-disassembler weaponry was prohibited inside closed-in spaces like the interiors of buildings or spacecraft. There was too great a chance that the higher concentrations of nano-disassemblers would score own-goals against friendlies… or eat the deck out from beneath their feet.
"Get the hell out!" Vaughn yelled. "We have what we came for.…"
Extending his strider's ordnance launcher, he selected the nano-D load-out, targeted the confused mass of Hoshi machines struggling in the doorway below, and triggered a long, rolling burst. Each shell detonated meters from the targets, firing like miniature shotguns while in flight. Each released a high-velocity cloud of micro-disassembler robots, a swarm of sub-micron-sized machines programmed to break down the molecular bonds of whatever they hit, reducing its material to a thin haze of gas and a lot of heat.
The only defense was counter-nano, even tinier robots programmed to seek out nano-D and break it down. "Popping counter-N!" Hallman shouted. Gas launchers mounted on the exterior of the Confederation warstriders began firing off clouds of counter-nano, enveloping the rebel machines in a gray cloud of smoke. The Hoshi striders were firing counter-N as well, but several of the machines had already begun to dissolve in the highly corrosive cloud from Vaughn's fire. The lead Hoshi strider collapsed on the floor, large black chunks breaking from its body, its outlines softening. Its cockpit opened suddenly, blossoming like a flower… and the pilot struggled to get free.
The man was shrieking, his
legs deforming.…
Vaughn forced himself to concentrate on the other enemy striders, to ignore the thrashing, dying pilot. Sometimes—not often, but sometimes—modern combat became horribly, nightmarishly personal. You didn't think, normally, about there being people inside the war machines you were engaging, didn't think about what happened to flesh and blood and human nervous systems when they were exposed to the raw savagery of advanced weaponry.
The pilot was still trying to crawl to safety, but his legs were almost gone, now, bright red streaks on the flooring. Somebody shot the terribly wounded man and he stopped moving; Vaughn thought the shot had come from one of the Hoshi machines, but wasn't sure.
Two more Japanese striders collapsed, their hulls dissolving, and the others began pulling back. Vaughn sent a stream of deplur slugs through the doorway after them. "Lieutenant!" he shouted. "I respectfully suggest we get the gok out of here!"
For moment, he thought was going to balk, but then she sounded the squadron recall, a bright tone transmitted through each pilot's implant. "Fall back!" she ordered. "All striders, fall back!"
But before they could move, six more Japanese striders began spilling out onto the catwalk across the hangar from Vaughn's position. From their vantage points overlooking the hangar floor, they began spraying the rebel machines below with heavy fire. Vaughn targeted the ferroplas supports beneath the other catwalk, hammering at them with particle cannon fire. The enemy returned his fire, and he felt the shock as depleted uranium slugs hammered into his strider's hull.
From the floor below, Talmand opened up on the newly emerged enemy, pounding at one of the machines overhead with her particle-beam cannon, chewing through the safety railing on the catwalk, and holing the walk itself in several places. The Hoshikumiai strider, a bulky two-seater Hariken, twisted aside from Talmand's volley, collided with a smaller Arashikaze, trying to bring its weapons to bear, and then the catwalk gave way beneath its ponderous feet, sending all six warstriders tumbling noisily five meters to the floor below.