Warstrider: Symbionts (Warstrider Series, Book Four)

by Ian Douglas

  "Unlikely, that last," Ortiz said. "Considering the fact that humans are responsible for ending the long DalRiss war with the Nagas, I doubt very much that there's a Riss on the whole planet who doesn't know about us in one way or another. Still, I think you're right about the need to take up communications with the DalRiss at the same place the Imperials evidently left off. There could be symbolic value in that . . . and we'll be facing fewer unknowns."

  "Then we're agreed," Dev said. "Katya? The sooner we get your people down there, the better. How soon can you go?"

  "We just need as long as it takes to file One-slash-one aboard an ascraft and deorbit," she said, referring to the 1st Rangers' First Company. "Say two hours."

  "We're coming up on ship's night," Dev said. "Why don't we give your people a last, good night's sleep? God knows how long it'll be before they have someplace to rack out besides the link modules of their warstriders. Muster aboard your ascraft at 0800 hours tomorrow."

  "Zero-eight hundred it will be, Commodore."

  "You'll be pretty much under your own discretion, Katya, though I'll want to maintain full linkage with you all the way. Your overall directives will be first to assess and eliminate the Imperial threat—and I'll rely on your judgment as to just how you carry that out—and then to attempt to make contact with the DalRiss. Again, your judgment."

  "Wait," Ortiz said. "Shouldn't the Contact Team be along for that, Commodore?"

  "Negative, Professor. Not this time, not with this many unknowns. We'll have you packed aboard an ascraft though and ready to deorbit just as soon as Colonel Alessandro gives the word. Once the Impies are cleaned up, once we have at least some acknowledgment that the DalRiss are willing to talk to us, then we'll send you down."

  "I think you're making a mistake there," Ortiz said, the frown showing in her voice.

  "Maybe. But until we've sized up the political situation down there, this is still a military mission, with military objectives and prerogatives. I promise you, the colonel won't go in shooting. Not at the DalRiss, anyway."

  The discussion turned next to the mechanics of contact and to what the Confederation Expeditionary Force hoped to accomplish, assuming, of course, that the Empire gave them time.

  Dev was feeling noticeably better now that the mission was properly under way. He'd given in to the monitor's suggested regime of recreational linking and alpha wave control, and possibly that was helping as well. He'd noticed in any case that he felt worst when he wasn't jacked in, best when he was enjoying a full, three-jack download. He no longer dreamed as much about what had happened on Herakles. His earlier depression was largely gone, too, though there was a lurking nostalgia for the far vaster sweep of experience and knowledge and being that had been his during the Xenolink. The longing for that vaster, inner world was controllable when he was linked, with immediate access to literally any knowledge and experience he wished to have. Only when he was out of link, with nothing to rely on but his own native abilities and the few gigs of implanted RAM in his brain, did he really feel the impact of his loss.

  If only he could just somehow manage to stay linked all the time. . . .

  Chapter 20

  Warstriders found their first military application in the Manchurio-Japanese War of 2207. It was that conflict, incidentally, that demonstrated once and for all Imperial Nihon's technological lead over the other nations of Earth, a clear result of her having seized the high ground of space during the previous two hundred years.

  Significantly, though, there were relatively few new developments in warstrider technology during the next three centuries. There were experiments, of course, with changes in size, in numbers and types of weapons, in control systems, sensor packages, and armor, but the basic idea—an armored combat machine controlled by the directly channeled neural impulses of a cephlinked pilot has remained virtually unchanged since its inception.

  —Modern Military Hardware

  HEMILCOM Military Documentary

  C.E. 2537

  The ascraft, a VK-141 Stormwind, slanted in from the southwest nose high, kicking up a swirl of dust and fragments of vegetation as the ventral thrusters cut in. Four bulky, roughly egg-shaped packages disengaged two at a time from slots beneath the ascraft's down-canted wings, tumbled free, then steadied in bursts of hot plasma. As each touched down on howling, twin jets, side and bottom panels swung open, articulated joints unfolded, legs and arms and weapons pods deployed in smooth-moving parodies of the motions of a living creature. One after another, the machines went into full combat mode, rising on jointed digitigrade legs, weapons and sensors alike extended and scanning their surroundings. Their armored hulls shimmered as the nanoflage coating them adjusted to the new surroundings, taking on the mottled, gold-orange hues of the vegetation in the area. They didn't vanish—quite—but when the machines froze in place, their outlines all but disappeared, making a firm ID difficult. When they moved, their outlines blurred, while the color patterns twisted and moved as though the strider's entire outer surface was paneled with mirrors.

  The first four warstriders were down unopposed. As the Stormwind's thrusters shrieked and the bulky craft pivoted in place, then rose once more into the sky, a second ascraft drifted in out of the southwest, followed by a third and a fourth, each stooping to disgorge its own complement of warstriders in a ragged line to either side of the first team. There were sixteen in all, a full platoon consisting of a mix of light and medium machines: RLN-90 Scoutstriders, Ares-12 Swiftstriders, and LaG-42 Ghostriders.

  The largest was an RS-64GC Warlord, with the legend Assassin's Blade picked out in white script on its armored prow, and as the machine swung about, the warm, background colors reflected by its nanoflage surged and rippled behind the letters. Tucked away within its three jackerslots, Katya, Sublieutenant Ryan Green, and Warrant Tech Kurt Allen were linked to the Warlord's systems. Green was piloting, Allen was jacked to the primary weapons, while Katya concentrated on running the platoon.

  "Skyfall, Skyfall," she announced over the ground-to-orbit frequency. "Dagger is down."

  "Dagger, Skyfall, we copy that," the voice of Eagle's Battle Ops officer replied in her head. "We've got you pegged at the primary LZ, with no hostiles or unknowns in your immediate area. Your objective is at zero-three-five, range five point two kilometers. You should have Point Alfa in sight to your northeast."

  Checkpoint Alfa was a low, bare-topped ridge three kilometers from the landing zone, easily recognizable from the simulated runs Katya had worked on aboard the Eagle. "Roger that. I see it."

  "Your objective should be in sight from there. How's the weather down there?"

  "Hot," she replied, glancing at her met readouts. "And muggy. With a chance of acid rain. But no bandits. None that've shown themselves, anyway. Plenty of background noise, though. There could be an army out there, and if they weren't powered up, we'd never see them."

  They'd landed in a broad clearing extending west from the ridge and almost encircled by forest. Their surroundings felt distinctly alive, with rustlings and subtle shiftings among the vegetation. The tallest were slender with fernlike or spearlike tips thirty meters or more above the ground, and some had a feathery look almost reminiscent of the virgin native forests back on New America. Most were rounder and squatter, though, like huge mushrooms or bloated puffballs or stacked layers of shelf fungus, while others possessed surreal clumps of light-gathering foliage that resembled huge, ragged natural sponges, all holes and pits and tatters with lots of interconnecting branches like jackstraws. Some of the vegetation exuded a thick orange or pink foam that dripped from the canopy and covered the ground, soaking up sunlight and somehow transferring it to the parent organism.

  There was no sign of animal life on any of Katya's scanners, though many of the plants, including the spongy, sheetlike growths the striders were trampling underfoot, were in constant rippling or pulsing motion. Overhead, the sky was violet-blue, with scattered clouds tinged with sulfurous yellow.

 
"That way," she told her pilot, indicating the ridge to the northeast. "Low and fast."

  "Right, Skipper."

  "Dagger, Dagger One. Deploy and move out!"

  The Warlord lurched forward, then shifted into a sprint, the easy, scissoring movements of its birdlike legs providing a relatively smooth ride, though each long step caused the fuselage to swoop in what a newbie could find to be a disorienting fashion. It was an old machine, one handed down from unit to unit with patches and replacement parts to show its checkered history. Blade's main fuselage, Katya knew, had been cast in 2489, and it had seen service with a Hegemony line unit for eighteen years before it was sold to a New American militia unit. The body of her warstrider was damn near twice Katya's age, older by nine years than the Xenophobe War.

  Older machines like this one had been the mainstay of the various Hegemony and local militia units fighting the Xenos, and they'd given a good account of themselves. This time, though, the enemy wasn't Xenophobes. The black hull armor of those Tachis and the Katana glimpsed by the remote probe earlier suggested that the Dojinko defenders were Imperial Marines, with few exceptions the best troops and machines Dai Nihon possessed.

  They reached the base of the ridge without incident and started to climb, the other warstriders of the platoon stretching out in a line to either side, each close enough to its neighbors to keep them in sight. Katya didn't need to give more than an absolute minimum of orders. The veterans in her team knew what they were doing and knew what she expected of them; the newbies had had plenty of training and drill back on New America, and the majority of them were veteran warstriders from various Hegemony units. The true test of any military formation was how well it stood up under battle, of course, and that had yet to be tested, but Katya had been careful to select her best people for this mission. She was confident that they'd be able to face anything the Imperials threw at them, and win.

  But it would help a lot if she knew just what the Imperials had prepared for her. They couldn't be unaware of the Confederation landings. Imperial sensors would have picked up the heat signatures and radar traces of the Stormwinds coming in; there would have been plenty of time to deploy an ambush.

  The question was . . . where?

  The warstrider line neared the top of the ridge labeled Point Alfa but remained in body-down position behind the crest. Extending a sensor arm above the rise, Katya could see the Imperial base, a cluster of gray towers and domes huddled against the yellows and ochers of the encroaching forest. It looked much as it had when she'd seen it last as a simulation compiled from flyby data, save that the four Japanese warstriders parked in front of the central structure were not in evidence. Four gun towers were very much in evidence, however, with heat signatures that suggested they were powered up and operational.

  The absence of enemy warstriders was disturbing. Not that she'd been expecting them to make this easy, but Katya much preferred the enemy you could see to the one you couldn't.

  "Skyfall, this is Dagger One," Katya called over the ground-to-orbit channel. "How about patching through an orbital feed? Let's see where the bad guys are hiding."

  "Dagger One, Skyfall. We copy. We don't see anything from up here, but here's the feed."

  A window opened against her awareness, small enough not to obscure her view forward, large enough to give considerable detail to an elaborate, three-dimensional map of the Dojinko region. Compiled from data picked up both in orbit and from high-flying, teleoperated drones, the image gave her an eye-in-the-sky false-color view of the landscape that included land forms and vegetation, artificial structures, and the heat and neutrino sources that might be enemy vehicles. She could clearly see the eight Confederation warstriders like tiny, glowing toys spread out along the crest of the ridge, could see the individual buildings of the base nestled into the valley two kilometers away. There was no sign, however, of hidden or camouflaged warstriders in the forest nearby.

  "Maybe they all went inside," Captain Kilroy suggested. "Their neutrino emissions would be masked by the reactor leakage."

  "That's a thought, Frank," Katya said. As she shifted her attention back and forth between the map and the actual layout of the terrain around her, she began to think that turning the base into a fortress might have been the Imperials' best tactical choice after all. In the same situation, she would have much preferred leaving a back door for herself, an escape route through difficult terrain, rather than letting herself get shut in within a wall-encircled trap. But if the Imperials were suspicious of the forest, possibly afraid of DalRiss that might still be in the area, and knowing that there was no escape for them into orbit until a relief force showed up . . . yes, they might very well be prepared to hold out for as long as possible inside their base.

  "Kilroy's right," she told the others. "Unless they've pulled out and headed for the hills in the last few hours, which I doubt, they're waiting for us inside."

  "The base is surrounded by a kill zone," Virginia Halliwell pointed out. "We won't get halfway across before they drop us."

  "What do you think, Skipper?" Captain Ward asked. "Maybe we call in a bombardment from orbit?"

  "No," Katya said after considering the thought for a moment. "Not when we don't know what's going on in there, or with the DalRiss."

  Arguably, that was the worst aspect of this mission. Any combat deployment becomes more and more difficult—and risky—as additional requirements, objectives, and restrictions are added onto the original operational orders. Farstar had the dual objective of neutralizing the Imperial presence on ShraRish and of making peaceful contact with the locals. Since they had no way of knowing how the DalRiss were going to react to a pitched battle right in their own backyard, they would have to proceed carefully, and that would put some fairly serious constraints on what they could and could not do. An assault by warstriders represented one level of threat, while laser bombardment from space represented quite another.

  "Well, the first thing to try is to tell them to surrender," Katya said. "Who knows? Maybe we'll get lucky."

  "Colonel," Captain Kilroy said. "I'm picking up an accelerated power flow through that nearest gun tower. I think—"

  There was a flash on Katya's tactical display as her AI painted the laser pulse in brilliant green light, and vegetation on the hillside thirty meters to Katya's left erupted in a geyser of smoke, steam, and organic debris. Lieutenant Halliwell's Ghostrider, caught at the fringe of the blast, staggered on the uneven ground, desperately attempting to remain standing.

  No luck today. "Skyfall, Dagger, we're taking fire from the gun towers!" Shift to tactical. "Dagger, Dagger One, commence fire!"

  The thin, white contrails of antiarmor missiles scratched their way into the sky above the base. All along the ridgetop, Confederation warstriders opened fire, loosing volleys of laser and particle beam fire, missiles, and unguided flights of rockets. Within seconds, the entire base was masked behind a thundering, flashing wall of high-flung dirt and smoke. A one-hundred–meter length of the fence disintegrated under that onslaught, as the nearest gun tower took half a dozen direct hits within the space of two seconds. Chunks of fabricrete rained across half a square kilometer; part of the turret, with the twisted barrel of a 103-mm laser still extending from its mount glacis, spun end over end, trailing a long streamer of black smoke. Smoke and nanoaerosol shells burst between the base and the ridge, adding to the impenetrable murk.

  The missiles already launched from the base began arching over, seeking targets. Katya sensed the dome of the hivel cannon mounted on her Warlord's back swivel, then fire with a buzz saw rasp of sound, but she kept her attention focused on her tactical deployment display, where the warstriders of First Platoon were picked out in clean, graphic symbols representing the various types of machines in her command. A game . . . a low-res vidsim empty of the emotion of blood and death.

  "Laser fire on target sighting only," she ordered. At the moment, there were no ground targets visible, and random laser bursts would be
swallowed in the black pall of dirt and smoke screening the base.

  But that screening effect worked two ways, which had been part of Katya's plan from the start.

  "Section Two, cover us," she ordered. "Section One, with me!"

  Breaking from cover, the big command Warlord crested the ridge, then crashed through the ground cover on the opposite slope. Dirt slid and crumbled from beneath the Warlord's broad, duralloy-flanged feet, and Katya could feel Ryan Green struggling to maintain the machine's balance on the uncertain ground. Warheads from the base exploded blindly around her; rockets and missiles that her AI decided were on an intercept course were clawed from the sky by the Warlord's hivel cannon or by bursts of laser fire precisely aimed by Warrant Tech Allen. She felt the Warlord stagger as it hit the bottom of the slope, then recover. More explosions, softer ones, this time, bumped and thudded in front of her, erupting in clouds of dense, lowlying smoke.

  "Nano-D!" Green snapped. "Point three-oh and rising!"

  "Push through! Kurt! Stand by with the AND dispensers!"

  Nano-D, short for nanotech disassemblers, was a relatively new weapon, one suggested by combat with the Xenophobes. Shells and rocket warheads were loaded with nanotech molecules that, when activated by the breaching of the container, were programmed to seek out certain materials, such as the layered duralloy or nanoflage coatings of a warstrider's outer hull, and begin taking it apart, literally atom by atom. As with radiation, exposure was cumulative; concentrations of nano-D higher than .85 or so could strip the outer armor from an undamaged warstrider in five minutes or less.