Warstrider: Symbionts (Warstrider Series, Book Four)

by Ian Douglas

  Anti–nano-D was the logical counterweapon, nanotechnic particles dispensed as a fog over the surface of the warstrider or from shells or battlefield area sprays, programmed to hunt down and neutralize free–floating nano-D.

  "AND units charged and ready to go," Allen told her. "I don't want to use it while we're moving."

  "Agreed."

  "Nano-D at point five-five," Green announced.

  Radar showed the buildings of the Imperial base looming close ahead, still masked by the smoke and dust. Allen triggered a salvo of M-21 rockets, firing blindly at the largest radar shadows. Imperial radar painted the Confederation striders in return, then dissolved in the hissing static of broadband jamming. Visibility on any wavelength was virtually nonexistent. Explosions mingled with the shouts of Katya's striderjacks over the tactical channel and the shrill blasts of radio noise generated by the fringe effect of particle beams. Lieutenant Hari Sebree's Scoutstrider took a missile hit on its right side, which spun the machine back and gouged a spray of hot shrapnel from its side. Katya's Warlord halted once, swinging out the big left and right arms mounting their ponderous proton accelerators, charged particle guns that could call down a devastating lightning on targets regardless of screening smoke.

  The CPGs fired, twin bolts of man-made lightning searing into the smoky gloom. Then the Warlord was advancing again. In another moment the ground beneath Katya's feet was suddenly empty of vegetation . . . and she was smashing her way past a fallen tangle of fence. Dirt and tangled conductor filament gave way to fabricrete pavement, once smooth, now pitted and cratered both by years of acid rain and by the bombardment. They were on the base now; the main building rose three stories tall less than fifty meters ahead.

  "Dagger, this is Dagger One! I'm on the objective! Cease fire!"

  Did the bombardment slacken a bit? She couldn't tell, and savage detonations continued to slam at her through the boiling murk, most of it friendly fire from Section Two back at Point Alfa. Unfortunately, here inside the smoke, laser communications were useless, save for talking to warstriders a few meters away, and the electromagnetic spectrum was a shrill hiss of static as each side aggressively jammed the other's EM emissions.

  Then the bombardment dwindled away to almost nothing. Good. Captain Manton Crane, heading up Section Two, must have called off the bombardment when he'd seen the First Section striders vanishing into the smoke.

  "Nano-D's up to point seven-one," Green called.

  "Bring her to full stop. Kurt! Let's hose down the outer hull!"

  "You got it, Colonel!"

  White fog gushed across the warstrider's hull from nozzles embedded in the armor. The nano count fell swiftly.

  Peering as far into the screening smoke as her sensors could reach, she recognized where she was . . . just opposite the main entrance to the Imperial base's vehicle bays. The enemy striders might—

  Yes! The outer door of the vehicle air lock was sliding open. Black shadows, long-legged and ominous, moved against the blaze of light inside.

  "I've got targets!" Katya yelled over the general frequency. A shrill rasp drowned out her voice as Allen discharged the Warlord's two proton cannons. Lightning flared behind the opening door. "Main building! Two . . . make that three Impie striders, coming out now!"

  Cannon shells slammed against the hull, and Katya heard metal tearing beneath the crash of the explosions. The Warlord was going down. . . .

  Chapter 21

  Ten thousand highly trained fighting men are but a milling mob when they're not organized. Proper organization should result in the transmission of the commander's will to each and every person in his command, both by indoctrination and by communication. So organized, a thousand men can conquer the unorganized ten thousand.

  —General Holland "Howling Mad" Smith, USMC

  During the American landings on Kiska

  C.E. 1943

  The Kawasaki KY-1001 Katana was one of the best Imperial warstrider designs. Trading speed and maneuverability for armor and firepower, it was a two-slotter massing thirty tons and possessing multiple arms, hull turrets, and hardpoints, deploying a bristling array of rapid-fire cannon, lasers, and missile pods. Though it only weighed half what the RS-64 Warlord did, it was somewhat slower but packed a more impressive punch. As it strutted out of the Imperial base garage, the 50-mm hivel cannon mounted atop its hull continued to slam high-explosive rounds into Katya's warstrider even as the Warlord crashed into the pavement in showering sparks.

  Warning discretes flashed across her visual display, and a small, 3-D, wireframe model of the RS-64 showed a brightly winking chain of lights marking primary and secondary damage. More cannon shells tore into the Warlord, exploding along the left arm in a hail of near-point-blank impacts. The big accelerator coils for the left-arm proton gun shredded; then the ball joint for the entire assembly exploded and the arm was torn away. Katya felt it as a hard jolt on her left side.

  "Kurt! Hit him, Kurt!"

  No response . . . and one of the warning discretes showed a pressure loss to the weapons tech's module. Kuso!

  Downloading a rapid-fire sequence of commands, Katya shifted full fire control to her own system, then struggled to bring weapons to bear. The Warlord was on its right side, its remaining particle cannon trapped beneath the hull. One of the paired 50-MW lasers extending from the strider's prow like the pincers of some huge insect would bear, however, and she triggered a pulse of coherent light that scraped across the Katana's fuselage in a dazzling sunburst.

  The Katana was definitely Imperial Marine; Katya recognized the hull markings and the overall layer of nanoflage that normally showed jet black rather than reflect the surroundings, but which flashed to mirror-bright silver at the touch of a laser. As Katya's beam struck it, it paused in midstride, dipping slightly on its back-canted legs, and pivoted with the suppleness of a living animal to deliver another salvo into her machine. Smoke steamed from a ragged scar across its hull; Katya's laser shot had at least seared some of the nano from its armor, leaving a charred furrow in its wake.

  The Katana's primary weapon was a monster 150-MW laser jutting from beneath its hull in a deliberately suggestive mockery of sexual aggressiveness, while two 88-MW lasers were mounted to either side of its hull. All three guns would be ponderously difficult to aim at such close range, but a hit by any of them from ten meters would punch through Katya's armor like a knife through cardboard. The Warlord lurched to the left just as the big laser winked on. Her vision blanked out for a second as secondary sensors went dead and a filter overloaded, but Ryan had the Warlord moving before the enemy gunner could achieve a solid target lock. Katya compensated for the movement of her machine with intuitive grace, then triggered both bow lasers a second time, aiming for the damaged patch. Metal flared a dazzling white, then boiled away, leaving a gaping crater and an exposed tangle of dripping, sparking wires and power cables.

  The Katana staggered and nearly fell, the main laser comically drooping as its hydraulics failed. A triplet of laser beams from Halliwell's Scoutstrider flashed across the Japanese machine, adding to the destruction. As the Warlord rose to its feet, the aim point of the Mark III weapons pod slung from its belly dropped across the target. Katya adjusted the aim, targeting the smoldering scar on the Katana's hull, then triggered a full, rapid-fire salvo of M-21 rockets.

  At a range of less than ten meters, the rockets hammered into the Katana, one on the fiery tail of the next. The chain of detonations tore out the Imperial strider's exposed electronics, disemboweling the machine, then opening the fuselage from front to rear like the action of an enormous zipper. A lesser explosion barked, followed by the flutter of a hull panel blown away. One of the Katana's two crewmen had just ejected—the pilot, she thought—an instant ahead of a triple pulse of savage, internal explosions that blew the machine's fuselage apart.

  There wasn't enough oxygen in the ShraRish atmosphere to support more than a smoldering fire, but the blast-savaged hull slumped between the still
-upright legs, smoking furiously. Katya pulled a swift check of her Warlord's systems. Power was down by thirty-one percent, all left-arm systems were out—no surprises there—and one of her three pairs of gyros was threatening failure. ICS with Kurt Allen was down and she couldn't tell whether the weapons tech was alive or dead. Her ICS linkage with Ryan Green was also out, but the pilot appeared to be alive still, his life support intact. To simplify controlling the Warlord, Katya switched all command and control functions to her own system. That would isolate Allen, now a helpless observer, but she couldn't afford the confusion that would be raised with trying to move and fight the big Warlord without full internal communications.

  Assassin's Blade was hurt, but things weren't as bad as they could easily have been; the Warlord had been hit hard but was still in action. The same, apparently, could be said of both Halliwell's and Sebree's machines.

  Other warstriders from Katya's section were passing her now to left and right. She'd been so focused on the immediate threat of the advancing Katana, she'd lost track of the other Imperial machines, but one of them, a KY-1180 Tachi, had been caught in a cross fire from Kilroy's Manta and Sublieutenant Jesse Callahan's little Ares-12 Swiftstrider. The Tachi's low, dorsal turret mounting twin 88-MW lasers was carried away in a storm of high explosives; one of the Mark III weapons packs mounted above its shoulders rapped out a stutter of machine-gun fire before it, too, was shredded in the high-intensity fire.

  A second Tachi tested the waters outside the protective shelter of the base garage, then ducked back as a storm of shells and laser fire snapped and crackled through the air. It looked to Katya as though the Imperials had deliberately opened the large, interior maintenance bay to the outside air. The main doors were doubled, providing an air lock large enough to pass one or two warstriders through to the outside at a time without contaminating the bay area, but someone had thrown open both sets of doors at once, either by mistake or because they'd wanted to get more striders through the door at once. Possibly her CPG shot had taken down a smaller strider. The lights were out inside now, and smoke was boiling out of the darkened entrance.

  Outside, laser fire burned and hissed across the pavement from the remaining gun towers, but the rush by the Confederation warstriders had carried them inside the reach of most of the base defenses. Scanning a full three-sixty, Katya could see battle-armored troops scattering this way and that, some carrying weapons, others apparently unarmed. A third Tachi sprinted across the pavement, heading away from the battle in what looked like a blind attempt at escape . . . only to be hit repeatedly by fire from one of the laser towers.

  At that moment, Katya knew that there was no carefully prepared Imperial trap, that the enemy was in fact little more than an armed mob. That mob was still dangerous—the damage to her own Warlord certainly attested to that—but the defense was poorly organized and weak enough that one hard push had all but toppled it completely.

  The fleeing Tachi exploded; seconds later, a pair of Confederation missiles slammed into the laser tower, setting off a cascade of savage explosions that burned through the swirling smoke like minor suns in darkness. Another explosion shook the ground, and a communications tower toppled and fell. Abruptly, the hissing static on half of the radio channels cleared, and Katya heard a babble of voices, all in Inglic.

  "One-five, One-eight! I got three runners, at two-one-five. Hit 'em!"

  "They're down, One-eight."

  "Hey, commo's open!"

  "Where's Dagger One? I saw her go down!"

  "This is Dagger One-one, on the air," Katya announced.

  "Colonel! You all right?"

  "I'm okay. Listen, people, I think the opposition's going down. If they want to surrender, let them." She shifted frequencies, searching for an unjammed Imperial channel. There was nothing . . . no! There, a voice was barking in Nihongo, the words too shrill and quick for Katya to follow but apparently delivered in the clear, without the usual encryption algorithms.

  "One-one, this is One-three," Halliwell said on the team's tac channel. "I'm inside the main building. There are some downgrudged Impie striders here, Katanas, Tachis, and Tantos. Some guards and tech types lit out when I came through the wall, but I'm not getting any resistance here."

  "Confirmed, One-one," another voice added. "This is Kilroy, One-two, and I'm inside too. I've got people surrendering in here."

  "Roger that. Round 'em up and keep 'em quiet. One-five and One-six, get in there and give them support."

  "Copy, One-one. We're on our way."

  Shifting back to the Japanese channel, Katya downloaded a command to the Warlord's AI to engage a Nihongo translation program. The sharp, barking orders in Japanese shifted to Inglic. ". . . fall back and hold your positions!"

  "Imperial Commander," Katya snapped, "your position here is hopeless. Cease fire, and have your armed units lay down their weapons."

  There was a harsh clatter of noise, and then the channel was again jammed tight. Whoever she'd been eavesdropping on wasn't ready to give up yet, it seemed . . . but it was clear that he was losing control of the battle. A Tanto, a light, nimble Imperial strider, moved into the open and froze in place, its weapons directed at the sky, its hull nanoflage paling to the mottled grays and browns of the metal's natural finish in a gesture of surrender. Half a dozen troops in black combat armor gathered nearby, gloved hands in the air.

  "Hey, Colonel? This is Kilroy. Sounds like there's fighting inside the main building. I think we may have a mutiny under way in there."

  "Hold position until we have some backup. Dagger Two-one, this is One-one. Do you copy?"

  "Two-one copies," Captain Manton Crane, CO of Section Two, said. "Go ahead."

  "Bring your people on down, Manny. Watch for leakers and stragglers."

  "Roger that. On our way."

  With the high-intensity shelling and missile attacks over, the pall of smoke over the Dojinko base began lifting. As Katya stood there on the debris-littered pavement, shafts of dazzling white light slanted through the overcast, lifting the gloom. In seconds, the patches of sunlit ground expanded, and the base stood revealed in a harsh morning light intermittently dimmed by the moving shadows from billowing clouds of smoke. Here and there across the base compound, more and more troops in Imperial armor or light environmental suits were standing up, hands raised in surrender. Occasionally, she caught the crack and hiss of a laser, or the dull thud of an explosive shell or grenade. A few in the Imperial compound, no doubt, would turn out to be fanatical holdouts, willing to die to the last man.

  "Hey, Colonel? Sebree here."

  "Go ahead, Hari."

  "I got a prisoner here. Claims he's head of the base civilian staff, and he wants to talk to you."

  "Bring him on through."

  Sebree's Scoutstrider emerged from the base vehicle entryway a moment later. A somewhat more humanoid construct than most other warstriders, the RLN-90 Scoutstrider vaguely resembled a squat and headless suit of medieval armor standing three and a half meters tall, save that the right arm usually mounted either a high-speed cannon or a 100-MW laser, and KV-48 weapons packs were set into the blocky, squared-off shoulders. Sebree's battered Scoutstrider had the autocannon option, and as he walked toward Katya he kept the flame-blackened muzzle of that weapon centered on the back of the head of his prisoner.

  The man wore a bright yellow environmental suit, a close-fitting garment that offered no armor protection at all, and a goldfish bowl helmet with an attached PLSS, a Portable Life Support System, slung from his shoulder. He kept his gloved hands carefully palm down atop the helmet.

  Katya checked the local nano-D contamination and saw that it was down to about .2, low enough that unarmored humans would be in no danger in the area, at least not without an exposure time of several hours at least.

  "You are the commander of the Confederation force?" the man asked, speaking passable Inglic. His helmet electronics broadcast his voice through external speakers in his suit, and Katya's hull sens
ors carried the words to her. "Please, help us! They've gone crazy in there!"

  "Help you how? Who's gone crazy?"

  "Chusa Kosaka, the marine commander. He's been shooting those of us who were trying to surrender!"

  "And you are? . . ."

  "Dr. Mitsukuni Ozaki. I am chief of . . . how would you say? Department of Gengo-gaku . . ."

  Katya repeated the phrase through the language program. "Linguistics?"

  "Exactly. Linguistic Department, Imperial Alyan Mission. Ozaki has ordered his marines to kill all the civilians! . . ."

  "You have a link interface in that suit you're wearing?"

  Ozaki held up his left hand, showing the cross-hatching of contact circuitry embedded in the palm of his glove. Katya focused her thoughts, and a panel set into the left leg of the Warlord a meter and a half off the ground slid open. It was one of several interface access ports on the machine, used for downloading new programs through direct interface with maintenance AIs, but it could also be used to pass data directly from cephlink-equipped personnel to the warstrider's systems.

  "Show me," she said, advancing one step.

  The man started and took a quick step back, nearly colliding with the muzzle of Sebree's gun, and Katya realized her movement had scared him. The Warlord stood over five meters tall, towering above the lone man, and even with the left arm missing it must present a terrifying aspect. The damage, in fact, might well enhance its nightmarish look; Katya had momentarily forgotten what she must look like from the linguist's point of view.

  "It'll be okay, Dr. Ozaki," she said. "Interface with me."

  "Arigato gozaimasu," the man said, lapsing into Nihongo. "Thank you!" He moved forward and placed his hand against the interface.

  "Colonel," Sebree said uncertainly. "Do you think that's a good idea?"

  There was a danger of sabotage, that Ozaki had been primed with an AI-killing virus with or without his knowledge, but there was no time for less direct measures. Katya opened her own link and felt the trickle of data coming through from the man's cephlink RAM.