Heisaku Ariyoshi
C.E. 2523
Katya was receiving very little data from the outside world, had been virtually isolated for the past four hours. Her hull sensors were sending in a steady flow of information on pressure, temperature, and the like, but the data were unchanging, confirmation merely that though hell was rampaging across Port Jefferson's fabricrete apron, the seas just off the stony beaches of Cape Dickson were quiet.
Her only feed from the world above came through a tiny sensor packet bobbing on the surface of the water five meters above her head, connected to her RS-64D Warlord by a slender fiber-optic cable. The sensor pack was too small to give her more than low-res visual and access to the combat radio frequencies, and it increased her feeling of smothered isolation. Old dreads - of darkness, of being buried alive - stirred uneasily just below the fringes of her conscious thoughts.
Sometimes she wished she had an Imperial Marine's mastery of Kokorodo, the Way of the Mind. She'd been exposed to the discipline, of course, during her training for the Hegemony Guard, enough to allow her to focus her thoughts on mnemonic codes. Nothing she'd learned, however, would take away the raw, nerve-grating fear… especially in the long wait before a battle.
Four hours earlier she'd taken command of thirty-six warstriders, one quarter of the 1st Confederation Rangers' entire complement, and under the sky-screening cover of billowing smoke clouds had waded into the steep-bottomed, high-tide waters off Cape Dickson. There, the striders had released their sensor packets and hunkered down to wait. The waters, if calm, were murky, heavy with silt backwashed from the surf along the beach. Tides on New America, prodigious with huge Columbia in the sky, were nonetheless ponderously slow. World danced with moon here in a lockstep two-to-three ratio - a pair of 5.2-standard-day orbits of Columbia to three of New America's eighty-three-hour days. At low tide, Cape Dickson rose above kilometer upon empty kilometer of wet, weed-choked tidal flat; at high tide, the surf lapped nearly to the perimeter of the port. Luck had begun the Imperial assault before the tide was in full ebb. Had the invaders delayed their attack by so much as another couple of orbits of their fleet, Katya's plan might not have worked.
That fear, at least, was ended now. The fighters had appeared, and eighty minutes later the first of the striderpods had streaked in out of the west, shedding foil chaff and decoys, arrowing in toward the port on flickering white tails of plasma.
Thank God that the last of the shuttles bearing key members of the Confederation government - and Fred, still secure in his travel pod - had rendezvoused hours ago with the Transluxus, a big, fifth-generation K-T drive passenger liner owned and operated by the pro-rebellion Highstar lines. Most of the independence-minded delegates ought to be safely on their way to Mu Herculis by now, escorted by a precious few of New America's interstellar ships.
General Sinclair and the senior military leaders, however, had remained on the colony world. New America was too vital to Confederation interests, as a base, as a symbol of resistance, as a world, simply to surrender it to the Imperium without a fight.
A victory here, at the spaceport, before the Imperial assault forces achieved a firm beachhead, might be enough to delay the enemy's attack indefinitely, as at Eridu.
It had better. It was all they had to work with now.
"Ready," she transmitted, the coded signal flashed to the other bobbing sensor packs in the sea around her. Her plan called for close coordination and precisely calculated timing. The counterattack would go nowhere if it was launched in spluttering fits and starts, a few warstriders emerging from the sea at a time. Peering from her vantage point, bobbing on the waves a hundred meters from shore, she waited until she was certain the Imperial assault wave had grounded.
It was time. "Forward!"
Through her tenuous link with the surface, she could see very little of the shore a hundred meters ahead, so shrouded was it in billowing clouds of smoke. She fixed her gaze on one particular part of the beach, flexed her powerful legs, and started moving.
"Take it, Ken," she told Sublieutenant Ken Maubry, her number-two in the three-slot Warlord. Number-three was her weapons tech, Warrant Officer Francine DelRey.
"Yes, sir," Maubry replied, and control of the Warlord passed smoothly to him. Maubry was a raw newbie, newly recruited from some town in the Newamie out-back. Francine had been Hegemony Guard for four years before she'd elected to join the rebels… and an enlisted trooper, a "crunchie," in the New American militia for three years before that. Katya was counting on Francine's steel-nerved steadiness handling the strid-er's weapons so that she, Katya, could concentrate on running the counterattack.
Though Ken was jacking the machine toward the beach, she could still feel through the Warlord's sensors. The ground was steep beneath her massively flanged feet, a mix of course-grained sand and stones smoothed to pebbles by the tides. Progress was painfully slow as the nearly sixty-ton machine dragged its massive shell through the water. She could feel the tide's ebb-flow current on her skin, clutching at her, dragging at her with each step forward like a cold and sluggish wind.
Then the Warlord's upper works broke the surface, exposing submerged sensors as water cascaded down the machine's curved flanks, and Katya's awareness was once again flooded by light and motion and noise. She reeled in the sensor pack with a thought, then pulled down a quick scan of the entire panorama. The coastline ahead was shrouded in smoke and the more ominous, drifting gray patches of ground-hugging fog that marked nano-disassembler clouds. Flashes, like muted lightning, flared and stabbed through the mist, accompanied by thunderous rumbles, but so far there was no direct sign of the enemy.
Progress was faster now as the Warlord's torso cleared the water. The machine plowed ahead, trailing a churning wake. Movement flashed, high and to the left; the Warlord's upper torso canted and turned, weapons tracking… then discharging in twin bolts of blue light from the arm-mounted proton CPGs. Locked in the flashing embrace of a targeting cursor within Katya's ViRdisplay, a Ko-125 Akurna flared sun-brilliant for an instant, then disintegrated, smoke-streaming fragments descending on the sea like a fiery rain.
"Never mind the ascraft," Katya warned Francine. "Save it for the heavies ashore."
"Sure, Katya," the weapons officer replied. "That bird was radar-locking us, though."
"Nice shooting. But if you have to bird-shoot, use the hivel. I want full-power on the main weapons when we wade ashore."
"Yes, sir."
Gouts of water rose to either side; steam boiled away as lasers grazed the surface. To left and right, a ragged line stretching for a kilometer in either direction, the rest of Katya's reserve heavy company splashed out of water that now broke and curled about the warstriders' feet. Wading out of the surf and onto the steeply sloping beach, they entered the wet intertidal zone that had been submerged a few hours earlier, but which now was open and exposed. Rocks cracked and popped beneath the great weight of her RS-64's feet; a stray shell whined lonesomely overhead. Battle fog swirled about the advancing machines, cloaking them as their surface nano shifted from water-dark to smoke gray.
Movement… nano-shrouded, but large and heavy. The Warlord's CPGs barked again; steam exploded from a tumble-down of water-smoothed boulders. A laser flashed in return, an emerald sparkle in the fog-heavy air. Katya felt the beam hit. Pain was not transmitted through the link, of course, but the sensation was one of being lightly punched, a solid thump against her side.
Fire! She willed the return volley, though she didn't verbalize the order. Francine returned fire with left-right-left hammerblows from the CPGs, a salvo of rockets from the Warlord's ventral Mark III weapons pod.
The target, revealed now as a KR-86 Tachi, was half the Warlord's bulk, lightly armored, built for speed rather than endurance. Explosions savaged its side and dorsal surfaces, gouged holes through layered duralloy, smashed the left leg motivator assemblies in a fine spray of broken parts. Another CPG struck home, a bolt of blue-white light that melted through
the machine's left side. Oily smoke boiled from the crater, where wires and circuitry glowed red-hot. The Tachi twisted right, shuddered, and fell, right leg twitching spastically with the final nerve discharges of its dying pilot.
The AI in Katya's Warlord keened warning: an unidentified strider to the rear. Maubry spun in time to catch another Tachi rising from the water, twenty meters offshore. Evidently, some of the incoming assault strid-ers had undershot or overshot the narrow cape that was their target and come down in the sea. Francine hit with a twin laser-CPG blast that sent great clouds of steam boiling into the sky and ripped the right arm from its joint. The Tachi swung fast, trying to bring its electron cannon to bear, but Francine completed the destruction with a long burst from the hivel cannon, slamming fifty rounds through the Tachi's armor and punching it back beneath the rolling tumble of the surf.
"Watch yourselves!" Katya warned over her company's tactical channel. "We've got some with us in the water!"
To her right, another Warlord, jacked by Captain Vic
Hagan and his crew, lumbered onto the sand, water streaming from its armor. Nanoflage blurred its outlines and color, save for a bright patch of nose art - a shaggy blond caveman shouldering a club beneath the legend Mission Link. Hagan's strider had just smashed a third Tachi at the water's edge.
"Hey, Boss!" Hagan's voice rasped across the tactical lasercom channel. "Easy pickings!" Katya's command Warlord was The Boss, though no nose art accompanied the name.
"These guys were stragglers," she replied. "It'll be tougher with the guys already ashore."
The rest of her ambush company was emerging all along the beach. She'd placed her most experienced people and her only two heavies - the Warlords jacked by herself and by Vic - near the center, the greener striderjacks on the flanks. If this counterpunch had any hope of success, it would be with an all-out, strength-in-the-center punch. "Come on, Rangers!" she called over the tactical link circuit, urging her people forward. "Move! Move!"
Pacing Hagan's Mission Link, her Warlord stilted up the last few meters of beach. An RLN-90 Scoutstrider, a Confederation machine, lay in a shattered heap of barely recognizable fragments at the top of the beach, still burning. Farther in, on the unyielding surface of the fabricrete apron, her optics picked up the fallen hulk of a Newamie Militia Manta and, close by, the bodies and body fragments of an infantry squad, cut down by heavy autofire.
They were heaped up together in tangled clumps, with a few isolated bodies marking men who'd tried to run and been hit before they could get away. Katya saw loose arms and legs, a blood-smeared spill of intestines, and at least one severed head still strapped into its helmet.
Katya shuddered… or rather, she felt the icy mental shiver that would have accompanied such a purely physical response, even though her body was now out of the circuit in its padded slot. As often as she'd seen such things, she could never get used to them.
Damn, damn! Infantry against goking warstriders. Unless the infantry had some high-powered support, the contest was always hopeless. Those troops had been wearing combat armor; it might as well have been garlands of flowers. The weapons they'd carried had been chemflamers and satchel charges, thumpers and rocket launchers, all designed to knock out light warstriders; they'd never even gotten a chance to use them.
There was such an awful lot of blood…
Dev Cameron, Katya remembered, had pioneered joint infantry-strider close combat tactics on Loki. They'd worked well enough against Xenos, but Katya still had her doubts about the place of infantry in strider-to-strider combat. Infantry, even civilian mobs, had faced striders on Eridu… but casualties had been heavy in what had been acts of sheer desperation.
Well, so, too, was this. With so few recruits available with the three sockets necessary for jacking a warstrider or other large, full-linkage combat machine, the only option open to the Confederation was to find ways to employ infantry - lightly armed and armored foot soldiers - against enemy warstriders.
It was no wonder, though, that striderjacks referred to infantry as "crunchies," supposedly because that was the sound they made when stepped on by a strider.
"Stay… stay with me, Vic," she told Hagan. "Stick close."
"You got it, Boss."
Passing the tangled bodies, the two Warlords angled toward the main spaceport buildings. The entire line, according to plan, switched on their radars. That illuminated themselves as well as any targets, of course, but they had to see. Katya's AI processed the returns, showing massive shapes moving eighteen hundred meters ahead, and they weren't showing the flashing white star the Confederation AIs were using to flag friendly IFF signals.
"Take them long-range," she told the others. Her tiny command was heavily outnumbered; they would accomplish more by sniping at the enemy than getting into knife-fighting range, at least to start with. Later, perhaps, as the assault developed further…
There was no time to think about later, only now. Francine bracketed a ghostly, slow-moving radar target and loosed one of the Warlord's Striker missiles, which slid off the RS-64's aft-mounted Y-rack with a hiss like tearing paper. To left and right, other missiles arrowed into the murk, which suddenly began to flash and strobe with brilliant, internal lightnings. The Confederation line advanced, still firing, tracking and firing and firing again. Something exploded beyond the low-lying cloud, sending up a fireball visible even through the gloom. So thick was the smoke now that Katya found it hard to remember that it was, in fact, afternoon, that outside the battle area the sky was clear and the sun was brightly shining. Fire!
Then the first Imperial volley slammed a reply into the advancing Ranger line, rocking the warstriders with thundering explosions. Two of Katya's striders went down, limbs thrashing; a third, a Ghostrider, was badly damaged, the duralloy peeled back from its dorsal hull like the ragged edge of some terrible, deep-slashed wound. Her own Warlord, under the faster-than-human reflexes of its AI, knocked down two incoming rockets a split second before they hit, whipsawing them from the sky with bursts of deplur slugs from the hivel mount.
Damn! How many of the enemy machines were there? During their planning for this engagement, Katya and the members of Sinclair's combat staff had estimated that the Imperials would allot at least two companies of assault striders to the capture of the spaceport, and more likely a full battalion. The volume of highly accurate rocket fire thundering in from dead ahead had convinced Katya that she was facing a battalion, possibly more.
"Keep firing!" she ordered, as Francine launched the last of their Striker missiles. Now it was unguided rockets… until they were close enough to the enemy that they could engage him with beam weapons.
Thunder rolled low overhead, passing west to east, an ascraft of some kind, though bigger and more powerful than the air-space interceptors they'd seen so far. Katya ignored it. Damn it, though, it would have helped if they could have held onto air superiority here, instead of just surrendering it to the Imperials.
"Let me take it," she told Maubry, issuing the mental code that shifted control of the big Warlord from his cephlinkage to her own. Her reflexes, her linked control, were better than his, faster and more automatic.
Mostly, though, she had to be doing something. The Warlord lurched toward the enemy line, a bipedal carnosaur with mincing gait. A pair of Tachis confronted her and she exchanged salvos, shrugging off a pair of rockets that slammed against her armor, then burning the legs off one of her opponents as Hagan lumbered up to engage the other.
"Nano count!" Maubry warned, his voice sharp. "Point three-one, and rising!"
Those warheads had packed nano-disassemblers instead of conventional explosives; the stuff was deadly, programmed to attach to any artificial material within reach - like duralloy - and begin taking it apart molecule by molecule. The point number was a measure of concentration in the air. The higher the number, the faster a strider's armor was dissolving.
Alert flags were already flashing in her field of view. "I see it! Francine!
Pop the AND!"
Point three-nine, now… and thicker to the right. She moved left, as Francine triggered the Warlord's hull-mounted AND canisters. A fog of anti-nano-D shrouded the warstrider, nano hunting nano in a deadly, invisible, and ultrahigh-speed battle in the air around the machine.
Then the battlesmoke parted in front of her just as three Tachis sprinted forward, their nanoflaged hulls shimmering between fog gray and dappled where a sudden shaft of sunlight touched their flanks. An explosion just in front of the Warlord staggered her, opening a pit in the fabricrete pavement and pelting her with gravel.
She felt her footing give way, struggled to regain her balance. An electron bolt caught The Boss in the left flank, arcing through control circuits and power feeds, jolting her with all the force of a lightning bolt. There was a searing blast and a howling noise, both abruptly chopped short as her sensor feeds failed.
All sensation vanished, and she toppled forward…
* * *
Chapter 9
Someday, military commanders will be able to cut through the fog of war to see both the dispositions of their forces and those of the enemy, to fully direct the course of battle. On that day, military science will become worthy of the name, a true science, instead of the fuzzy, half-blind guesswork it is now.
Warstrider: Jackers Page 10