Warstrider 01 - Warstrider

by William H. Keith

  The Xenophobes, obviously, possessed that magic now. They were growing their alien architecture before Dev’s optics, using rock and wreckage as raw materials.

  Dev could see the tunnel mouth clearly now, as the last of the fog dissipated in the crater’s central core. The white sea continued to lap in a vast circle around the crater’s perimeter, but the crater floor was exposed at the center. It looked like tar or liquid asphalt, jet black, liquid, but thick and viscous. IR showed that it was warmer than its surroundings, but not nearly as hot as the lava had been moments before. The lava itself seemed to have been converted into something else, the delicate tracery of crisscrossing spires and crystal shafts surrounding the core, perhaps.

  A Death Adder emerged from the tar, blunt-nosed, sluglike, gleaming clean and gray-silver as if coated with liquid mercury. Sliding clear of the tunnel mouth, it began transforming into its combat mode, shapeshifting into a six-armed starfish armored in spines like black needles. Close behind it was the snake-shape of a Fer-de-Lance. Other shapes followed, a nightmare procession of alien geometries. They spread out around the crater perimeter, like sentries mounting guard.

  Had he been seen? Apparently not. None of the invaders appeared to notice the lone, combat-savaged Warlord lying in the rubble of the fallen battlements three hundred meters from the tunnel mouth. Maybe the strider’s protective coloration was camouflaging him after all, or maybe they’d dismissed him as another piece of wreckage, junk like that broken Battlewraith nearby.

  He wouldn’t be able to rely on their nearsightedness for long. If nothing else, there must be thousands of Gammas and hot-nano scraps all over the ridge, left over from the earlier fight. Sooner or later they would start gnawing on whatever they happened to find, and the Warlord would become a large and helpless hors d’oeuvre.

  There was little more he could accomplish by staying where he was, and every second he remained increased the risk that he would be seen.

  Dev started to turn away, then froze. Distinctly he could hear a heavy thump-thump-thump, a rhythmic pounding that was almost certainly coming from the Warlord’s hull.

  A Gamma, he thought. A Xeno Gamma had attached itself to his fuselage and was smashing its way inside!

  Chapter 16

  No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.

  —Complete Psychological Works

  Sigmund Freud

  early twentieth century

  For Katya Alessandro, the blackness surrounding her had become an intolerable hell. She lay in the coffin-sized niche of the command module, swaying in her support web, feeling the ungainly lurch-swing-lurch of the Warlord’s long-legged gait.

  Her AI link was still completely dead, and even the module’s manual controls appeared to have shorted out. She’d long since given up trying to eject. Not a single gleam of light came from the small console pad, which left her muffled in a terrifying, stiffing cloak of darkness.

  That darkness had brought her to the ragged edge of stark panic and held her there, held her as she battled the rising terror she’d felt once before, aboard the Kaibutsu Maru. She’d gone through a year of implant therapy before she could sleep without a light on at night, had come that close to submitting to voluntary amnesia. With a claustrophobe rating of point seven, she’d come within an ace of being rejected when she volunteered for warstrider training. During training, a simulated power failure had dropped her into a night much like this one, and she’d come damned close to washing out right then and there.

  Somehow she’d managed to hang on, going through the rote procedure to restore link power manually and not giving in to panic. Those procedures hadn’t worked this time, however—her fingers were bleeding from pounding at the control pad in the dark. She wanted to scream, and knew that if she did, she would lose all control, all reason, and possibly kill herself trying to batter through that hatch.

  And what made it worse was the knowledge that they must be just outside her hatch.

  They. The bogeyman, the horror in the dark, the monsters under the bed. She remembered what had happened to Mitch, and couldn’t stop shaking. She could clearly remember the moments before the power failure during the fight with the Copperhead. Suresh Gupta and Chris Kingfield had both been dead, dead… and when she had recovered consciousness an unknown agony of minutes or hours later, she’d felt the Warlord moving and knew that Xenophobe Gammas must have infiltrated the machine, transforming it into a zombie.

  Strange. She’d never seen a Xenozombie that still had its legs. Usually when the ’Phobes remade a human strider, they reworked the legs into a misshapen platform containing powerful magfield guides, letting it float a meter above the ground. She could definitely feel the thump of each foot as it hit the ground, could feel the swaying stop-and-go motion of the strider’s birdlike walk.

  But the Blade had to be a zombie. The AI couldn’t run the strider by itself, and Gupta and Kingfield were both dead. That meant the monsters were all around her, inside the Warlord’s armor, inside its power plant and weapons and hull, eating their way toward her compartment. And when they reached her…

  Katya screamed, her fists pounding against the padded surface of the module’s external hatch. The manual hatch release, like the eject handle, seemed to be jammed. She had to get out… out!…

  Somehow Katya had managed to free herself from the support harness and unplug her helmet from the useless link feeds, then squirm about until she could double her legs above her body, knees to chest. Kicking hard, she thought she felt the hatch give slightly. She kicked again. Thump! And again. The manual release was still jammed, but she thought she’d felt the centimeter-thick sheet of nanomolecular armor give ever so slightly. A shock might free it, might force the locking mechanism open and unseal her prison.

  She tried not to let herself think about what was going on in the Warlord around her. For a time, the strider’s swaying motion had stopped, but then, over two minutes later by her internal clock, there’d been a savage explosion. The shock wave had made the walls of her metal coffin ring, there’d been the unmistakable stomach-twisting sensation of a fall, and then the Warlord had smashed into unyielding ground.

  The crash slammed her against one end of the module and nearly returned her to unconsciousness, but though flashes of visual purple danced and sparked before her eyes, she clung to her awareness like a talisman, like a weapon, unwilling to lose it when the Xenos were eating their way through the darkness to reach her.

  That thought bit, slick and panic-edged, like sharp ice twisting in her brain. Hysterical strength surged through her body, mingled with a throat-rasping scream of anger and defiance and stark terror. She kicked again, and this time she was sure she felt the hatch yield ever so slightly. Perhaps the shock of the fall had loosened the locking mechanism.

  A thin, high whistle sounded in her ears, swelling quickly into the mindless shriek of escaping air. The pressure seal was broken!

  Then the hatch snapped up and away from her coffin as a hurricane tugged and brawled against her skintight. In less than a second the pressures equalized. Cold bit the fingers of her ungloved hand as moisture turned to frost on her helmet visor. She groped in the darkness for her left glove, found it, and pulled it on. Her hands were shaking so badly, she had trouble pressing the wrist seal closed. Next she unhooked her helmet from the module’s life support system and reconnected it to her skintight’s PLSS. When she touched the test switch and got an answering green light gleaming in the dark, the relief was almost palpable. The pack was fully charged. How far would two hours get her? Not far enough, she suspected, but better than being trapped here in the dark, waiting to be eaten by Xenos.

  Three final checks, all by touch: her laser pistol holstered to her right hip, a medikit strapped to her left, and, most important, an AND canister in a belt pouch. Her vehicle suit wasn’t equipped to warn her
of nano hot spots, so she would have to use the stuff as a prophylactic and pray it lasted until she got… where?

  She didn’t know and she didn’t care. Bracing herself, she kicked up and out with both feet one last time. With no difference in atmospheric pressures to keep the hatch sealed, the outer hull access banged open, and light flooded her black prison cell.

  Clinging to the rim of her hatch opening, she raised herself on trembling knees. Light, the eerie, shifting glare of fires banked behind thick clouds, gleamed through her helmet’s visor. She saw… strangeness, and the movement of Xeno machines. Assassin’s Blade was still on the ground, and the open hatch was less than two meters above the ground.

  Where was she? What was this place? She was having trouble identifying the shapes looming from the swirling, light-charged fog, so alien were they, so far removed from anything familiar or recognizable.

  The rasp of her indrawn breath sounded unnaturally loud in her helmet. She didn’t know how long the skintight’s PLSS would last her, and she didn’t really care. She had to get out, to get away from this nightmare of black and crystal shapes and unearthly light and smoke boiling above a lake of smothered fires. Standing erect in the open module, she swung one leg over the side, clinging to the hatch for an easy slide to the ground.

  Suddenly the Warlord stirred beneath her, a sleeping monster awakened to full awareness. The fuselage jerked up and back, throwing her forward. Katya screamed as the sharp motion catapulted her from the open hatch. Twisting, she grabbed the hatch combing, dangling by her arms as the combat machine rose on unsteady legs. The fuselage snapped forward with a piercing squeak of metal grating on metal, and her hands lost their grip. She fell, her gloved hand raking painfully across hull metal, grabbing at a foothold, then tearing free.

  Katya was still screaming as she plunged five meters to the ground. She hit hard and awkwardly, bounced, then slithered down a loose scree of rock and gravel.

  The pain when her right leg snapped was indescribable.

  Chapter 17

  Why does a man fight? Not for country or leader or ideology, despite what the ViRdramatists might say. He fights for his brothers and sisters who fight at his side.

  —A History of Human Warfare

  HEMILCOM Military ViRdocumentary

  C.E. 2533

  Dev was first aware that Katya was the cause of the ominous thumping that had convinced him the Xenos were on the Warlord’s hull when his AI sent a cascade of data across his visual field, warning of a pressure loss in the command module, that the commander’s strider PLSS had been taken off-line, and that the commander’s access hatch had been blown.

  At that point Dev had already started to lever the strider erect, leaning against the strider’s gyros to maintain his balance. He tried to abort the mental command, but too late. The brief mental conflict of order and counterorder jarred the strider to motionless indecision just as Dev felt something bump against his left side.

  He shifted visuals, switching from the main optics on the Warlord’s blunt snout to sensors mounted high on the strider’s left shoulder. From that angle, he could look forward and down across the hull and see the gaping maw of the commander’s access hatch and two black-suited arms clinging to the opening from the outside. His audio sensors caught Katya’s scream as she lost her grip and fell. Shifting optics again, he saw her hit the ground next to the Warlord’s left foot, then bounce and slide down the ridge until she came to rest on a pile of loose gravel and snow ten meters below the Warlord’s position.

  She was still alive, trying to sit up, cradling her right thigh and rocking side to side in pain. Damn! He couldn’t leave her, but if he stayed put much longer, the images he’d been recording for the past minutes would be melted down with the rest of the combat debris on the ridge crest, just as soon as the Xenos worked their way up the slope.

  Dev checked again for one of the circling Storm winds, but the smoke and steam from the tunnel eruption were still too thick to even let him glimpse the ascraft, much less tag them with a communications laser.

  He had only one real choice. He couldn’t leave Katya to the Xenos, but he couldn’t risk losing the recording either. Carefully he folded the Warlord’s legs, lowering the fuselage once again to within a couple of meters of the ground.

  “AI,” he thought, concentrating. “Robot mode. Receive programming.”

  “Blade ready to accept programming,’’ the AI’s voice replied.

  He considered firing an AND round to shield himself and Katya from the nano count outside, but decided that the detonation would almost certainly alert the nearby Xeno machines. He’d have to trust in speed… and the last few shots in his hand-held AND dispenser.

  Dev gave the computer its instructions, received an acknowledgment, then disconnected from the link. In a way, Dev had just transformed the Warlord into a rather simple-minded robot. He’d ordered the Warlord to continue to scan for any of the circling ascraft, to initiate a lasercom link when atmospheric conditions permitted, and to transmit all of the recorded imagery in the Warlord’s RAM as soon as that link was open. If the Warlord was attacked, it would be able to fire back with the hivel cannon, which had been slaved to the AI.

  But those simple-minded orders, with no room for interpretation, would leave it easy prey to an attacking Alpha, especially since Dev had also ordered it to remain in place.

  Sensation returned to Dev’s body, and he pulled his left hand from the contact pad. The interior of the pilot’s module was stuffy and hot, the padding around him slick with condensation. He unhooked harness, helmet jacks, and life support, checked his combat armor PLSS and glove seals, then cracked his access hatch with a squeal-whoosh of equalizing pressures. A ladder was stowed in an external compartment below his hatch. He extended and locked it, swung out of his compartment, and clambered down to the ground.

  Dev was scared as his boots crunched again on bare gravel. Leaving the safety of the Warlord was one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do in his life. He could feel his heart hammering beneath his sternum, and his mouth had gone vacuum-dry. From behind the tumbledown of the RoPro wall, he had an excellent and unobstructed view down the slope and into the steaming pit.

  With an almost morbid fascination, he found himself rooted to the spot, staring into the pit. Something new was emerging from the tunnel mouth, something unlike anything he’d seen before. It looked like a pearl, a glistening silver-white sphere half a meter across, rising from the pool of tar at the crater’s center. Other pearls followed the first, more and more of them. They hung in the air, supported, Dev supposed, by some sort of magnetic field. Hovering anywhere from just above the uppermost wisps of fog to fifteen meters in the air, they dispersed in every direction, drifting slowly, traveling in straight lines that took them through the new-grown crystalline architecture as though according to some complex plan. One by one, like soap bubbles, the spheres sank to the ground and vanished. Since he no longer had access to the strider’s telescopic optics or AI enhancement, Dev could see no details, but it looked like the top of each sphere simply vanished, while the bottoms came to rest on the ground.

  Tearing his gaze away, he leaped across the wall and scrambled down the gravel slope to Alessandro’s side, rocks and loose sand scattering in a tiny avalanche. “Captain!” he yelled, not sure if her helmet radio was tuned to the tactical frequency. “Captain Alessandro! Can you hear me?”

  Her eyes opened behind her visor, showing both recognition and a sharp edge of pain. “My God, what are you doing here?”

  It was like an accusation. “Never mind that.” His voice cracked from the fear-dryness, and from relief. “Let’s get you back aboard the Blade. Where’s your AND?”

  “Lost it.” An arm gestured weakly down the slope. “When I fell.”

  Glancing down the slope, Dev saw movement there. The deadly fog was creeping slowly up the ridge, and shapes, small and slithery shapes, moved there, half-visible in the gloom.

  “Medikit
?”

  Katya grimaced. “I think I landed on it. Felt it smash. But I still have this.” She patted the holstered lasgun with something like affection. “They won’t get me alive, anyway. …”

  “That’s enough of that kind of talk, Captain. We’re going to get you out of here.”

  Dev already had his AND dispenser out. Alessandro’s skintight was dusted with patches of silver, like a fine, metallic flour, sticking to her shoulders and wrists and against the swell of her left breast. Nano-Ds adrift in the air were gathering in patches large enough to see. Her suit would be holed in seconds.

  He sprayed the parts of her body he could reach thoroughly, but he had to coax the last few squirts from a near-empty canister. Unless there were more counter-nano applicators stored aboard the strider, he’d just used the last there was. Discarding the empty can, he knelt beside her. He could see the kink in her leg where it had broken. There was already quite a bit of swelling.

  “How bad does it hurt?”

  A grimace was her answer. She would be working on an anodyne block through her implant, but she wouldn’t be able to hold it for long.

  A wet clink nearby, metal on rock, convinced him there was no time to attach a splint. He had to move her now. Pulling his own medapplicator from his pouch, he slapped it against her thigh above the break, firing a stream of medical nano into her leg. It was strictly rough-and-ready field first aid, designed to prevent further damage, stop bleeding, and, most important if he was going to carry her back up that hill, help anesthetize the break.