Warstrider: The Ten Billion Gods of Heaven (Warstrider Series, Book 7)

by Ian Douglas

  And only when Japanese mechanized warriors learned to overcome their inhibitions and fully embrace the alien technology would they have a chance against the gaijin.

  It was a matter of military necessity. And, more, one of survival.

  * * *

  Vaughn fired his warstrider's main jets, a sharp, jolting burst that got him moving fast enough that his diamagnetics could react smoothly with the planet's magnetic field. His strider made the transition from walker to ascraft smoothly, unfolding itself as it left the ground, growing wings and taking on a sleeker, more streamlined shape. Swerving from side to side to throw off enemy targeting AIs, his Gyrfalcon shrieked as it plowed through the heavy air. The other five Black Griffins followed, an echelon formation rising as it emerged from the constriction of the cities outlaying streets. White fire slashed down from the cliff tops ahead… but not as thick, not as deadly as Vaughn had been expecting.

  Corporal Laris Palmer, Green Four, loosed a trio of missiles. They swooped high, then veered toward the enemy fortress… then vanished in a swift one-two-three as enemy counter-missile fire burned them down.

  "Hold your fire, Green Four!" Vaughn snapped. "Put your PDLs on auto, but can the offensive stuff!"

  Point Defense Lasers were generally automatic in any case. Human reflexes simply weren't fast enough to target something as small, fast, and maneuverable as an incoming missile at close range and knock it down.

  The squadron descended once more, dropping to NOE flight—nape of the Earth—and moving so quickly that they kicked up towering clouds of red-gold dust. If they didn't see us before… Vaughn thought, but then his full concentration was engaged by something else, something new appearing along the main deck parapets of the grounded fortress.

  The mobile fortress was massive, over half a kilometer on a side and almost two hundred meters high, with towers twice that in height at each corner mounting dozens of high-energy weapons. The idea behind them was to create a strongpoint, either for the defense of a planet, or as a firebase that could be placed as a part of a siege, as here. Massing hundreds of thousands of tons in a one-G field, it couldn't move fast… but its power tap generators could induce diamagnetic fields strong enough to lift it clear of the surface and slowly drag it from one position to another—hence the term semimobile fortress. The things were big enough to engage capital ships in orbit. Their key weakness, strangely enough, was their vulnerability to individual troops in armored suits, like warstriders, troops who could get in so close that the fort's weapons couldn't be turned on them. Their main defense against close assault was to maintain their own on-board defensive garrisons of armored personnel.

  Which was exactly what he could see now as his sensors picked up and highlighted movement along the structure's upper deck. Warstriders were emerging there from below. Several carried banners with the Hojo mon.

  "I don't recognize those striders, Sosh," Hallman called. "What the hell are those things?"

  "Warbook says they're an unknown design," Wheeler reported. "Something we haven't seen before.…"

  "Kuso!" Newburg added. "More bad news! Those things are hull-morphing!"

  By zooming in on the image of one of the enemy striders, Vaughn could see a portion of the machine's black armor deforming, like clay, could see it flowing from the aft portion of the war machine to the front, thickening the forward hull. Long-barreled weapons emerged from the black material… probably railguns. They looked a lot like Gyrfalcons, in fact… but with more heavy weapons. They might be Taifus… but not with that living Naga-matrix.

  Green Flight, what was left of it, was well into the open now, skimming a couple of meters above the ground in broad, sweeping turns as the land began to rise. Vaughn led them into a wide patch of woods, thick with the fuzzy orange growths that filled the ecological niche occupied by trees back on Earth. The canopy gave a precious few moments of welcome cover, but then the striders emerged on the other side, twisting into sharp, almost vertical climbs to race up the sheer face of the cliff.

  The good news was that the enemy couldn't hit them here, at least not with the heavy weapons of the fort. The Hoshikumiai warstriders, however, were launching themselves from the parapets and going ascraft. As they banked and turned, maneuvering to attack the rebel forces, they had Green Flight pinned against the face of the cliff.

  Three missiles slammed into Newberg's strider, the detonations flashing in a rapid-fire triplet each as brilliant as the sun and strewing flaming wreckage up and out across the rocks.

  "Damn it!" Palmer cried. "Why didn't his PDLs work?"

  "Too close!" Vaughn replied. "They're too close! C'mon… we need to mix it up with these people. Break on my mark… three… two… one… break!"

  The four surviving Gyrfalcons of Green Flight arced back and away from the cliff, passing through the flight of Japanese ascraft-mode striders behind them. Vaughn's strider AI handled the flight controls; no human brain could react quickly enough to fly the warcraft that close to a cliff and anticipate enemy flier movements and weapon releases. The pilot could only shape general commands through the machine interface, a series of unvoiced mental nudges to go there or shoot that.

  An enemy war flier filled his forward view, a flattened wedge shape with a rough and uneven surface so black it made human eyes water when they tried to track it. At a range of scant meters, Vaughn and his AI together triggered both of the strider's charged particle weapons, sending a searing bolt of protons along a magnetic beam to slam into the Hojo craft's belly.

  His shot, he decided, must have holed the enemy machine's meta tanks. The exotic fuel was stable only at extremely low cryogenic temperatures, and any breach of the heavily shielded containment fields resulted in the instant release of energy—a very great deal of energy. The air-space craft disintegrated in white flame and a heavy thump of concussion; Vaughn flew through the fireball, twisting up hard to avoid crashing headlong into the cliff.

  "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 deployed 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 rabb
le 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.