Warstrider

by William H. Keith

  There must have been several hundred of them within the broken sphere. As soon as they were free, each began fanning out across the uneven ground with wet, pulsing movements of their bodies, half returning to the fog, the other half making their way across the rocks along geometrically perfect straight lines.

  Aiko stooped, looking close. “They are connected.”

  “That’s right. The detail at this range from the strider isn’t sharp enough for us to be sure what’s happening, but it looks like each slug is physically connected to those nearest to it by a slender strand.”

  “Are they separate creatures then?” Takahashi wanted to know. “Or a single organism?”

  “Our bio people are still arguing that one.” He nudged the empty shell again. “But this is what we found that was important.”

  Howard fed a command through his link to the AI controlling the simulation, and the landscape changed. The alien structures around the crater rim were more numerous now, competing with one another in jerky, angular thrusts into the lead gray sky. There were many more silvery hemispheres scattered about on the ground now. Some had the curiously melted look of objects being dissolved by nano disassemblers, but others were fresh and new. Spheres continued to rise from the crater floor like bubbles in an effervescent drink. The warstrider on the ridge was gone, but a dozen human ascraft circled the area at the very limits of visibility. An explosion thumped at the top of the ridge… then something streamed fire into the midst of the crater architecture and detonated with a shattering roar.

  “This is four hours later,” Howard said, raising his voice to be heard above the bombardment. “As soon as we saw what we had in the recording from Cameron’s strider, we put together a special assault team. We’re looking at a sim based on recordings made by a Stormwind in the area.”

  Shapes appeared along the ridge, the squat, deadly shapes of Hegemony warstriders. Answering shapes emerged from the crater, the dragonish uncoiling of a King Cobra, the spine-bristling threat of a combat mode Fer-de-Lance. Battle was joined. A plasma blast sheared whiplashing tentacles from the side of a drifting Copperhead, was answered by the rapid-fire thud-thud-thud of Xeno nano-D rounds hurled at the ridge. Drifting smoke obscured the battlefield.

  Out of the haze, three armored, manlike shapes emerged, shepherded by a larger form. The shepherd was an LaG-42 Ghostrider. The humanoid forms were single-slot Scoutstriders, with arms instead of paired weapons pods.

  The Ghostrider took a covering position, blazing away into the smoke cover with missiles and laser. The Scoutstriders moved down the slope toward the empty hemispheres. Howard could hear the hollow fire-extinguisher shoosh as nano-countermeasures were sprayed over the area, the whine of servomotors as the recon striders stooped, grasped the Xeno artifacts in durasheathed hands, and picked them up.

  “One of them didn’t reach the recovery point,” Howard explained as the warstriders began lugging their trophies back up the ridge. “Countermeasures failed. The other two spheres were brought back to a special containment area outside of Midgard. We’ve been picking them apart almost atom by atom since.”

  The battlefield faded from view as Howard broke the linkage. The three men floated again in Aiko’s office in Asgard.

  “As a result,” he continued, “we now have the molecular pattern of a Xeno magfield projector. We know how they perform their little trick of moving through rock, and we’re beginning to understand how they can manipulate the planet’s magnetic field to float above the ground. We’re programming construction nano to build replicas, as many as we need.”

  “To what purpose?” Takahashi, his pudgy legs still lotus-folded, was rotating slowly in the center of the room. Somehow his mass and the eye-grabbing details of his personal ornamentation tended to support the illusion that the Daihyo was stationary, and that Howard, Aiko, and the room all were rotating around him.

  Howard fixed his eyes on Aiko, shifting again to Inglic. “We can duplicate their trick of sending payloads through solid rock.”

  “So?”

  “Don’t you see? We could create nuclear depth charges!”

  Takahashi looked blank.

  “Depth charges,” Howard repeated. “Bombs that would sink into the ground and detonate at a preset depth!”

  “Interesting idea, though I fail to see how such a weapon could be effective,” Takahashi said. He shook his head, jowls wobbling in the zero-g. “In any case, I doubt that it would be feasible politically. There are not enough qualified Imperial officers at Asgard to supervise the deployment of so many nuclear warheads. Perhaps in time, with reinforcements from Earth, something could be worked out. …”

  Howard released the handline, spreading his arms. “Admiral-san, we need your help. The Empire’s help. Look, the people on Loki don’t give a damn for the politics of the Empire and Hegemony. What we do know is that every time the Xenos stick their noses above ground, outposts disappear, mining facilities are destroyed, cities are smashed, and our people die. The Xenos are pushing us off the planet, and so far the Empire hasn’t been giving us a rat’s ass worth of real help!

  “Well, now we have a way to fight back. Stop them cold and win back our world. We can’t wait for things to thread their way through eighteen light-years of red tape to Earth and back.” His eyes flicked to Takahashi, then back to Aiko. “The Xenos are as dangerous to Earth as they are to us. We could stop them for you, right here, right now, before they get anywhere near Earth. Isn’t that worth something? A little help with the red tape, maybe? Or do we get nothing from the Emperor but promises and platitudes?”

  He stopped, breathing hard. He’d gone over the diplomatic line with that little speech, he knew, but found he didn’t care anymore. Fighting with the Imperial bureaucracy could be like arguing with a Lokan methane storm: lots of noise, fury, and confusion, with little accomplished.

  Perhaps, though, if he made enough noise…

  Aiko was silent for a long moment, and Howard wondered if he had, indeed, gone too far. Simply by questioning the bureaucracy’s efficiency, he could have just ended his career. The Hegemony governor would hire or fire anyone in his command whom the Imperials told him to, including the commander-in-chief of the local armed forces.

  “Tell me,” Aiko said at last, “about depth charges that sink through solid rock.”

  Enthusiastically, Howard began outlining the idea.

  Chapter 20

  Decorations are for the purpose of raising the fighting value of troops; therefore they must be awarded promptly.

  —Letter of Instruction

  General George S. Patton, Jr.

  mid-twentieth century

  Tristankuppel was alive with the color and excitement of military pomp and ceremony. Tons of sand had been carted in from outside and RoProed into an elegantly curved and sunburst-graven reviewing stand set squarely in front of Scandia Hall. Bleachers had been grown to either side, forming silver wings that flanked stage and podium and masked the base’s drab fabricrete barracks, classrooms, and equipment warehouses. Gayly colored banners representing each of Midgard’s forty-one domes plus most of the outlying settlements hung from invisible struts crisscrossing the underside of the transplas sky.

  As a very special touch, Asgard’s lasers had gently nudged Loki’s weather patterns the day before, creating a high-pressure zone that put all of the Midgard Plateau under a rare break in the perpetual cloud cover. Dagstjerne, Loki’s orange Daystar set in a clear green sky, touched the dome’s transplas with liquid ruby and bathed the parade ground in warm sunset colors.

  The grinder had been kept clear, save for three ranks of warstriders, the First, Second, and Third Platoons of the Thorhammers’ A Company, walked in through a specially grown airlock the evening before. Recoated with nano armor films in the Thorhammers’ blue and white colors, they gleamed in the sunlight like brand-new machines. Only someone who knew combat striders and had a sharp eye could pick out the missing weapons or armor plates or sensor clusters tha
t showed these machines had been in heavy fighting only days before.

  Dev stood just inside a gold-decorated archway opening onto the parade ground. The ceremony was due to start in another few minutes, and the area inside the archway was crowded with the men and women of the Loki Fifth as they began to form up ranks for the processional march. Outside, the bleachers were nearly filled by those Midgarders with money or political rank or social pull enough to attend. Dev had heard that a fair-sized contingent from Asgard had descended Bifrost the day before. They would be in the special review stand seats, out of sight from his vantage point in the seats behind the speaker’s podium.

  He tugged at his collar with a forefinger. This was the first time he’d worn full dress army grays, and he was finding them damned uncomfortable despite the tailor-programmed fit. The crisply fashioned two-toned uniform had been fresh-grown in the base nanovats just that morning, and still it felt stiff, especially around the rigid collar. He didn’t mind the formal discomfort in the least, though. His shoulder boards and collar both bore the thick gold stripe and single cherry blossom insignia of sho-i, sublieutenant.

  Strangest of all, though, was his being accepted once again into the Fifth Loki Warstriders.

  He checked his internal clock. Eight minutes to go. Yeah, no static. He could hold on another eight minutes. Outside, a crash of music announced the beginning of the festivities. The crowd cheered, creating the atmosphere of some mammoth sporting event.

  Wryly, Dev shook his head. All this fuss. Victories against the Xenos were rare enough, so the Battle of Norway Ridge, as it was now being called, certainly deserved a celebration. The who-was, though, hinted at some sort of breakthrough, possibly a new discovery or weapon of some kind. Nobody knew any details, though, save that some mighty high-powered brass was coming down from Asgard for the awards ceremony today.

  “Hello, Lieutenant.”

  Startled, he turned, still not used to the honorific that went with his new rank. Katya Alessandro stood there, slim and attractive in the female version of Hegemony dress grays, with a rack of medals and campaign ribbons above her left breast that made him do a double take. Above a rainbow collection of campaign ribbons and unit citations, she wore a silver star, three combat drop badges, a blood bar with one cluster… and the Yukan no Kisho, the Imperial Medal of Valor, fourth dan. His eyes widened. He’d not realized she carried that much show metal.

  But then, he’d never seen her in full dress before. He saluted. “Good morning, Captain. You have this habit of sneaking up behind me.”

  “Stealth, Lieutenant. The secret of strider warfare. How are you feeling?”

  He grimaced. “Sore. They’ve got me on the new exercise program. And the brace is hurting my legs worse than that damned Gamma. They say it’s coming off tomorrow. I don’t know if they mean the brace or one of my legs.”

  She laughed. Strange, he thought, how shared black humor could acknowledge yujo, the warriors’ bond. He felt comfortable with Katya, despite the difference in rank and experience.

  “So what do you think about all this?” The tilt of her head took in the arch and the stadium beyond, with its screaming thousands.

  “Am I supposed to think something?”

  “Well, it is in your honor, Dev. Your little exploit on Norway Ridge created quite a stir. Or hadn’t you noticed?”

  “I guess I did. I’m still trying to figure out why.”

  “Stop thinking. Give me your ’face.” He held out his palm, and she touched it with her own. Data passed from her RAM to his, a trickle of words and numbers. A place, a restaurant in Towerdown, and a time, that evening. “We’re having a party. Be there.”

  “Why me?”

  She grinned. “Because you’re the guest of honor, newbie.”

  “Is that an order?”

  “If it has to be.”

  “I’ll be there,” he said. “Hey, I hear you’re getting some more show metal today to add to your collection. Congratulations.”

  She made a sour expression. “That and a sen-en will buy me lunch in Midgard.”

  “No big deal, eh?”

  “Hey, I didn’t mean to put yours down, Lieutenant. You did pretty good, first time up.”

  First time up. It was as though she’d forgotten his first ignominious experience under fire. Or was she telling him his first time didn’t count?

  He was about to ask, but her head cocked into a listening position. “They’re calling me,” she said. “Time to odie. Good luck, Lieutenant.”

  His own call came moments later, the official-sounding voice of the Ceremonies Master in his mind, relayed through the tiny radio/cephlink transceiver plugged into his right T-socket. He found his place in the waiting ranks of First Platoon, a solid block of men and women in two-toned grays, with full-dress epaulets and medals. A simulated band was blaring out the opening bars of “Earth’s Hegemony” outside.

  “Regiment, stand by!” the voice in his head called. “Ready… ten-hut! With the music, and left!… and left!… and left!…”

  Dev had seen little use for drill during Basic, but he had to admit there was a martial thrill to the spectacle of over nine hundred men and women marching through the archway and into the center of that vast, circular coliseum. Perhaps it was nothing but showmanship, but for perhaps the first time since he’d volunteered for Hegemony service, he felt himself to be a part of something meaningful. Sho-i Devis Cameron might be a very small part of a vast and impersonal organization, but he did have a place, a slot that he’d made his own.

  He belonged.

  The Ceremonies Master continued to call cadence for the regimental formation as it turned onto the field and marched in review past a raised, temporary platform filled with the dignitaries and military brass. “Eyes right,” the CM called, and Dev had the opportunity to see them.

  Most impressive of the visitors were the hundred men of Third Company, First Battalion of the Fifteenth Imperial Assault Guard, the Zugaikotsu regiment, dazzling in the full dress black and silver armor of the marines. Part of the Imperial garrison on Asgard, the 1/15 was arrayed in front of the review stand, blast rifles held at present arms. It was impossible to look at those spotless martial ranks and think of them as crunchies.

  Behind them, on the stand itself… damn, it looked like half of the Asgard brass was present. Above and behind the stand, an enormous repeater screen had been raised, thirty meters tall and ten wide. At the moment it showed the regiment as it passed in review, endless blocks of marching color: officers in two-toned grays, technicians in green, ordnancemen in red, ascraft pilots in dark blue, enlisted troops in khaki or in dress black armor.

  The men on the reviewing stand were divided about half and half, Japanese and gaijin. Shosa Fisher and Shorn Rassmussen, the HEMILCOM Training Command CO, were both there. A civilian, Piotr Klasst, the Hegemony governor on Loki, was present as well, a small, squat, self-important man in a purple jumpsuit and gold sash.

  But Dev almost missed a step when he saw the man in Imperial black and gold standing at the podium, none other than Shosho Aiko himself, the commander of Asgard’s Nihonjin contingent.

  Aiko! He was making the presentation? The last time Dev had seen him, the man had been a captain, a member of the Imperial Staff. He’d been present at the ceremony when they’d awarded the Imperial Star to the newly commissioned Admiral Michal Cameron.

  Dev wondered. Did his father’s disgrace have something to do with Aiko being given a field command, eighteen light-years from the Imperial Palace? If so, it was astonishing that he’d agreed to preside at this particular ceremony. Behind Aiko was a ponderously fat civilian in nangineered feathers, scales, and inlays. Dev didn’t know who he was, but his adornment suggested that he was from the Imperial Court. The who-was was right. This was a high-powered ceremony.

  Marching rank by rank, the Thorhammers completed one turn about the stadium circuit, then took up their positions facing the review stand and the motionless line of Imperial Guardsm
en. They numbered, all told, nearly nine hundred men and women, about sixty percent of their officially listed strength. From other archways around the stadium, troops from other units marched to their assigned places, techies and ordies by the hundreds, line infantry in newly grown combat armor, cadet-trainees in yellow. Only the Thorhammers and the training companies were represented in full, but both the Odinspears and the Heimdal Guards had sent colorfully uniformed contingents, each behind a staff-carried banner.

  Music and marching ceased as Dev’s implant noted that the eight minutes were up. There was a moment’s silence, and then the band began playing the Imperial anthem. After that came the first of several speeches.

  Dev stood at attention, watching the Lokan Governor’s florid features on the giant repeater screen above the reviewing stand as the man talked about the utter necessity of pressing on, Empire and Hegemony, side by side until the job was done. Dev’s mind wasn’t on the speech, however. He was more interested in the data Katya had passed to him.

  Yes… he’d thought so. Besides the date and time for the party, there was a small, closed file, marked personal so that it could not be picked up by a data feed scan without his express permission. He hadn’t noticed it when she ’faced him the other information, but its presence had been subconsciously nagging at him.

  Curious, he opened it, and heard her voice in his mind.

  Dev, you’re not even supposed to know this, but I originally put you in for the Imperial Star. I hear the recommendation made it all the way up the sky-el to Aiko’s staff before the stiff-necked sheseiji finally squelched it.

  Well, I doubt the Star would’ve passed without more witnesses anyway. The thing to remember is that it’s the man who counts, not the show metal on his chest. Medals you can buy at any pawnshop on the Midgard Way; heroes, the genuine variety who don’t wear their bravery like a medal, are damned hard to find.