Warstrider

by William H. Keith

  Although Darwin’s researchers were still working on understanding the DalRiss time scales, it appeared that ShraRish had been reworked in GhegnuRish’s image nearly twenty thousand years ago. The DalRiss had been living on both worlds ever since.

  Until recently.

  According to the DalRiss emissaries, an enemy had appeared on GhegnuRish perhaps two centuries before, an enemy unlike anything ever encountered. They rose from solid ground in devices that could be sensed only by heat and sonar. Sometimes the enemy could be sensed directly, but vaguely, distantly, almost as though the life force was somehow diluted. Usually they remained undetectable behind walls of dead metal. The DalRiss called them Gharku—the Chaos.

  The DalRiss had fought back, creating an arsenal of living weapons, creatures that sounded like heavily armored dinosaurs, living warstriders. But what the Chaos touched, it destroyed. The DalRiss of ShraRish had lost contact with the homeworld nearly fifty years before.

  And now the enemy had appeared on ShraRish.

  For centuries, the DalRiss had been aware of radiations coming from a certain part of the sky. They’d long been able to detect radio through living receivers—Dev thought of the Maias and their natural-occurring radio—and determined that the source must be a civilization spanning many stars so distant that the radio signals themselves had traveled over a century to reach GhegnuRish. At the time, the discovery had been hailed as one of the most incredible of DalRiss history. Life, as certain Riss philosophies had suggested, truly was universal!

  But contacting that life directly seemed out of the question.

  Then the Xenophobes had appeared, and contacting this other civilization became a matter of life or death. This civilization, it was argued, might know of the Xenophobes. Certainly their radio network appeared to indicate that they spanned many suns, while the DalRiss occupied the worlds of only two.

  A special ship was grown, one employing a new theory of travel. Special creatures were evolved, semiintelligent forms called Achievers that could open space by force of mind, allowing travel from point to point simply by envisioning it.

  As with nanotechnology, the DalRiss had achieved the same ends as had humans, but by totally different methods. Their means of traveling faster than light sounded more like magic to Dev than like science.

  But it worked. The DalRiss ship had arrived at the star closest to the radio civilization that was also closest in mass and radiation to their own, home star.

  And there they’d met the occupants of the Altair Deep Space Research Facility.

  Five months later, Interstellar Expeditionary Force One had departed for ShraRish. Allies now in the fight against the Chaos, neither humans nor DalRiss knew where that alliance would lead.

  But for the first time, there was hope of understanding that enemy, of knowing it as it had never been known before.

  Chapter 25

  It was a completely serendipitous event. If we’d not had the facility at Altair, a station, incidentally, devoted to pure research, we should in all probability never have encountered the DalRiss. After all, they had no way of knowing that we were native to the worlds of far milder suns.

  —Dr. Paul Hernandez

  Hearings on the DalRiss,

  Terran Hegemony Space Council,

  C.E. 2542

  Four months later, IEF-1 dropped out of the godsea for the final fourspace leg of the voyage. For three days more the ships fell through space toward their destination, bathed in the arc-bright light of Alya A. ShraRish appeared first as a pinpoint of light almost lost in the star’s fierce glare, but day by day it swelled from pinpoint to crescent, attended by a pair of mediocre moons.

  Excitement aboard the troopship ran so high that heat, crowding, and discomfort all were forgotten. Most Thorhammer personnel had all but lost interest in the DalRiss during the grueling voyage out, but now that their destination was in sight, they again spent much of their allotted RJ time linked with Yuduki’s AI, gazing at the spectacle unfolding before them. Alya A was a tiny, dazzling disk nineteen times brighter than Sol, set like a jewel in a soft haze of zodiacal light. Alya B was a pinpoint beacon against the far stars, more brilliant than Venus at its brightest in Earth’s night sky.

  The Inglic-speakers had long since given up on the DalRiss transliterations of the two suns’ names. They were simply Alya A and Alya B, names quickly shortened by familiarity to the letters alone. The worlds of ShraRish and GhegnuRish became, respectively, “the DalRiss colony” and the “DalRiss homeworld” or, simpler still, “A-VI” and “B-V,” and the DalRiss themselves were often called Aryans… or Aliens, picking up on the coincidental Inglic pun.

  Then for two days all RJ privileges were suspended and the Thorhammers were ordered to remain strapped in their bunks. The spin modules, no longer rotating, unfolded like the petals of a flower so that “down” remained “down” as the ship decelerated stern-first toward the destination at nearly two gravities. Men and women rose only to eat or use the toilets, moving carefully where a fall could break bones.

  When deceleration ceased and spin gravity resumed, they were allowed to link for outside views again. The red-gold-violet-white glory of a world turned beneath them. They were in orbit.

  ShraRish looked nothing like Earth or Loki. The local equivalent of plants utilized a complex sulfur compound to turn radiant energy into stored energy; instead of the familiar chlorophyll hues of Earth, the colors ranged from pale orange to deep red-brown. There were oceans, but they gleamed purple in the light of Alya A instead of blue, and reports from sampling probes sent down as scouts indicated that the seawater was mixed with sulfides as well as salt and included dilute solutions of carbonic and sulfuric acids. Over the night hemisphere, the polar areas shone forth with the shifting, ghostly dance of auroras, driven by solar radiations far more energetic than Sol’s. The flash and spark of meteors was common as well, more common than the throb of lightning beneath aurora-lit night clouds; this was a young system, and a lot of dust and debris remained in the ecliptic. The impression was of a raw, new world still in the making and not yet tamed by the red-pigmented life that had taken hold of its surface from pole to iceless pole.

  “Actually, we could survive on the surface of A-Six without a lot of protective gear,” Dr. Phillip DuChamp’s image said. He was a tall, lanky, blond man, one of the planetary scientists off the Darwin, and his ViRpersonality had been programmed as guide for the men and women who linked with Yuduki’s AI to explore the new world turning below the orbiting troopship’s keel. “It’s hotter than we normally like it, forty to fifty degrees on the average, and we’d need oxygen masks in order to breathe, and goggles of some sort to protect our eyes from the ultraviolet. But don’t let anybody scare you about getting burned by all that acid. Swimming in the oceans would be a bad idea, but the actual concentration of corrosives in the atmosphere is quite low, less than a few parts per million. It wouldn’t do your lungs any good… but I doubt that you’d even notice it on your bare skin.”

  “I think I’ll stick with an environmental suit just the same,” Sergeant Wilkins said over the link circuit.

  “Yeah,” Erica Jacobsen added. “Or a warstrider!”

  “Will there be a problem with the striders?” Katya wanted to know. “Corrosion eating the hull, fouling circuits, that sort of thing?”

  “Your ship factories ought to be cooking up nanofilms that will take care of that, Captain. Over a period of time, and without nanofilms to counteract the acid, yes, the environment could be pretty rough on machinery. That may be one reason why the DalRiss haven’t done any building with, oh, steel, say. Ever hear the term ‘acid rain’?”

  “No, sir.”

  “One of the by-products of large-scale industrialism before the nanotechnic revolution. The rainwater on A-VI is acidic enough to dissolve zinc or tin over a period of months. On old Earth it was a man-made problem. Here, though, it’s natural. Sulfur and sulfur products—like H2SO4—are part of the life cycle.”
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  “You mean life here is sulfur-based instead of carbon-based?” Rudi Carlsson wanted to know.

  “No, it’s carbon chemistry, like us. From the little we’ve learned so far, sulfur seems to play the same role in DalRissian biology that phosphorous plays in ours. I say ‘seems.’ The nucleic acids that make up our DNA are phosphates, but we don’t bathe in the stuff the way the DalRiss bathe in sulfuric acid.” DuChamp’s image shrugged. “This is a whole new twist to carbon chemistry. We still have an awful lot to learn.

  “In any case, the environment, though strange, shouldn’t pose any special problems for you. Your machinery will corrode over a period of time, but then, wind-blown sand didn’t do it that much good on Loki.”

  Dev caught Katya’s sardonic murmur. “You got that right.”

  “On the whole, atmospheric conditions on ShraRish are mild compared to Loki. I imagine a suit breach was a rather serious event in Loki’s atmosphere, with such a high concentration of ammonia.”

  Mental chuckles rippled through the audience, edged by dark, soldier’s humor. Dev remembered the bite of ammonia when his own suit had been breached. A rather serious event? Yeah, you could say that. …

  “If your suit is breached here,” DuChamp said, pressing ahead, “the atmosphere CO2 level is high enough to poison you, but the air won’t burn your lungs the way Loki’s atmosphere would. Air pressure at the surface is actually a bit below one bar. Keep your oxygen-nitrogen mix flowing in your helmet and you’ll be okay until you can get to safety.”

  DuChamp paused, a lecturer surveying his class. “That concludes my discussion on DalRissian surface conditions,” he said. “Are there questions?”

  “How much longer are we going to have for precombat?” Dev asked.

  The invisible audience chuckled again. For five days now they’d been in orbit, waiting as negotiations proceeded between members of the expedition’s command staff and the DalRiss. Either no one in the military chain of command knew how much longer the negotiations might last, or they were unwilling to speculate.

  By asking Dr. DuChamp’s AI personality, Dev was trying to bypass the command staff and get some useful information from another source. There might be rumors among the science staff, for instance, that had not filtered across to the troopships yet. Even if he wasn’t supposed to talk about it, he might make a slip. AIs often failed to recognize the significance of seemingly unimportant tidbits of information; one of the few things that separated human minds from AIs was the human ability to jump to conclusions—sometimes accurately—from some seemingly unrelated bit of data.

  But DuChamp’s AI image only smiled. “I’m afraid your guess is as good as mine, Lieutenant. The situation down there sounds pretty fluid. It may take a while to assess just where your troops and striders could do the most good.”

  Which was no fuzzier an answer than Dev had expected. From what he and the rest of the regiment had heard so far, IEF leadership was still divided over what they were going to do. Hell, there were rumors that Aiko and Howard had come to blows over the question, though Dev doubted that either the reserved John Howard or the imperturbable Kazuo Aiko could get that excited.

  But the split between Imperial and Hegemony units was definitely a problem; Admiral Yamagata, insisting that the fleet represented the Emperor, had publicly suggested that the Hegemony gaijin remain in orbit. Their presence could upset the delicate diplomacy necessary to establishing relations with a new, starfaring species. His personal troops, the black-armored Imperial Guard, were better-disciplined, less likely to disrupt the negotiations.

  General Howard and the other senior Hegemony staff officers, naturally enough, objected. They had not tagged along with the Japanese across 115 light years simply to remain in orbital reserve, and the consensus among the non-Nihonjin of the IEF was that Yamagata was trying to grab the benefits of DalRiss contact for Japan’s Empire.

  It was two more shipboard days before the waiting ended.

  There’d been a sharp skirmish between Imperial troops and the mysterious enemy the Translators called the Chaos. It confirmed what everyone in the regiment had assumed ever since they’d first heard the name. The Chaos and the Xenophobes were the same. They’d appeared on ShraRish two standard years before, with different forms and different weapons than they’d used on the worlds of the Shichiju, but there was no doubt about the identification. Three Guards striders, two Tachis and a big Katana, had been lost in the skirmish, and an attempt to use a penetrator nuke had been botched. Though the reports from Aiko’s HQ had claimed a victory, it looked as if the landing party had been lucky to get off as lightly as that.

  The who-was spread through the Thorhammer modules at light speed. It would be a combat drop; they’d be going in to clear out Xeno surface structures, then plant penetrators where they would do the most good.

  When the word came down officially through the ship’s speakers, less than ten minutes after the rumors had begun circulating, the Assassins in A Module broke into ringing cheers. Dev cheered with them, then laughed when one of the Commandos observed that anything was better than dying of boredom in orbit.

  After that, they were too busy to cheer. Final checks were run on each strider, and the big assault shuttles were prepped and given their final assessment: go, up-gripe, or down-gripe. Weapons were unpacked, stripped, cleaned, and reassembled in grim ritual. Power packs were charged, environmental systems tested, AIs queried and shunted into self-diagnostic routines.

  Forty hours after the alert, a final mission briefing was held, a ViRconference of Platoon and Company COs and the Regimental command staff.

  Dev was invited as well, somewhat to his surprise. Though he was not a platoon leader, his CAG ideas had received some attention at the higher echelons, thanks largely to Katya’s intervention. The decision had been made to let the Commandos drop with the Thorhammers, tasking them with a special mission. Dev linked in with the meeting, said nothing, and took mental notes. This would be his opportunity to show what properly supported infantry could do.

  The briefing was conducted by Major Gennani, the senior regimental intelligence officer. After laying out the planned deployment of the Thorhammers at a place the cartographers had dubbed Regio Aurorae, Gennani described what was expected of Cameron’s Commandos.

  Mindful of the benefits of the Xeno technology captured at Norway Ridge, the Commandos would enter the target area after it was secured by strider assault, searching for anything that the IEF’s intelligence people might be able to use. Of special interest were the “greaseballs,” the gray, sluglike organics that had been observed emerging from the ground in travel spheres.

  Current thinking was that these were the Xenophobes themselves, though how they could manipulate technology like stalkers and Xenozombies was still not known. They seemed to be somehow intermingled with their technology, to the point where it was impossible to separate the two. Greaseballs had been discovered inside wrecked Xeno machines; they’d never been noticed before because they looked so much like lubricant or waste. Submicroscopic scans and N-tech probes had demonstrated that the greaseballs themselves were made of both organic and inorganic cells—part organism, part nanomachine. That seemed to explain their tolerance for a wide variety of environments—environments as mutually alien as Lung Chi, Loki, and ShraRish.

  For centuries, most humans had been cybernetic blendings of man and machine. The Xenophobes had carried that meld much further, so far, in fact, that they probably had little in common with the full-organic creatures they had once been.

  The DalRiss had never gotten close enough to the invaders to study the slugs. Xeno nano-Ds did nasty things to living tissue, no matter how well armored it was. With the Commandos’ help, though, that would change. DalRiss biologists, their Lifemasters, were already growing organisms to receive and duplicate living Xenophobe specimens, a first step toward learning how to communicate with them.

  The drop zone on ShraRish would be only a few kilometers from DalRis
s lines, and local forces would be available for support. The new meson imaging gear aboard the science ship Dirac had begun mapping the Xenos’ crustal lairs, and a large concentration of tunnels had been discovered close to the surface at Regio Aurorae.

  The meson scans suggested an explanation for why, after almost two years, the Xenos weren’t more widely established on ShraRish. Almost three billion years younger than Earth or Loki, with a thinner crust and a hotter interior, the planet was far more tectonically active than any world of the Shichiju. As the original infestation tunneled out from its first landing site, the SDTs must have been disrupted time after time by seismic quakes, slipping fault lines, and intrusions by pockets of magma. Now, according to the scanners, there were three main pockets of Xeno activity on the planet, and their expansion was still quite slow.

  Not that that could save the Alyans in the long run. According to the DalRiss themselves, GhegnuRish, with conditions almost identical to ShraRish, had been completely overrun, slowly but inevitably, within a few hundred years. The knowledge that the same would happen to ShraRish had prompted the desperate search that had ended at distant Altair.

  “Your force will be supported by A Company, Lieutenant,” Major Gennani told Dev after laying out the overall plan. “Do you anticipate any special problems?”

  “No, sir,” Dev replied. A three-D graphic of the planned battlefield revolved slowly before his inner vision, showing subterranean tunnel complexes and company deployment zones on the surface. “We’ll need enough airlift assets to get us off the ground fast, in case something goes wrong.”

  “Already arranged for. Three Stormwinds will be dedicated to your part of the assault. They’ll put you down, fly air support, and take you off again afterward. Anything else?”

  “Just the time for the assault, Major.”

  “Six hours,” Gennani replied. His image grinned at the others. “I think the general’s a bit anxious. Wants to show Aiko and Yamagata how it’s really done.”