Warstrider

by William H. Keith

  “Just one more question, sir,” Victor Hagan, First Platoon’s CO, said. “That botched penetrator drop. Is anything more known about that?”

  “Just that the thing didn’t go off. We don’t know why.”

  “Could have been a timer malfunction,” Colonel Varney put in.

  “Or it could be something else,” Hagan said. “Back in the Shichiju, you know, the Xenos have a nasty habit of turning our own weapons against us. If they have an atomic warhead now…”

  He didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t need to. The meeting ended on a somber and reflective note.

  Chapter 26

  Humans long for order, for rationality, for logic. Yet with each step in our understanding of the universe, somehow the universe persists in defying us.

  —Hearings on the DalRiss

  Terran Hegemony Space Council

  Dr. Paul Hernandez

  C.E. 2542

  Katya found Dev in the spin module’s number three equipment bay, as the Commandos were boarding their ascraft. He was standing next to his RLN-90 Scoutstrider, going over last-second instructions with Sergeant Wilkins and Corporal Bayer. The sergeant had a Hitachi Arms subgun slung over her back and a bulky flamer cradled in her arms. Bayer’s plasma gun was folded in its steadimount, muzzle up. Above them, the ascraft crouched in the shadows like a huge, black insect.

  “I’ll want a fast dispersal,” Dev was saying as Katya approached, “fast and clean. Tell your people that if they trip coming out the door, there won’t be time to stop for them. We’re supposed to be hitting a cleared DZ, but—”

  “Don’t trust us to do our job, Lieutenant?” Katya asked as she joined the trio.

  Dev grinned at her. The self-confidence she saw there was reassuring. He’d gone through some major changes over the past few months. “Just taking Murphy’s Law into account, Captain. Anything that can go wrong—”

  “Will,” she finished for him. “I approve. Lieutenant, can I talk to you for a moment?”

  “We’re about finished here,” Dev said, looking at the others. “Any other questions? Okay. Get on board and check your people. I’ll link with you soon as I jack in.”

  Katya waited as the two leggers saluted, then turned and headed up the ramp into the ascraft’s brightly lit interior.

  “You wanted to see me, Captain?”

  She touched his arm lightly, and they started walking across the deck toward the line of First Platoon’s warstriders. The combat machines were moving, one after another, into the waiting ascraft, where men in bright orange armor attached the clamps and feeder lines that connected them with the ascraft’s systems. The equipment bay rang with the clatter of heavy equipment and metal striking metal. Technicians huddled over flaring torches as last-second repairs were made, and yellow-painted bugs scurried among the hulking striders and ascraft, carrying men, ammunition, and stores.

  Katya nearly had to shout to make herself heard above the racket. “I wanted to tell you to be careful down there. This has all the markings of a real, old-fashioned hema.” The word was another Inglic borrowing from Nihongo. It meant a bungled mess.

  “Anything I should know about?”

  “The Imperial-Hegemony politics are getting pretty bad. I gather Yamagata threatened to have General Howard relieved of command.”

  “That is bad. Who would replace him?”

  “Aiko.”

  “Bad timing. My people are already upset about Yamagata’s crack about us gaijin screwing up the diplomatic works. I don’t think they’d like working for the Japanese one bit.”

  “Agreed.” They reached Katya’s Warlord. Sergeant Reiderman, Katya’s crew chief, dropped off the access ladder next to them, wiped his hands on a rag tucked into his coveralls, then gave Katya a quick thumbs up. “She’s hot, Captain.”

  “Thanks, Red.” She turned again to Dev. “I guess I’m still not convinced you can count on the leg infantry,” she said.

  “I’m leg infantry,” Dev said. “And strider. We’ll get ’em what they need.”

  “Just so you get in fast and… get out safe. Promise me?”

  He gave her a wry wink. “Promise. Just so I have First Platoon to keep the bastards busy.”

  “That’s something I can promise you.” Leaning forward swiftly, she brushed his lips with hers, then turned and started pulling herself up the Warlord’s ladder, leaving him standing alone on the deck.

  As always, she had to steel herself to slide into that narrow, black crypt in the Warlord’s side. As soon as she’d jacked in, though, her crew welcomed her aboard. Sho-i Torolf Bondevik was in the pilot’s module, and Jun-i Muhammed al-Badr was handling the weapons.

  Engaging her external view, she picked out Dev Cameron’s tall frame as he climbed aboard the single-slotter RLN-90.

  Dev’s Destroyer. The name made her smile. She remembered when he named his new strider, declaring that at last he had command of a ship of his own. He never had asked for a retest, or a transfer to the navy.

  She still hadn’t sorted out her own feelings for the man. He was sensitive, fun to be with, and superb recreation. She suspected that her first attraction had been less sexual than it had been her penchant for picking up strays. He’d seemed so vulnerable. …

  Well, he wasn’t vulnerable now, and she still felt…

  Damn. As if she didn’t have enough on her mind right now with a company to run.

  “Status check,” she called.

  “Piloting systems green,” Bondevik reported. “We’re hooked into mother-bird and ready for drop.”

  “Weapons are safed and locked,” al-Badr added. “But all checked out and go.”

  “Eagle-Three, this is Hammer One,” she said, switching channels. “We’re ready for hookup.”

  “Come to Mama, Hammer One.” The ascraft was jacked by Sho-i Lena Obininova, a Russian national from Earth.

  Technicians guided the Warlord into position as the ascraft’s clamps descended and hooked on. Her view of the outside world was blocked off as power grippers slid a thin durasheath shell over the ascraft’s belly, sealing the loaded strider slots off in the darkness.

  Fear twisted in the back of Katya’s mind for a moment. Then she went on-line with Lieutenant Obininova, watching the bay through her electronic eyes. Easy, girl, she told herself. You’ve done this before. There’s no call to lose it before you even get clear of the transport!

  She thought of Dev’s easy grin, and that steadied her. Time dragged on, one long second after another. Eventually klaxons sounded and red lights flared, clearing the equipment bay of all personnel. Air was being bled from the deck into holding tanks, preparatory to drop. Finally there were only the strobing warning lights. The deck was in vacuum, rendering the klaxon voiceless.

  “Coming up on the drop point,” Obininova said. “Deck panels opening.”

  Silently in the hard vacuum, hinged panels beneath each of the waiting ascraft swung open. At first Katya saw only a giddily endless hole filled with wheeling stars. Then she was looking down at a mottled red and gold and white-streaked landscape swinging past the opening. Vertigo tugged at her. The spin module was still rotating; the open drop hatch alternately looked down onto planet and stars as it continued to turn.

  “Everything’s green,” Katya said, as much to reassure herself as anyone else. “Power’s up. Systems go.”

  “Release in five seconds,” Obininova said. “And four… and three… two… one… drop!”

  Clamps securing the ascraft released their hold. The habitat’s spin gravity, assisted by a nudge from maneuvering thrusters, kicked the ascraft clear of the Yuduki and into space.

  Then retros fired with silent thunder, and the long drop began.

  For the next thirty minutes, Katya was too preoccupied with the steady flow of data from Obininova’s control systems to worry. The ascraft hit atmosphere with a jolt like a kick in the pants, and soon the view outside was obscured by the pink-orange haze of reentry. When she could see beyond
the ascraft’s hull again, clouds were billowing toward her from the red-brown landscape, and the deep violet curve of the planet’s far horizon was flattening out.

  Lightning flared, illuminating rain-swollen thunderheads. A volcano brooded beneath a wind-scrawled track of white ash. Two other ascraft from the Yuduki dropped on parallel tracks, five kilometers to the north—Second and Third Platoons, on final approach. Obininova opened mental windows displaying flight corridors and surface detail in glowing, AI-generated graphics. Their destination was the gathering storm ahead.

  The ascraft’s reentry shields fell away and Katya corrected her earlier impression. It was not lightning that was illuminating the clouds ahead, but the steady stroke of lasers fired from orbit. They continued to fire until the entire target area was so masked by a spreading umbrella of smoke that the bolts were no longer getting through to the ground. With a hard jolt of wind-battered control surfaces, the ascraft flew into the cloud, and Katya was plunged into wet semidarkness. When she emerged, the land beneath the ascraft’s belly was a fire-tortured hellscape. Katya saw the same sort of twisted architecture and crystalline growth she’d seen at Norway Base, but it appeared to be built here on a grander scale, and with greater complexity. The laser barrage from the orbiting fleet had slagged much of the alien-grown architecture to the ground, but enough remained to create the impression of an eldritch fairyland… a fairyland with just a taste of black nightmare hidden in the fantasy.

  “Hang on,” Obininova warned. “Ventral shields coming off!”

  With a bang, the duralloy armor was whipped away, and Katya’s Warlord was exposed for the first time to the local atmosphere. She checked her external sensors, watching the data fill block after block on her visual field. Temperature… atmospheric composition… acid levels… all as expected. Dust levels were high, but that was to be expected after the bombardment. There were no detectable traces of nano particles.

  The ground was much closer now. They crossed a dry river valley, and a clump of what might have been trees—slender, compact cone shapes thirty meters tall and colored red-brown. Smaller, feather-shaped fronds waved nearby, pink and orange in the harsh white light.

  “DZ coming up, Hammer,” Obininova said. “Fifteen seconds.”

  Light-line graphics flickered across Katya’s vision, painting out a bland strip of rolling ground three kilometers ahead. “I see it. Arming weapons.” She shifted to the intercom. “Hey, Junior. You ready back there?”

  “Safeties off, boss. We’re set to odie.”

  Seconds later, the Warlord dropped from the ascraft’s belly, then steadied on shrieking thrusters. Katya hit the ground in a swirl of dust, taking the shock with a groan of stressed hydraulics. First Platoon was down.

  Where was she? More graphics overlay reality, showing strider icons scattered across half a kilometer. Blue outlines revealed Xeno structures hidden by the smoke. She shifted to infrared.

  Better. Xenotown spread out around her, fairyland and nightmares mingled. Downtown, the mouth of a tunnel, was that way. “On me, Hammers!” she called. “Bearing two-five-oh. Snap it up!”

  Over her link, she could hear the calls and commands of other units in the drop. “Third Platoon, down and moving!”

  “Second Platoon, we’re down. Lance, watch your six! I’ve got movement there!”

  Magnetic interference crackled through her mind. “Bandits! Bandits!” a voice yelled. “Hammer Two-Three reporting bandits at Delta-Charlie-one-one…”

  Katya put the Warlord into an easy, loping run. Light flared through the mist to her left, lighting up the smoke from inside. In a moment, she broke out of the cloud. Shafts of white sunlight lanced down through rents in the smoke staining the sky. Ahead, alien forms twisted and mushroomed like monstrous fungal growths among sponge-textured cones that might have been trees. DalRiss cities, she knew, were living creatures, grown rather than built; what she was seeing now was an alien perversion of an alien design, a city long dead and rotted, the shell reworked into the stuff of nightmare. There were crystal columns, like she’d seen at Norway Ridge, rearrangements, she thought, of sand into something like glass. Buildings like squat, red-capped mushrooms had unfolded, their walls spilling across the ground in heaps of pallid, wormlike tendrils, strangeness following strangeness until Katya felt a sharp inner vertigo. What was DalRiss, and what was Xenophobe? Nothing looked familiar save the clouds overhead and the occasional thrust of boulders through the carpet of alien biomass.

  Something huge and monstrous turned on elephantine legs, wrinkled body slung between the hips, black above, gray-red below, with prongs or horns on one end, a balancing tail on the other. She hit it with her ranging laser, the AI computed size from range and angle and told her the creature was six meters tall—bigger than most warstriders—and massed at least fifty tons.

  Katya noticed something else about that towering apparition. Chunks of pebble-rough hide dropped from its flanks with each step, revealing raw meat and purple-red blood.

  Among striderjacks, zombie referred to a Beta, a warstrider or other human machine somehow taken over by the Xenos. This… thing gave new definition and horror to the word, a once-living organism now transformed into a decaying puppet two stories high.

  There was a flash, and something hit the Warlord high on its left torso. The nano-D count soared, and Katya cut in the strider’s external countermeasures.

  Moving swiftly to sidestep the deadly, invisible cloud, she swung her left arm up and triggered the CPG. White light flared from the beast’s shoulder, causing it to stumble. An instant later, al-Badr cut in with the dorsal hivel gun. Pieces of the giant beast splattered with the buzz-saw impact. The body took another step forward, then sagged in a bloody heap.

  Other shapes were moving among the broken forest of pillars. Katya tracked something moving quickly on four legs and fired with her hull lasers, but the bolt flared against the side of a gnarled, organic column crowned with spikes, biting a chunk from it and sending it crashing to the ground.

  “Hold steady!” al-Badr called. “I’m launching a Starhawk!”

  She dug in the strider’s armored heels, lurching to a halt. “Go!”

  There was a hissing shriek and a jolt. A stub-finned missile streaked into the sky. She opened a window inset on her field of view. It showed the landscape ahead streaking past, the mind’s-eye view from Jun-i al-Badr as he guided the teleoperated missile through a radio link. Katya’s graphics showed more life-forms, closing from behind the encircling walls of smoke.

  “We’ve got heavy targets at five kilometers,” she told him over the link. Short range for a Starhawk, but they had to relieve some of the pressure in the immediate area of the DZ. “Moving this way.”

  “I’m on them.”

  Dots appeared on the ground, growing swiftly to shadows. Katya saw more alien life-forms, monstrous, already decaying in the thrall of the unseen creatures riding them. The Starhawk impacted one of the largest ones with a flash and a snowstorm of static.

  “Scratch one zombie,” al-Badr said, his point of view now back with the Warlord.

  “Yeah, but we have lots more coming,” Bondevik pointed out. He indicated an icon clear on the graphics display but not yet visible to hunorm optics. “I think we’ve got a Cobra over there.”

  A Cobra! So there were familiar Xeno types here. Katya had been wondering. The Xenos on ShraRish appeared to be using organic forms as their principal surrogates and mounts, and it seemed possible that the lack of any DalRiss steel or heavy manufacturing industry might be the reason for that. The Xenos needed processed metals and advanced materials to make combat vehicles of metal… though she’d always assumed they took what they needed from veins of ore underground.

  But perhaps it wasn’t that simple. Steel, for instance, was not found underground; it was iron, laboriously smelted from ore, then alloyed with carbon through one of several high-temperature processes. Other artificial materials came to mind: ceramics… plastics…

>   “Let’s see what this Cobra is made out of, gentlemen,” Katya said. She turned the Warlord onto a new heading, stalking the unseen Cobra.

  Explosions erupted around them, pelting the strider with rock and shattered crystal. Katya engaged the ventral-mounted weapons pod when a starfish-shaped creature that looked like an overgrown DalRiss appeared fifty meters off, hurling fist-sized balls of flame from an unseen launcher implanted in its back. Rocket fire disintegrated the creature, or drove it under cover. Katya couldn’t be sure which.

  The EM spectrum was blocked now, the piercing hiss of Xeno electromagnetics as effective as any jamming. Katya scanned the skies, looking for the promised air support. Nothing yet.

  Then the Cobra lunged at them from behind a low wall of toppled debris. It was in its combat mode, squat and lumpy and deadly-looking, but one blast from her CPG tore a piece from the gray hull as big as a Stormwind’s wing. On a hunch she fired her bow lasers. Dazzling light flared from the thing’s flank; metal vapor boiled into the air. Katya told the strider’s AI to analyze the gas’s spectrum.

  Nickel-iron, raw and unrefined.Some lead, silver, gold, and copper… but mostly nickel-iron as pure as from any asteroid. Traces of silica, sulfur, magnesium… rock! The thing had worked slabs of stone into its hull.

  Rock and nickel-iron. Stuff the Xenos could find deep within a planet’s crust. The Xenos took what they could get, but they did little real manufacturing or metals processing of their own. For years it had been assumed that they had factories of some kind in their labyrinths deep in the crust, places where they could forge the scraps of demolished human technology they stole into something new.

  Could it be possible that the nanotechnics they obviously used were their only technology?

  She fired again, lasers and CPGs, and the Cobra started to morph, gray metal and stone flowing together like liquid mercury, gleaming silver in the sunlight. Taking control of the central weapons pod, al-Badr triggered a barrage of M-22 rockets. The multiple detonations shredded the damaged Cobra and scattered smoking lumps of the thing across a thousand square meters of ground.