Warstrider

by William H. Keith

  In her mind, Katya chewed on an imaginary lip. She had a feeling she’d just pried back a small piece of the Xenophobe mystery.

  Now if she could just get the data back! Damn, where were the ground-support ascraft?

  Then the pace of the battle began picking up.

  Chapter 27

  … temperature range (equatorial): 40° C to 50° C; Atmospheric pressure (arbitrary sea level): .75 bar; composition: N2 83.7%, O2 8.7%, O3 3.6%, SO2 2.4%, Ar 1.2%, H2O (mean) .2%, H2SO4(mean) 850 ppm, CO2 540 ppm…

  —Selected extracts from science log

  Alya A-VI

  IRS Charles Darwin

  C.E. 2541

  Open flames were impossible in an atmosphere consisting of less than ten percent oxygen, but organic matter smoldered as intense heat broke it down, liberating choking clouds of greasy smoke, and chemical reactions precipitated liquid droplets out of the sky, a thin, wet mist. The ascraft’s reentry shell had dropped clear moments before. Dev strained for a glimpse of the ground as the ascraft dropped through the pall.

  There… an undulating landscape, streaked and broken by cloud-shadow. Trees—or something like trees—pink and orange spearpoints and curl-tipped feathers thirty meters tall rose from soft, red masses of ShraRishan life. Surreal spirals and twists and mushrooms carved from red foam matched descriptions of DalRiss living cities, but everywhere order had begun melting into disorder. No wonder the DalRiss called the Xenos the Chaos. Their city was at once both dead and horribly alive, with new and malevolent growths invading, penetrating, replacing, changing like a hideous cancer run amok.

  Humans had added to the destruction, blasting craters, smashing delicate towers, slagging down once-living buildings, uprooting the geometric perfection of vast gardens. It was like a terrible, three-sided struggle, the life of the DalRiss pitted against the perversion of the Xenos, and the wholesale death delivered by the humans.

  “Where are they?” Dev called, worried now. Somewhere in that hell, the Assassins should have secured a DZ where the Commandos could disembark. They’d been out of touch with regiment HQ for several minutes now, ever since the Commandos’ ascraft had emerged from reentry blackout. Radio and laser communications both had been interrupted, and Dev could not establish a fix on any topological landmark with any certainty. This was certainly the right general area for the DZ, but nothing looked as it should have looked. His graphic overlays refused to mesh with reality as he was able to snatch it, a glimpse at a time, through the drifting islands of smoke and gas. Alessandro’s Assassins could have been anywhere within two or three kilometers range, and he would never have seen them.

  The ascraft jolted, hard, and Dev thought they’d been hit.

  “No sweat,” Sho-i Anders told him. “Rough air from a hot blast crater.”

  “Can you take us any lower?”

  “Sure, but we won’t be able to see as far. The higher we are, the better our chances of catching something through a hole in the sky junk.”

  But Dev had about given up on that. “Look, if we stay up here, your wings are going to fall off. You checked your hull integrity lately?”

  He was watching the readouts from a battery of atmospheric sensors as he spoke. Those clouds were the product of an alien ecology, death-pallid fogs of sulfuric acid. As Anders guided the ascraft through the misty air, acid condensed on the wings and hull metal, streaming aft in corrosive rivulets. The nanofilm on the exposed portions of Dev’s Scoutstrider had already been degraded by twenty percent in places. As Dev tapped into Anders’s systems readouts, he felt the strain registering on the ascraft’s intakes. How long would the turbine fans last?

  “What’s that over there?” Dev asked, using a cursor to indicate a circular, sunken field in the middle of the alien city. White mist spread like a milky sea across the terrain. Enhancing the view with telephoto optics, he could see what looked like balloons rising from the kilometer-wide swirl of barren earth and mist, and hovering above the ground.

  Xeno travelers, emerging from underground by the thousands.

  “Looks like our friends are coming up to play,” Anders said.

  A Xeno tunnel mouth.“Yeah. Let’s set down over there.” He indicated another spot, a flat area near the crater rim.

  “We’re starting to pick up a nano count,” Anders warned him. “Point one-five.”

  “All the more reason to get this over with.” He took another look about for Katya’s company. Lightning flared and boomed to the north. That might be her… but here was the opportunity he’d been looking for. “Let’s hit it!”

  The ascraft flared out at twenty meters, releasing Dev’s Scoutstrider from one side and a Mitsubishi Type 400 APC from the other. Dev tensed his shoulders, and the twin jets of his hotbox thrusters roared. Seconds later, Dev’s Destroyer hit the ground with a crash, absorbing the shock on bent legs and whining stabilizers. At his side, the APW unfolded stiltlike legs.

  Called the Kani—Nihongo for Crab—the Type 400 was a squat, humpbacked shape supported by four legs that folded against the hull during transport, but telescoped out from the sides on ball-and-socket joints to lift it clear of uneven terrain. With a hull five meters long and two high, the Kani was a smaller version of the big VbH Zo walkers, carrying twenty armored men in motion-sickened discomfort. Hivel cannons in blister turrets to left and right provided fire support.

  “How’re you people doing, Sergeant?” Dev called.

  The Crab lurched forward, sensor clusters tasting the air like sensitive antennae. “Down in one piece,” Wilkins replied. A three-plug technician was jacking the APC, but Wilkins had linked into the comm system with her palm interface. “Where’s our backup?”

  “What backup?”

  “Uh-oh. Things are getting interesting now.”

  An explosion gouged dirt and rock from the ground ten meters away. Dev pivoted, tracking the round. Two hundred meters away, something like a vast, convoluted sponge, roughly spherical but rising fifty meters into the air, was rolling ponderously and very slowly toward them.

  Had it fired? The shapes surrounding him were so strange, so distorted, Dev was not sure just what he was seeing. He was glad now that the decision had been made to drop them deep in the Xeno-controlled area. If he’d had to worry about which of these alien shapes were friendly and which were hostile, he would have been unable to fight for fear of hitting an ally.

  Another explosion ripped through ground and biomass, five meters away. Something hard clanged off Dev’s light armor, staggering him. The nano count was rising.

  With no DalRiss friendlies about, the simple rule was kill everything strange that moved. He aimed his right arm, heavy with the muzzle-heavy bulk of a Cyclan Arms CA-5000 autocannon. Codes flickered through his awareness, target track… lock… fire! High-velocity explosive shells ripped into the sphere, exploding deep inside with strobing flashes muffled by the creature’s soft mass.

  It fired back. This time his targeting radar caught the track of high-speed projectiles, but the thing was having trouble getting the range. Strange. It wasn’t using an active radar lock, though Dev’s external mikes picked up an ultrasonic squeal that might have been some kind of sonar. The APC’s hivel cannons joined the thundering fury of Dev’s autocannon. Pieces of the giant were hurled hundreds of meters into the air; white smoke streamed from the surface of the thing as the submicroscopic machines animating it lost their cohesion and flowed away by the billions.

  Like they’re abandoning ship, Dev thought, continuing to hose the living mountain with explosive shells. It was falling apart as he watched it.

  Stranger and stranger. The Xenos on ShraRish had adapted the “technology” of the inhabitants, biological shapes and sonar, but ignoring such obvious and simple technical aids as radar or laser ranging. Why? The simplest answer was that they took what was at hand and adapted it to their own purposes… and those adaptations weren’t carried from world to world. On Loki and Lung Chi and Herakles and the other invaded worlds of the
Shichiju, they’d found steel and duralloy, glass and plastic, ferrocrete and duraminium… all products of advanced human manufacturing and materials technology. The Xenophobe weapons and vehicles on those worlds were made of metals and plastics, dissolved and re-formed in new and extremely fluid ways by Xeno nanotechnics.

  Here, though, all the Xenos had to work with were organics, no match at all for durasheathed warstriders.

  Legs scissoring, he ascended the low rise of the crater rim. Beyond, pearl-colored spheres drifted on shifting magnetic aurorae, some hanging together meters above the white fog like masses of glistening bubble-foam, others clustering along the creamy white shores of that alien sea and bursting, releasing their wet-slithering riders.

  The slugs covered the ground within the crater rim. They were everywhere, woven into a glistening web of living tissue, crawling over one another, smothering one another as they oozed their way over the crater rim, clumping together into living sculptures, shapes of no certain form or purpose. Strands of gray tissue stretched between crystal towers, like shreds of tissue clinging to bone.

  If there was such a thing as evil, Dev thought wildly, this was it. There was a basic wrongness to this perversion of the ecology of an entire, living world. It felt unclean; he felt unclean, wading ankle-deep through that wetly shining mass of life-gone-berserk.

  At least, though, there were plenty of samples available for the taking. “Okay, Sergeant,” he said. “Come and get ’em!”

  The Kani slewed to a stop at the base of the crater rim’s gentle slope, its legs folding above its back as they lowered the hull to the ground. Clamshell doors at front and rear hissed open as ramps extended. Foot soldiers, ungainly in armor, pounded down the ramps and spread out in perfect combat deployment.

  Six men carried bulky, insulated chests, two men on each. Inner layers of counter-nano films should keep the slugs from eating their way through if they had any nano-D capabilities themselves. Each two-man team lugged its chest to the edge of the gray, oozing mass, opened the top, and began snatching specimens with long-handled tongs.

  An explosion gouted earth and rock to Dev’s left. Three troopers went down, one screaming as his helmet started to dissolve. Dev pivoted, firing an AND round to blanket the area, then tracking the projectile back to its source.

  Surprise stabbed at him. Just when he’d decided that the Xenos on ShraRish were all organics and relatively easy to deal with! Five hundred meters away, a huge, blunt snake-shape was morphing into the many-spined horror of a Fer-de-Lance.

  Dev opened fire with both his autocannon and his left-shoulder Kv-48 weapons pack, crouching his strider to bring the rocket tubes to bear. M-22 rockets flashed and hissed, trailing white contrails through the wet air, then slamming home with a thundering barrage of detonations.

  Spines and writhing tentacles snapped from the Fer-de-Lance’s body. Gaping craters appeared in the soft gray of the hull beneath. Dev’s strider did not possess a laser, so he couldn’t analyze the Xeno’s makeup, but it looked to Dev as though the core of the thing was alive… or at least made of something like meat. There was other material, too, rock, he thought, and possibly something like iron or lead. It was hard to make sense of it.

  But sense or not, this Fer-de-Lance was easier to kill than its cousins on Loki. Dev swept the dying thing with another burst of explosive shells. Pieces were still moving, flopping on the ground like demented snakes, blindly questing like whip-slender worms.

  “Wilkins!” he snapped. “Let’s have some fire over here!”

  “You got it, Lieutenant.” Sergeant Wilkins yelled out orders. Corporal Bayer appeared, the long, heavy barrel of his steadimount plasma gun already tracking.

  White-hot bolts shrieked from his weapon, blazing fire purifying everything its blowtorch breath touched. Dev continued to mount high guard from the crest of the crater rim, scanning the entire area for the approach of more Gammas. At his back, the six troops assigned to collect slugs were finishing their task. At an order from Sergeant Wilkins, the perimeter began to contract.

  Gammas, organic-looking pieces of pseudolife like blindly struggling worms and rags and bloody scraps, flooded toward the top of the ridge, making for Dev and the Crab parked fifty meters away. Dev swung his hivel cannon across this new threat, but there was no way he could hit every one. Panic rose at the back of his mind. Those struggling shapes could cover the Scoutstrider, eat away nanofilms and armor, reduce the machine to a corroded skeleton in minutes.

  But Sergeant Wilkins braced herself at his feet, training her heavy-duty flamer at that wriggling, living sea. Flamer chemical loads carried their own oxidizer; she triggered the weapon, sending flame searing into the Gamma horde.

  “Thanks, Sarge.”

  “Any time, Lieutenant. Let’s get the hell out of here, huh?”

  “Right. Get on board.” But something had caught his eye, something large and black, moving in the twisted, alien shapes on the far side of the crater. Another warstrider! Thinking it might be A Company, he engaged his telephoto optics and zoomed in for a closer look.

  It was almost five kilometers away, but clearly visible as a stiff crosswind cleared the mists and acid clouds from above the white fog sea. Dev felt a shock of recognition: those curved power feeds like horns, the long and bulbous torso, the faded rising sun emblem on one armored pauldron. … It was an Imperial warstrider, a Katana, and it was emerging from the tortured cityscape like a vengeful demon from the mouth of Hell.

  A zombie, one of the Imperial Guard striders lost in the first encounter days before. The upper works were relatively intact; the legs and lower torso had shapeshifted into something gleaming and metallic and horribly, nightmarishly other. …

  But Dev’s attention had focused on what the transformed Katana held clutched in its black-armored hands, a pearl gray sphere identical to the traveler spheres floating overhead and lining the fog sea by the thousands.

  Why was the strider carrying it?…

  Five kilometers—too far for autocannon. Targeting information flowed across his field of view… range, elevation, target lock…now! Stooping, he triggered his right-shoulder weapons pack, loosing an arrowing flight of M-22 rockets. As the last rocket cleared its launch tube, Dev whirled, throwing himself from the top of the ridge, hitting the ground in a spray of gravel and pulped, gray Xeno organics. “Cover!” he bellowed, using external speakers and radio simultaneously. “Everybody take cover behind me!…”

  The sky lit up, outshining the white sun masked behind banks of clouds to the east. As the members of Cameron’s Commandos dove for cover behind Dev’s fallen, armored body, that white glare waxed brighter, stronger, in an absolute silence that had smothered every sound and dragged on and on and on. EMP surged through electrical circuits. Some failed, melted by the power surge. Others shut down to prevent damage. Dev’s external view faltered, dissolved into static, then returned.

  What was the speed of sound at slightly less than one atmosphere at a temperature of forty-eight degrees Celsius?

  Dev’s implant calculated the mathematics and fed him the answer just as the shock wave struck, a raw, howling hurricane of noise and overpressure that sheared off the upper meter of the crater rim at his back and struck him and raged at him and clawed at the armor of his hull. His nanofilm was gone in the first half second, stripped from his back by the sandblasting of heat and radiation and wind-borne grit, but he extended his arm above the huddled mass of armored troops that were snuggling against his torso. The ground shuddered beneath him; the hurricane roar filled the universe beneath a towering pillar of white cloud rising toward heaven.

  Then Dev’s external sensors were carried away, and he was left alone in a howling wind- and fire-swept blackness. He could sense the link systems shutting down around him as damaged circuits continued to fail. He began to initiate a disconnect. …

  Too late. Total system shutdown engulfed his mind, plunging him into unconsciousness.

  Chapter 28

 
; There was a time when it was taken for granted that the sentient inhabitants of other worlds, if they existed, would be very much like us—different in form or color or size, perhaps, but sharing with us our perception of the universe.

  Only now are we beginning to discover, once again, how very conceited our species is.

  —Hearings on the DalRiss

  Terran Hegemony Space Council

  Dr. Paul Hernandez

  C.E. 2542

  Dev was surprised when he woke up aboard ship. To begin with, he was weightless, and the feeling of endlessly falling pervaded his dreams as he was brought slowly back to consciousness. Yuduki’s sick bay was located in the central core, and he nearly panicked when he opened his eyes to see a mass of colored tubing snaking above his face. It looked… alive, like the horrors he’d seen on ShraRish.

  A Japanese nurse appeared almost at once, however, floating head-down a meter “above” him, reassuring him that he was safe, that an ascraft had brought him and his team back to the troopship, that his treatment was proceeding well and that he was already almost completely recovered.

  He’d come close to being killed by radiation. While his Scoutstrider had screened him from alpha and beta particles and most direct gamma radiation, the atomic nuclei of steel, manganese, and silicon in the armor had trapped neutrons from the blast, creating a cascade of induced radiation that had poured through his module despite heavy screening and neutron-absorptive molecular layers.

  He’d been sick, the nurse told him, almost dead, when Lara Anders had loaded him and his people aboard and dusted off from that hellfire desert five klicks from ground zero. But medical nano programmed to correct radiation damage on a subcellular scale had been filtering through his system for the past three days. His blood count was normal now, as were his bone marrow scans and thyroid levels. He now ran, he was told, a slightly increased chance of developing any of several cancers, all of which would easily be detected and treated automatically long before they became a threat. Even the higher risk of birth defects in any children he might one day have was negated by the medical nano watch now patrolling his body.