Warstrider

by William H. Keith

  Dev’s Destroyer had been so hot that it had been abandoned, as had the ascraft that had brought him and his troops back to orbit, the Kani APW, and the Commandos’ battle armor. Of the twenty men in his command, three had died in the battle; the rest had been treated for minor radiation injuries and released.

  And for the past three days the biological wizards of the DalRiss had been studying the specimens returned from Aurorae Regio with an interest that bordered on fanaticism.

  “So you’re a hero again,” Katya said, drifting close. “What are you doing, trying for another medal?”

  Dev had been nearly asleep. He started, then reached out, trying to shove the tubes aside so he could see her face. He was nude, held immobile by a webwork of restraints; the tubes, which carried nutrients for the medical nano in and a drainage system for wastes and scoured particles of radiation, branched from his neck, sides, belly, groin, and thighs, from hair-thin threads to pipelines the diameter of his thumb. He felt no pain, of course—the nerve endings around each insertion had been individually shut down—but he felt achingly hungry, as well as frustrated at his inability to move.

  “I’d be happy just to get out of here,” he said. “I can’t tell where I stop and the plumbing begins.”

  “The nurse says another twenty hours and you’re out of here. You’ll be pulling barracks duty before you know it.”

  “Where? Is the regiment still on the ground?”

  She made a sour face. “I wish. The Imperials have stepped in again. The Thorhammers are back in reserve. I think Aiko and Yamagata’re afraid the DalRiss’ll get the wrong idea if we go around detonating nukes on their planet.”

  “It wasn’t us. Talk to the Xenos. They’re the ones carrying around live nukes.”

  It had been pure intuition that had saved Dev and the others on the surface. There’d been no time to reason things through. But if the zombie Katana had been carrying the fission device captured earlier from the Imperials, and if the Xenos did only adapt captured equipment rather than remanufacturing it, then the chances were they’d tampered with the warhead’s triggering mechanism, probably by dissolving the radio-controlled interlocks. Nuclear warheads were triggered by a conventional explosive that slammed two subcritical masses of plutonium together; by firing his salvo of M-22 rockets, Dev had induced a sympathetic detonation in the chemical explosives, and guaranteed that the warhead went off five kilometers from his command instead of closer. That zombie Katana had been heading their way.

  Any closer and they all would have fried or been buried under the rubble from the blast crater.

  “You know,” Dev said after a moment, “I had a bit of a brainstorm down there. I think the Xenos are pretty badly limited by the stuff that they can capture. They can change its shape, but not what it’s made of.”

  “I’m way ahead of you,” Katya replied. “All that was in the report I filed with General Howard’s staff two days ago.”

  “Hmph. Did you tell him about the opportunity this gives us?”

  Her brow furrowed. “What opportunity?”

  Dev thought a moment. He’d not worked all the details out himself. However…

  “Look, GhegnuRish, the DalRiss homeworld, it’s supposed to be just like ShraRish, right?”

  “Sure. They… well, I guess ‘terraformed’ is the wrong word, but they modeled ShraRish after GhegnuRish.”

  “Then the Xeno war machines on GhegnuRish are going to be the same sorts of critters we’re running up against here. Local animals that the Xenos have taken over, like those poor creatures we saw at Regio Aurorae. Maybe not even that much, if all the native life on GhegnuRish died off a couple of hundred years ago.”

  Katya blinked. “Say, that’s a thought. The DalRiss have assumed that all life on their homeworld is extinct. They never had much in the way of machines. So what will the Xenos use for weapons?”

  “Oh, there’ll be something. Cobras made out of rock or crystal or the DalRiss equivalent of dead trees. They had stuff like that on ShraRish. But did you notice that it was easier to kill the Xenos down there?”

  She nodded. “Back on Loki, you had to hit them eight or ten times before they’d start falling apart.”

  “That’s because they were using RoPro fabricrete and high-tech alloys. I don’t think we’re dealing so much with superscience here as we are with the junk collectors of the Galaxy. They’ve got the tricks they pull with magnetic fields. That’s probably connected somehow to their using nanotechnics to morph and repair damage. But when it comes to making alloys, layered armor—”

  “Hang on a second, Dev. I want to bring some other people up here, get them in on this.” Her eyes took on a glassy look as she used her link to tap into the ship’s ICS.

  Dev glanced down the tube-tangled length of his body. “I think I’d like to get a bit more presentable first.”

  The people she had in mind were Colonel Varney, the regimental commander, and Major Gennani, the regimental intelligence officer. While they were waiting, the nurse was able to provide Dev with a robe to afford him some measure of dignity, despite the tubes that sprouted from various seams and openings. She also released his hand and foot restraints so that he felt a little less like a victim of torture and a little more like a warstrider pilot undergoing debriefing.

  Varney and Gennani both congratulated him on the success of his raid as soon as they swam into the sick bay cubicle. “That was fine work, son,” Varney said. He was a lean, small man with hair turned silver at the temples and a white mustache. He looked as if he was in his fifties, though rumor had it that he was rich enough to have afforded the medical nano for advanced geriatric treatment. How true those stories were, Dev neither knew nor cared. Varney was wealthy, the son of a prominent Earth banking family with connections to Kyoto’s financial institutions.

  On the other hand, another rumor insisted that he’d passed up an inheritance to stay in the Hegemony army.

  “Thank you, Colonel. We got lucky.”

  “I don’t believe in luck. Never did. If I did, I’d have to insist that all my officers be lucky ones, and that’d look bad on the fitness reports.” He pulled himself over alongside Dev’s harness. Katya and Gennani floated near the door. “So. Captain Alessandro tells me you’ve got some ideas about GhegnuRish.”

  “Yes, sir.” He’d been doing some hard thinking since his earlier conversation with Katya, but he still had to pause and marshal his thoughts. “I gather the Thorhammers are at loose ends at the moment.”

  “Hmph. You could call it that.” The words were noncommittal. The expression was not.

  “I would like to suggest a recon of the DalRiss homeworld, sir. This might be our best opportunity.”

  Varney folded his arms. “Okay. Why?”

  “Point one. We still don’t know how the Xenos get from world to world. Here we are, in contact with a civilization that was fighting them two hundred years ago, and they’ve never seen Xenophobe space fleets either.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “The DalRiss have had no contact with their own homeworld for one hundred eighty-some years. Presumably the Xenos have been at peace on that world for all that time. This might be the time to go pay them a visit.”

  Varney slowly unfolded his arms. “I’m not sure I see what you’re getting at, son. What are you saying… attack them?”

  Dev spread his hands. “Colonel, the one thing that’s been hampering us ever since this damned war began was lack of intelligence on the enemy. We don’t know how their technology works, we don’t know how they think, we’re not even sure we’ve seen a living Xenophobe. The grease blobs could be pets. Or slaves. Or juveniles, for God’s sake.”

  “All of that’s rather unlikely, given what we’ve seen so far,” Gennani said. “But he’s got a point, Colonel.”

  “Here’s our chance to drop in unannounced and see how they really live,” Dev continued. “If they have spacecraft, we’ll see them. If they have large-scale manufacturing
of their own, we’ll see that, too. I mean, what have they been doing for two hundred years?”

  “Attacking ShraRish,” Varney said, his voice dry. “And the Shichiju.”

  “Not the Xenos on GhegnuRish, sir. As far as we can tell, every world grows its own crop of Xenos. We’ve still never seen a Xeno ship.

  “Now we have DalRiss biologists who can grow and program Translators. Wouldn’t it be worth the risk, just to see what a peaceful Xenophobe looked like?”

  “If there is such a thing, yes.”

  “We’ve been assuming ever since the first Xeno attack that they attack humans on sight,” Katya said. “That’s the idea behind their name, right? They’re afraid of strangers. Of aliens like us.”

  “That’s never been proven, Captain,” Gennani said. “We don’t know why they attack us. In some cases, though, it’s been hard to prove they were deliberately attacking us. They could perceive us as part of the landscape—”

  “A source for raw materials, yeah,” Katya interrupted. “I’ve heard that one.”

  “The DalRiss have given us a new example in that regard,” Gennani pointed out. “Their picture of the universe, their worldview, if you will, is completely different from ours. We see…” He moved his arms, indicating the room, the space beyond. “We see space, mostly vacuum, some usable planetary surfaces, rather thinly populated by life-forms. They see the universe as an organic whole, a giant swimming pool chock-full of life, with inorganic matter as empty spaces in the water, and themselves as custodians doing the backstroke. If the Xenophobes are self-aware, their worldview may be more alien still.”

  “God, that’s all we need,” Varney said. “More cockeyed viewpoints.”

  “Who says we see things the way they really are, Colonel?” Katya asked him.

  Varney ignored that. “So, you think we should zip off to Alya B to see the real Xenos. And if they attack us? Like they always do?”

  “We take enough ships—as many ships as Yamagata lets us have—to cover us. If they have a fleet, well… isn’t that worth knowing about? We still don’t know what to look for when it comes to Xeno starships, if there even is anything to look for. This could give us some clues.”

  “ ‘If there’s anything to look for,’ ” Varney repeated. He looked at Dev. “Are you one of those people who believe in invisible Xenophobe ships?”

  “No, sir. But I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that they send clouds of nano-sized ships to the stars, billions of machines a few microns across. Maybe those machines manufacture the organic components, the greaseballs, once they land. Or maybe the ships are larger—the size of 27-mm autocannon shells, maybe. We’d be hard-pressed to detect those. Or they ride on meteorites.” He spread his hands. “I gather the DalRiss have a completely different way of crossing space.”

  “Achievers,” Gennani put in.

  “Magic, as far as our physicists can tell. Even with cornels, they don’t understand what the DalRiss are talking about. Well, maybe the Xenos have something else, a way of stepping directly from ShraRish to Loki without crossing all that empty space in between. There are lots of possibilities.”

  “Reasonable,” Varney said. “Even if we don’t see any Xeno ships at the DalRiss homeworld, the recon alone could tell us a lot about them. Just one problem. I doubt that Yamagata’s going to buy in to this. Right now he’s doing his best to convince our hosts that we’re just along to carry the baggage. He won’t like the idea of us nosing around the old DalRiss homeworld. Makes us look too important.”

  “Well, there are different ways of breaking it to them, Colonel.”

  “Such as?”

  “Suppose we put it to them that, ah, we had reason to believe the Xenos were going to reinforce ShraRish from GhegnuRish? Volunteer to go check it out with a squadron of warships and the Thorhammers for recon. He can’t very well refuse that.”

  Varney looked thoughtful. “No. No, he couldn’t. There’s sound military logic in that, son.”

  Katya grinned. “I told you about this guy, Colonel.”

  “So you did, Captain. So you did.”

  “I like it,” the major said. “Yamagata won’t want to risk a large part of his fleet, but I sure as hell wouldn’t want to get caught in orbit by an unknown war fleet from God knows where. A patrol, a recon in force. That would do it.”

  “But your real idea is to try to talk with them?” Varney asked.

  Dev managed a weightless shrug that set his plastic tubes swaying. “If we can. You know, sir, we’ve never seen any sign of cooperation between the Xenos on Loki, say, and the ones on Herakles or any of the others. That suggests that each invasion force is pretty much on its own. Well, it’s a sure bet that the Xenos on ShraRish aren’t going to talk to us. But maybe their relatives back on GhegnuRish will.”

  “Man oh man,” Varney said, a sly grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. “What I wouldn’t give to see Yamagata’s face if we came back from the DalRiss homeworld with a Xeno peace treaty!”

  Dev wondered if the Xenos understood the concept of “peace.”

  It took almost three weeks, with Yamagata stubbornly refusing even to consider the idea. After all, there were no indications that any hypothetical Xeno warfleet was making the crossing from GhegnuRish.

  Still, Varney had planted a seed of worry in Yamagata’s mind, and Admiral Aiko was far more willing to discuss matters of strategy with the Hegemony regimental commander than was the taisho. The Daihyo was unwilling to let the gaijin anywhere near the DalRiss homeworld, but patience—and Aiko’s insistence that he had to know what he was facing in order to take proper precautions—won out in the end. Yamagata agreed at last, and Takahashi was overruled. Since the question was one of military strategy rather than politics, the Emperor’s liaison could be courteously ignored.

  The Emperor, after all, was a long way off.

  The operation was called Siranui. The word referred to the phosphorescent foam stirred by a ship’s wake at night, but literally meant “unknown fires,” appropriate for a squadron reconnoitering the unknown fires of another star. It consisted of the cruiser Sendai as flag, with Chosho Yasunari Sato in overall command; the destroyers Akatuki, Ikaduti, and Tatikaze: and the transport Yuduki. They would be accompanied by the Darwin, which numbered with her crew twelve DalRiss Lifemasters and a menagerie of bioengineered Alyan life-forms.

  While Sato had the final say over the disposition of his ships, Colonel Varney was in command of the surface-recon element of the squadron, with orders instructing him to use his discretion insofar as whether or not to approach the planet or to attempt a landing.

  His orders even included the possibility of establishing communications with the Xenos. Though Yamagata didn’t relish the possibility of a political coup by the Hegemony, he was realist enough to know that a good military commander takes the chances that are offered him. A chance to meet the Xenos, to talk with them, or simply to learn about them, was simply not to be passed up.

  Dev was surprised that Yamagata had been that open to the idea. Varney thought it likely that the Imperial admiral had weighed the possibility that the Xenophobes at GhegnuRish would be friendly, and discounted it.

  Whatever the politics of the decision, three weeks after the battle at Regio Aurorae, Siranui Squadron entered the godsea for a short transit of just five light-days. They emerged in the A7 star’s system and spent two days more maneuvering inward, surveying the planets and monitoring the electromagnetic spectrum for… anything, radio messages, radar, any evidence at all that the squadron had been sighted or that the system was even still inhabited.

  There was nothing.

  GhegnuRish did not look promising from space. As the, squadron fell around the curve of the planet toward the sunlit side, the difference was striking. Absent were the reds and oranges and golds of ShraRishian vegetation. There were clouds here, and violet seas, but the land appeared barren, with an albedo far lower than expected. It was as though the entire land surface of the wo
rld had been scorched and blackened.

  With no challenge, no sign of enemy ships, the five ships dropped closer, finally taking up orbit at two hundred kilometers.

  And still there was no sign that the Xenophobes were aware of them, no sign that there was any life on the planet at all. Orbital scans showed that much of the land surface had been covered by complex shapes that seemed to rise out of the ground to engulf each former DalRiss population center, then spread out across the open ground like vast, malignant growths.

  Those growths, black and dark gray, wrinkled, convoluted, drank the light of Alya B, and were responsible for the sharply decreased albedo.

  Albedo was a measure of reflectivity, of how much light was bounced back into space by a given terrain feature. It used a scale of zero to one, with one indicating total reflectivity of light, and zero total absorption. Darwin’s astrophysical team reported that the blackened portions of GhegnuRish’s land surface had an average albedo of .01, about the same as the maria of Earth’s moon.

  If GhegnuRish was absorbing a lot more light from its sun, however, it was also giving off a lot more heat. The planet glowed in the infrared bands, and the surface temperature averaged ten degrees Celsius higher than expected. Industrial waste heat, someone had suggested, but there was no sign of industry, of factories, of any life at all. Some of the expedition’s officers speculated that the Xenos died off once they’d subjugated a world.

  Dev doubted that. He felt the enemy down there, waiting. They’d never yet attacked a ship in orbit. Maybe they were waiting for the Thorhammers to land. Maybe… maybe…

  After two days of orbiting, during which time survey teams completed their photo mapping of the surface and the DalRiss biologists aboard the Darwin completed work on a new species of Translator, the decision was made. The Thorhammers would attempt a landing on the DalRiss homeworld.