Warstrider

by William H. Keith

  Final preparations were made, weapons, ascraft, and warstriders all checked and prepped for landing. Dev, fully recovered now, was issued a brand-new LaG-42 Ghostrider to replace the Scoutstrider abandoned at Regio Aurorae. The regiment was already shorthanded, though, which meant he would have to jack the two-slotter solo. He worked twenty-five hours straight with the Thorhammers’ maintenance techs, breaking the machine out of storage, bringing its AI core on-line, powering up its fusion reactor, supervising the integration of a jet-pack hotbox, checking out the systems, and tuning its link hardware to his own.

  The name Dev’s Destroyer had been a wry joke, and for a time he considered naming the LaG-42 Dev’s Destroyer II. Sergeant Wilkins suggested Strider-man, the nickname he’d been known by during his hitch with the Wolfguard, but he settled at last on Morgan’s Hold. Not many of the other striderjacks caught the reference, but the members of Cameron’s Commandos cheered when they heard.

  After a too-short ceph-induced sleep, he was up again, briefing the Commandos on their part in the upcoming drop.

  And to think, Dev thought wryly as the final moments before drop clicked away, that this was all my idea!

  Chapter 29

  … temperature range (equatorial): 45° C to 55° C; Atmospheric pressure (arbitrary sea level): .85 bar; composition: N2 82.3%, O2 9.7%, O3 2.1%, SO2 3.5%, Ar 1.1%, H2O (mean) .1%, CO2 570 ppm, H2SO4 (mean) 140 ppm…

  —Selected extracts from science log

  Alya B-V

  IRS Charles Darwin

  C.E. 2541

  They’d landed on the outskirts of what the DalRiss said had once been the largest of their homeworld’s cities. The place was preternaturally still and quiet, with no indication that their arrival had even been noticed.

  The Thorhammers had landed in full regimental force, establishing a perimeter around the big Typhoon transports, then extending a platoon-strength line to sweep through the tortured, blackened landscape in search of…anything.

  The city had been alien to begin with, a vast and geometric sprawl of dwellings grown rather than built, with materials that ranged from stuff with the texture of sponge to something like a seashell’s slick, opalescent hardness. Most of the DalRiss structures had hugged the ground, part of the terrain they rested on. Now, though, the nightmare shapes and surreal forms that cloaked the ruined city added layer to machine-blind layer, utterly transforming the original shape and feel and logic of the place. The surfaces were smooth, bloated… obscene, as though some vast and intricate work of art had been desecrated, twisted from one design of rational purpose into something irrationally different.

  And that, Dev reflected as he scanned the dead cityscape through the senses of his Ghostrider, might very well be what had happened. Most of the old DalRiss buildings had been converted, eaten or mutilated or simply buried by the coal black Xeno growths that covered everything like a sea of once molten lava.

  From what he’d seen on ShraRish, DalRiss architecture usually presented smooth surfaces and curved shapes that fit together in strange but aesthetically pleasing ways. Most of what he saw now, though, had the look of something excreted… organic, but unspeakably foul, and with a randomness that suggested the builders had been blind… or simply completely unconcerned with anything a human or a DalRiss would have called beauty. Most surfaces were covered with massive, tangled coils of glistening tubes that reminded Dev of heaped entrails. Here and there, bizarre forms, some smooth, some spiked and angular, rose from the organic tangle, jet black in the light of that blazing sun.

  “Delta Leader, this is Delta Four,” Dev called over the tactical net. “Katya? You scanning anything?”

  “Kuso, Dev, this place is dead,” Katya replied. “Like a tomb. I don’t think there’s been anything alive here for a century at least!”

  Glancing to his left, Dev could see other members of Group Delta, Katya’s Warlord and four striders of First Platoon. To his right, a Kani APW stilted along on spidery legs, pacing the warstriders’ recon sweep.

  It was eerie, and lonesome despite the presence of the other striders, with a graveyard stillness as oppressive as the obscene growths surrounding them.

  “Delta Leader, Delta One,” Hagan called. “I’m picking up some interference on the radio. G and H bands…”

  “Spooky, ain’t it?” Nicholsson added. “Like the city’s singing to us…”

  When Dev shifted bands, he could hear the interference, too—not the usual hiss and crash of static, but a modulated thrumming, like the plucking of some bass stringed instrument. “Yeah,” he said. “But what’s doing the singing?”

  They came to a gulf, a canyon with sheer walls carved through solid rock, spanned by vaulted arches and the limply hanging tubiforms of the Xenophobes, many running straight up and down the walls. The depths were lost in shadows. Dev probed with a ranging laser and found the bottom almost two hundred meters down.

  “Delta Leader, Delta Four. We’re crossing.”

  “You’re covered.”

  Dev flexed his legs and jumped, sending the Ghostrider soaring above the chasm. Mentally he shrugged his shoulders, cutting in the strider’s hotbox, feeling the surge of thrust catch hold, extending his leap across the gulf. His flanged feet struck the hard surface on the other side, striking sparks, as his knees flexed to absorb the shock.

  “Down and clear!” he called over the net. Data flowed across his visual field. Jump reserves down thirty-eight percent. Full power in another twenty-eight seconds.

  Dev scanned the surreal terrain, wondering if he would recognize a threat in this strange landscape of meltingly soft, malformed shapes if he saw it. Nothing looked normal, nothing looked right. Even the sky had an aching, hollow feel to it. Atmosphere readouts showed the same general composition as Alya A-VI, though it was much drier. The temperature hovered around forty degrees Celsius. Acid concentrations in the air were no worse than in a pre-nano industrial park on old Earth, the result, possibly, of the extinction of all native life. In the hours since they’d landed, in the days they’d been orbiting the planet, there had been no sign at all of biological life on this world.

  His audio sensors picked up the roar of the Kani APW touching down with a crash in a billowing cloud of superheated steam sixty meters away. Seconds later, Hagan’s Manta landed a hundred meters to the left.

  “I’m getting a heat plume up ahead,” Hagan reported. “Three-five-oh, range forty-two hundred.”

  “I see it,” Dev replied, catching sight of the geyser of heat on an IR scan. “Let’s check it out.” The cityscape was so still and dead that anything as energetic as a warm exhaust from some subsurface pocket was a welcome event, and worth checking out. Was the infrared leakage from this world a natural effect, or the result of some kind of industry?

  Together, then, Dev’s Morgan’s Hold and Hagan’s ’Phobe Eater advanced, adopting a bounding overwatch through the twisted terrain that sent first one strider, then the other ahead, each covered in turn by the other. The APW followed. A kilometer to the west, Katya and the rest of 1st Platoon continued the sweep toward the center of the city.

  Everywhere Dev saw the stark, bleak evidence of older DalRiss buildings dismantled… no, digested by the Xenophobe invaders, replaced by the Xenophobe excretions. Haphazard mounds of tubes, some of them tens of meters across, lay in tangled masses, some heaped into artificial mountains hundreds of meters high.

  It must have taken armies, Dev realized, to so completely wreck a flourishing civilization. Where had those armies gone?

  Uneasily he glanced up into the deep violet sky. The Expeditionary Force was watching all wavelengths, all radar bands. Nothing could move on this world’s surface without Captain Sato’s immediate knowledge.

  But what about under the surface? Many of those obscene-looking tubes were open, gaping blindly at the sky. Tubes descended into the bowels of the planet everywhere, spreading and burrowing between and through the remnants of DalRiss foundations like the massive roots of ancient t
rees.

  Always the Xenophobes emerged from underground. Had their armies emerged to devour the DalRiss civilization here, then returned to those black depths?

  He checked his weapons system readouts again. This time he mounted a Taimatsu Type-50 on his right-arm hardpoint, a strider-sized version of the man-portable chemical flamers. A rocket pod was mounted over his left shoulder. Less than adequate if the Xenos should decide to emerge and—

  “Target!” Hagan cried. “Bearing three-three-one! Firing!”

  Dev turned just as the Manta opened up with its Kv-70 weapons pods. Streaks of fire sleeted like machine-gun fire across the twisted landscape, smashing into a tower a kilometer away.

  There was no response from the structure, which exploded as Hagan’s rockets tore through it, then collapsed.

  “Kuso!” Hagan snapped. “It’s already dead!”

  Dev summoned an image of the tower from his Ghostrider’s memory, zoomed in, enhanced…

  It had been a stalker. Hagan’s first instinct had been right. It looked something like a Fer-de-Lance, round and squat and covered with spines. But the thing was an empty shell, a corroded torso as lifeless as its surroundings.

  “What the gok are you shooting at, Vic?” Katya’s voice said over the tacnet.

  “Sorry, Captain,” Hagan said. “I thought—”

  “Forget it. But let’s cruise easy, huh? We’ve got a long way to go.”

  They found more machines after that, hundreds of them, scattered across the city ruins. All were dead, abandoned centuries ago.

  Why?

  Dev stepped closer, scanning the silent ranks with his optics. “Hey Captain,” he called. “You getting this?”

  “Affirmative, Four.” He heard her shift channels. “Starlight, this is Delta Leader calling Starlight. Come in, please.”

  “Starlight copies.” It was Colonel Varney, still aboard the Yuduki, but personally supervising the deployment. “Go ahead, Delta Leader.”

  “I’m relaying transmissions from Delta Four. Do you copy this, Starlight?”

  Dev continued to pan the derelict Xeno machines so that the mission officers aboard the Yuduki could see the full, grand sweep of the scene. It was eerie, like an army of skeletons, waiting to be summoned to rise. …

  “Affirmative, Delta Leader, Delta Four. Your signal is clear.”

  “It’s like they all just packed up and left,” Dev said.

  “Roger that.” There was a pause, filled with the singsong cries of radio interference, the background hiss of static. “Ah… Delta Leader, this is Starlight. Be advised that Intel believes that the Xenos might be underground. They recommend caution.”

  Cheerful thought.

  “We copy,” Katya replied. “Starlight, we are investigating a heat source, map reference Alpha Delta One Seven Niner. Do you see it?”

  “Affirmative, Delta Leader. Orbital scans show IR source, probable venting from subsurface structures. Watch your step.”

  “Rog.”

  “Dev, you heard that?”

  “I copied, Captain. Vic and I are moving closer now.”

  The heat plume was clearly outlined against the sky under IR scan. Another chasm yawned ahead, where some ancient DalRiss structure had been cleared away all the way to its roots far underground, leaving gaping-mouthed tubes and shafts plunging down into darkness.

  Dev kicked off, then triggered his jump pack once… twice… a third time, holding the jump as he aimed for an invitingly clear area on the far side. His strider’s feet came down. …

  … and then he was falling as the ground disintegrated beneath his weight. What he’d thought was steel plate shredded like foil as his warstrider plunged through. Forgetting himself, he almost triggered his left and right weapons pods as he tried to fling out his arms and grab the edge of the pit as he fell. Warnings flashed across his vision and he aborted the accidental aim-lock-fire order, then fired his jets.

  Morgan’s Hold had twisted sideways as it broke through, and the thrust slammed him into an arching strut. Then he was falling. “Mayday! Mayday!” he cried, using the ancient call for help. “Delta Four calling mayday—”

  The pit opened up around and beneath him, a webwork maze of girders and steel scaffolding. Dev twisted himself in midair, swinging the Ghostrider into a feet-down attitude, then mentally shrugged his shoulders, firing the twin jets. Warnings flicked through his consciousness. The fusion jets had not yet recharged; their combined thrust was a fraction of what was necessary to even slow his fall.

  He banged into another projection… and another. He was falling down a well of some kind. … No! It was one of those tubes, he realized with a horrid crystal clarity, a tube twenty meters across, roofed over by a flexible sheet of metal foil too thin to support his strider’s twenty-five-ton weight. The walls consisted of recognizable bits of technology fused into a random hodgepodge of organic-looking struts, girders, braces, and bits and pieces crushed together into a nightmarish tracery of interlocking jackstraws. Laser rangers probed the darkness below as he fell. Fifty meters more and he would strike bottom. …

  Dev’s attention focused on the swiftly dwindling range numbers flashing through his mind. Time seemed suspended, his senses and the workings of his brain itself working with a computer’s speed. He tensed himself… then flexed his shoulders at the last possible moment.

  This time the jets fired at full power, and kept firing, slowing him with a savage deceleration that would have been crushing had he been able to feel his body. Clouds of superheated steam billowed around him. His feet struck bottom and his torso kept going, slamming into a duralloy-hard pavement as his legs folded on either side. There was a thunderclap of noise, a spray of debris from overhead as part of the wall collapsed, and then… silence.

  For a long moment Dev remained there, unmoving, not even daring to acknowledge the warnings flashing through his mind. The Ghostrider had been hurt—the actuator links and shock supports of both legs damaged—and a power drain from his lower right torso probably meant a bad short. For a moment he’d thought he was about to be buried alive as the weakened tunnel walls collapsed, but the cave-in had only been partial. Slowly, gingerly, he tested systems, opened circuits… then eased the machine into a wobbly upright stance. Pieces of tunnel wall, like smoothly rounded tree trunks, spilled to the floor in a cascade of rubble, dust, and gravel.

  He was down, and he was safe, at least for the moment. The big question was… where?

  It was pitch-dark at the bottom of that well. The Ghostrider’s AI calculated a fall of 103 meters… a drop that had carried him well past the shell of machines and reworked buildings on the surface and into the dark, stonewalled crust of the planet itself.

  Looking up, he could see the partial blockage of the well. He thought he could probably see the tunnel opening far above if he moved, but he didn’t want to move yet until he was sure the strider’s systems were all working.

  In any case, he wasn’t getting out that way. The Ghostrider’s jets had been barely up to slowing his fall; they’d never lift him up that sheer drop, and he knew that he couldn’t climb one hundred meters.

  With escape ruled out for the moment, he decided to investigate his surroundings. Had anyone heard his earsplitting entrance? Was there anyone to hear? On infrared his surroundings took on the irregular, smooth-surfaced look of cavern walls, glowing with radiated heat. To his left, though, he could see a definite regularity to the rock. He might be standing on the foundations of some extremely old stone buildings, ancient DalRiss structures, though their architectural purpose had long ago been lost, or possibly the rock had been somehow reworked according to a different plan.

  A Xenophobe plan, perhaps.

  “Delta!” he called, opening the tactical frequency. How the hell was he going to get out of here? “Delta Sweep, this is Delta Four! Do you copy?”

  A burst of static was his only answer, one shot through with alien twitterings and flutings and high-pitched piping sounds that
set his imagination crawling. Radio interference from the surrounding walls, he decided, and the blockage overhead, possibly mixed with assorted local transmissions.

  Transmissions by whom? Imagination gave texture to the heat-glowing semidarkness around him. Dev tried to pierce it, tried to resolve some sort of images from the midnight blackness. He could make out walls, but he decided that his IR feed had been damaged. The walls seemed to be moving with that vague crawling sensation one senses when focusing on shadows in the dark in the middle of the night.

  No, it was not his imagination. The walls of the cavern were alive… and moving.

  He tuned his IR receptors, trying for better resolution. There was almost no visible light at all, and his infrared feed gave indistinct images at best, because the walls and what seemed to be covering the walls were very nearly the same temperature.

  At last, though, he was able to resolve those masses of color marking sources of heat, letting the AI filter the images in such a way as to pretend that the cavern walls were cool, with warmer masses covering them, patches of yellow against green and blue.

  It was impossible to see any detail. Through linkage, Dev’s senses could receive infrared data, but his brain could still only interpret input in the hunorm range. Anything else was a translation, and subject to interpretation. At first Dev thought that the walls were wet, that water was flowing across rock surfaces, but as he watched, he became convinced that he was looking at something more complex than that.

  Impulsively he switched on the strider’s outer lights, flooding the cavern with harsh brilliance. At visual wavelengths the walls retained their glistening, wet-smooth look, like the walls of a limestone cavern sculpted by a million years of flowing water.

  But they were moving, rippling beneath the lights like the flutter of a jellyfish.

  It took several minutes for Dev to understand what he was seeing well enough to even attempt to describe it to himself. There were… things hugging that wall, each a meter square or more, each rounded, smooth-surfaced, and shapeless.