Katya advanced, pounding at the Tachi. She had no weapons left now save for her machine guns, and the ammo loads on those were rapidly dwindling toward zero as she kept hammering round after stuttering round into the chaos of fallen striders and struggling men before her. Dust and smoke gouted from her exploding rounds, and bits of wreckage were flung into the sky from strikes against the monorail’s hull. The surviving marines were pulling back now, snapping off shots from their laser rifles that flashed ineffectually from Katya’s armor, scattering back into the forest, twisting and dying and falling as Katya’s heavy machine guns swept through their ranks. Smoke from the smoldering striders hung like a blanket across the battlefield.
Unstoppable, Katya strode forward, driven now by battle lust. She was a giant on the battlefield, a steel-and-duralloy Valkyrie striding forward in wreathed smoke and flame, death hammering from her weaponry pods. The Tachi’s damaged laser turret whined through ninety degrees, taking aim…
Then a thundering pulse of explosions shredded the Tachi’s armor, smashed aside the laser turret in a tangled ruin, then nearly tore the Tachi’s body in half. Lee Chung had arrived from the switch house, his curiously anthropoid RLN-90 Scoutstrider hammering away at the Tachi with a stream of high-explosive shells.
The battle ended with stark abruptness; according to Katya’s internal clock, eighteen point two seconds had elapsed from first shot to last.
“Lee!” she called. “Where’s Simone?”
“Still in the switch house, Captain.”
“Stay with her. I don’t want those marines circling back and finding her alone. Darcy! Are you okay?”
“Still here, Captain,” Darcy’s voice replied. “Power’s down thirty percent but I’m still moving.”
“You’ve got overwatch,” she told him. “Watch that those Impie leggers don’t try a counterattack.”
“Yes, sir.” There was no resentment, no hesitation in his voice now.
“Lipinski, unbutton and come with me.”
She coded the shutdown sequence for the Ghostrider, then pulled her hand from the palm interface. She woke up inside her link pod, a close, dark, chokingly hot tube in a claustrophobic darkness relieved only by a small, wan lighting strip. Removing her cephlink helmet and the connections to her bodysuit, she pulled on a breather mask and life support pack, then donned a pair of gloves that sealed themselves against her cuffs. She slapped a release and the Ghostrider’s dorsal hatch whined open. Releasing an access ladder, she climbed to the smoke-clotted rail cut. Lipinski, breathing hard behind his mask, joined her a moment later.
She unholstered her sidearm, a ProTech M-263 rocket pistol, and touched Lipinski’s shoulder. “Stay with me,” she told him. “We’ll check Rudi’s strider first.”
The Lokan striderjack hadn’t had a chance. His light machine was gutted, his link pod torn open by the deadly kiss of a plasma bolt. The pod’s interior was splashed with blood and shredded, meaty fragments, very little of it recognizable as human.
Behind her, she heard Lipinski’s gasp of recognition, followed by the fumbled sounds of him removing his mask before he vomited explosively. Katya struggled to contain her own rising gore. She’d seen death as violent and as bloody, but it was always a thousand times worse when the broken wreckage was what remained of someone you’d known.
Ghosts, Chris Kingfield and Mitch Dawson and other men and women she’d known through too many years, moaned and whimpered in her ears.
“C’mon,” she said roughly. “Get that mask back on.”
Lipinski, already pale, tried to draw a shuddering, gasping breath and nearly strangled on the thin, CO2-heavy air. His eyes bulged in his face.
“Now!” Katya barked, and with trembling hands he pulled the mask back on. She reached over and pressed the feed rate control on his chest pack, giving him an extra kick of oxygen to purge his lungs. CO2 poisoning could be an insidious thing, unfelt and unsuspected until the victim keeled over unconscious.
He took several deep, shuddering breaths, then nodded, eyes blinking at her against the harsh light.
“Your gun,” she reminded him. “We have to check the train.”
She led him across the rocky clearing, ducking under one maglev rail and approaching the second, where the two monorail cars lay silent behind the scattered heaps of dead Imperials and the smoking ruin of two warstriders. The Katana, she saw, had been wrecked as badly as the Swiftstrider, with both linkage pods slashed open. The headless and armless torso of one of the pilots hung upside down from a jagged finger of hull metal, still draining into the dust. The black, scorch-streaked fuselage was splashed with blood.
With difficulty, Katya and Lipinski picked their way past the debris and heaped bodies. Some of those men, she noticed with sick horror, were still alive, moving legs and arms in nightmare slow motion.
She wanted to help, but there was nothing to be done for them now. Her unit was too small, their numbers too few, to even think about stopping to render first aid. The suits of most of the wounded had been breached; anoxia and the carbon dioxide in the air would claim them in minutes.
Scrambling up crumpled metal, Katya peered into the second car’s interior, ready to duck back if some surviving marines were waiting for her approach. The monorail car was empty. It was dark inside, though sunlight spilled through the open loading door and painted the sharply canted floor with a dazzling slash of white. By the reflected glare. Katya could see the large horizontal braces that had been used to transport the two warstriders. Judging by the speed of their reaction, though, the striders must have been powered up and battle-ready, their pilots already sealed in and linked. Seats lined the car’s walls, all empty now. There were weapons lockers tumbled in a pile on the floor, open and empty, and several crates of ammo and weapon power packs. Two armored bodies, marines who’d tumbled back into the open car after being hit, sprawled unmoving at the angle of floor and wall.
There was nothing that might be the prize they sought.
“Forward,” she said, gesturing with her pistol. The second car was joined to the first by sliding doors. The first door opened smoothly; the second ratcheted halfway open and then hung up in its twisted frame, but Katya was able to turn sideways and squeeze through. The forward car was smoke-filled and dark, dark enough that she had to switch on the light mounted on her belt. There were more dead marines here—unarmored men who’d died when cannon fire and lasers had slashed open the vehicle—and the hull-crumpling wreck had slammed men, seats, and cargo into a tangled pile at the forward end of the compartment.
Lipinski found what they were looking for after nearly five minutes of desperate searching, a large safe with a palm ’face reader to open it.
The owner of the interface that would have opened that safe was dead. Katya opened it the hard way, burning through the locking mechanism cover with her hand laser, then twisting together a pair of wires inside. A circuit completed and the door hissed open.
Inside was a metal box, as long as her forearm and twenty centimeters deep. A simple touch-lock opened to her thumb.
Within the box was a comel.
She stared at the prize, heart quickening. It was still alive, a rippling, translucent slug perhaps the size of a basketball. She hoped it would stay alive in Eridu’s atmosphere… but she knew from experience that the bioengineered creatures were uncannily tough, able to survive in a broad range of atmospheres and conditions. Lipinski produced an empty knapsack of heavy plastic-weave cloth, and she sealed the box and packed it away.
“Company coming, Captain.” It was Simone’s voice, speaking over the radio compatch behind her left ear. “Aircraft, from Babel.”
The marines would have radioed for help when the first shots had been fired. Reinforcements would have been dispatched at once.
“On our way out,” she replied. “Darcy! Start setting the charges!”
“Already done, Captain. Just give the word.”
“Let us get clear first.”
Katya and Lipinski scrambled clear of the wreckage and back into Marduk’s burning daylight. Crossing to the waiting Ghostrider, they swarmed up the access ladder, wiggled back into their pods, and sealed themselves in. Moments later, Katya was linked in again, the daylight outside now dimmed to human levels by the strider’s AI. Data cascading across her visual display identified three incoming aircraft as probable Hachi fliers.
Hachis—the name was Nihongo for “Wasp”—were swift and deadly air-to-ground killers, ascraft designed to provide close air support for infantry. They were coming in low and fast, with an ETA of less than three minutes.
“Into the jungle,” Katya ordered. “Simone, you climb in with Chung. It’ll be a tight fit, I’m afraid.”
They waited while Dagousset climbed aboard the Scout-strider and wriggled legs-first into the open hatch. Katya knew what it was like riding that way, squeezed body-against-body in near-total blackness, and she sympathized. Simone would have an uncomfortable ride back to base.
Hatches sealed again, the three warstriders turned from the wreckage and with swiftly scissoring strides plunged back into the jungle. It was urgent that they get well clear of the battlefield fast. The surviving Imperial Marines might still have strider-busting shoulder weapons; worse still, those Hachis had IR sensors that would be able to pick up a warstrider’s heat through the forest canopy. It wouldn’t take long, however, for the vastness of the jungle to swallow them up. The enemy fliers would have their figurative hands full tracking the scattered marines.
Behind them, a thunderous blast echoed off the mountains to the south, followed swiftly by a second, a third, a fourth. Charges placed by Darcy one by one disintegrated the wrecked striders. If the rebels couldn’t use them for spares, then neither would the Imperials.
Katya regretted not being able to take the time to give the wreckage a more thorough search. They’d hoped to be able to load Braun’s Rhino with captured weapons, but the four-legged walker was still smoking furiously, its hull utterly charred and gutted. As they left, Lee had stooped and retrieved one squad support plasma gun from among the Impie bodies, and he carried it now like a handgun in his strider’s massive, armored fist; that SSPG and the comel would be their only prizes this day.
That sharp skirmish, less than twenty seconds in duration, had been a victory… but it was a victory with a high price. Two of the Freestriders’ nine striders had been destroyed—twenty-two percent of its entire mechanized strength. Two men had died… one of them Rudi Carlsson, whom Katya had known since their campaign on Loki. In exchange, they’d destroyed two of the Empire’s inexhaustible supply of warstriders, killed perhaps twenty marines, and scattered another ten or fifteen into the jungle.
The rebellion could not afford to trade the Empire and the Hegemony strider for strider, not even if the exchange was Rhinos for Katanas. Katya thought about the comel, tucked away beside her inside the pod, and wondered if the damned thing was going to be worth it.
Chapter 14
Is a Xenophobe intelligent? Or a Barnard’s sky island? Or a comel? What about dolphins, gorillas, elephants, or the other fabulous beasts of Terra’s recent past that pique our curiosity with largely anecdotal records of their use of language, memory, or tools? I think the question we must set for ourselves is not whether a given life form is intelligent, but whether or not that intelligence takes a form that we conceited and self-centered humans can comprehend.
—Intelligence in the Universe
Dr. Paul Hernandez
C.E. 2532
There was Self, and the myriad extensions of Self that intertwined through the sheltering warmth of Mother Rock like the lacy twistings of veins of metal ore. As always, Self dreaded the parting, the tiny death of separation of Self from Self that was necessary as an extension of Self into the surrounding unconsciousness of not-Self. It was precisely like the amputation of a limb as several hundred of the component cells of one slim pseudopod of Self nestled within the Self-manufactured prosthesis of a rock threader and, cell by pain-wracked cell, severed each link with the main body.
White agony… and loss…
For both of the two sundered aspects of Self there was diminution. For the main body, resting within the cavernous, interconnected voids of not-Rock deep within the depths of Mother Rock, the loss was slight. The Self-mass was continually fissioning off bits of itself and sending them off like exploratory probes, independent bearers of tiny, micro-Selves that wormed out through the surrounding rock as messengers of intelligence and self-awareness. Usually they returned. Sometimes they did not.
For those slivers of awareness, however, amoebic, organic-inorganic composites of awareness, the loss was catastrophic. Perhaps half of those micro-Selves could not endure the transition, the shattering loss of identity, of memory, of ego that was part of the golden warmth of Unity. Sealed within the sleek, artificial body of the rock threader, the fragment of diminished Self struggled to come to grips with its truncated scope and being, »self« now, instead of Self.
Shrunken, isolated, »self« could remember snatches of its former life as Self, but dimly, as splintered dream-memories. Awareness once had been the shifting and blended thoughts and perceptions of trillions of tightly organized, interconnected units; now its awareness encompassed the being of a few thousand units only. So much had been lost! For long moments, the Self within the artificial body of the rock threader shuddered, writhed, and very nearly went mad.
It was a madness of loss and of something that might translate roughly as grief.
Of what remained of »self’s« awareness, strongest was the need to quest out from the parent body, a drive hardwired both into the complex molecular rings analogous to chromosomes within each unit’s organic material, and within the molecule-sized computers adrift within its inner, cytoplasmic seas. That need granted »self« a measure of control, gave it purpose and a means of filling the yawning chasm of loss and need howling behind »self’s« brutally amputated mind.
Gradually, madness subsided, though it remained as a churning subset of rigidly controlled need, boiling constantly just beneath the highest levels of »self’s« thoughts. The rock threader, a slender and inorganic extrusion grown from Self’s body, became a kind of mobile exoskeleton for the oozing mass of »self’s« gelatinous units. Magnetic fields flicked on, shifted, and grew in power. As »self’s« perceptions reached out in the surrounding Rock, the threader began moving.
There was Rock, and there was »self«, the former parting for the latter in the powerful magnetic flux that turned it plastic. The rock threader followed the track of another »self« that had passed this way before, a »self« that for reasons unknown had never returned to Self for reabsorption and a sharing of new perceptions and memories. »Self« followed the old track partly because the rock, once deformed by another threader’s passage, was softer and more yielding there; it followed, too, in a dimly perceived quest for that lost fragment of the vaster Self.
Threats, both to »self« and to Self, had to be found and absorbed if Self was to continue its age-old expansion through the comfortingwarmth of Mother Rock.
The old track led upward, away from the sustaining heat of Mother Rock. Ahead, dimly sensed now, »self« could taste the magnetic savor of pure metals and other less-identifiable substances in seemingly boundless concentrations. Closer at hand, in every direction, in fact, it could sense the energy flux and movement of other »selves«, all climbing through the yielding Rock away from the comfort of Self, closing on a treasure trove promising boundless raw materials, growth and survival.
»Self’s« pace through the rock increased.
Chapter 15
Everything we know about Xenophobe psychology comes from the testimony of those few of us who actually made physical contact with them. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to tell how much of the story has been filtered by our human prejudices and opinions.
—from a report given before the
Hegemony Council on Space Exploration
C.E. 2542
Twenty-eight kilometers west of Babel, a kilometer-wide crater marked the site of the last Xenophobe breakthrough. There, the jungle pressed close around the scar of that last battle, overlooked by a modest, thick-forested slope called Henson’s Rise. The crater itself had been tagged Site Red One.
Hegemony Military Command, with the experience won on twelve other worlds infested by the Xenophobe invaders, had erected defensive barriers against the possibility of a second breakthrough at this place. Shortly after that first encounter, walls more massive than those of any Terran castle had been grown in place; earth and dead vegetation had been poured into hastily erected plastic molds, then seeded with self-replicating nanits that had transformed rubble into solid rock, a treatment known as the Rogan Process.
The improvised fortifications overlooked the crater rim, ringing it in completely with ten-meter RoPro walls and brooding gray towers, each capped by a robot gun emplacement. The automatic defenses were backed up by troops, both Hegemony warstriders from the 3rd New American Mech Cav and leggers of the Eridu 1st Home Guard Militia.
Less than an hour after sunrise, the assault was heralded first by an earthquake that caused the nearest trees to shiver. Mud fountained into the air as the ground split wide. Seconds later, a dense, milk-white fog began issuing from the gaping fissures, spreading across the crater floor to create a white, circular lake almost a kilometer across, a pool of heavier-than-air gas far thicker than any morning mist but too thin to be properly called a liquid. As it pressed relentlessly against the crater’s inside rim, sampling robots planted there tasted the gas and transmitted their findings seconds before they died; the fog consisted of trillions of molecule-sized machines, nanodisassemblers, each carrying a few atoms of what once had been solid rock.
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