by Ian Douglas
Though it was supposed to be impossible to tell the difference between full sensory linkage and the real thing, Katya preferred reality. The encounter with Mitch had been wonderful nonetheless, and much needed, a long-sought chance to relax, to blast free some of the tension of command that had been building for these past few months, a chance to share something beautiful with one close, special someone.
She hoped the gods of war hadn't noticed this time.
"Company commanders can't have friends, Mitch," she said. "And they can't play favorites. It didn't happen."
"I understand."
"But . . . I enjoyed it too."
"DZ in two minutes," Lara's voice interrupted over the regular channel. "Ready for a touch and dust-off. We're starting to pick up some static."
"Affirmative," Katya replied. Xenophobe machines employed powerful magnetic fields that blasted radio frequencies with intense static at short ranges. Human weapons—proton guns and electron cannons—had the same effect. Communications were often sharply limited during a close-in battle.
She called up a god's-eye view. Created by her Warlord's AI, the display revealed the surrounding terrain as a realistic three-D image of wrinkled hills and meandering valleys as seen from overhead. Fossae Schluter was a broad, flat valley carved by a vanished glacier. Schluter itself was a mining encampment nestled against one of the canyon's sheer slopes, part beneath a pressure dome, the rest built into tunnels laser-bored for kilometers into the layers of exposed black rock.
The two Stormwinds, marked by swiftly moving pinpoints of green light above the desert floor, were just entering the valley's mouth. Schluter was marked in blue, ten kilometers ahead. Across the valley, Terraform Facility Baldur rose from the badlands, a four-sided pyramid larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Was it coincidence the Xenos had surfaced here? So far, Threat sightings and raids had been confined to the far side of Loki. The Xenos' target might be the mining facility, but the proximity of the terraforming tower was worrisome. The shapeshifters seemed to home on large masses of engineering and technology—like cities and sky-els.
Katya nulled the computer graphics, shifting back to hunorm vision. She could hear the whispered mental voices of Dawson and Kingfield as they went through their final checks, readying the Warlord for combat. No downcheck, no sysfails. Weapons powered up, safeties locked. Chu-i Hagan, First Platoon's commander, reported over the tacnet that the platoon was hot and ready.
The Stormwind jolted hard on some rough air, slowed, then skewed to the left in a gently drifting hover. Through her link with Anders, Katya could see the dome now, rain-swept and bathed in the glare of harsh external lights. There didn't appear to be much damage visually, but when she cut in her infrared again, Katya could see a heat plume spilling from a white-glowing rupture in the dome's face. On the horizon, Baldur squatted against rugged mountains, showing a heat plume like the mushroom cloud above a volcano.
No movement outside the Schluter dome. Where were they?
"Primary DZ coming up," Lara warned. "Cutting internals."
Katya lost her link with the ascraft module. All she could see now was the shadowy ground meters beneath her feet.
She opened the ICS again. "You've got control, Mitch."
"Rog." His voice was tight. "Jets hot."
Blade's AI was counting off the seconds to release: three . . . two . . . one . . .
Katya felt herself falling. An instant later she was jolted as Blade's jump pack cut in with twin jets of screaming, superheated gas. Sand blasted from the ground beneath her feet, followed by a rush of fog as the heat melted the permafrost, then turned it into steam. The cloud blinded Katya, but her strider's radar kept ticking off the last few meters to the surface.
Contact!
Assassin's Blade rested on folded legs, then rose, torso and arms deploying from drop mode to combat mode. The warstrider's body looked like a lumpy, misshapen aircraft fuselage, toad-ugly with a blunt snout. Its two legs were longer than the hull slung between them, heavily armored and digitigrade, articulated with the "knees" angled sharply toward the rear. It gave the strider a mincing, birdlike walk, a light-footed gait surprising for a sixty-ton bird.
Blade's AI automatically established a laser line of sight with each of the other striders unfolding from their grounding spots, linking them together in a lasercom tacnet.
"Move-move-move!" she called. "Everybody! Spread out!"
Katya was out of the control circuit, so she was only along for the ride, but she could sense the feedback of the Warlord's sense of balance as Mitch leaned into a long-legged stride. She concentrated on the deployment. To left and right, the other warstriders of the platoon fanned out, putting distance between them. Victor Hagan's KR-9 Manta 'Phobe Eater, flat-bodied and horned like its namesake, moved toward the Schluter dome. Deus Irae, Sho-i Guiterrez's Battlewraith, followed. Two smaller, roughly humanoid warstriders, LaG-42 Ghostriders, took up flanking positions. Nicholsson's Battlewraith and Chung's Skorpiaad heavy-weapons carrier brought up the rear.
She sensed movement in the darkness.
"Guiterrez!" she called. "Bandit, left ten, range four-zero!"
Guiterrez's Battlewraith dropped into a crouch, pivoting on the threat like a gunfighter, bringing its massive right-arm electron cannon into line with a shadow rolling across the rocky ground.
Man-made lightning seared down a laser-tunneled vacuum, accompanied by a boom of thunder and the searing hiss of static over the open radio channels. The flash banished the shadows, and Katya saw the Xenophobe machine.
It was torpedo-shaped—Xenos always were when first emerging from underground. Its surface gleamed like quicksilver in the alien light.
"Target lock!" Kingfield yelled in Katya's mind. "Primaries charged! Firing now!"
The RS-64 shuddered as the weapon tech triggered the left arm gun. Warlord mounted two proton guns, its primary weapons, heavy-bodied particle cannons that swung from the elbow mounts like blunt, oversize forearms. Katya felt the blast of raw heat as it fired, saw the eye-searing flash as megajoule energies channeled down a laser-bored tunnel in the air. Lightnings played across the Xenophobe, twisting in the alien machine's magnetic fields.
Guiterrez added his electron cannon's whipcrack flash to the fury clawing at the Xeno's silver hull. Dawson swung the Warlord's torso slightly, aiming the dual chin lasers that extended from the blunt snout like the mandibles of some great insect. The Xeno loomed huge in Katya's vision, fifty meters distant now, embraced in the red glow of targeting reticles. The lasers fired, scattering from the quicksilver surface even as that surface began changing shape.
Like a hideous silver flower, the Xeno killer began unfolding into something new. . . .
Chapter 4
The Xenophobe War is like no other conflict in Man's bloody history because, for the first time, his opponent is a complete unknown. In past wars, at least, the enemy was human, his science known, his reasons for fighting rational or at least intelligible, his worldview comprehensible.
After four decades of war, however, the only motive we can ascribe to the Xenophobes is hatred or fear of other life forms—hence their name. Some researchers go so far as to suggest that their thought processes may be so alien to ours that we may never understand their reasoning.
—The Xeno Foe
HEMILCOM Military ViRdocumentary
C.E. 2537
Flares popped in the sky, illuminating the landscape in eerie silver light. Its surface flowing like molten metal, the Xenophobe machine was morphing into a chunkier, nightmarish shape, a flattened polyhedron sprouting half a dozen weaving, snakelike tentacles. It seemed to grow legs as it needed them, flowing across the ground with a rolling, almost amoebic motion, advancing on pseudopods of mercury-bright metal that shifted from fluid-soft to diamond-hard at will.
Hegemony Military Command had classified the primary Xenos based on mass and on the types of weapons each most often used, naming them after poisonous Eart
h reptiles. This particular design, massing ten to twelve tons and armed with mag-fired nano-D projectiles, had been code-named Krait.
"I've got more targets," Kingfield warned. "Bearing one-seven-one, range four point five thousand! Looks like their tunnel mouth! Recommend Starhawk CMP!"
Katya saw them, points of light on a window called up on her visual display. The Krait was the immediate threat, but those other targets, emerging now from underground, would be problems damned soon. Better to stop them now, at a distance. A CMP—a Cluster Munitions Package—ought to do the trick.
"Do it!" Katya replied over the intercom. "I'll take the CPGs! You handle the teleops!"
"Rog!"
She felt the inner click, the completion, as control of Blade's main weapons shifted to her linkage. An instant later, the Warlord shuddered as Kingfield triggered one of the strider's two dorsal-rack Starhawk missiles. The weapons tech was gone, his mind riding the teleoperated missile to the target on a beam of laser light.
Dawson, meanwhile, continued to operate the Warlord's legs and body motions, dodging to the right as the Xeno horror closed in a blur of silver spikes and tentacles. And Katya took aim.
A kind of mist or cloud flickered between Katya and the apparition—a shield. Many Xenos could suspend clouds of metallic dust motes in magnetic fields, clouds that could absorb laser and particle cannon energy enough to blunt an attack.
As long as that shield was up, though, the Xeno couldn't fire at her. She raised both arms, and twin green targeting reticles slid across her visual field, centering over the hazy outline of the Krait's body. She clenched her fists right . . . left . . . right . . . left.
Each flash was dazzling, banishing the night. The Xeno's shield could absorb only a fraction of each bolt, and by the third shot, the cloud had dissipated. With the fourth shot there was an explosion, a sharp report that tore two of the weaving tentacles off with a splatter of liquid metal and left a red-glowing scar.
The Xeno, stricken, seemed to collapse upon itself, melting, surface blurring . . . and then it reformed, growing new legs, and kept on coming.
Humans called them stalkers, shapeshifters, and snakes. Presumably they were combat machines, analogous to human warstriders, but how the Xenophobes got them to change their shape, to morph, was still a mystery.
So were the means by which they traveled underground, like enormous land-going submarines, and the way they could repair battle damage in seconds. Nanotechnics were at least part of their magic; that much was obvious. Human engineering, construction, materials processing, computers, and medicine had all been transformed by the nanotechnic revolution, and there was promise of more and greater wonders to come.
The Xenophobes, however, seemed to be able to apply nanotechnology on a far grander scale than human science had yet dreamed of. It seemed—seemed—that the alien machines were composed entirely of separate, bacteria-sized elements locked together by internally generated magnetic fields. Control of those fields appeared to be the key to how Xeno machines could change shape, grow legs or tentacles like metallic pseudopods, fill in battle damage, or even fragment into dozens of separate, individually mobile fragments.
"Watch it!" Dawson warned. "He's going to fire!"
Katya had already seen the buildup of a powerful gauss field in the stalker's shell. There was a flash, just as Dawson jacked the Warlord to the side, and something slammed into Katya's left shoulder.
There was no pain, of course, but it felt like a hard, numbing shock. Warnings flashed across her visual field.
"Mitch!" she yelled. "Nano count at point eight-seven, left shoulder!"
"Firing NCMs!"
The Xenos' principal weapons were nano disassemblers, clouds of molecule-sized machines that dissolved solid matter literally atom by atom, picking it apart and carrying it off in a stream of white fog so quickly that durasheath armor could be eaten away in seconds. They could be dispersed in clouds like an insidious, corrosive gas, loaded into shells, or incorporated into surface layers that made a Xenophobe's touch deadly. NCMs—Nano Counter Measures—were submicroscopic machines shot like fire extinguisher blasts from nozzles set into a warstrider's hull, programmed to hunt down and fuse with nano-Ds before they could cause significant damage.
White vapor gushed from a nozzle inset in Katya's left pauldron, the heavy curve of armor protecting the Warlord's shoulder. The nano count registering on her visual display dropped. Blade's, armor was down eighteen percent in the damaged area . . . a scratch.
She fired the Warlord's main weapons again, carving off one of the Krait's stumpy legs in a flash that left sand and gravel fused and glowing. A second later, light flared on Katya's inset data window. "Got them!" Kingfield exulted in her mind, his link with the Starhawk broken. "That's three down! The other two are hurting. . . ."
"Take the hivel!" Katya ordered. Her own hands were full, literally, handling the big CPGs. "Hit the Krait at zero-one-five!"
"Got it!"
Hivels—the acronym was drawn from the words high velocity—were the descendants of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Gatling cannons. Firing 8-mm rounds of depleted uranium at better than 150 rounds per second, the hivel's rotary barrels loosed a stream of projectiles traveling virtually nose to tail, streaking toward the enemy at a kilometer per second.
Katya heard the whine of the hivel's eight rotating barrels as they came up to speed, felt the shift in mass as the turret tracked the target. There was a shriek as Kingfield triggered the weapon, and Katya felt the savage recoil. The silver polyhedron of the Xeno machine splashed with the close-range impact.
"Hit!" Kingfield exulted. "That's another down!"
Down, but not out of the fight. The burst had torn the Krait in two, but both halves were still very much alive . . . still moving, still deadly.
Humans divided Xeno machines into three basic types. Alphas were their main weapons, snakelike when they emerged from underground, spiked and tentacled in their combat mode. Betas were something else entirely—Xenozombies, human machines, warstriders, or transports partly replaced by shape-shifting nanotechnics.
Deadliest of all were the Gammas, fragments of Alphas ranging in size from two or three meters long to the size of a man's hand, individually mobile, and coated with nano-D layers that let them eat through the hardest armor like acid through skin.
An Alpha could be torn to pieces, and the individual pieces, the Gammas, simply kept on fighting—less mobile, perhaps, and unable to kill at a distance, but deadly in their small size, great numbers, and ability to kill with a touch.
Heat was the best weapon against Gammas. Katya brought her CPGs into play again, firing bolt after bolt into the shattered Krait. Alarm tones keened in her ears, and blocks of red text wrote themselves across the periphery of her vision. Her particle cannons were overheating, the massive drain on her fusorpak critical. Her power systems would fail any second now if she kept driving them this way.
Movement scissored on her left. Sho-i Rudi Carlsson, a native Lokan newly commissioned in the Thorhammers, guided his dual-seater LaG-42 close to the churning ruin of the Krait, hammering at the glowing fragments with the Ghostrider's 100-megawatt chin turret laser in an eruption of light and hurtling shrapnel and glassy bits of heat-fused sand.
Katya shifted to her Warlord's lasers, twin 50-megawatt projectors extending on either side of the Warlord's snout like the jaws of some hugely improbable insect. Each delivered half the energy of an exploding stick of dynamite in a pulse lasting a hundredth of a second. Katya aimed by looking at what she wanted to hit, fired by clenching the muscles of her left and right eyes in a savage squint.
Dipping the Warlord's torso and swinging left to bring both lasers into action, she focused and fired, loosing twin bolts. The silvery metal scattered much of the light, but enough energy was absorbed within the still rough surface where it had broken off to blast the piece into a hundred smaller fragments. Once the fragments were small enough, they became harmless.
> "Hunter Leader! Please, Hunter Leader, come in!" a woman's voice called over the tacnet. "This is Schluter Control. We need help inside the colony dome!"
"This is Hunter Leader," Katya replied. "What's your situation?"
"We've got a Xeno Alpha inside the main dome! We've lost integrity in the main section. Most of our people are pulling into the shafts and sealing them off behind them, but we've got thirty or forty trapped up here on the top level! Nano count . . . We've got a nano-D count of point two-two in the main dome level!"
Damn! It would be a death trap for warstriders inside the narrow confines of a colony dome, but she couldn't ignore that call.
"Sit tight, Schluter Control. Help is on the way. Keep your heads down! Carlsson! Stick with me!"
"Affirmative, Tai-i!"
Shifting to the ICS, she added, "Let's haul it, Mitch!"
"I'm with you, boss. Hang on!" The Warlord's legs scissored in a ground-eating stride toward the dome.
Calls rasped through radio static, or sounded clear as the Warlord picked up spills from tight-beamed laser transmissions. "Hunter Four!" a voice cried, quavering on the ragged edge of panic. "This is Four! I'm taking fire! Help me! Help me!"
"I'm on it, Nick! Come right ten!"
"Xeno down! Hit him! Hit him again! Use your flamers!"
"Watch it, Harald! On your right, one-five-zero!"
"I'm hit, God, I'm hit! Get them off! Get them off!"
"This is Hunter Two! Four's in trouble!"
Four was Sho-i Harald Nicholsson, another Lokan. Katya shifted optics, scanning the entire area. There he was, his Battlewraith spilling a stream of white vapor from its side that cascaded, heavier than air, across the ground at his feet. Thirty meters away, a Xeno, a squat, sea urchin—spined Adder, continued to hurl nano-D shells into the stricken warstrider.
"Hold it, Mitch," Katya said. "Swing right forty!"
The Warlord stopped, then turned. Her particle cannons were still hot, and the bow lasers weren't powerful enough to seriously hurt something as big as an Adder. Taking control of the strider's torso from Dawson, Katya lined up the sleek Mark III weapons pod recessed into the machine's fuselage. The pod could carry various munitions; for this patrol, Katya had ordered her machine armed with M-22 laser-guided rockets.
