by Ian Douglas
The ground was much closer now. They crossed a dry river valley, and a clump of what might have been trees—slender, compact cone shapes thirty meters tall and colored red-brown. Smaller, feather-shaped fronds waved nearby, pink and orange in the harsh white light.
"DZ coming up, Hammer," Obininova said. "Fifteen seconds."
Light-line graphics flickered across Katya's vision, painting out a bland strip of rolling ground three kilometers ahead. "I see it. Arming weapons." She shifted to the intercom. "Hey, Junior. You ready back there?"
"Safeties off, boss. We're set to odie."
Seconds later, the Warlord dropped from the ascraft's belly, then steadied on shrieking thrusters. Katya hit the ground in a swirl of dust, taking the shock with a groan of stressed hydraulics. First Platoon was down.
Where was she? More graphics overlay reality, showing strider icons scattered across half a kilometer. Blue outlines revealed Xeno structures hidden by the smoke. She shifted to infrared.
Better. Xenotown spread out around her, fairyland and nightmares mingled. Downtown, the mouth of a tunnel, was that way. "On me, Hammers!" she called. "Bearing two-five-oh. Snap it up!"
Over her link, she could hear the calls and commands of other units in the drop. "Third Platoon, down and moving!"
"Second Platoon, we're down. Lance, watch your six! I've got movement there!"
Magnetic interference crackled through her mind. "Bandits! Bandits!" a voice yelled. "Hammer Two-Three reporting bandits at Delta-Charlie-one-one . . . "
Katya put the Warlord into an easy, loping run. Light flared through the mist to her left, lighting up the smoke from inside. In a moment, she broke out of the cloud. Shafts of white sunlight lanced down through rents in the smoke staining the sky. Ahead, alien forms twisted and mushroomed like monstrous fungal growths among sponge-textured cones that might have been trees. DalRiss cities, she knew, were living creatures, grown rather than built; what she was seeing now was an alien perversion of an alien design, a city long dead and rotted, the shell reworked into the stuff of nightmare. There were crystal columns, like she'd seen at Norway Ridge, rearrangements, she thought, of sand into something like glass. Buildings like squat, red-capped mushrooms had unfolded, their walls spilling across the ground in heaps of pallid, wormlike tendrils, strangeness following strangeness until Katya felt a sharp inner vertigo. What was DalRiss, and what was Xenophobe? Nothing looked familiar save the clouds overhead and the occasional thrust of boulders through the carpet of alien biomass.
Something huge and monstrous turned on elephantine legs, wrinkled body slung between the hips, black above, gray-red below, with prongs or horns on one end, a balancing tail on the other. She hit it with her ranging laser; the AI computed size from range and angle and told her the creature was six meters tall—bigger than most warstriders—and massed at least fifty tons.
Katya noticed something else about that towering apparition. Chunks of pebble-rough hide dropped from its flanks with each step, revealing raw meat and purple-red blood.
Among striderjacks, zombie referred to a Beta, a warstrider or other human machine somehow taken over by the Xenos. This . . . thing gave new definition and horror to the word, a once-living organism now transformed into a decaying puppet two stories high.
There was a flash, and something hit the Warlord high on its left torso. The nano-D count soared, and Katya cut in the strider's external countermeasures.
Moving swiftly to sidestep the deadly, invisible cloud, she swung her left arm up and triggered the CPG. White light flared from the beast's shoulder, causing it to stumble. An instant later, al-Badr cut in with the dorsal hivel gun. Pieces of the giant beast splattered with the buzz-saw impact. The body took another step forward, then sagged in a bloody heap.
Other shapes were moving among the broken forest of pillars. Katya tracked something moving quickly on four legs and fired with her hull lasers, but the bolt flared against the side of a gnarled, organic column crowned with spikes, biting a chunk from it and sending it crashing to the ground.
"Hold steady!" al-Badr called. "I'm launching a Star-hawk!"
She dug in the strider's armored heels, lurching to a halt. "Go!"
There was a hissing shriek and a jolt. A stub-finned missile streaked into the sky. She opened a window inset on her field of view. It showed the landscape ahead streaking past, the mind's-eye view from Jun-i al-Badr as he guided the teleoperated missile through a radio link. Katya's graphics showed more life-forms, closing from behind the encircling walls of smoke.
"We've got heavy targets at five kilometers," she told him over the link. Short range for a Starhawk, but they had to relieve some of the pressure in the immediate area of the DZ. "Moving this way."
"I'm on them."
Dots appeared on the ground, growing swiftly to shadows. Katya saw more alien life-forms, monstrous, already decaying in the thrall of the unseen creatures riding them. The Starhawk impacted one of the largest ones with a flash and a snowstorm of static.
"Scratch one zombie," al-Badr said, his point of view now back with the Warlord.
"Yeah, but we have lots more coming," Bondevik pointed out. He indicated an icon clear on the graphics display but not yet visible to hunorm optics. "I think we've got a Cobra over there."
A Cobra! So there were familiar Xeno types here. Katya had been wondering. The Xenos on ShraRish appeared to be using organic forms as their principal surrogates and mounts, and it seemed possible that the lack of any DalRiss steel or heavy manufacturing industry might be the reason for that. The Xenos needed processed metals and advanced materials to make combat vehicles of metal . . . though she'd always assumed they took what they needed from veins of ore underground.
But perhaps it wasn't that simple. Steel, for instance, was not found underground; it was iron, laboriously smelted from ore, then alloyed with carbon through one of several high-temperature processes. Other artificial materials came to mind: ceramics . . . plastics . . .
"Let's see what this Cobra is made out of, gentlemen," Katya said. She turned the Warlord onto a new heading, stalking the unseen Cobra.
Explosions erupted around them, pelting the strider with rock and shattered crystal. Katya engaged the ventral-mounted weapons pod when a starfish-shaped creature that looked like an overgrown DalRiss appeared fifty meters off, hurling fist-sized balls of flame from an unseen launcher implanted in its back. Rocket fire disintegrated the creature, or drove it under cover. Katya couldn't be sure which.
The EM spectrum was blocked now, the piercing hiss of Xeno electromagnetics as effective as any jamming. Katya scanned the skies, looking for the promised air support. Nothing yet.
Then the Cobra lunged at them from behind a low wall of toppled debris. It was in its combat mode, squat and lumpy and deadly-looking, but one blast from her CPG tore a piece from the gray hull as big as a Stormwind's wing. On a hunch she fired her bow lasers. Dazzling light flared from the thing's flank; metal vapor boiled into the air. Katya told the strider's AI to analyze the gas's spectrum.
Nickle-iron, raw and unrefined. Some lead, silver, gold, and copper . . . but mostly nickle-iron as pure as from any asteroid. Traces of silica, sulfur, magnesium . . . rock! The thing had worked slabs of stone into its hull.
Rock and nickle-iron. Stuff the Xenos could find deep within a planet's crust. The Xenos took what they could get, but they did little real manufacturing or metals processing of their own. For years it had been assumed that they had factories of some kind in their labyrinths deep in the crust, places where they could forge the scraps of demolished human technology they stole into something new.
Could it be possible that the nanotechnics they obviously used were their only technology?
She fired again, lasers and CPGs, and the Cobra started to morph, gray metal and stone flowing together like liquid mercury, gleaming silver in the sunlight. Taking control of the central weapons pod, al-Badr triggered a barrage of M-22 rockets. The multiple detonations shredded th
e damaged Cobra and scattered smoking lumps of the thing across a thousand square meters of ground.
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%, Ar1.2%, 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.
