Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  Then a sudden magnetic flux at the crater's center hurled shattered stone and gravel into the sky, and the thread-slender, questing tip of the lead Xenophobe slithered into view, weaving above the surface of the white fog sea.

  Xenophobes, when they traveled underground, usually followed the Subsurface Deformation Tracks of other Xenos that had passed that way before, as though the SDTs were underground highways running through solid rock. That preference was one of the few ways in which the alien machine/creatures were predictable, and it had given the Red One defenders some warning. They'd been listening to the growing subsurface sounds—the creaks, snaps, and groans of bending rock—for days now, and were already at full alert. When the actual breakthrough began, they'd been prepared—or at least, so they'd thought.

  It was the sheer savagery of the attack that caught them by surprise, as one Xeno after another boiled from the tortured ground, streaming white fog, turning the area deadly with the disintegrating touch of drifting nano-D clouds. Turret-mounted plasma guns and lasers had crisscrossed the crater's bowl with searing flame, shells laden with anti-nano-D countermeasures had been pumped into the fog by rapid-firing autocannons, but the Xenophobe Alphas had smashed clear of the geysering earth and snaked their way toward the crater rim like twenty-meter serpents, breasting the white fog like eldritch sea serpents with writhing whips for heads.

  Several of the monsters died in the crater, sliced to bits by the withering. Al-directed fire or the bolts of light from warstriders posted along the defensive wall. Others, however, began transforming, their snakelike forms blurring and melting, their quicksilver bodies collapsing into new, more compact shapes. Most common were things like terrestrial sea urchins, flattened spheres two meters across with slender spines reaching five meters beyond that. Embedded in crackling auras of electromagnetic force, they floated on Eridu's magnetic field. The maglev effect did not render them weightless, quite, but they drifted along lightly enough that their rippling spines snapping against the ground or the wind itself could waft them toward the nearest human defenses more quickly than any warstrider's pace.

  Two of the drifting monsters died in the high-energy crossfire from the surrounding towers, but eight more serpents surfaced in the meantime, and the fog sea was rising now, spilling across the crater rim and lapping against the inner base of the RoPro fortifications themselves. Counters recorded dizzying concentrations of nano-D in the atmosphere; the walls were softening under the assault of submicroscopic weapons that pulled them apart in the same way that they'd been assembled, a molecule at a time. Foundations weakened and walls cracked; a gun tower settled slightly, tilting ominously inward toward the white sea as foot soldiers manning its ramparts scrambled for safety.

  Five minutes after the breakthrough had begun, reinforcements arrived at the scene, a dozen circling ascraft with ground support weapons, and a pair of VK-141 Stormwinds, each carrying four Mech Cav warstriders in external hull slots. With shrieking jets, the Stormwinds set down in a jungle clearing east of the crater amid swirling clouds of dust and uprooted vegetation. The striders had unhooked and swung into action, loping toward the Red One fortifications just as the first tower crumbled into the pit in an explosion of RoPro fragments and debris.

  The nano-fog spilled through the gap in the wall like a flood gushing through a broken dam. Monsters followed, black or silver or dull pearl-gray nightmares of lashing spines and twisting, medusoid tentacles. Xenophobe Alphas that fought by using powerful magnetic fields to hurl BB-sized fragments of themselves at hypersonic speeds, or killed with the deadly embrace of a tentacle laden with nanodisassemblers. A Mech Cav RS-64 Warlord opened fire with thundering, left-right-left blasts from its charged particle guns; forked lightnings played across the leading Xeno horror, then shattered it into fragments.

  Horribly, those fragments kept moving, as though the Xeno machines were themselves alive and continued to live even when they'd been smashed into smoking pieces. The fragments, dubbed Gammas by the humans who fought them, some no more than a meter across, hunched and wriggled themselves across the battlefield, each steaming with the release of trillions of deadly nano-D units from their writhing surfaces that steadily ate away at whatever they touched. The nano count hit point four-eight and climbed steadily. The circling ascraft accounted for two more Alphas, but the rising nano count soon forced them back, their air surfaces and intake fans already corroding in the deadly, invisible cloud of nano-D drifting above the battleground.

  Tensions were still high between the local militia troopers and the Hegemony forces, but politics were forgotten as combat was joined at point-blank range. Legger militiamen fought in the shadows of Hegemony warstriders, turning hand flamers and lasers on the carpet of crawling fragments. AND rounds burst overhead, bathing the area in anti-nano-D clouds to combat the disintegrating effect of the Xeno fog. For six long minutes, the issue was in doubt, as warstriders smashed down the Xeno Alphas and foot soldiers mopped up the Gammas with blasts of flame and radiation.

  Then a fresh wave of Xenos emerged from the tunnel entrance, smashing down a fifty-meter stretch of RoPro wall and spilling onto the seared battleground east of the crater. The nano-D count reached point six-five, high enough to gnaw through the armor of the legger infantry in ten minutes or less. At a command, the troops fell back, covered by their huge, cephlinked comrades-at-arms. The warstriders fought on until Gammas began clinging to their legs and foot assemblies, eating through durasheath armor like acid through paper. For a time, the strider warriors cleansed one another in brief, hissing blasts of flame, but soon there were just too many of the creeping horrors, armor panels were failing, internal mechanisms corroding. Unable to battle so many at once, the striders began to retreat. A second line of defensive fortifications was being erected five kilometers to the east, between Red One and Babel.

  The fight to save Babel and Eridu's space elevator would continue there.

  »Self« had emerged from the rock suddenly, to find itself in the midst of a searing storm of energies unlike anything it had ever before encountered. The environment was bizarrely alien, a near-vacuum of not-Rock, a gulf that »self's« senses strained to bridge and measure . . . and failed. Other »selves'« were nearby; »self« could hear their calls across the low-energy end of the electromagnetic spectrum and sense that they'd been attacked by some unseen, terribly destructive threat.

  Without conscious volition, threat triggered response, a shifting of body surface from rock threader to defender.

  The transformation to the defender form was not an ability native to the original evolution of Self, but something adopted in the distant past from contact with another species, a not-Self intelligence that had manipulated matter in much the same way that Self manipulated Rock. The trait was now part of »self's" gene-analogues, an inborn conditioning transmitted through each reproductive cycle, the response virtually automatic each time a »self« emerged from the protection of Mother Rock into the Void at the heart of the universe.

  Theoretically, with each combat encounter. Self—the massive, growing Self still safely hidden within the womblike embrace of Mother Rock—would learn, acquiring skills, reflexes, even weapons from the not-Self opponents the individual »selves« met and defeated. Those skills and memories had to be returned to Self first, however, before they could be reproduced and disseminated throughout all future, budding »selves«, and so far in this cycle, no »self« had survived the encounter to return to Self with its prize of knowledge. »Self« was thrown into combat, completely unprepared. Seconds after reaching the Void, a searing blast of coherent radiation had slashed along the still-unformed side of the defender-form. Half of »self's« organic units had died, shriveling in white heat unlike anything it had ever before sensed.

  It was quiet now, the battle swirling to other parts of the Void. »Self« clung to the wall of the Void, fearful that at any moment it might be flung from the Rock and into that disconcerting emptiness that gaped above and around it. It underst
ood gravity as direction rather than as a force: to its senses, »self« seemed to be hanging, suspended at the edge of a precipice, in immediate danger of dropping into the Void.

  The feeling passed, but slowly. The direction leading toward Mother Rock, toward warmth, security, and the yearned-for reunion with the fully sentient glory of Self, seemed somehow to be holding »self«, leechlike, to the surface of Rock. Eventually, »self« dared to move, inching back toward the not-Rock crevasse through which it had emerged into this terrible, disconcerting space.

  To »self's« perceptions, the Void was not empty; true vacuum would have been incomprehensible. Void was a sea of energy, of magnetic lines of force and of electromagnetic radiations, most of which seemed to originate with a diffuse mass of heat and radio noise suspended within the not-Rock gulf. Trembling, »self« tasted its strange surroundings, detecting familiar elements but in unfamiliar guises—oxygen as a gas, for instance, instead of as part of solid chemical compounds. Most common of all was molecular nitrogen—rare in the depths of Mother Rock, but present here as fully four-fifths of the Void's chemical composition. When Self ate new cavities for itself within the deep Rock, the not-Rock that remained usually consisted of carbon dioxide and various other carbon- and sulfur-compound gases, the products of Self's metabolism.

  Movement was difficult, hampered by the damage. Part of »self« had not completed the transition from rock threader to defender, and the machine-life shell was trapped now between the two, unable to return to the Rock, unable to defend. It would have to heal itself before it could move far. Worst was the loss of its own organic body mass. That would have to be replaced, and quickly. Fortunately, pods bearing more amputated fragments of Self were nearby, rising from Rock, dispersing into Void on magnetic winds.

  »Self« recognized »self« and called out to it. . . .

  Chapter 16

  Xenophobe psychology is patterned on their physiology, with a kind of hierarchy of organization. At the bottom are individual units—football-sized blobs of jelly made of an intriguing mix of organic cells and inorganic . . . call them machines, cell-sized structures representing an organically based nanotechnology that gives the Xenophobes an adaptability that we can only guess at. So, too, is the Xeno concept of "Self" organized into layers, the combined experiences and perceptions of many separate Nodes capable of joining together as a self-aware whole.

  —from a report given before the

  Hegemony Council on Space Exploration

  Devis Cameron

  C.E. 2542

  The VK-141 Stormwind descended toward the clearing on screeching, ducted jets, lashing the surrounding trees into a hurricane frenzy. The ascraft shuttle, registered with the Babel militia, was one of a handful of transports used by the rebel forces. Katya, cocooned inside the Ghostrider clamped to one of the craft's external rider slots, waited until they were two meters from the ground, then gave the mental command that broke the connections between ascraft and strider. She dropped free, landing with a heavy thud. Vic Hagan's RLN-90 Scoutstrider dropped seconds later, a few meters away.

  Most ascraft possessed external cargo bays, called riderslots because they could be adapted to carry striders in magnetic grapples, tucked away beneath the vehicle's delta wings. Stormwinds had four, two to either side, but only two were filled on this run.

  If this crazy idea didn't work. Katya had argued, then four striders would be no advantage over two . . . and the rebels would lose only two of their precious combat machines.

  "Okay, Lara," she called over the general frequency. "We're down, all green."

  "Copy that, and I'm out of here." the ascraft pilot shot back. "Call when you need your dust-off. Good luck, you two." With a gathering roar, the Stormwind lifted above the clearing, pivoted until it was facing southeast, then accelerated, streaking away just above the treetops.

  It was a calculated risk, of course, conducting an ascraft strider drop less than thirty kilometers from Babel, where their activities might be noticed by the always-present watching eyes at synchorbit, directly overhead. It was unlikely that they'd be noticed, however. Right now, all HEMILCOM eyes would be focused on Site Red One, where the Xenophobes had broken through the surface scant hours before, overwhelmed the defensive line, and begun chewing their way east through the jungle, arrowing straight for the Babel towerdown.

  "We'd better start moving, Vic," she called. She rotated her optics slowly, studying their surroundings. The clearing was an old storm blowdown, and the footing was treacherous even for warstriders. "I make it three-one-three. Looks like I'd better break trail."

  "Roger that, Captain. After you."

  Their steps were slowed by the tangle of vegetation underneath. There was supposed to be a path here, the remnants of a seventy-year-old logging road, but Eriduan flora, beneath the high-energy light of an F7 sun, proliferated, grew, and even moved with a most unplantlike haste. Numerous Nomad trees had migrated from the higher slopes in search of moister ground, and the ubiquitous anemone plants had sprouted everywhere. The trail, its topography downloaded into her RAM by Creighton back at Emden base, was no longer there.

  Its loss would slow them, but there was no danger of becoming lost. Site Red One had been carefully mapped and plotted, its coordinates downloaded to their cephlinks. Katya could check the navdata displayed across one corner of her visual field and see that Red One was now some twelve kilometers away . . . that way.

  They'd heard the news at the rebels' Emden base last night: early-warning sound detectors at Red One had detected a large number of Xenophobe tunnelers a scant few hundred meters beneath the ground, pinpointing their probable breakout point. A military alert had been sounded, and both the organic and robotic defenders of the crater itself brought to peak readiness. From the ground recordings tracking the rumbling DSA, this would be no isolated breakthrough but an all-out assault, probably aimed at Babel and the space elevator.

  That added a note of deadly urgency to the op. For the moment, at least, the Rebellion was on hold, as the Network rebels joined Babel's defenders. Armed revolution might be necessary for Sinclair's "explosion of diversity," but for human diversity to have any chance at all the humans had to survive, whether they were Hegemony colonists, placard-waving demonstrators, or Imperial Marines.

  The Eriduan Network was continuing its covert activities, of course, but the overtly military units—and the men and women like Creighton who remained with the Hegemony's garrison forces—all reacted as they'd been trained, deploying to meet the suddenly emerging threat in the jungle west of Babel.

  There was, of course, some question as to whether rebel military forces could join in Babel's defense without attracting Imperial notice. The easiest means of handling the problem was for them to pass themselves off as loyal militia units. Every city on Eridu had at least one small, locally raised self-defense force, and since the exact number of operational warstriders fluctuated daily with breakdowns, repairs, and conversions, not even the vast HEMILCOM AI systems at Eridu Synchorbital could list or track them all with any degree of accuracy.

  Katya, however, had suggested an alternative.

  The appearance of Xenophobes near Babel gave the Network the opportunity it had been looking for, the chance to find an isolated Xenophobe machine, possibly one damaged in battle, and use the comel to try to establish contact with its operators. If the Xenophobes could be reached, could be made to understand what was at stake, a kind of alliance might be struck, something along the lines of Help us fight our war, and if we win, we'll find a wax to share this world with you in peace. . . .

  Katya had argued that her experience made her the logical choice to go. She still wasn't sure why she'd insisted on that point with such fire. Partly, she realized as she guided her LaG-42 across the sharply sloping ground through the patterns of golden light spilling through the forest canopy, it had to do with Dev, almost as though her success in contacting the Xenos for the Confederation would atone for Dev's working for the Hegemony,
for the damage he'd done to the Winchester Network.

  Too, there were still so many unknowns, right down to the question of whether or not acquisitive-phase Xenos could even be reasoned with. Katya had virtually appropriated the idea of trying direct contact for herself, and she damn well wasn't going to send others out to shake hands with Xenos while she stayed behind.

  She concentrated on her footing, her heavier LaG-42 in the lead, pressing through the undergrowth and trampling it down for the lighter Scoutstrider behind her. The ground sloped sharply skyward to her left. The putative trail worked its way crabwise along the flanks of the Pipe Mountains, a thickly wooded spur of the Equatorials that circled west of Babel like a protective wall eight hundred meters high. The jungle was thick, almost impenetrable in places, and heavily shadowed in the lower layers. Eriduan trees were mushroom-shaped, though with caps made of thousands of slender, interlacing fibers instead of a solid mass. Many had three or four levels, the better to trap every scrap of the energetic radiation from Marduk. Beneath them, in the shadows, saprophytic sponge brush and tentacled anemone plants made footing treacherous, even for a warstrider.

  She wondered just what they would find waiting for them at Red One.

  Vince Creighton had encountered a Xenophobe outside of Winchester several months before, and he'd been able to feed the rebels all of his own briefings on the threat. The Xenos on Eridu appeared to be identical to those she'd encountered on Loki and on the DalRiss homeworlds, shapeshifting Alphas that fragmented into amoebic Gammas when destroyed. So far on Eridu, no human machines had been captured by the Xenos, so none had yet been transformed into the Beta or "Xenozombie" form that utilized a disturbing parody of human technology.