Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  "Yes, sir. Let's get the gok out of here."

  Dev heard the men muttering among themselves as the striders turned and pushed back into the woods.

  Who, he wondered, were the Xenophobes? The shape-shifting monsters tunneling away kilometers below his feet? The anti-Hegemony mobs that urged dissolution of a government that had kept the peace for centuries?

  Or the Imperials like Omigato, who called alien and human alike gaijin, and who issued such monstrous directives?

  "Uh . . . Tai-i?" It was Gunnar Kleinst.

  Dev shifted his optic feed to a rear scanner. Kleinst's Swiftstrider was still at the edge of the woods, shifting its weight back and forth between its slender, birdlike legs. "DeVreis is in command now," he said.

  "I don't care who's in command," Kleinst shot back. "Look, I can't . . . I can't go back. Do you understand? My family lives near here. Those are my people down there!"

  "Captain?" DeVreis said.

  "You're in command now," Dev said. "Not me."

  But it was not the sort of decision that could be casually tossed off to someone else. The entire company was still in a kind of shock, unable to decide which way to move, or how to react.

  Dev knew what he had to do.

  Swinging his Ghostrider about, he broke away from the others, smashing through the underbrush toward the lone Swiftstrider standing at the forest's tree line. "Open for a direct feed!" he snapped, and he felt Kleinst's RAM open for direct access. In less than a second. Dev copied the orders he'd just received into Kleinst's files. "Get going!" he said, his voice urgent. "Fast! Tell the people in Tanis what's going on, and show them the orders for proof! Tell 'em Imperial Marines are going to show up any time, and they'd better be ready for them."

  Dev wasn't sure what the civilian population of Tanis could do if the Impies launched an all-out assault on the dome. At the very least they would have time to get breathing masks and oxygen ready, or even to begin evacuating the dome. At best, they might manage to get the word out to other cities on Eridu, to the shadowy forces of the Rebellion, perhaps. The government could try to wipe out one small village with secret orders to an isolated unit, but there was no way to carry out such orders against the aroused population of an entire planet.

  "Sir?" Kleinst sounded desperate. "Come with me!"

  "Go!" Dev roared over the link. "Now!"

  The Swiftstrider pivoted on spindly legs, then broke and ran from cover, long, scissoring strides carrying the recon vehicle rapidly down the slope toward Tanis.

  Dev found he wanted desperately to follow, but he still wasn't sure just where his real duty lay—to himself or to his unit. If he deserted now, the fury of HEMILCOM might well descend on the entire company.

  Besides, he wanted the kid to make it and he didn't know yet how the others were going to react.

  "Hey! He's deserting!" Barre called.

  Turning, Dev faced them. Barre was crashing his Scoutstrider through the brush toward the edge of the woods, the bulky 100-MW laser comprising his machine's right forearm coming up into firing position.

  Smoothly, Dev stepped between the laser and the fleeing Swiftstrider. "Do you want to shoot me?" he said calmly, "or carry out your orders and arrest me?"

  "Ranger Blue Two!" Sandoval's voice snarled over the voice circuit. They would have observers monitoring the company's communications links, which meant that they'd seen and heard everything. "This is HEMILCOM. Stop that deserter!"

  Koenig was moving his Swiftstrider forward, well to Dev's left, where Dev couldn't block him and Barre as well. Dev swung sharply, tracking with his chin laser.

  "Tai-i!" Helmann's voice sounded frightened. "You can't—"

  Dev ignored him, concentrating on the targeting brackets closing now on the Swift's chin turret with its bulky 18mm autocannon. He was terribly conscious of the Ares-12's vulnerability; the eight-and-a-half-ton machine had almost no armor at all, and the slightest error in targeting could pierce Koenig's life support pod and kill him.

  Locked . . . fire! The muzzle of Koenig's main gun glowed white-hot for an instant, then puffed away in a sparkle of vaporized metal.

  "Damn it, Cameron!" That was Barre's voice, anguished and shocked.

  All of the warstriders were in motion now, some toward the treeline, others toward Dev. Dev could also sense some outside party working at the encoded locks guarding access to the Ghostrider's artificial intelligence. He was running out of time.

  Schneider's LaG-17 moved between Dev's Ghostrider and Barre's Scoutstrider, blocking the bigger machine's line of fire. In one blazing instant, the company could dissolve in the bloody chaos of strider-to-strider close combat.

  "Everybody relax!" Dev yelled over the command circuit. "Iceworld, iceworld, right—"

  . . . and then he felt his power going, the drain totally outside his control. He groped with his mind toward an override and found nothing there, no way to switch control back to his cephlink. Vision, speech, all control functions were gone. With a shock, he realized that he was no longer linked to the LaG-42's AI. He'd been bumped off the circuit. His VCH was still connected, his hand still on the interface plate, but no feeds were coming through and he was wide awake, inside his body, harnessed within his life support pod.

  HEMILCOM must have inserted a command override and shifted control of the Ghostrider to Helmann. Dev was now deaf, blind, and helpless inside his coffin-sized pod. Tentatively, he laid his palm against the hatch release . . . but that, too, was denied him. The access locking system, and no doubt the capsule eject as well, had been sealed off or disabled. He was a prisoner.

  As he lay there, sensing the ponderous swayings of the strider as it moved through the woods, he wondered what was happening outside. Had his men been ordered to run Kleinst down? Were they tracking the kid now, or sniping at him with missile or laser fire?

  Or had the entire column given up and moved back into the woods? The motions of the LaG-42 suggested steady movement, not battle or a chase. The Ghostrider, at least, was heading back to base.

  And Dev was carried along helplessly in its belly, a prisoner.

  Chapter 24

  It is impossible to live in a society and to he free of that society.

  —Vladimir Illych Lenin

  early twentieth century

  Aegir Strang did not understand his current orders, but he felt no compunctions about carrying them out. He hated the agitators and speech makers and Constitutionalist rabblerousers who seemed to have sprouted up like weeds in a dozen south Eriduan cities, and if HEMILCOM wanted continuous reports and updates on the demonstrations breaking out among the cities of the Euphrates Valley, he was delighted to oblige.

  For several weeks now, he'd been traveling among several of the cities in the valley—Lagash, Memphis, Tanis, and Sidon in particular—a circuit of south-polar towns and cities where discontent was breeding rebellion, where even the news that Xenophobes had surfaced outside of Babel failed to stop the litanies of sedition and treason.

  Strang was not from Eridu, though he spoke perfect Deutsch—as well as his native Inglic and Norsk-Lokan. He'd been born and raised on Loki, but a winning thesis in school on the Teikokuno Heiwa had won him the chance at a scholarship to the prestigious Tokyo University. For the young Strang, that had been a literal chance of a lifetime. He hated Loki, its bitter half-T-formed climate, its cheerless people, its crowded domes, and when his one opportunity to get off the frigid Frontier world came, he'd taken it.

  Gaijin students in most Japanese schools were still unusual in a country that distrusted foreigners, but Tokyo University was an exception, a showcase institution in the most cosmopolitan of Japan's metroplex cities that ostentatiously solicited the brightest non-Japanese students throughout the Shichiju. After passing the school's grueling, hellish exams, Strang had quickly distinguished himself, majoring in political science and revolutionary theory. He'd been recruited by the DHS three months before his final graduation. For ten years he'd served the Directorate,
first at Singapore Orbital, then at Eridu. He'd never returned to Loki.

  On the Frontier, the Directorate of Hegemony Security had the reputation of being a kind of political secret police, keeping tabs on the hundreds of dissident groups that flourished throughout human space. In fact, the largest part by far of the DHS's charter involved the so-called "technic crimes" such as unlicensed starship jacking, computer hacking, and file smuggling. The Shichiju required order for efficiency, but there were always elements within society that tried to shortcut or break the regulations for personal gain. The DHS was tasked with running down the criminals who threatened the economic and technical order of things, and Strang had long since decided that he loved his work.

  Lately, though, much of that work had centered on the dissident movements on Eridu. There were dissies on every Shichiju world, of course, but Eridu was a breederbed of revolutionary movements, illegal jack tampering, and sedition. Worst were the holdout greenies still fighting the Hegemony's plan to transform their world into a paradise. The battle over terrafonning Eridu appeared to have sharpened the political confrontation that was evident across the Shichiju and could easily lead to full-fledged rebellion.

  And yes, the DHS was also tasked with suppressing rebellion.

  Special Agent Aegir Strang, then, had been assigned to his circuit of towns and cities in Eridu's Euphrates Valley, where he'd assumed the identity of Rudolph Heinz, a Bavarian importer negotiating a deal to import Terran beer to Eridu. The cover let him talk to lots of people, especially the managers of bars, beer halls, and restaurants, places where people tended to gather to vent their frustrations. He'd been following the growing surge of popular discontent and had even spoken to some of the dissie leaders who were planning a series of demonstrations in half the cities of south-polar Eridu. Omigato's announcement that outposts and towns were to be evacuated had generated a tidal wave of protest. Revolution, he was convinced, could break out at any time. All it needed was a push.

  Dutifully, Strang had recorded everything he'd seen and heard in his implanted RAM, and, dutifully, every other day or so he'd downloaded the recordings into a millisecond-burst transmission and beamed it to Eridu Synchorbital. He wasn't privy to any important secrets—cephlink technology, after all, made any stranger a potential spy—but he was able to keep HEMILCOM apprised of plans to launch the biggest anti-Imperial demonstrations yet. He'd picked up the who-was about hidden weapons and armor and passed those on as well, and when the big rally began in Tanis he'd been on hand to record the speeches for later assessment by the DHS intelligence teams. J. L. Mattingly, one of the most outspoken of the so-called Eridu patriots, was the featured speaker. The man had been arrested twice already for anti-Imperial agitation, and it looked like he was about to make a stab at third-time's-the-charm.

  Events in Tanis had rushed ahead at a breakneck pace. A thousand people were gathered in the town square, where a four-story holoscreen had been erected to project the speaker's voice and image. Mattingly had appeared in the screen, a giant delivering a two-hour sermon on the evils of the Empire and its Hegemony puppets. After that, there'd been a succession of lesser speakers, including the administrator of Tanis herself, a woman who'd been appointed by the Governor but had recently and publicly sided with the dissidents.

  After her. Sinclair's image had boomed down at them for thirty minutes, a message from "fellow patriots, fighting injustice and tyranny on neighbor worlds." An analogue, obviously, sent from New America, since it was unlikely that Sinclair was here. Strang wished he could have a chance at the real Sinclair. The man. Strang thought, should be shot for his anarchist's attacks on the most just and stable government Mankind had yet managed to devise in a very long and bloody history. Well, who could tell? Once the troublemakers on Eridu were rounded up, perhaps he could swing a reassignment to New America. That rats' nest had needed cleaning for a long time now, and the biggest rat of all ought to be easy enough to track down. Someone on New America, surely, could be found who would be willing to trade Sinclair for blood money.

  Then Mattingly was back.

  Throughout it all, Strang had recorded every word, every gesture, and he'd circulated through the crowd too, filing faces in his implanted RAM for analysis later at Eridu Synchorbital.

  He was pretty sure that HEMILCOM was preparing something special. During his last transmission to synchorbit, he'd been warned to keep a mask and life support pack handy and had been given a password in case he needed to identify himself to occupying Imperial troops. He was to lie low until he could approach an officer with an Imperial Marine garrison unit.

  It wasn't until the warstrider appeared in the city's main airlock that he realized that something was wrong.

  They'd been playing canned folk music over the giant holoscreen, some woman in a red headband singing something in Inglic about eagles and time and dust, meaningless stuff as far as Strang could tell. Mattingly himself had interrupted the show, though, with the warning that Hegemony forces were outside the city and that an attack could be imminent.

  Panic had gripped Tanis with the announcement, and Strang had recorded it all. This was what he'd been sent to find, he was certain . . . the townspeople's frightened gatherings in tight little knots on the streets, the grim-faced militia troopers appearing, carrying a motley assortment of weapons obviously just unpacked from hidden stores. The Tanis town militia commander himself, a black-bearded former police chief named Duchamp, appeared on the screen, urging the citizens to stay calm and the troopers of the 200-member Tanis Militia to assemble by the main lock and wait for further orders. After a while, a wild-eyed kid, a Hegemony warstrider by the look of the patches on his bodysuit, came on the screen, explaining in a high-pitched, fear-ragged voice that his unit had received orders to attack the town, but that he'd managed to break away and come warn them.

  Strang didn't believe the kid at first, though the level of panic in the town went up like a sky-el shuttle as he talked. A Hegemony attack on Tanis? What HEMILCOM officer in his right mind would order such a thing, knowing that such a heavy-handed move would inflame every city on Eridu?

  Then someone gave the kid on the big screen an implant jack. He'd plugged it in, closed his eyes . . . and then his image had vanished, replaced instead by words scrolling up the building-sized screen.

  SECRET

  TO: COMMANDING OFFICER, COMPANY A, 1ST BATTALION, 4TH TERRAN RANGERS

  FROM: HEMILCOM, ERIDU STATION, ERIDU SYNCHORBIT

  RE: OPERATIONAL ORDERS

  1. DANGEROUS REVOLUTIONARY FORCES HAVE SEIZED THE MAIN CITY DOME OF THE TOWN OF TANIS . . .

  By the time the message had reached "A harsh display will impress the rebellious elements," the panic had begun to metamorphose into something else. Strang heard it clearly in the voices of the people around him in the Tanis square, a growing, bubbling anger that swept over the earlier fear like the incoming tide, submerging it in a sea of chanting, hate-darkened faces.

  Maybe HEMILCOM had known what it was doing after all. If this kind of emotion had been lurking just beneath the surface, maybe the only way to deal with it was with military force.

  Unfortunately, the attack appeared to have been broken off. The warstrider, a kid named Gunnar Kleinst, claimed that his company's commander, Devis Cameron, had refused the orders and given him his chance to escape.

  Strang watched the screen, gnawing at his lower lip in an uncertainty born of the knowledge that the operation of which he was a part was collapsing before his eyes. What should he do? The Hegemony, surely, had contingency plans, a backup unit for just this kind of situation, and the DHS no doubt had SWAT forces ready to move in and scoop up Mattingly and the other high-profile traitors.

  He would have to make another transmission.

  Strang's lasercom link with HEMILCOM was hidden among the rocks on the Sinai Heights above the town, a unit hidden inside a hollowed-out chunk of rock, with only the carefully aligned transmission and receiver arrays showing. All he had to do wa
s compose and encode a cephlink message and zip-squeal it to the laser transmitter through a fist-sized radio relay hidden just outside the dome wall. He had to be within ten meters or so of the relay, but there was a convenient spot, a park close beside the dome that he'd used before. He began pushing his way through the angry crowd, heading toward the south side of the town.

  Omigato had taken command of the HEMILCOM communications center at Eridu Synchorbital. The plan, Omigato's carefully crafted and precisely balanced plan, was in danger of being smashed, and it was all the fault of that cursed gaijin, Cameron.

  It had mattered little to Omigato whether the town was destroyed or not, since his target was not Tanis but Devis Cameron. The American, Omigato had been certain, would do one of two things. Either he would carry out the orders and attack the town, or he would refuse the order and set himself up for a court-martial. What Omigato had not foreseen was the possibility that Cameron would actually warn the rebel populace of the town, dispatching one of his own men to do so!

  Damn the man! Some of the men on Omigato's staff, including his own analogue, had guessed that Cameron would carry out his orders and attack Tanis. The orders telling him to do so, of course, could be easily accessed and rewritten before the public trial, and the revised version of them—directing him simply to observe the situation and report to HEMILCOM—was already on file with Eridu Synchorbital's communications AI. Cameron would be tried, convicted, and disgraced for his part in killing hundreds of unarmed civilians.

  Omigato himself had expected Cameron to refuse to carry out those orders. True, the man had been diligent and conscientious in the attack on the rioting mob in Winchester, but Omigato had been watching Cameron closely during the interview with Prem. The fool had agonized over a handful of civilian casualties, convincing Omigato that he would never have the stomach to breach a colony dome. Given that some of his men were native Eriduans who would protest such orders, it wasn't likely, in Omigato's opinion, that an attack would take place. Cameron appeared to be one of those popular commanders who listened to his men instead of demanding instant and unquestioning obedience. Discipline among the Hegemony troops was not what it was in the Imperial armed forces.