Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  They reached the base of the ridge without incident and started to climb, the other warstriders of the platoon stretching out in a line to either side, each close enough to its neighbors to keep them in sight. Katya didn't need to give more than an absolute minimum of orders. The veterans in her team knew what they were doing and knew what she expected of them; the newbies had had plenty of training and drill back on New America, and the majority of them were veteran warstriders from various Hegemony units. The true test of any military formation was how well it stood up under battle, of course, and that had yet to be tested, but Katya had been careful to select her best people for this mission. She was confident that they'd be able to face anything the Imperials threw at them, and win.

  But it would help a lot if she knew just what the Imperials had prepared for her. They couldn't be unaware of the Confederation landings. Imperial sensors would have picked up the heat signatures and radar traces of the Stormwinds coming in; there would have been plenty of time to deploy an ambush.

  The question was . . . where?

  The warstrider line neared the top of the ridge labeled Point Alfa but remained in body-down position behind the crest. Extending a sensor arm above the rise, Katya could see the Imperial base, a cluster of gray towers and domes huddled against the yellows and ochers of the encroaching forest. It looked much as it had when she'd seen it last as a simulation compiled from flyby data, save that the four Japanese warstriders parked in front of the central structure were not in evidence. Four gun towers were very much in evidence, however, with heat signatures that suggested they were powered up and operational.

  The absence of enemy warstriders was disturbing. Not that she'd been expecting them to make this easy, but Katya much preferred the enemy you could see to the one you couldn't.

  "Skyfall, this is Dagger One," Katya called over the ground-to-orbit channel. "How about patching through an orbital feed? Let's see where the bad guys are hiding."

  "Dagger One, Skyfall. We copy. We don't see anything from up here, but here's the feed."

  A window opened against her awareness, small enough not to obscure her view forward, large enough to give considerable detail to an elaborate, three-dimensional map of the Dojinko region. Compiled from data picked up both in orbit and from high-flying, teleoperated drones, the image gave her an eye-in-the-sky false-color view of the landscape that included land forms and vegetation, artificial structures, and the heat and neutrino sources that might be enemy vehicles. She could clearly see the eight Confederation warstriders like tiny, glowing toys spread out along the crest of the ridge, could see the individual buildings of the base nestled into the valley two kilometers away. There was no sign, however, of hidden or camouflaged warstriders in the forest nearby.

  "Maybe they all went inside," Captain Kilroy suggested. "Their neutrino emissions would be masked by the reactor leakage."

  "That's a thought, Frank," Katya said. As she shifted her attention back and forth between the map and the actual layout of the terrain around her, she began to think that turning the base into a fortress might have been the Imperials' best tactical choice after all. In the same situation, she would have much preferred leaving a back door for herself, an escape route through difficult terrain, rather than letting herself get shut in within a wall-encircled trap. But if the Imperials were suspicious of the forest, possibly afraid of DalRiss that might still be in the area, and knowing that there was no escape for them into orbit until a relief force showed up . . . yes, they might very well be prepared to hold out for as long as possible inside their base.

  "Kilroy's right," she told the others. "Unless they've pulled out and headed for the hills in the last few hours, which I doubt, they're waiting for us inside."

  "The base is surrounded by a kill zone," Virginia Halliwell pointed out. "We won't get halfway across before they drop us."

  "What do you think, Skipper?" Captain Ward asked. "Maybe we call in a bombardment from orbit?"

  "No," Katya said after considering the thought for a moment. "Not when we don't know what's going on in there, or with the DalRiss."

  Arguably, that was the worst aspect of this mission. Any combat deployment becomes more and more difficult—and risky—as additional requirements, objectives, and restrictions are added onto the original operational orders. Farstar had the dual objective of neutralizing the Imperial presence on ShraRish and of making peaceful contact with the locals. Since they had no way of knowing how the DalRiss were going to react to a pitched battle right in their own backyard, they would have to proceed carefully, and that would put some fairly serious constraints on what they could and could not do. An assault by warstriders represented one level of threat, while laser bombardment from space represented quite another.

  "Well, the first thing to try is to tell them to surrender," Katya said. "Who knows? Maybe we'll get lucky."

  "Colonel," Captain Kilroy said. "I'm picking up an accelerated power flow through that nearest gun tower. I think—"

  There was a flash on Katya's tactical display as her AI painted the laser pulse in brilliant green light, and vegetation on the hillside thirty meters to Katya's left erupted in a geyser of smoke, steam, and organic debris. Lieutenant Halliwell's Ghostrider, caught at the fringe of the blast, staggered on the uneven ground, desperately attempting to remain standing.

  No luck today. "Skyfall, Dagger, we're taking fire from the gun towers!" Shift to tactical. "Dagger, Dagger One, commence fire!"

  The thin, white contrails of antiarmor missiles scratched their way into the sky above the base. All along the ridgetop, Confederation warstriders opened fire, loosing volleys of laser and particle beam fire, missiles, and unguided flights of rockets. Within seconds, the entire base was masked behind a thundering, flashing wall of high-flung dirt and smoke. A one-hundred–meter length of the fence disintegrated under that onslaught, as the nearest gun tower took half a dozen direct hits within the space of two seconds. Chunks of fabricrete rained across half a square kilometer; part of the turret, with the twisted barrel of a 103-mm laser still extending from its mount glacis, spun end over end, trailing a long streamer of black smoke. Smoke and nanoaerosol shells burst between the base and the ridge, adding to the impenetrable murk.

  The missiles already launched from the base began arching over, seeking targets. Katya sensed the dome of the hivel cannon mounted on her Warlord's back swivel, then fire with a buzz saw rasp of sound, but she kept her attention focused on her tactical deployment display, where the warstriders of First Platoon were picked out in clean, graphic symbols representing the various types of machines in her command. A game . . . a low-res vidsim empty of the emotion of blood and death.

  "Laser fire on target sighting only," she ordered. At the moment, there were no ground targets visible, and random laser bursts would be swallowed in the black pall of dirt and smoke screening the base.

  But that screening effect worked two ways, which had been part of Katya's plan from the start.

  "Section Two, cover us," she ordered. "Section One, with me!"

  Breaking from cover, the big command Warlord crested the ridge, then crashed through the ground cover on the opposite slope. Dirt slid and crumbled from beneath the Warlord's broad, duralloy-flanged feet, and Katya could feel Ryan Green struggling to maintain the machine's balance on the uncertain ground. Warheads from the base exploded blindly around her; rockets and missiles that her AI decided were on an intercept course were clawed from the sky by the Warlord's hivel cannon or by bursts of laser fire precisely aimed by Warrant Tech Allen. She felt the Warlord stagger as it hit the bottom of the slope, then recover. More explosions, softer ones, this time, bumped and thudded in front of her, erupting in clouds of dense, low-lying smoke.

  "Nano-D!" Green snapped. "Point three-oh and rising!"

  "Push through! Kurt! Stand by with the AND dispensers!"

  Nano-D, short for nanotech disassemblers, was a relatively new weapon, one suggested by combat with the Xenophobes. She
lls and rocket warheads were loaded with nanotech molecules that, when activated by the breaching of the container, were programmed to seek out certain materials, such as the layered duralloy or nanoflage coatings of a warstrider's outer hull, and begin taking it apart, literally atom by atom. As with radiation, exposure was cumulative; concentrations of nano-D higher than .85 or so could strip the outer armor from an undamaged warstrider in five minutes or less.

  Anti–nano-D was the logical counterweapon, nanotechnic particles dispensed as a fog over the surface of the warstrider or from shells or battlefield area sprays, programmed to hunt down and neutralize free–floating nano-D.

  "AND units charged and ready to go," Allen told her. "I don't want to use it while we're moving."

  "Agreed."

  "Nano-D at point five-five," Green announced.

  Radar showed the buildings of the Imperial base looming close ahead, still masked by the smoke and dust. Allen triggered a salvo of M-21 rockets, firing blindly at the largest radar shadows. Imperial radar painted the Confederation striders in return, then dissolved in the hissing static of broad-band jamming. Visibility on any wavelength was virtually nonexistent. Explosions mingled with the shouts of Katya's striderjacks over the tactical channel and the shrill blasts of radio noise generated by the fringe effect of particle beams. Lieutenant Hari Sebree's Scoutstrider took a missile hit on its right side, which spun the machine back and gouged a spray of hot shrapnel from its side. Katya's Warlord halted once, swinging out the big left and right arms mounting their ponderous proton accelerators, charged particle guns that could call down a devastating lightning on targets regardless of screening smoke.

  The CPGs fired, twin bolts of man-made lightning searing into the smoky gloom. Then the Warlord was advancing again. In another moment the ground beneath Katya's feet was suddenly empty of vegetation . . . and she was smashing her way past a fallen tangle of fence. Dirt and tangled conductor filament gave way to fabricrete pavement, once smooth, now pitted and cratered both by years of acid rain and by the bombardment. They were on the base now; the main building rose three stories tall less than fifty meters ahead.

  "Dagger, this is Dagger One! I'm on the objective! Cease fire!"

  Did the bombardment slacken a bit? She couldn't tell, and savage detonations continued to slam at her through the boiling murk, most of it friendly fire from Section Two back at Point Alfa. Unfortunately, here inside the smoke, laser communications were useless, save for talking to warstriders a few meters away, and the electromagnetic spectrum was a shrill hiss of static as each side aggressively jammed the other's EM emissions.

  Then the bombardment dwindled away to almost nothing. Good. Captain Manton Crane, heading up Section Two, must have called off the bombardment when he'd seen the First Section striders vanishing into the smoke.

  "Nano-D's up to point seven-one," Green called.

  "Bring her to full stop. Kurt! Let's hose down the outer hull!"

  "You got it, Colonel!"

  White fog gushed across the warstrider's hull from nozzles embedded in the armor. The nano count fell swiftly.

  Peering as far into the screening smoke as her sensors could reach, she recognized where she was . . . just opposite the main entrance to the Imperial base's vehicle bays. The enemy striders might—

  Yes! The outer door of the vehicle air lock was sliding open. Black shadows, long-legged and ominous, moved against the blaze of light inside.

  "I've got targets!" Katya yelled over the general frequency. A shrill rasp drowned out her voice as Allen discharged the Warlord's two proton cannons. Lightning flared behind the opening door. "Main building! Two . . . make that three Impie striders, coming out now!"

  Cannon shells slammed against the hull, and Katya heard metal tearing beneath the crash of the explosions. The Warlord was going down. . . .

  Chapter 21

  Ten thousand highly trained fighting men are but a milling mob when they're not organized. Proper organization should result in the transmission of the commander's will to each and every person in his command, both by indoctrination and by communication. So organized, a thousand men can conquer the unorganized ten thousand.

  —General Holland "Howling Mad" Smith, USMC

  During the American landings on Kiska

  C.E. 1943

  The Kawasaki KY-1001 Katana was one of the best Imperial warstrider designs. Trading speed and maneuverability for armor and firepower, it was a two-slotter massing thirty tons and possessing multiple arms, hull turrets, and hardpoints, deploying a bristling array of rapid-fire cannon, lasers, and missile pods. Though it only weighed half what the RS-64 Warlord did, it was somewhat slower but packed a more impressive punch. As it strutted out of the Imperial base garage, the 50-mm hivel cannon mounted atop its hull continued to slam high-explosive rounds into Katya's warstrider even as the Warlord crashed into the pavement in showering sparks.

  Warning discretes flashed across her visual display, and a small, 3-D, wireframe model of the RS-64 showed a brightly winking chain of lights marking primary and secondary damage. More cannon shells tore into the Warlord, exploding along the left arm in a hail of near-point-blank impacts. The big accelerator coils for the left-arm proton gun shredded; then the ball joint for the entire assembly exploded and the arm was torn away. Katya felt it as a hard jolt on her left side.

  "Kurt! Hit him, Kurt!"

  No response . . . and one of the warning discretes showed a pressure loss to the weapons tech's module. Kuso!

  Downloading a rapid-fire sequence of commands, Katya shifted full fire control to her own system, then struggled to bring weapons to bear. The Warlord was on its right side, its remaining particle cannon trapped beneath the hull. One of the paired 50-MW lasers extending from the strider's prow like the pincers of some huge insect would bear, however, and she triggered a pulse of coherent light that scraped across the Katana's fuselage in a dazzling sunburst.

  The Katana was definitely Imperial Marine; Katya recognized the hull markings and the overall layer of nanoflage that normally showed jet black rather than reflect the surroundings, but which flashed to mirror-bright silver at the touch of a laser. As Katya's beam struck it, it paused in midstride, dipping slightly on its back-canted legs, and pivoted with the suppleness of a living animal to deliver another salvo into her machine. Smoke steamed from a ragged scar across its hull; Katya's laser shot had at least seared some of the nano from its armor, leaving a charred furrow in its wake.

  The Katana's primary weapon was a monster 150-MW laser jutting from beneath its hull in a deliberately suggestive mockery of sexual aggressiveness, while two 88-MW lasers were mounted to either side of its hull. All three guns would be ponderously difficult to aim at such close range, but a hit by any of them from ten meters would punch through Katya's armor like a knife through cardboard. The Warlord lurched to the left just as the big laser winked on. Her vision blanked out for a second as secondary sensors went dead and a filter overloaded, but Ryan had the Warlord moving before the enemy gunner could achieve a solid target lock. Katya compensated for the movement of her machine with intuitive grace, then triggered both bow lasers a second time, aiming for the damaged patch. Metal flared a dazzling white, then boiled away, leaving a gaping crater and an exposed tangle of dripping, sparking wires and power cables.

  The Katana staggered and nearly fell, the main laser comically drooping as its hydraulics failed. A triplet of laser beams from Halliwell's Scoutstrider flashed across the Japanese machine, adding to the destruction. As the Warlord rose to its feet, the aim point of the Mark III weapons pod slung from its belly dropped across the target. Katya adjusted the aim, targeting the smoldering scar on the Katana's hull, then triggered a full, rapid-fire salvo of M-21 rockets.

  At a range of less than ten meters, the rockets hammered into the Katana, one on the fiery tail of the next. The chain of detonations tore out the Imperial strider's exposed electronics, disemboweling the machine, then opening the fuselage from front to re
ar like the action of an enormous zipper. A lesser explosion barked, followed by the flutter of a hull panel blown away. One of the Katana's two crewmen had just ejected—the pilot, she thought—an instant ahead of a triple pulse of savage, internal explosions that blew the machine's fuselage apart.

  There wasn't enough oxygen in the ShraRish atmosphere to support more than a smoldering fire, but the blast-savaged hull slumped between the still-upright legs, smoking furiously. Katya pulled a swift check of her Warlord's systems. Power was down by thirty-one percent, all left-arm systems were out—no surprises there—and one of her three pairs of gyros was threatening failure. ICS with Kurt Allen was down and she couldn't tell whether the weapons tech was alive or dead. Her ICS linkage with Ryan Green was also out, but the pilot appeared to be alive still, his life support intact. To simplify controlling the Warlord, Katya switched all command and control functions to her own system. That would isolate Allen, now a helpless observer, but she couldn't afford the confusion that would be raised with trying to move and fight the big Warlord without full internal communications.

  Assassin's Blade was hurt, but things weren't as bad as they could easily have been; the Warlord had been hit hard but was still in action. The same, apparently, could be said of both Halliwell's and Sebree's machines.

  Other warstriders from Katya's section were passing her now to left and right. She'd been so focused on the immediate threat of the advancing Katana, she'd lost track of the other Imperial machines, but one of them, a KY-1180 Tachi, had been caught in a cross fire from Kilroy's Manta and Sublieutenant Jesse Callahan's little Ares-12 Swiftstrider. The Tachi's low, dorsal turret mounting twin 88-MW lasers was carried away in a storm of high explosives; one of the Mark III weapons packs mounted above its shoulders rapped out a stutter of machine-gun fire before it, too, was shredded in the high-intensity fire.