Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella

by Ian Douglas

  A second Tachi tested the waters outside the protective shelter of the base garage, then ducked back as a storm of shells and laser fire snapped and crackled through the air. It looked to Katya as though the Imperials had deliberately opened the large, interior maintenance bay to the outside air. The main doors were doubled, providing an air lock large enough to pass one or two warstriders through to the outside at a time without contaminating the bay area, but someone had thrown open both sets of doors at once, either by mistake or because they'd wanted to get more striders through the door at once. Possibly her CPG shot had taken down a smaller strider. The lights were out inside now, and smoke was boiling out of the darkened entrance.

  Outside, laser fire burned and hissed across the pavement from the remaining gun towers, but the rush by the Confederation warstriders had carried them inside the reach of most of the base defenses. Scanning a full three-sixty, Katya could see battle-armored troops scattering this way and that, some carrying weapons, others apparently unarmed. A third Tachi sprinted across the pavement, heading away from the battle in what looked like a blind attempt at escape . . . only to be hit repeatedly by fire from one of the laser towers.

  At that moment, Katya knew that there was no carefully prepared Imperial trap, that the enemy was in fact little more than an armed mob. That mob was still dangerous—the damage to her own Warlord certainly attested to that—but the defense was poorly organized and weak enough that one hard push had all but toppled it completely.

  The fleeing Tachi exploded; seconds later, a pair of Confederation missiles slammed into the laser tower, setting off a cascade of savage explosions that burned through the swirling smoke like minor suns in darkness. Another explosion shook the ground, and a communications tower toppled and fell. Abruptly, the hissing static on half of the radio channels cleared, and Katya heard a babble of voices, all in Inglic.

  "One-five, One-eight! I got three runners, at two-one-five. Hit 'em!"

  "They're down, One-eight."

  "Hey, commo's open!"

  "Where's Dagger One? I saw her go down!"

  "This is Dagger One-one, on the air," Katya announced.

  "Colonel! You all right?"

  "I'm okay. Listen, people, I think the opposition's going down. If they want to surrender, let them." She shifted frequencies, searching for an unjammed Imperial channel. There was nothing . . . no! There, a voice was barking in Nihongo, the words too shrill and quick for Katya to follow but apparently delivered in the clear, without the usual encryption algorithms.

  "One-one, this is One-three," Halliwell said on the team's tac channel. "I'm inside the main building. There are some downgrudged Impie striders here, Katanas, Tachis, and Tantos. Some guards and tech types lit out when I came through the wall, but I'm not getting any resistance here."

  "Confirmed, One-one," another voice added. "This is Kilroy, One-two, and I'm inside too. I've got people surrendering in here."

  "Roger that. Round 'em up and keep 'em quiet. One-five and One-six, get in there and give them support."

  "Copy, One-one. We're on our way."

  Shifting back to the Japanese channel, Katya downloaded a command to the Warlord's AI to engage a Nihongo translation program. The sharp, barking orders in Japanese shifted to Inglic. ". . . fall back and hold your positions!"

  "Imperial Commander," Katya snapped, "your position here is hopeless. Cease fire, and have your armed units lay down their weapons."

  There was a harsh clatter of noise, and then the channel was again jammed tight. Whoever she'd been eavesdropping on wasn't ready to give up yet, it seemed . . . but it was clear that he was losing control of the battle. A Tanto, a light, nimble Imperial strider, moved into the open and froze in place, its weapons directed at the sky, its hull nanoflage paling to the mottled grays and browns of the metal's natural finish in a gesture of surrender. Half a dozen troops in black combat armor gathered nearby, gloved hands in the air.

  "Hey, Colonel? This is Kilroy. Sounds like there's fighting inside the main building. I think we may have a mutiny under way in there."

  "Hold position until we have some backup. Dagger Two-one, this is One-one. Do you copy?"

  "Two-one copies," Captain Manton Crane, CO of Section Two, said. "Go ahead."

  "Bring your people on down, Manny. Watch for leakers and stragglers."

  "Roger that. On our way."

  With the high-intensity shelling and missile attacks over, the pall of smoke over the Dojinko base began lifting. As Katya stood there on the debris-littered pavement, shafts of dazzling white light slanted through the overcast, lifting the gloom. In seconds, the patches of sunlit ground expanded, and the base stood revealed in a harsh morning light intermittently dimmed by the moving shadows from billowing clouds of smoke. Here and there across the base compound, more and more troops in Imperial armor or light environmental suits were standing up, hands raised in surrender. Occasionally, she caught the crack and hiss of a laser, or the dull thud of an explosive shell or grenade. A few in the Imperial compound, no doubt, would turn out to be fanatical holdouts, willing to die to the last man.

  "Hey, Colonel? Sebree here."

  "Go ahead, Hari."

  "I got a prisoner here. Claims he's head of the base civilian staff, and he wants to talk to you."

  "Bring him on through."

  Sebree's Scoutstrider emerged from the base vehicle entryway a moment later. A somewhat more humanoid construct than most other warstriders, the RLN-90 Scoutstrider vaguely resembled a squat and headless suit of medieval armor standing three and a half meters tall, save that the right arm usually mounted either a high-speed cannon or a 100-MW laser, and KV-48 weapons packs were set into the blocky, squared-off shoulders. Sebree's battered Scoutstrider had the autocannon option, and as he walked toward Katya he kept the flame-blackened muzzle of that weapon centered on the back of the head of his prisoner.

  The man wore a bright yellow environmental suit, a close-fitting garment that offered no armor protection at all, and a goldfish bowl helmet with an attached PLSS, a Portable Life Support System, slung from his shoulder. He kept his gloved hands carefully palm down atop the helmet.

  Katya checked the local nano-D contamination and saw that it was down to about .2, low enough that unarmored humans would be in no danger in the area, at least not without an exposure time of several hours at least.

  "You are the commander of the Confederation force?" the man asked, speaking passable Inglic. His helmet electronics broadcast his voice through external speakers in his suit, and Katya's hull sensors carried the words to her. "Please, help us! They've gone crazy in there!"

  "Help you how? Who's gone crazy?"

  "Chusa Kosaka, the marine commander. He's been shooting those of us who were trying to surrender!"

  "And you are? . . ."

  "Dr. Mitsukuni Ozaki. I am chief of . . . how would you say? Department of Gengo-gaku . . ."

  Katya repeated the phrase through the language program. "Linguistics?"

  "Exactly. Linguistic Department, Imperial Alyan Mission. Ozaki has ordered his marines to kill all the civilians! . . ."

  "You have a link interface in that suit you're wearing?"

  Ozaki held up his left hand, showing the cross-hatching of contact circuitry embedded in the palm of his glove. Katya focused her thoughts, and a panel set into the left leg of the Warlord a meter and a half off the ground slid open. It was one of several interface access ports on the machine, used for downloading new programs through direct interface with maintenance AIs, but it could also be used to pass data directly from cephlink-equipped personnel to the warstrider's systems.

  "Show me," she said, advancing one step.

  The man started and took a quick step back, nearly colliding with the muzzle of Sebree's gun, and Katya realized her movement had scared him. The Warlord stood over five meters tall, towering above the lone man, and even with the left arm missing it must present a terrifying aspect. The damage, in fact, might well enhance it
s nightmarish look; Katya had momentarily forgotten what she must look like from the linguist's point of view.

  "It'll be okay, Dr. Ozaki," she said. "Interface with me."

  "Arigato gozaimasu," the man said, lapsing into Nihongo. "Thank you!" He moved forward and placed his hand against the interface.

  "Colonel," Sebree said uncertainly. "Do you think that's a good idea?"

  There was a danger of sabotage, that Ozaki had been primed with an AI-killing virus with or without his knowledge, but there was no time for less direct measures. Katya opened her own link and felt the trickle of data coming through from the man's cephlink RAM.

  A three-dimensional map of the Imperial base floated in her mind, rotating as she examined it. The layout was identical to that provided by Dev after his capture of the Kasuga Maru, though some of the rooms appeared to have different functions now. One room, a barracks or dormitory area on the second level, was highlighted.

  "That's where they had most of the civilians locked up," Ozaki explained. "A few of us were in ops and were able to escape. But they're going to kill the others!"

  "We'll see what we can do, Doctor," she said. It wouldn't be easy. Warstriders were designed for combat in the open, not inside buildings, however large or elaborate. "Hari? Put him someplace safe." Turning her attention to the outside of the main building, she compared the structure with the diagram. That barracks area should be about there. . . .

  "Callahan! Langley!" Katya rasped, directing the call to a pair of nearby Swiftstriders. "With me!"

  She plunged ahead into the main building's open equipment bay. The brilliant lights were off now, the building's main power feeds cut, and the interior was cave-dark, illuminated only by the shifting patterns of light and shadow thrown by the high-intensity lamps mounted on the striders' hulls. Her own lights illuminated tangled pipes and cables on walls and overhead, the crisscross steelwork of maintenance gantries, the menacing but unmoving forms of Imperial warstriders laid up for repair or service. The smoking wreckage of a Tachi lay in one corner; nearby, a dozen man-sized shapes in black combat armor sprawled on the duralloy-mesh deck, scythed down by a hivel cannon burst.

  A steel stairway rose to a landing halfway up the far wall; a second set of stairs ran along the wall to a second-level doorway on the right. Katya passed the updated map to the Swiftstriders. "Up those stairs," she told them. "Down the corridor at the top, then to the left. Provide cover for the civilian scientists who want to surrender, and take down anyone who tries to stop you. Move it!"

  "Right, Colonel."

  "Yes, sir!"

  The two Ares-12 striders mounted the stairs, the steps bending and chirping ominously beneath their weight.

  Swiftstriders were lightweight single-slotters, massing less than twelve tons apiece and standing only about three meters tall. Their 18-mm autocannon would be more suitable for the close-up mayhem of warstrider combat inside the confines of a building than, say, Katya's CPG.

  In any case, the floors and stairways of this building would never support the Warlord's sixty-ton tread. Dropping her strider into standby mode, she broke linkage.

  Lying in the near-darkness of her link slot, she felt a warning shudder of claustrophobia as she shifted this way and that, disconnecting her suit from the strider's life support and donning gloves, facemask, and PLSS pack. With a heady rush of relief, she palmed open the hatch, then scrambled out onto the Warlord's dorsal hull.

  Using exterior access jacks, she discovered that both Green and Allen were alive. Kurt Allen emerged from his slot wearing his mask but physically unharmed. He'd been knocked off-line when his linkage systems had failed, and a hit close by his module had depressurized it. His emergency life support gear had saved him, though Katya shuddered at the thought of what he'd gone through, penned up in his black coffin, feeling the strider's movements and unable to tell what was going on outside. As for Ryan Green, his system had been fully operational, though a power failure had killed both his ICS and his comlink circuits, leaving him unable to talk to anyone.

  "You two feel like stretching a bit?" she asked, jerking a thumb at the stairs. "Grab weapons. We're going up there."

  Kilroy's LaG-42 Ghostrider advanced on her, its lights glaring eerily through the smoky cavern. "Colonel?" Kilroy's voice boomed from an external speaker. "What the hell are you doing?"

  "Leading my unit," she snapped back. She wasn't about to wait around out here while her people finished up the fighting inside the building. "Captain Crane will be here in a minute—"

  "He just arrived at the perimeter, Colonel."

  "Okay, good. Tell him he's got command until I go back online."

  "But sir—"

  "Move, damn it!" She grabbed three combat rifles from a hull storage locker and passed two of them to Green and Allen, then checked her own weapon and slapped a full magazine home in the stock receiver. The weapons were Interdynamics PCR-28s, high-velocity rifles firing 4-mm armor-piercing rounds. One mag held two hundred caseless rounds, more, she hoped, than they were likely to need.

  She also grabbed hand lights for the three of them. Out here, without a linkage to the Warlord's night- and fog-piercing senses, it was dark. She made her way down the footrails set into the side of the Warlord's leg, dropped the final meter to the ground, then waved to Green and Allen when they landed next to her. "Let's odie, guys."

  Turning, Katya led the way toward the stairs.

  Chapter 22

  There are three types of leader: Those who make things happen; those who watch things happen; and those who wonder what happened.

  —American military saying

  Mid-twentieth century

  The two Swiftstriders had left the stairway all but impassable to humans on foot, and the door at the top looked like it had been smashed in by a battering ram. Air was still escaping through the opening; with an internal pressure a third higher than that of the native ShraRish atmosphere, air inside the building was now blasting into the maintenance bay with a gale-force wind. Katya and the others leaned into the howling storm and pushed their way in, taking care not to tear their suits on the jagged edges of the door.

  Once inside and on the second level, it was easy enough to follow the trail left by the two Swiftstriders. One wall of the corridor had been chewed open by a burst of automatic cannon fire; several Imperial Marines in full do armor had been standing in front of that wall, but it was impossible now to tell how many there'd been. The sound of high-speed cannon fire, a deep-throated bam-bam-bam, echoed through the dark corridors. The three striderjacks, now temporarily demoted to the status of legger infantry, picked their way past steaming pools of blood and less-identifiable body fragments, then broke into a run.

  The battle was over by the time they got there . . . which was probably fortunate for the three of them, Katya thought later. Wearing nothing but skin-tight survival suits, masks, and goggles, they would not have lasted long in a stand-up fight with armored marines. Still, Katya was glad they'd come, for when they burst into the barracks, they were confronted with a churning mob of terrified men.

  The two Swiftstriders were there, their legs folded almost double in the close confines, their dorsal hulls brushing against the ceiling. Several marines lay dead outside the smashed-in door, and several more lay on the floor inside. Others stood with their hands raised, automatic weapons and lasers scattered about at their feet. The civilians, though, were on the verge of panic. Someone was shrieking in agony. It was pitch black inside the barracks, save for the warstriders' lights, and somewhere in the distance an alarm was shrilling, warning of pressure-wall breach and air loss.

  "Hidoi koto wa shi masen!" Katya yelled, her voice muffled by her face mask, but still intelligible. "You will not be hurt!" Her spoken Nihongo was limited, rusty, and carried an atrocious accent, but she had enough of the language loaded in her personal RAM to make herself understood. "Listen to me! There are masks and air tanks in emergency equipment lockers in the passageway. File out of th
e room one at a time, get breathing gear, and proceed to the building's maintenance bay. Do not run. There is plenty of time. . . ."

  Somehow, order was restored. The sight of the two warstriders looming through the shattered door had been, if anything, more terrifying to the civilian scientists and technicians than the appearance of the marines with orders to kill them. Having someone in human shape there, shouting orders and pointing the way with hand lights, was enough to stop the panic before it overwhelmed reason. There was plenty of time. It would take some hours for the air pressure inside the base to equalize with the pressure outside, and only then would enough of the native ShraRish atmosphere, with its sulfurous gases and dangerously high levels of CO2, mingle with the air inside in quantities enough to pose a threat to people without masks.

  Within an hour, the entire base was secure. Chusa Kosaka was found in the control center, dead by his own hand, and the last of the surviving holdouts among the marines inside the main building had thrown down their weapons and emerged with upraised hands. Twelve more of Katya's people had disembarked from their striders and, armed with hand lasers or PCRs, made their way through the various base structures on foot. They found a total of twenty-one of the civilian personnel dead, five of them in Ops, the rest in the barracks, but another sixty-five were still alive. Those survivors greeted the Confederation troops with that wild and somewhat embarrassing enthusiasm normally reserved for saviors and liberators. A total of over two hundred military officers and enlisted personnel had been captured as well. These were disarmed and locked inside an empty storage dome until more troops could arrive to help handle them.

  The Confederation striders reported in one by one. Only three—hers, Halliwell's, and Sebree's—had been damaged, and there'd been not a single casualty in her team. Not bad, considering they'd just violated one of the oldest precepts of warfare by carrying out a frontal assault on a prepared enemy position.

  Katya was convinced there'd been no other way to do it, given the limitations of the situation. She'd gone into this fearing a casualty rate of forty percent or more, though, and it could have been lots worse had the enemy been organized enough to put up a real fight.