by Ian Douglas
Of course, no one cared what an old warstrider jockey thought; the Black Griffins had been ordered to stage an orbit-to-ground drop in Asunción, and that was most decidedly that. The Hoshikumiai, the Japanese Empire's Star Union proxies out here, reportedly were on the planet in force, with at least two planetary defense battalions located in and around the capital. The Star Union striders weren't as tough as Imperial troops, not by a hell of a long hivel shot, but there were a lot of them. The one advantage the Confederation had going for it in this fight was that the Union didn't have Naga-symbiotic technology… at least not yet.
If and when that changed, things were going to get bad.
Vaughn's warstrider shuddered as he plunged into atmosphere, compressing the air ahead into a hot, violent shockwave and bleeding off heat and velocity in a long, sharp contrail roiling out astern. His warstrider recognized the changing environment and shifted its shape, morphing into an egg-smooth teardrop shape streaking from the sky. Over half of the mass of the Mark XCs—the "Naga-Nineties"—was made up of xenomaterial matrix, computronium derived from the Naga aliens once called Xenophobes. It had taken decades and a major interstellar war before humans discovered that the Nagas were artificial life forms based on highly advanced alien nanotechnology. Computronioum was matter arranged to most efficiently serve as computer hardware; Naga fragments could think… but not in any way even remotely comprehensible to humans.
But the stuff could be programmed, and fragments of it could interact on that basis with people, forming large parts of their machines, and even living—in small amounts—inside human brains as symbiotic partners. Vaughn's symbiote reported that his warstrider was in atmospheric re-entry mode, and rapidly decelerating.
Not that he'd needed a play-by-play. He felt the sluggish drag of over four Gs… and the orange, white, and violet disk of the planet of the planet was opened now to fill half the sky.
Light flared across Heaven, another Hellbrand fusion missile. Green Eight's emergency transponder went off… and then the warning chirp dissolved into static.
"Doug!" Pat Newburg yelled. "Kuso!…"
Still decelerating, the rest of the flight punched through the planet's cloud deck, entering a brilliant world of orange and red and violet. Abundancia's sun was a type K3.5, an orange star eighty light years from Earth with three-quarters of the mass and just one quarter of the luminosity of Sol. The planet circled its primary in 157 days, with a semi-major axis of just over half an AU. Thunderclouds piled high into the sky, illuminated by the sun in brilliant reds and golds, while the sky itself took on a deep purple hue.
They were right smack on-target. The Falls of Heaven stretched out ahead and below, a three-kilometer horseshoe-shaped cliff wreathed in mist and rainbows.
"I'm picking up a bunch of planetary defense batteries down there," Krysta McIntyre, Green Five, reported. "They're painting us!"
"Heavy jamming on the RF freaks," Sergeant Kokoro Wheeler, Blue One, said. "The General Staff guessed right for a change."
She was referring to the order—controversial among the warstrider officers and personnel—passed down from Confederation Military Command for this mission. Warstriders commonly were run remotely, with personnel using teleoperation to control the combat machines from a distance. With an electronic link between the pilot's cerebral implants and the machine's Naga-computronium body, the pilot couldn't even tell whether he was inside the machine, or thousands of kilometers away.
The presence of heavy and sophisticated electronic warefare countermeasures, however, meant that warstrider pilots had to physically occupy their machines' cockpits. Jam-proof electronics such as quantum signal processing could handle simple voice in close-range, tight-beamed ship-to-ship communications, but simply wasn't up to the far deeper requirements of full-spectrum nested-signal processing. Until the EW boys could come up with quantum-coupled teleoperational links, unjammable and undetectable, it looked like warstrider combat would have to its primitive roots, with enhanced humans wearing computronium combat armor.
And so Vaughn and the other warstriders of the Black Griffins were physically present in their vehicles as they dropped through red-orange clouds toward the city. Volleys of laser and particle-beam fire, mingled with swarms missiles and high-velocity cannon rounds, swept toward them. Vaughn could see smoke from a number of fires, and large swaths of destruction down there. The Hoshikumiai militia had surrounded Asunción and been pounding it from a dozen semimobile fortresses. Confederation warships were continuing to bombard the area around the city… but this fight would not be settled from orbit. Troops had to go down there, boots on the ground, and drag the damned Hoshis out into the open for a final accounting.
Vaughn's warstrider was changing shape again, losing the streamlined re-entry shape and growing wings. The air down here was thick and turbulent, and the wings had to keep adjusting their breadth, cant, and angle to compensate. The machine's diamagnetics grappled with the planet's magnetic field, sharply decelerating the craft.
Particle beams flared from a pair of fortresses atop the Catarata Cliffs, locking on to one of the flight's fliers. "I'm hit!" Sergeant Chiu called. "This is Red Three! I'm hit! I'm hit!…"
"Chewy! Roll left!" Vanderkamp called… but then Chiu's warstrider fragmented, spraying across the sky in a cloud of superheated fragments.
With only short-ranged, tight-beamed communications operable at the moment, the assault wave couldn't call in a planetary bombardment from orbit… but the Confederation ships up there were watching events unfold, both at optical wavelengths and with cloud-penetrating radar. Seconds after Red Three was blasted from the sky, straight-line contrail streaks snapped down from space at a sharp angle, and first one… then three more cliff-top fortresses were engulfed in white spheres of expanding plasma. The Connie heavy cruisers Constitution, Revolution, and Independence were using their heavy spinal-mount railguns to slam crowbars—the popular term for inert kinetic-kill warheads—into the planetary fortresses at a few percent of the speed of light. Visible shockwaves rolled out from each strike point, as the fireballs boiled skyward. In seconds, the characteristic mushroom-shaped cloud spread out above each target. Other KK rounds streaked down, finding additional fortresses and concentrations of Hoshi troops.
How can anything live through that kind of bombardment? Vaughn wondered… but he dismissed the thought almost as soon as he was conscious of it. Soldiers throughout history had watched bombardments from off-shore or off-world weapons of various technological levels and thought that the coming landings would be easy. Sheer wishful thinking, that. Of course there would be survivors—far too many of them. There always were.…
The flight continued its descent. Wings extended, flattening out their glide. Diamagnetic drives further slowed the fall, as individual craft weaved in and out to throw off tracking AIs on the ground.
With their mastery of nanomorphic technology—on-the-fly shape-shifting—warstriders were the ultimate in combat flexibility, combining the ideas of individual combat armor with space fighters, aircraft, and walking tanks. Vaughn guided his machine toward the edge of the burning city, and his strider began unfolding, morphing into the XC's standard walking shape. The sky allowed room for maneuver and speed, but it was also a dangerous place for combat craft; on the ground, a strider could take advantage of natural cover, camouflage itself nearly to invisibility, and lose itself in ground clutter in ways impossible for airborne fliers.
He fired his braking rockets, bursts of N-He64 meta, a high-energy exotic fuel with the specific impulse of a gas-core nuclear engine, and rode the last few meters to the ground on the jets' ryu no shippo—the dragon's tail.
With a savage, teeth-rattling jolt, he was down.
His legs finished unfolding, levering the strider's hull into the sky, pivoting. In ground combat mode, the Ninety measured just over five meters long and four high, forward-leaning on two massive legs, with arms mounting heavy particle cannons. Naga hull-matrix rolled to either s
ide, exposing the high-velocity rapid-fire gun set onto its dorsal hull.
He'd come down in the courtyard of a wrecked manufactory, a sprawling collection of ruined buildings and reactor towers. A dozen fixed-hull striders were in the process of taking down a building somewhat more intact than the others. They were smaller than Vaughn's Ninety, little more than heavy power-armor encasing the soldier within. One carried a standard—a square black banner hung from a mast extending over his power pack, bearing a clan mon—the mitsu uroko, the three triangular dragon scales of clan Hojo.
Vaughn was startled by that. The Griffins were supposed to be up against local militia—meaning troops from Abundancia and elsewhere loyal to the Empire, but not themselves Nihongo. Was that armored figure with his dragon-scale flag in fact a member of Clan Hojo, and therefore ethnically Japanese? Or was it some Latino wannabe who'd appropriated the banner somehow—maybe someone who didn't even know what an Imperial mon was?
But Vaughn couldn't take the time to think about it. The Hojo warstrider and several of his friends were already turning their weapons against Vaughn and the other Griffins who'd touched down nearby. Lasers hissed and sparkled against his outer hull matrix, and indicators giving readouts through his implants warned of skyrocketing temperatures on his outer armor.
With a thought, Vaughn swung his left particle cannon left and triggered it, targeting the militia officer with the mon banner. The bolt of tightly-wrapped protons rode an artificial lightning bolt to its target, slamming into the Hoshi soldier's plastron in a savage eruption of molten metal and steam, as the charge earthed itself to ground in coruscating bursts of electricity. Vaughn was already pivoting farther left as the enemy warstrider, what was left of it, collapsed to the charred and broken pavement. A second Hoshi warstrider fired at him, then ducked behind the corner of a wrecked building. Vaughn depressed the muzzle of his railgun autocannon, then triggered a long burst of steel-jacketed depleted uranium slugs, the weapon's magnetic field cycling the rounds out in a devastating stream, twelve per second. The deplur rounds struck the corner, slamming through stubborn fabricrete. Chunks of rock flew in every direction, and the three-meter warstrider crouched behind the wall, suddenly exposed, took a full second's worth of high-velocity autofire to its right arm and torso. The damaged strider turned, bringing a heavy laser to bear on Vaughn's machine… but an avalanche caught the enemy in a thunderous storm of falling rubble and dust as the building's fabricrete façade slammed down onto the street.
Dust and smoke swirled heavy in the air, cutting vision to a range of a few meters, no more. As the dust boiled through the air, laser beams became visible, pencil-thin streaks of light illuminated by the drifting particles. The dust also served to attenuate the beams, cutting their effectiveness at the target. Vaughn guided his strider forward, wading through a fusillade of coherent light pulses and beams, his black armor drinking them and dispersing their energy.
Another warning shrilled within his mind—nano-D. Microscopic nanotechnic disassemblers were mingled with the dust clouds, and as they came into contact with his hull matrix they began, with simple-minded obsession, to take it apart, atom by atom. His warstrider, however, had already detected the threat and released a defensive NCM aerosol. The cloud surrounded Vaughn's machine, submicroscopic nanotechnic countermeasures programmed to hunt down nano-disassemblers and destroy them. His armor was already flowing in places, sending fresh naga-matrix to the damaged areas, patching holes and regrowing the power feeds and control lines. The fiercest part of any modern battle took place at physical scales far too small for human vision to detect, and at speeds incomprehensible to organic brains.
Vaughn continued to blast away at the Hoshi warstriders, which were scattering now beneath the Griffin onslaught. Two more went down in a flurry of explosions and grounding bolts of electricity.
More Black Griffins were coming in, moment by moment. A savage crash and a shower of fragments from overhead grabbed Vaughn's attention and he looked up. Sergeant Mike Hallman had dropped out of a violet sky and clipped another building coming down, ripping a gash down the facade. He landed in the street with a shriek of N-He64 fueled rockets, spilling clouds of smoke and swirling dust.
"Welcome to hell, Mike!" Vaughn called.
Autocannon shells slammed into his external armor, knocking off black chunks. "You were keeping it hot for me, I can tell!" he called back. His Naga-armor was already healing itself, but the enemy fire was intensifying.
Hallman and Vaughn were close… doshi. The Nihongo term, meaning "comrades," was one of a number of words that had spread to common English usage thanks to centuries of Imperial dominance. They'd humped it through basic together on New America, then gone into warstrider specialist training together on Madison. They'd been through more battles together than Vaughn could remember… not to mention more drinking bouts and lost weekends, more wild groundside liberties, more brothel visits, and more pub brawls. He was a good man to have at your back—the best—no matter whether the opposition was a pack of kuso-faced yoppie brawlers from a rival unit, or a pack of Imperial warstriders in all-out combat mode.
As the Hoshi striders scattered, Vaughn managed to get all of the surviving members of his flight lined up and moving in the right direction. The idea was to push the Hoshis south and out of the city. Any enemy combat machines still in the city proper could be handled by the local rebels. The Black Griffins would help form a perimeter around the city, and clear out the Hoshikumiai semimobile fortresses on the nearby heights. Once that chore was complete, the Confederation Navy could begin bringing down supplies, equipment, and men.
Of course, much would depend on the reaction of Imperial forces. If they decided to send combat units to Abundancia to reinforce their Hosikumiai allies, the Confederation would have a nasty decision on its hands… whether to abandon the rebel forces here, or fight it out and risk a wider war with Imperial Japan. The Confederation had a significant technological advantage right now in their use of Naga symbionts and living-nanotechnic computronium. The Japanese, more conservative, more fastidious in their willingness to merge with alien artificial-biologicals, hadn't embraced the new tech, at least not in anything like large-scale.
What they did have in their favor, however, though, were numbers. The Japanese Empire could draw on the resources of hundreds of worlds scattered across a sphere almost two hundred light years wide. The Confederation numbered just twenty-five systems within a region forty light years wide set within the Imperial periphery. If the Japanese decided to respond with an all-out assault on Connie holdings, New America's technological advantage likely would count for very little.
Hallman strode up alongside Vaughn. "Where are the bastards?"
Vaughn gestured with his strider's left arm. "They scattered off that way. Toward the cliffs. And the mobiles."
"Kuso. They'd make it a whole lot easier on themselves if they just gokking surrendered right now."
"Mike… one of them was carrying a mon."
"Kuso! What clan?"
"Hojo."
"So we're facing Imperials here?"
"I don't gokking know, Mike. Maybe they just want us to think we are."
"But you don't think so, huh?"
"No. I don't. We'll know more when we develop some G2… but for now I think we have to assume there may be some Japanese impies serving in an advisory capacity, y'know? Or maybe they're mercs hired by the yaris." The slang term was drawn from roiyarisuto, and meant loyalists—colonists fighting to remain under Japanese rule.
"Shit. The bunditos didn't say anything about fucking yaris."
"No. You think New America would have sent us in if they'd known it was a civil war?"
"I don't know. Probably not. Okay, flight leader. What's the plan?"
"We find bad guys—yaris, hoshis, or impies, it doesn't fucking matter… and then we kill them."
"Sounds like a plan, Sosh."
Socho was sergeant major, the highest enlisted rank in the Japanese arm
ed forces. Inevitably, the New Americans had bastardized it even as they'd accepted it for their own military. Hallman was a gunso, a sergeant.
A heavy mass-driver round slammed in among the buildings to the north, and Vaughn felt the ground lurch beneath his strider's feet. A building collapsed with a roar.
"Let's get out of here, man," Hallman said.
They spread out to avoid presenting too tempting a target, and began moving through rubble-clogged streets. Although the larger buildings provided a measure of cover, moving armor through city streets was flat-out tempting the deities of war. Warstriders in the streets were funneled together by the surrounding walls, and the buildings provided excellent cover for ambushers.
In fact, warstriders were the modern incarnation of three ancient combat modes—tanks, close-support aircraft, and individual infantrymen in battle armor. Theoretically, they possessed the strengths of each—the heavy firepower and sheer, brute strength of tanks; the flight and high-speed maneuverability of strike aircraft; and the ability to maneuver and seek cover of soldiers.
Unfortunately, and so far a Vaughn was concerned, they also had the weaknesses of each. If you put enough armor on a tank to shrug off most of what might hit it, you got something like those semimobiles up on the cliff-tops over there—large, slow targets. If you took to the air, you instantly became a target for every enemy particle gun, laser, and railgun in the battle zone, and at high speed you would miss a lot of what there was to see… like enemy troop concentrations.
And no matter how good the technology, armored soldiers never had enough armor, or good enough communications, or enough firepower, or unit coordination, or a way to peer through the fog of battle. Further up the street, a Griffin warstrider staggered as an antimatter round vaporized its upper torso with a flash and a thin spray of red mist. As the smoke dispersed, the machine took a couple of steps back, auto correcting itself, then collapsed to the ground in a tangle of metallic limbs like a string-cut puppet.
