Warstrider 01 - Warstrider

by William H. Keith

  Most of the Gammas were dead. The human forces were winning! The line was holding! If the striders could deal with the advancing Alphas…

  Behind him, all four Stormwinds were on the base landing pad, each releasing its cargo of warstriders, then lifting again in a swirl of dust and steam. Dev wondered which unit it was. The striders were anonymous in their reflective nanoflage, but the blue and white markings on the ascraft looked like those of the Thorhammers. Dev wondered if Katya was down there.

  “Attention, First Platoon!” Anderson snapped, his voice carried over the laser tacnet. “By squads, fall back to Norway Base! One and Three, lay down cover! Two and Four, move out!”

  Dev had never heard such warm and welcome words. When the big boys arrived, leg infantry was best pulled back and kept out of the way. Dev stayed where he was as half of the platoon moved back from the wall and started slipping and sliding back down the south slope of the ridge toward the base and the waiting APWs.

  A Gamma as large as a groundcar was gliding up the north face of the ridge faster than a man could walk, flowing like a rippling, living blanket. Sergeant Anderson raised his laser rifle and fired into the shape, and Dev brought his SSPG up to assist.

  An orange line of fire pierced the clouds and struck in the valley, a piece of star suddenly released. Dev stared into the expanding fireball, then realized he could see nothing at all as his helmet visor’s polarizers cut in. A heartbeat later there was a shock like a full-speed collision with a RoPro wall, and he was lying on his face in the mud ten meters down the slope, blinking away light-dazzled blotches of visual purple that were dancing before his tearing eyes. Again, he’d heard nothing. His armor’s speakers had cut out, a safety measure to keep him from being deafened. As his vision returned, he could make out the red-lit underbelly of a new cloud mushrooming above him.

  He rose, stunned and dizzy but otherwise unhurt. That railgun package had been entirely too close!

  At the top of the ridge, the Gamma he’d been aiming at had flowed over the shattered ruin of the wall, had knocked Sergeant Anderson down and was pinning him to the ground. Dev heard Anderson’s scream in spite of the static.

  Frantically Dev reached for his plasma gun, but his gloved hands groped empty air. Looking down, he saw that the steadimount had been sheared off as cleanly as if sliced through by a laser. Anderson screamed again, not in fear but in mind-tearing agony.

  Nearby, a body lay sprawled on its back, a flamer still clutched in gauntlet-clad hands. Stooping, Dev retrieved the flamer, trying to avoid seeing Lipinsky’s bloody, staring-eyed face behind the shattered helmet visor. He aimed the stubby weapon and loosed a burst of incendiary rounds that blossomed into a golden stream of chemical flame washing across the Gamma, which writhed and twisted and cycled from black to silver in pulsing waves.

  Suddenly it released its prey and turned, slithering down the ridge toward Dev in a suicidal rush. Dev clamped down on the trigger until the flamer was empty and the Gamma lay two meters from his feet, a blackened, smoking corpse.

  Platoon Sergeant Anderson was dead. His armor had been opened up the front as though cut by a knife. What remained inside did not look human anymore. Skin and muscle, bone and teeth, had melted into the inside of the armor, which smoked as though it had been sprayed with hot acid. Biting back his rising gorge, Dev stumbled back a step, then looked around helplessly. Where was the rest of his squad? Lipinsky’s body lay a few meters away… and farther along the slope, Falk sprawled like a broken doll, white smoke steaming from corroded patches on his armor. That railgun load had landed squarely on the ridge less than a hundred meters away, shattering the Norway Line wall and spilling troops about in every direction.

  Spotting movement farther down the slope, Dev hurried forward. It was Bronson, lying on his back, half of his SSPG beside him on the ground. The plasma gunner was clawing wildly at his helmet, and as Dev stepped closer, he could see the man’s visor turning opaque as the transplas crazed in myriad tiny cracks. A viscous white smoke curled off the helmet, as fluid as a lighter-than-air liquid. Branson’s gloved fingertips began smoking as he scrabbled wildly at his invisible attackers.

  Dev’s knees almost gave way as he fought to control a paralyzing fear. The Xeno that had killed Anderson had released a cloud of nano disassemblers that was attacking every piece of artificial material within reach.

  The only way to fight a nanotechnic weapon was with nanotechnics. Dev fumbled at his belt for his aerosol, aimed it at Bronson, and pressed the trigger. One burst should have released enough N-tech hunter-killers to neutralize the Xeno nano-Ds, if Dev had gotten there in time. Dev’s external speakers could pick up Branson’s helmet-muffled screams.

  God, part of Branson’s suit was softening into swirls of white mist. His chest armor was crumbling away into black char as the nano-D ate through ceramic and durasheath. Twinkles of light played across his chest armor, energy released by snapping chemical bonds.

  Dev heard the pop-hiss of escaping air and dropped to his knees, digging into a side pouch for a nano sealpad, but it was too late. Through the visor, the man’s eyes bulged, his mouth gaped and filled with blood, and his screams turned to ghastly, drawn-out shrieks as his air mix became contaminated with the lung-searing flame of ammonia. An instant later, Branson’s helmet visor blew in a spray of glass and blood.

  Dev’s helmet buzzed warning, as words appeared on his HUD. His right arm had been contaminated, and both legs. The count stood at point six-three. Nano disassemblers were eating their way through his suit.

  Desperate now, Dev stumbled back out of the contaminated area, tripped on something unseen, and fell heavily to the ground. Frantically he used the aerosol to dust his arm and legs and the front of his armor, praying all the while that he hadn’t picked up such a heavy dose of Xeno nano-Ds that countermeasures wouldn’t work. A dozen meters away, he saw a manlike shape struggling to free itself from ground gone suddenly soft. One gloved hand clawed at the air, then froze into immobility.

  They were dead, all of them. Dev was still alive, so the aerosol must have worked in time for him. He thought about going back to look for more survivors, but couldn’t bring himself to move toward the sprawled horrors of Anderson, Bronson, and the others. Besides, the area was completely contaminated now and would remain deadly until the nano-Ds’ internal clocks ran out and they started to break down.

  Rising, replacing the aerosol canister in its pouch, he started running, a heavy-footed slog, actually, moving down the slope and away from those mangled, motionless forms. Smoke filled the air, reducing visibility to a few tens of meters. He couldn’t see the APWs, but he knew they were not far from Norway Base. He switched on his radio: “Bravo Company! Bravo Company! Can anybody hear me?”

  Static was his only answer. All radio channels were out. He stopped for a moment, checking the compass reading in his HUD to get his bearings. The horror and confusion of the last few moments had really twisted him around. Which way was south?

  That way.

  Panic grew, a throbbing urgency beneath his chestplate, a heavy rasp of his suit respirator as he dragged at each breath. Damn it, where was the base? His boot hit something hard and he glanced down. A piece of Gamma lay there, a blackened twist of dead metal. Nearby was another… and another. …

  Then Dev knew a fresh horror. Somehow he had gotten turned around. The railgun blast had flung him onto the north side of the ridge; he was in the valley north of the Norway Line, with the ridge between him and the base and the rest of Bravo Company.

  Alone… except for those advancing Xenophobe stalkers.

  Chapter 13

  Our lack of understanding of Xenophobe tactics and strategy, the fact that we didn’t even know if they did think, lost us some major battles that we should have won. At Norway Ridge, for instance, our warstrider units were kept back because certain Hegemony senior commanders thought the main Xeno wave was a diversion.

  —Testimony before the Imperial Staff


  Shosho Minora Nagumo

  C.E. 2540

  Katya was not thinking of Dev Cameron as she guided the Assassin’s Blade up the ridge toward the Norway Line. She was thinking that whoever was directing this null-headed hema of a battle at HEMILCOM Command ought to be shot for gross stupidity. For three hours, an eternity in modern battle, she’d been waiting with rising fury for the orders releasing the Thorhammers from their Midgard barracks. A battle was being fought within twenty kilometers of Midgard, a battle that could well mark the beginning of a major assault on Loki’s capital city and sky-el, but the Thorhammers, put on alert the day before, had been left hanging at Midgard’s airfield.

  Colonel Varney had told her the reason. A new DSA had been detected very close to the chain of fortifications called the Norway Line, evidence, possibly, of a new Xenophobe breakthrough. Was this evidence of a new Xenophobe strategy, a frontal attack on human defenses followed by a swift strike in the rear or flank from underground? Or was it coincidence in the seemingly blind probings of Xenophobe forces? Where and when would the new Xeno force surface?

  No one on or off Loki was even willing to take a guess, and HEMILCOM was waffling, unwilling to commit the warstriders until the situation had been clarified.

  The problem was that nearly two thousand foot soldiers had already been committed. The Second Loki Infantry, the Wolfguard, was fighting a desperate delaying action against an advancing wave of Xenophobes that had surfaced earlier that morning nearly one hundred kilometers to the north.

  Katya had never thought much one way or the other about the leg infantry. Certainly she didn’t share the disdain some of her brother striderjacks had for the “crunchies.” They were useful for patrols and for standing guard duty, for house-to-house searches and in-dome security and other tasks that warstriders were simply too bulky or clumsy to handle. In most combat, however, striders were so clearly superior to line infantry that it seemed silly to think of the two as separate branches of the same infantry.

  But they were people, and flinging them against Xenophobes without adequate weapons or armor or strider support was nothing short of murder.

  The orders had come through at last, but even then, the commitment had been piecemeal. The Thorhammers’ First Battalion would be deployed to the Norway Line, while Second Battalion reinforced the Sweden Line. The two remaining Loki warstrider regiments, the Heimdal Guard and the Odinspears, prepared the last-ditch defense of Midgard itself.

  On a three-D holomap the deployment might look good, but Katya’s own company, now numbering sixteen operational warstriders, would have to cover twelve kilometers of the Norway Line defenses. Her First Platoon, six striders on two ascraft, had set down at Norway Base, at the point where the Xenophobes were pushing hardest.

  Disaster had struck only moments after their arrival.

  Asgard had been bombarding the advancing Xenos for hours, pounding the enemy until few of their Alphas remained intact. Unfortunately, the communications between ground and Asgard Orbital were ragged and on the point of breaking down. Several railgun projectiles had fallen close enough to the human lines to cause casualties. As Katya guided her Warlord up the slope, another artificial meteor had thundered out of the sky, striking the ridge a few hundred meters to the west.

  The concussion flung her strider off its feet. The legger infantry manning the line had been in the process of falling back from the RoPro fortifications. The sudden detonation almost on top of the ridge had thrown an orderly retreat into complete chaos.

  Carefully Katya levered the Blade upright. Armored soldiers ran past her down the hill, sliding and falling in the well-churned ice and mud. To her left, mud-covered soldiers were filing up the ramp of a big APW, which was squatting between folded legs like a large and improbable-looking spider.

  “Close one,” Chris Kingfield said over the net. “I think Asgard Orbital forgot to allow for the wind on that last one.”

  “Maybe so. Let’s see if we can cover these people.”

  “How can we do that without burning them, too?” her pilot asked. “The Xenos are already coming through the wall.”

  Suresh Gupta was one of the newbies fresh from the Training Command. He was eager, but inexperienced.

  “We help by getting behind the Xeno lines and making a pain of ourselves. The Xenos might act crazy sometimes, but they do respond to threats. If we kill enough of them, they’ll slow their advance while they take care of us.”

  “I love the way this woman thinks,” Kingfield said. “Don’t you, Suresh? A laugh a minute.”

  “Quiet, Junior,” she replied. “You take the hivel and the belly pod. Leave the arms to me.” Shifting her optics for a three-sixty scan of her surroundings, she spotted another strider at her five-o’clock position, two hundred meters off, shimmering and fuzzy in its nanoflage as it slogged up the hill. Tagging it with her communications laser, she opened a static-free channel. “Guiterrez!”

  “I hear you, Captain,” Sho-i Raul Guiterrez replied. His strider was a big fifty-four-ton Battlewraith, the Deus Irae.

  “Stay with me,” she ordered. “Extended formation.”

  Footing was treacherous. Mud clung to the strider’s feet with each step, and Katya found herself leaning hard into the balancing gyros to keep them from skidding on the hillside. At the top of the ridge, the RoPro wall was a temporary obstacle, too high to step across. Delivering three quick kicks, she reduced a three-meter section to rubble. The works, she noticed, were deserted. The last defenders had pulled back within moments of that last railgun bolt from the sky.

  Scanning the terrain to the north, she picked up numerous targets with motion sensors and infrared. Heat sources were everywhere, picked out, framed in glowing reticles, and IDed by the Warlord’s AI; the brightest were the fresh-blasted craters, courtesy of Asgard Orbital, but other sources smoldered, unmoving, or advanced across the open plain singly or in small groups. Less than a kilometer away, Katya saw a trio of large heat sources, almost certainly Xenophobe Alphas… and they were moving toward her at a steady pace.

  “Three targets,” she said, alerting Kingfield. “Bearing three-five-one, range nine hundred and closing.”

  “Got them,” the weapons tech replied. “Striker missiles, firing one! And two! And three!”

  One after the other, the three Mitsubishi DkV laser-guided missiles hissed from their dorsal launch tubes, then arrowed toward the north on white contrails. Explosions strobed and flashed in the valley.

  “More stalkers on the way,” Suresh warned. “I have six bandits, bearing zero-one-five, range fifteen hundred.”

  “I’ve got four bandits at zero-two-five, range two thousand,” Guiterrez added. “Engaging…”

  Data from Blade’s AI scrolled past her visual display. The nano count in the valley was fierce, up to point sixty or seventy in some hot spots, and nowhere less than point fifteen. Worse, her motion sensors were picking up movement all around the Warlord, and close. The ground was alive with Gammas, and they were closing in on the lumbering Warlord from all directions. “Guiterrez!” she called. “Watch the Gammas!”

  Before Guiterrez could respond, something large and black detached itself from the ground and struck the Battlewraith’s legs. He turned a point-defense flamer on it, and it dropped away, but the Battlewraith’s lower left leg was smoking, the armor under attack by invisible clouds of nano disassemblers.

  A second Gamma rippled across the ground, as quick as thought, and heading for the Blade… followed by a third. The hivel cannon on her back spat brief buzzsaw shrieks, tearing the Gammas to shreds in rapid succession. Gammas were everywhere. Twice she fired her CPGs, shriveling attackers in searing bolts of electric flame. Twisting her torso left and right, she began picking off the Gammas with precisely targeted bursts of coherent light from her bow lasers.

  Movement was a slow agony of step—wrench—step. Hours of combat and orbital bombardment had melted water ice and churned the ground to mud half a meter deep. Many of the Ga
mmas were actually hidden under the mud, alerted to the warstrider’s passing by vibration or heat or some unknown Xeno sense. Slogging forward, she kept her attention on the Gammas and the ground within ten meters of the Blade, leaving Gupta and Kingfield to watch the approaching Alpha stalkers. More missiles slashed from the Blade’s dorsal tubes. The flash of their detonations seemed unnaturally dark under the pall of smoke and soot that stained the darkening sky.

  Something moved. …

  She swiveled the Warlord’s torso, locking on the target, then bit off a savage curse as she recognized the clumsy humanoid shape of a soldier in combat armor. That armor, gray and black and splattered boots to helmet with mud, was hard to see in hunorm vision; under IR, he glowed with the heat of overworked servomotors and power pack.

  Under the cold double stare of her lasers, the figure stood for a moment as though transfixed, then lifted one arm and waved. Angry at the distraction, she kept the strider moving forward, ignoring the lonely figure.

  God, what was he doing out here? In this mud, with so many Gammas about, the poor bastard wouldn’t last another five minutes.

  Well, there was nothing she could do for him. Two Alphas, a Copperhead and a Cobra, were less than five hundred meters off. She increased the strider’s gait, closing the range.

  The Copperhead was in the lead, moving so quickly now that each step threw a spray of freezing mud to either side as it galloped ahead on shifting silver legs. Katya stopped, bracing herself, then opened fire with both CPGs and her lasers. The Copperhead crumpled under the assault, great slashes torn in its body, its charge stopped, but the Xeno was morphing as Katya watched, filling in the molten holes. Katya fired again, missed. … The Xeno unfolded a gleaming pseudopod, and she sensed the gathering of an intense magnetic field. Too late, she tried to shift her aiming point, then staggered under the impact of five hard-driven blows against her chest that slammed her back a step.