Warstrider 01 - Warstrider

by William H. Keith

  Warnings shrilled in her mind. Nanotech projectiles had pierced her armor in three places, damaging her right arm, tearing away her belly weapons pod, smashing armor on leg and torso. Nano-contaminated hot spots glowed against her hull. She was initiating anti-nano-D countermeasures when the Copperhead splashed toward her out of the gathering smoke, a vaguely octopuslike shape, though without the body, a robbery sprawl of broad tentacles that engulfed Katya in black and silver coils.

  With a sharp slashing motion, Katya knocked the Xeno down and fired both CPGs at point-blank range. Lightning arced, blue-white and dazzling, carving through the Copperhead’s core in a splatter of molten droplets. Two tentacles fell away, followed by three more, the pieces huge and smoking on the ground. Lightning flared again, and what was left of the Copperhead fell away, shriveling.

  “Suresh!” she called. She felt uncertain of the strider’s balance, as though she were teetering, about to fall. The landscape wobbled around her. “Chris!”

  Data from the Warlord’s AI indicated that Chris Kingfield was dead. One of those nano shells had torn through the Warlord’s lateral armor and exploded inside his module. Internal nano-D countermeasures had been released. Would they be enough?

  Suresh Gupta wasn’t answering either, but she couldn’t tell if he was dead or simply knocked out of the circuit She was having trouble with her own link, too. Static crashed in her brain, blinding her. The interference cleared, briefly, giving her a glimpse of tortured ground and the smoking hulk of the Copperhead, and then her link failed and she was back in her body, her human body, lying inside the dark and stinking coffin of the strider’s command module.

  She felt herself falling. When the Warlord’s body hit the ground, the concussion exploded like a galaxy of stars in Katya’s mind, a dazzling light that engulfed her, then carried her into blackness. …

  Chapter 14

  If you are in a tight place and feel fear, recognize it. Then get control over it and make it work for you. Fear stimulates the body processes. You can actually fight harder, and for a longer time, when you are scared. …

  —Guidebook for Marines

  Fifteenth revised edition

  late twentieth century

  Alone on a battlefield of giants.

  Dev stood in shin-deep mud that was already starting to refreeze around his feet, staring after the towering apparition. The Warlord had advanced ponderously out of the gloom, its surfaces distorted by nanoflage, each step a measured concussion, a titan’s footfall. He’d held his breath as it paused, so close he could hear the hiss of its hydraulics and pressure bearings, the grating chirp of metal on metal in a worn articulator. It was an RS-64D, powerful, magnificent, a storm god astride the wind of the battle’s storm. He could see the name picked out on the hull against the reflective nano, Assassin’s Blade.

  Katya Alessandro’s Warlord.

  Had Katya seen him? Or Suresh? Idiot, he told himself. Of course they had. Little happened within range of a warstrider’s senses that the commander and crew weren’t aware of, and as if in answer, the machine’s blunt nose angled sharply with a whine of servos, bringing the twin bow lasers to bear on him. He waved, but the big machine’s torso angled up almost disdainfully, the right leg swept past, and the Blade moved on, ignoring him.

  He let his arm drop, feeling foolish. Hell, the only thought striderjacks gave to infantry was their nickname for them—crunchies—and they certainly wouldn’t have recognized a lone grunt in combat armor. Dev had been lucky the Blade hadn’t walked him down.

  One thing the strider had done was confirm his guess that he’d gotten turned around, that he was north of the Norway Line. His helmet, he realized, was only lightly shielded, and the powerful Xeno magfields had hopelessly scrambled his field sensors. Trusting to intuition, then, he started to move up the slope in the direction from which the Warlord had come. He just hoped the APWs hadn’t already packed up and left.

  Thunder crashed, and lightning painted the smoke clouds and billowing dust with savage hues of blue and green. Turning, Dev saw the Warlord clashing with something huge, a Copperhead, he thought, bolt following crashing bolt. Feeling small and alone and terribly naked on this no-man’s-land of giants, he started running up the ridge, his boots slipping and scrabbling in the mud. He stopped when his HUD warned of N-tech disassemblers, a count of point thirty-two and rising. Eight meters away, the ground was writhing and changing as he watched, stones dissolving into steam.

  Dev stepped back, lost his balance, and began sliding down the hill. At the bottom the nano count stood at point twenty-one. Better, but his helmet electronics identified hot spots on his gloves and arms. He used the AND spray on them, wondering how much longer the canister would last.

  The clash of metal, the thunderous discharge of lightning and a flash that lit up the sky, grabbed his attention. Through drifting smoke and the deepening gloom, he could see the Warlord, lying on its side fifty meters away.

  Dev started running then, straining to reach the fallen strider. The mud was quickly freezing, and with each step he had to struggle to pull his foot free as the slop steadily assumed a nightmare’s consistency of thickening tar. He wasn’t sure what he could do, but he knew the Blade’s crew was in trouble. They might have ejected, or they might still be trapped inside. Either way, he had to get down there fast.

  Smoke curled from a gash in the armored flank. His helmet warned of a nano count of point fifty, and everywhere he looked, pieces of the shattered Copperhead lay twitching on the ground. He grabbed a handhold and pulled himself up the curving side of the Warlord’s hull… then another, then two more. No one had ejected. The explosive hatches were still sealed and intact.

  In moments, Dev found what he was looking for, a maintenance panel set into the external hull near the commander’s hatch, with a readout for techs who needed to check the machine’s systems when it was powered up and in the field. He slapped the release, and the cover slid back. A constellation of green, red, and amber lights winked at him, and he frowned, puzzling out their meaning.

  The commander’s module showed definite life signs. Captain Alessandro was alive but unconscious, possibly hurt, and there was class-three damage to her control circuitry, a nano burn-through, it looked like, in the primary computer link node. The Warlord’s AI had cut her out of the circuit to isolate the damage, shifting primary control to the pilot.

  But the pilot’s module showed a mix of red and green, and Dev winced. Suresh—if he was the guy in the pilot’s compartment—was dead, though his systems were still powered up and operational. The weapons tech was dead as well.

  Clinging to the rough, nano-pitted hull of the Warlord, Dev considered his options. He wouldn’t last long alone on this hellfield, and Katya Alessandro would be easy meat for the first Xeno to come along. He tried to push away the image that came too easily to mind, as a Xeno absorbed her Warlord and she became a screaming, living part of the horror closing around her.

  He couldn’t let that happen… he couldn’t. She’d tried to help him, had spoken up for him at the inquiry. Dev couldn’t leave her to face the nightmare of Xeno assimilation.

  Scrambling up the handholds, avoiding the worst of the nano hot spots, Dev worked his way to the primary core maintenance access hatch, a circular plate set into what had been the upper surface of the main hull, just in front of the hivel cannon mount, but which now, with the Warlord on its side, was sunken into a vertical wall. Flipping open a cover marked in red and white stripes, he reached into the recess and grabbed a handle marked EMERGENCY RELEASE, and twisted hard. There was a sharp hiss of equalizing pressures and the round hatch slid aside, exposing the coffin-tight interior.

  The narrow tube served as internal access for pilot, commander, and weapons tech, as well as a way to reach the strider’s AI core and primary circuitry. It also served as airlock, a way to get in and out of the strider without opening the operating modules to a hostile outside environment. Lights glimmered in the darkness. His
shoulders hunched to avoid snagging his backpack, he wiggled around until he could stab at the pressure plates on the small control board, seating the hatch and flooding the compartment with anti-nano-D. The local count dropped to zero, and he keyed in the sequence that would replace the chamber’s air with something breathable.

  Come on… come on! Impatiently he counted off the seconds, waiting for the atmosphere indicator to change from red to green. He was completely blind in here, and he didn’t like to think about what might be moving around outside the crippled warstrider. Green!

  Awkwardly in the tight compartment, Dev removed his helmet and shrugged out of his life support pack. The air burned with the acrid taint of ammonia, making his eyes water, but it was breathable. He found the pilot’s module hatch—with the Warlord on its side, it was beneath him—and unsealed it.

  The chamber beyond was tight and cramped and dark; Suresh lay on his side, at right angles to the airlock tube. He hung in his restraint harness like a puppet, the jackfeeds still plugged into his helmet. The helmet was twisted back, almost beneath the body. It looked to Dev as though Suresh had been slammed against one end of the module, and the impact had snapped his neck. A quick inspection of Gupta’s medisensor on his chest confirmed that he was dead.

  If Dev could get him to a medical station, there was a chance. Nanosurgical techniques could reconnect or regrow severed spinal cords as easily as they could reattach a severed arm, but if his brain went many more minutes without a blood supply, so many cerebral connections would decay that nothing would bring the Earther back.

  At the moment, Dev had to worry about getting the Warlord on its feet again. Suresh would have to wait.

  With unsteady fingers he unsealed Gupta’s cephlink helmet and slipped it off, then struggled for several moments more to release the harness straps and drag the body out of the module. What followed was a contortionist’s nightmare. Gupta’s body was a dead weight, the effort like wrestling with a bag of sand while lying on his side in a steel pipe as wide as the reach of his arm. He tried to be gentle—the less he damaged the already broken body, the more likely Suresh might be brought back later—but at the moment, speed was more important than finesse. For now, at least, Dev and Katya were both definitely alive, while Gupta was not. Any second now a Xeno would sense them, and then they all would be dead for certain.

  At last Dev dropped into the narrow space occupied by Gupta moments earlier and, bracing the body above him with one hand, hit the hatch close switch. He was sealed off from the access tube now; lights, red, amber, and green, glowed eerily at him in the darkness, and he sensed the warm hum of the Warlord’s systems all around him. He studied the controls, finding he’d forgotten nothing. Had it only been a month since he’d jacked one of these armored monsters? He removed his glove to reveal the left palm implant, then donned Gupta’s helmet, reaching up beneath his chin to snap the jacks into his sockets, one—two—three. His palm sought the interface board. Light exploded behind his closed eyes… and pain.

  Groggily Dev fought the confused cascade of sensations surging through his brain. The Warlord’s AI was configured to Suresh Gupta’s cerebral patterns, not his, and it would take moments more to reset the system.

  Concentrating, he unlocked the AI access codes still stored in his cephlink RAM. “Pilot replacement,” he thought. “Reconfiguration, Code Three-Green-One.”

  “Think of a field of yellow grain,” the strider’s voice said in the back of his mind. “Concentrate on a flock of birds flying overhead, left to right.”

  He did so. Urgency gnawed at him. The mental image wavered, and he thought for a moment he was going to lose it.

  No!

  “Red,” the AI voice told him, and he pictured the color. “Orange… blue… white… square… triangle…”

  The list of words droned on, each a stimulus triggering an image received and recorded by the Warlord’s artificial intelligence. Distantly he felt a shudder pass through his body, a heavy, rolling sensation as though the Warlord had been struck by something very large, very massive. Fear rose, a clawing darkness behind the clarity of his thoughts, urging him to reach for the manual eject key… but he fought it down.

  “… the number fourteen… Picture a wild and rocky seacoast beneath a gray sky, with waves crashing against the rocks. …

  “Reconfiguration is complete. Enabling cephlink, full control to Module Two.”

  Pause, and then, with a satisfying inner snap, light flared again in Dev’s eyes, but this time it was like waking from a sound sleep. He was lying on his side, his face close to a gel of ice and mud. Something large and shaggy stood above him on silver pseudopods, its bulk obscenely distended and alive with the twist and wiggle of snakelike appendages. Dev recognized the amorphous shape, a King Cobra, slow and a bit clumsy, but one of the largest and most deadly of all the Xenophobe killer machines.

  The cascade of data through Dev’s senses was numbing in its length and in its complexity. He’d not handled a direct sensory link for a month, and the shock was like stepping into the thunder of a waterfall. The Warlord’s AI confirmed what he already knew: Katya was alive but unable to link, Jun-i Kingfield was dead; the strider itself had sustained damage—the list of failed or failing systems was the bulk of the data cascade—but it could still move and it could still fight.

  Nanotechnic disassemblers were storming at the Warlord’s outer hull, degrading the armor in an invisible molecular storm. The exterior nano count was approaching point eight-four. The behemoth standing above the fallen Warlord extended one broad pseudopod like a rippling black tongue, and where it touched the strider’s left weapons pod, the nano-D count shrieked into the point-nineties, approaching the one-point-oh that marked complete molecular breakdown.

  Lifting a fallen strider to its feet was difficult at the best of times, especially when it had weapons instead of true arms and hands. While under attack, it was nearly impossible. Dev thrust his left arm out, levering the hull far enough off the ground that he could tuck his left leg beneath his body. At the same time, he swiveled his torso and snapped his right arm up, bringing the right-hand CPG into line with the looming King Cobra.

  Lightning flashed, and the amorphous hull of the Cobra flattened beneath the assault. Dev triggered a second blast, and a pair of ropy, lancet-tipped appendages as thick as elephants’ trunks broke free in a splatter of silver droplets. The King Cobra drifted back a step, and Dev used the pause to straighten his left leg, raising the bulk of the damaged warstrider shakily erect.

  The nano count on his right pod registered point six-two, point six-one on his right leg. With a thought, he triggered a countermeasures release. Smoke, like a fire extinguisher’s blast, enveloped the strider, cooling the hot spots before his armor began dissolving.

  Twisting right, he triggered his twin bow lasers. Red warnings flashed across his visual field. The laser circuits were out, mud-clogged and shock-damaged, and so was his left-arm CPG. The fall had broken a power feed. With peripheral vision, he saw the blue-white snap and flash of an electrical discharge at the elbow connector, and he could feel the slow but steady drain on his power reserves.

  The King Cobra drifted forward with a curious rolling motion that slid the damaged areas out of the warstrider’s line of fire. A black pseudopod grew like a slender head from obscenely bunched and writhing shoulders. Dev started to fire his right CPG, noted temperature warnings and a threat of power shutdown to his right pod, and reset the fire command before he’d completed it. Shifting control instead to his dorsal hivel cannon, he loosed a point-blank stream of depleted uranium, hosing the Cobra with the hammering impact of fifty rounds per second.

  The King Cobra, its mantle spread to enclose the Warlord in a deadly embrace, was caught, vulnerable and exposed. The flattened pseudopod shredded in a whirling storm of fragments.

  Another tentacle groped toward him from the left. Sensing its approach, Dev twisted, bringing the arcing flare of the damaged power lead between him and
the enemy, then lunging sideways. The Xeno machine flinched under the sputtering crackle of Dev’s impromptu electric stun gun, part of its surface sloughing off as internal magfields were disrupted. Dev fired another hivel burst, then, noting that the right CPG bore temperature had dropped almost into safe levels, he loosed another burst of protons.

  The Cobra’s surface crackled and sparked, part of its mass smoking into vapor as the Xeno lost control of its N-tech surface. An explosion strobed at the thing’s core, sleeting Dev with Xeno fragments and tearing the alien machine into molten pieces. The largest fragments twisted and snaked across the smoking ground until, one by one, Dev fried them in bursts of nuclear flame.

  Power levels at seventy-four percent…

  Patches of armor on left side and leg depleted by twenty-seven percent…

  Temperature warning, right CPG, nine hundred degrees…

  New warnings flashed, and the line breakers in his right arm tripped out again. Smoke was pouring from the right Mark III—not the viscous white smoke of nano-Ds dissolving armor, but a sputtering, greasy black cloud from melting plastic and burning lubricants, mingled with green fumes from a ruptured coolant line somewhere. He tried to move his right arm and felt the mechanism grind and seize, rigidly locked and probably ruined.

  Dev was rapidly running out of weapons. His systems readout indicated he could still fire the CPG, but he would have to aim it by turning his whole body, a slow and clumsy way to fight an enemy that was already quicker and more maneuverable than he was.

  A wink of light on his visual display caught his attention, the electronic equivalent of his Warlord’s AI tapping his shoulder and pointing. Swiveling his primary optics toward the black and ominous sky, he glimpsed a fast-moving speck skimming just beneath the overcast, crossing the ridge from south to north.