Warstrider 01 - Warstrider

by William H. Keith

  “Come on, Captain. We’ve seen all we want to here.”

  As gently as he could, Dev slipped one arm beneath her shoulders, the other under her thighs, then scooped her up. She yelped once when the movement broke her concentration, but she clung tightly to his neck as he carried her back up the slope toward the looming gray shadow of the Warlord. Dev heard a shrill whine and glanced up. The hivel turret spun to the right, the barrel tracking something behind them. When the cannon fired, the flash was bright enough to throw shadows, and the thunder was as shrill as tearing steel. The stuttering thuds of high-speed rounds striking ground, the clatter of something scraping rock, sounded at his back, meters down the slope.

  Dev spun, searching the murk. One of the silver spheres lay a few meters down the slope, half of it melted away, and the hollow interior exposed to Loki’s air.

  Inside, something moved.

  His stomach twisted. This was the first time he’d seen anything associated with the Xenophobes that actually looked and acted alive, but he still couldn’t be sure of what he was seeing. A glistening wet, gray-black mass was sliding from the open sphere. It looked like an animate glob of grease… or a slug the size of his fist.

  Had that been the hivel’s target? No. He caught the fluttering movement of a Gamma farther down the slope as it rippled toward him across the uneven ground.

  Slinging Katya over his shoulder to free one arm for balance, he jogged up the slope, cursing as loose gravel skittered from beneath his feet and nearly threw them both to the ground. As he reached the top and paused to pick his way across the fallen rubble of the RoPro battlement, something closed on his left ankle.

  Lurching off balance, he slammed his shoulder against the strider’s hull and groped for the ladder to keep from falling. A Gamma, an amorphous mass the size and shape of a crumpled bath towel, jet black shot through with iridescent silver, clung to his foot, was working its way up his leg.

  He screamed and kicked against that sickening pressure, hard, his boot sinking into the thing’s formless body. The Gamma was more massive than he’d imagined, and he kicked again. This time it broke free with a sucking sound and dropped to the ground a meter away. Dev vaulted the first three rungs of the ladder despite his burden. “Below you!” Katya yelled, her helmet banging against his as the ladder lurched and swayed. “It’s coming up after us!”

  With her help, he managed to roll Katya off his shoulder and into the narrow hatch. The medical nano had not yet had time to do its work, and she must have been in agony, but she leaned out of the hatch and grabbed Dev’s shoulder with one hand, drawing her laser pistol with the other.

  Dev tried to squeeze past her into the compartment, but the heavy thing hit him from behind, molding itself to his legs and the ladder, pinning him. Dev could imagine the machine-creature’s nano already eating at his armor and boots, could imagine his legs beginning to dissolve like the bodies he’d seen. Then he felt the first real pain, a searing, burning sensation, like flames licking at his calves and the backs of his knees. Panic rose like a whirling nightmare, fire and storm in his mind, but he clung to the strider’s hull and twisted, prying his feet free from the monster’s grasp.

  The pain was unbearable, a searing liquid fire now flowing up his thighs. In his mind’s eye, his legs were shriveling in the heat, his feet reduced to charred tendons taut across blackened bone. He’d seen recordings of people savaged by Xeno Gammas, seen the agony in their faces, and thought he understood now the hell those poor wretches had faced. He was screaming, screaming, but still clinging to the warstrider and fighting back with a near-hysterical strength, kicking with whatever was left of fire-shriveled legs.

  “Don’t move!” Katya ordered, lunging her upper body past his, arm extended as she trained her laser on the black and silver amoebic horror enveloping his legs. She fired, the 30-MJ handgun’s beam invisible, but its effect immediately apparent, as a dazzling point of red light appeared on the Gamma’s surface centimeters from Dev’s knee. It spasmed under the assault, oily black smoke boiling from that part of the slick black surface that suddenly crinkled like burning paper.

  Dev kicked again. “Damn it, I said hold still!” she yelled, but it was impossible not to thrash as agony continued to eat through his brain. The Gamma slipped, still clinging to his calves and feet but releasing his knees. Looking down, Dev could see the remnants of his armor, smoking globs of melted plastic imbedded in flesh that had the mottled look of raw, bloody hamburger. White smoke streamed from his legs, Xeno nano-Ds carrying away molecule-sized pieces of him. The sight, the realization, assaulted his mind; the emotional shock was as sharp and as deadly as any physical damage.

  Closing his eyes, Dev tried to bring his cerebral implant into play. The pain lessened now as Dev went through the mental processes necessary to switch off part of his own nervous system. Next he concentrated on contracting blood vessels already starting to pool blood deep within his abdomen, and he elevated his blood pressure slightly to keep his circulation going. Shock, both physical and psychological, could kill him now just as surely as a plasma bolt through his skull.

  Subjectively, he hung there battling his own body’s reactions for an agony of time, despite the fact that his inner clock recorded the passing of less than four seconds. Suddenly the weight and pressure were gone, though the fire remained, and Katya was pulling him the rest of the way into the open hatch. Dev opened his eyes and looked down as he swayed precariously on the strider’s hull. At the foot of the ladder, two flopping, severed pieces of Xenophobe tried to find each another again.

  He also saw the ruin of his legs, his bare and mangled feet, and the shock hit him like an electric current. Control!… His body sagged, limp, and Katya nearly lost him.

  Then he was sliding into the embrace of the command module. A jacking slot aboard a warstrider was cramped for one; for two it was nearly impossible. He landed on top of her. They were face-to-face, with no room to move and scarcely room enough to breathe. Somehow Katya managed to reach past him and stab at the manual panel, cycling the access hatch closed. Neither of them could reach his legs, so she pressed his medical nano dispenser against his shoulder to inject him.

  Part of his mind continued to work on his own survival. Each breath was painful now, bringing with it an acrid, biting rasp in his nose and throat and lungs. Blearily he realized that his suit had been breached, that he was breathing a rather unhealthy concentration of methane and ammonia at half an atmosphere, that his combat armor PLSS was feeding enough oxygen into the mix to keep him going but that its O2 charge must be nearly exhausted. Katya would need to hook into the Warlord’s life support if she was going to jack them out of here; he damned sure couldn’t do it, but he wondered if that meant he was going to suffocate.

  There were worse ways to die. He remembered the horror outside the strider’s hatch, shuddered, and nearly lost his anodyne block.

  Katya must have already assumed that he couldn’t pilot the strider. She’d grabbed the dangling jacks, plugged them into her helmet, then peeled off her glove to make contact with the interface plate.

  She hesitated, though, before making contact, turning her helmet so that she could look into his face. The compartment’s only light was from the tiny manual control board beside Dev’s shoulder, and most of that was blocked by their bodies, but he could see her eyes, centimeters from his behind the two transplas layers of their visors.

  “Thank you, Dev,” she said. “You should have left me, though.” He could hear both anger and gratitude in her voice.

  “Hey, it could happen to anybody,” he said. His own voice surprised him, thin, weak, and shaking. “I moved the Blade before I knew you were outside.”

  “Dev, I panicked.” Bitterness edged her voice. He thought he could tell what the admission had cost her.

  Her helmet-framed face blurred in his vision, leaving only startlingly green eyes in focus. Was the medical nano taking effect? He couldn’t tell. “Hey, ’s’okay,” he said, his w
ords slurring. Her eyes were starting to grow fuzzy now. “Couldn’t leave a buddy out there…”

  He didn’t know if she’d heard him or not. Her hand was on the interface, and her eyes were closed. Her body twitched once beneath his, then went limp as her brain patched into the strider’s AI.

  Was the Xenophobe nano still eating his legs? He couldn’t tell and was afraid to relax the pain block to find out. He concentrated instead on controlling heart and breathing, and on subduing the panic that had so very nearly destroyed him. After a moment, he was dimly aware of a heavy, rolling motion, like a boat caught in a storm at sea. They were moving. Once he heard what sounded like an explosion, dim and distant, and he wondered if Katya had made contact with the Stormwinds, wondered if the Warlord would make it clear to a dust-off site, wondered… wondered…

  In the swaying darkness, exhaustion and the ministrations of the medical nano in his system finally gained the upper hand. Dev fell fast asleep.

  Chapter 18

  Healing, like so much else of Man’s endeavors, has been transformed by nanotechnics. Injuries once fatal can be erased in days, the body itself reshaped into new and more efficient vehicles of the spirit. It is when the spirit is wounded that even the god of nanotechnology may fail.

  —Introspections

  Ieyasu Sutsumi

  C.E. 2538

  The Hegemony Military Medical Center occupied most of a dome adjacent to the Tristankuppel. It was a doughnut-shaped RoPro building, the hole roofed over with transplas to create a pressurized central courtyard with a circular patio and garden.

  Katya stopped at the HMMC’s main entrance long enough to check with the patient information ’face, then followed a glowing holographic guide to the courtyard. Dev was in the garden, she learned, practicing with his new walker brace.

  It was amazing that Dev was alive. It had been touch and go getting him back from Norway Ridge.

  She’d attached her suit’s PLSS to his helmet in the Warlord after shooting him full of emergency medical nano. After that, she’d had no time to spare for him as she submerged herself in the Blade’s linkage. There’d been a moment’s terror there, when she realized Dev had recalibrated the pilot module’s linkage to his own brain; her own calibrations were still stored in the AI’s main access RAM, though, and a palm ’face command had set up the transfer and completed the linkage. She still remembered the dismay she’d felt as the data had flooded in, detailing the inventory of damage and systems failures the Warlord had already suffered. With energy weapons all but useless, with only fifty rounds remaining in the hivel cannon, all she’d been able to do was turn and run, Xeno Gammas writhing up the slope behind her like a living carpet.

  Eight seconds later, she’d broken out from beneath the blanketing umbrella of ash and dust that had kept the Warlord from establishing a lasercom link with the Stormwinds and Lightnings circling the battle area. Dev had left the appropriate commands; as soon as a clear L-LOS appeared, the Warlord’s AI established contact, transmitting all recorded data in a decisecond burst. Lara Anders’s VK-141 had led the air-ground strike that shattered the pursuing column of Xenos, as a Stormwind with vacant striderslots had touched down and slotted her in. They’d unloaded Dev’s mangled body at HMMC less than twelve minutes later.

  They’d kept him unconscious while they worked on what was left of his legs. She’d glimpsed them as they pulled his body off of her; everything below his knees had been gone, and the rest was raw, bleeding tissue and white bone halfway up his thighs.

  Katya had not seen him since then and wasn’t sure what to expect.

  She found Dev in the garden practicing with his personal walker, a lightweight frame of nanolayered alloys that did his walking for him. He was standing with his back to her, staring at the atrium’s small Japanese garden.

  “How are the new legs shaping up?” she asked.

  Dev turned. A jack in his C-spine socket connected with the walker’s tiny brain, mounted at the small of his back, translating his nervous system’s commands and anticipating his movements. His legs, revealed by the hospital-issue briefs he was wearing, were full-grown, but still smooth-pink and hairless, like a child’s. Try as she might, Katya could not detect a seam where new tissue had been woven into old.

  “Hello, Captain!” he said. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

  “Just making my rounds, Cadet,” she said, watching his face closely. She caught the slight widening of his eyes, the tic of a muscle beneath his cheek. As she’d expected, he hadn’t come to grips yet with what had happened to him in the last few days. “They told me you were trying out your new legs, so I thought I’d come down here and have a look. How are they?”

  “A bit weak.” One hand slapped the silver ribbon of his brace running down his thigh. “I can’t stand up without this thing on.” He looked down at her legs. “You seem to be getting around okay.”

  “Kuso,” she said. “I didn’t even need a brace. They had medical nano in me knitting the bone before they’d even finished cutting your legs off. I was walking on it again in twenty-four hours. But gods, you were a mess!” The words were calculated to shock, to probe for raw, hidden wounds.

  “Yeah, that’s what they told me.” He looked away, shaking his head. “Did you hear about Suresh?”

  She nodded. Suresh Gupta had lived, his spinal cord spliced together by HMMC’s nanosomatic engineers. Unfortunately, large parts of his brain had been damaged during the twenty minutes or so when it had been deprived of a blood flow by his dead heart. It had been possible to repair the actual damage… but the neuronic pathways that defined memories, personality, even self-awareness, were gone. Traumatic amentia could not be corrected by nanotechnic surgery. Even with RAM feeds to reeducate him, it would be years before Suresh regained what he’d lost.

  He would recover. Every newborn child went through the same process. But the new Suresh—or whatever name he eventually chose for himself—would never remember the old, identical to him genetically but with nothing in common with his original personality. It was as though he’d been reborn, with a twenty-four-year-old’s body and a blank slate for a mind.

  “I heard,” she said. Was that what was gnawing at him? Gupta and Cameron had been friends in Basic. She decided to change the subject. “Did you hear the Xenos were beaten off? It took two days, but the Sweden Line held. Special team hit that tunnel you found. The word is, they picked up some damned useful stuff before they sealed it off. After that, it was just a mop-up.”

  He nodded. “I’m glad.”

  “So… how long you gonna be in that thing? Are the legs still growing?”

  “They tell me they’re full-grown. The nanosomes say I’ll be in this thing for another week, until the muscles are strong enough to hold me up.”

  “You’ll never know the difference.” She held up her left hand and flexed it. “They grew this back on me two years ago.”

  “Really?” His eyes had a haunted look.

  “They’ll feel just like the old ones. They just won’t have the same scars and blemishes.”

  “That’s what they told me.” He looked away. “I’ve been awfully hungry these last couple of days.”

  The medical nano Katya had injected into Dev in the strider had done little but keep him unconscious, stop the bleeding, and scour his body for any trace of invading Xeno nano. At HMMC the surgeons had amputated both legs, replacing them with force-grown, neutral tissue buds grafted in place by HMMC’s best nanosomatic engineers. Full-grown in four days, the new legs were identical to the old, but they were still painfully weak, so weak, in fact, that he could not even stand or walk without the skeletal framework of the walker brace. Dev’s system had been loaded with meteffectors busily converting raw materials to fresh muscle, which was why he always felt hungry. Soon he’d be on an exercise program that would leave him too tired to think about much else.

  If his mind hadn’t been damaged by what he’d gone through on that ridge. That was what Katya was trying
to learn now.

  “Glad to hear it.” Katya smiled. “If you’re hungry, it means you’re on the mend. You know, when they pulled you out of the Blade, I thought they were going to have to take you out with a scraper and cutting torch.”

  Katya watched one comer of his mouth tug upward at that deliberately brutal probe. How would he respond? If his psychtechs knew what I was doing, she thought, amused, they’d toss me out of this dome without a suit.

  But she had to know how he would react.

  “I don’t think I would have gone very well with her pilot’s mod decor,” Dev replied. “Late Army Spartan. Not my style at all.”

  “And what is your style, Lieutenant? Early Navy Romantic?”

  “Definitely Romantic. Centuries out-of-date.”

  She laughed. “By God, Dev, I think you’re going to be all right!”

  He gave her a wry grin. “What, you thought I was going to null out?”

  “It’s been known to happen. Your mind can screw you over better than your body any day. And you got hit pretty bad.”

  Medical engineers could rebuild the body. In war, however, the most serious wounds often were those inflicted on the mind: shock at being wounded, shock at seeing friends die, the raw, destructive savagery of fear. Direct link counseling, psychiatric simulations, and sub-C therapy could all begin the healing, but the patient himself had to complete it.

  Dev rubbed one leg thoughtfully. “Yeah. Maybe they got me patched up so fast, I never realized I’d lost anything. I’m okay, Captain. Really okay.”

  Katya agreed. She’d seen his preliminary psych studies but hadn’t known how to pull the numbers together into a meaningful picture. His TM rating, for instance, was lower—down to point two—which might mean he’d lost some of his cockiness. There was some depression, of course. Claustrophobia was a bit higher, his suspicion of authority about the same. All in all, his attitude appeared to have improved.