Like so much else about the Xenophobes, exactly how they performed their subsurface movement trick was unknown. It was assumed that they were able to turn rock plastic or even fluid by manipulating it somehow with intense, focused magnetic fields and clouds of nanotechnic tunnelers. In sims, Dev had watched streamlined Xenophobe snake-shapes emerge from the ground, nosing their way up through solid rock turned plastic by a technology humans didn’t understand and could not copy.
The rock did not remain plastic after a Xenophobe passed through it, nor was an actual tunnel excavated. However, the rock was certainly weakened by the machine’s passage, creating what was known as an SDT, or Subsurface Deformation Track. HEMILCOM theorized that the Xenophobe forces might well use existing SDTs as underground highways. Possibly it took less power to force a path through rock that had been deformed once before. If HEMILCOM was tracking a Deep Seismic Anomaly here, now, it meant the Xenos could be rising toward the surface.
“What are we supposed to be doing out here, Lieutenant?” Dev asked.
“We’re a recon strider, newbie. We recon.”
“Why the hell don’t they just nuke the tunnel mouth and be done with it?”
“Maybe someone’s sentimental about Schluter and doesn’t want the place incinerated.”
“If they know the Xenophobes are coming back, they ought to evacuate it,” Dev said. “How many people are here, anyway?”
“Five, maybe six thousand. It’s Mitsubishi’s biggest ore-processing plant on Loki. I don’t think they’re going to let it go without a fight.”
The argument made no sense to Dev. In seven weeks, surely they could have evacuated six thousand people to Asgard. Which was more important, the people or Mitsubishi’s investment?
Numbers again.
“Gold Seven, Gold Seven,” Katya Alessandro’s voice called over the tacnet. “This is Gold Leader.”
“Gold Leader, Gold Seven,” Lanier replied. “Go ahead.”
“Looks like this might be it. Sensors have a hot spot triangulated at Bravo three-seven, Hotel one-niner. That puts them smack under your feet, Tami. Back off and let the towers take the first rush.”
“Don’t see anything happening yet,” Lanier replied. “It looks dead.”
Which is what we’ll be if you don’t do what Alessandro says and get us out of here, Dev thought. He kept the thought off the ICS, however, and focused his optics on the crater floor. He could almost imagine that he was sensing a deep-down vibration, transmitting itself through the ground and the Ghostrider’s legs. He tried lowering his audio range. In Basic he’d learned that it was sometimes possible to detect a Xeno approach through infrasonics—the low-pitched grumble of rocks yielding far below the surface.
“Gold Seven, we’ve got a plus five on IR at your coordinates,” another voice said. “Local magnetic now at point three gauss, with a flux of point two five. Data feed on Channel Five.”
The data from C-Three began scrolling down one side of Dev’s visual display. He shifted his own vision to infrared and overlaid it with computer graphics representing the local magnetic field. The ground was warmer inside the crater, glowing now in shades of green that contrasted with the blues and purples of the surrounding rock and snow, and there was a vague node of magnetic force in the crater’s center.
“Gold Seven, Gold Leader. Suggest you pull back. Now!”
“Sounds like a good idea to me, Lieutenant,” Dev added. He hoped that his voice didn’t sound as scared as he felt. Sometimes cephlinked transmissions could carry a lot more emotion than the sender intended.
“Copy, Gold Leader. There’s no danger yet. Maybe I can get off a shot or two when the bastard rears its ugly head.”
Damn it, Dev thought. That’s what the gun towers are for! I don’t want to be a hero!
“All units, go to combat alert!” Alessandro’s voice barked. “Weapons free!”
“IR at plus six,” the emotionless voice of C-Three added. “Centered on Schluter Crater. Mag now at point three-two, flux point three-seven.”
“Back off the crater rim, Gold Seven. That’s an order!”
“Roger, Gold Leader.” Lanier actually sounded disappointed. The Ghostrider turned and, gingerly on the uneven footing, began picking its way back down the crater slope. Dev was certain that he could feel a trembling now underfoot. The gun towers appeared to have come to life, their movements urgent as the muzzles of paired heavy lasers twitched back and forth. “Let us have a visual feed from one of the towers.”
“You got it, Gold Seven. Patched in.”
A window opened on Dev’s field of view, an inset of the crater floor from the vantage point of one of the robot sentry towers.
Something was happening there, but it was becoming harder to see. The snow was melting, vanishing into a swirl of fog obscuring the ground. The continuing data feed from C-Three showed that the crater floor temperature had risen ten degrees Celsius in the last fifteen seconds.
And then something burst through the cloaking fog.
Gravel sprayed into the overcast, like cinders from a volcanic eruption. The fog billowed into the sky as something struck Dev’s legs from behind, a savage blow that nearly toppled him. He cursed as he tried to balance himself… then realized that his reactions were still out of the circuit. Tami Lanier was in control of the strider, and all he could do was watch as the crater interior exploded in hurtling fragments of rock. Gravel pelted the Ghostrider like hailstones, and the ground continued to lurch underfoot. On the inset picture from the sentry tower, a blunt-nosed worm or snake five meters thick was squeezing out of the ground and into full view.
All six laser towers fired at the same instant, and the clouds above the crater lit blue-white with their reflected glare. Other warstriders were advancing across the valley now, a staggered line rushing to put themselves between the dome and the emerging Xenophobes. Stepper and Snake Stomper, the other LaG-42, were closest to the eruption. Dev glimpsed Carlsson’s strider, blurred and indistinct by its nano film, dropped into a gunfighter’s crouch atop the ridge, loosing a salvo of rockets. Explosions masked the crater’s center for a thunderous moment. Dev caught a glimpse of a silvery fragment spinning end over end as it arced through the dirty air.
More elongated shapes were forcing their way up through the ground now. Shock waves rippled through the fog, and across those patches of bare rock and gravel Dev could see. It looked as though the ground was writhing.
Then the visibility grew worse. Heavy, white smoke was boiling from the ground, a mist that could have been mistaken for fog except that it had a milky texture that made it seem almost liquid. Almost immediately the outside nano count began to soar.
“Lieutenant!” Dev yelled. “We’re picking up nano-D on our hull! Point three-one… no, three-two, and rising!”
“I see it.” Lanier cut loose with a rocket salvo of her own, sending a rippling barrage of M-22s searing into the crater. Dev saw something like a huge, silver worm shuddering as the LaG-42’s volley smashed into it, the detonations flashing and snapping and hurling smoke and dirt into the air. With startling suddenness the Xeno machine’s sinuous body changed, lengthening, extruding silvery whiplash tentacles. Dev had seen recordings of Xenos morphing during Basic, but seeing it this way was different. This was no AI-simulated graphic, but the real thing, transforming itself from traveler to killer. Dev recognized the new shape—a flattened sphere studded with slender spines and tentacles, a Fer-de-Lance in combat mode. The thing was jet black until a beam from one of the gun towers touched it, and then it flashed silver, scattering light in a rainbow cascade.
“Cameron!” Lanier shouted over the ICS. “Take the chin laser!”
Dev felt the inner chunk of relays slamming home, saw the target reticle for the 100-megawatt laser drop onto his field of view. The lieutenant was now handling both the strider’s movement and its left and right weapons pods; Dev had control of the heavy Toshiba Arms laser mounted beneath the Ghostrider’s blunt prow.
For several seconds, all was chaos and raw, thundering noise. Dev saw pieces of Xenophobe machine on the ground, most of them inching forward with a horrible, blindly searching life of their own. On either side, other Assassin striders were coming up the ridge in support. Something roughly the size and shape of a beach towel leaped through the air and hit Carlsson’s Ghostrider, clinging wetly to the right leg. Dev stared in horror as the strider’s leg began to dissolve, streams of white smoke gushing from visibly enlarging holes in the armor. Large patches of surface film had eroded away as nano disassemblers attacked it. No longer reflecting the colors of the strider’s surroundings, the affected areas looked like crumbling patches of rust.
“Damn it, Cameron!” his partner yelled against the muddled background of his thoughts. “Shoot! Shoot!”
He stared, unable to find the coded thoughts that would let him engage the Ghostrider’s laser. Things seemed to be happening around him in slow motion. Directly in front of him, ten meters away, a disk-shaped head balanced on a slender snake of a neck rose from the smoke.
“Cobra!” Lanier shouted, naming the Xeno machine. “Lase it, Cameron!”
He tried, but the codes, the numbers, would not come. Helplessly Dev watched as the flat head opened lengthwise, exposing a deep groove extending from a hole that gave the machine a sinister, one-eyed look. The opening glowed red, and a stream of high-velocity slugs howled into the Ghostrider’s left weapons pod with a sound like tearing sheet metal.
Something slammed into Dev with pile-driver force. The shock surprised him; despite training sessions, feeds, and lectures, he hadn’t realized that he would feel the impact of enemy rounds when he was not actually in control of the strider. A second blow struck his side, spinning him partway around. Glancing down, he could see the left Kv-70 pod dangling from the wreckage of its ball-and-socket mount. The pod’s upper surface had been opened from front to back, and loops of interior wiring were spilling from the tear, smoking and sparking in the cold air.
“Left arm’s gone, Dev!” Lanier called. “Fire, damn you, fire!”
Shifting the focus of his eyes, he brought the targeting reticle into line with that flat, deadly head, willing the main laser to fire, desperate now, still unable to make the thing work. Tami was still firing with the right arm pod, sending a long burst of high-velocity rounds into the rapidly descending horror that appeared to be coming apart even as he watched.
Then the Cobra’s main hull slammed into the Ghostrider, sending him toppling over backward in a spray of sand, gravel, and glittering fragments. A three-meter tentacle slashed across the cameras transmitting his visual feed. There was a flash of static, and then his vision was gone.
Gone! Desperately he tried to switch to another camera group on the LaG-42’s hull, but the entire visual feed network was down. He could still sense the warstrider’s position; he was on his back, a heavy, squirming weight across his chest, but he couldn’t see to fight back. A shrill scream filled his mind, going on and on and on for an eternity before he realized that the scream was his.
His hand came off the palm contact, and suddenly he was strapped to a narrow couch in a dark and fear-stinking space, surrounded by metal and feed cables and the lonely amber and green lights of the strider’s manual power-up system. His breath came in short, shallow gasps that rasped in his ears through the confines of his helmet. The metal walls reverberated as something hit the strider outside and rocked it to one side. He grabbed for support, his fist striking cold steel.
He slapped his palm back on the contact panel, but nothing happened. Lights winked at him, baleful eyes in the darkness warning of system shutdowns and failing power. The strider shuddered again, with a shriek like that of a damned soul. Dimly, with his ears rather than his mind, he thought he heard a far-off, muffled scream, not his scream this time, but someone else. A woman’s scream.
The lieutenant was sealed into the command pod, and he had no way of reaching her. He was trapped, and a Xeno Cobra had them in its deadly embrace.
He had to get out! Out!
Dev tried to interface with the strider AI again, and this time succeeded. The feeling of pressure on his chest and legs was terrible, suffocating, and he still couldn’t see. Words flowed across the emptiness: power was down to twenty-seven percent, left leg hydraulics were gone, massive damage to imaging and control systems, command module dead…
Dead! He tried to get more information, tried to open the ICS link, and failed. Either Tami Lanier was dead or the strider’s internal communications were completely shot. A red square flashed insistently at the corner of his vision. The Ghostrider’s AI was trying to pass control to him.
The darkness enveloping him was more terrifying than the sight of the oncoming Cobra. “Eject sequence!” he commanded. “Code… uh… red, seven, three… Eject! Eject! Eject!”
Nothing! Dev didn’t know whether the failure was in the eject sequence or in him. Breaking the linkage, he woke again to the darkness of the pilot’s module. Groping above his head, he found the manual controls, flipped up a guard shield, and grasped the ejection handle inside its recess.
He twisted it to the right. A thunderclap of sound and pressure battered Dev into unconsciousness.
Chapter 10
… it is left to war itself to strip the mask from the man of straw, which it will do with a quite ruthless precision of its own.
—The Anatomy of Courage
Lord Moran
mid-twentieth century
Katya spoke up for Dev at the inquest, but there was very little that she could do. The young Terran was doomed from the very start.
The review board included her, as Dev’s company commander, her own 1st Platoon Leader, Chu-i Victor Hagan; the Thorhammers’ CO, Taisa Gustav Varney; commanding officer of the Midgard Training Command, Shosa Karl Rassmussen; and an Imperial, the Adept Ieyasu Sutsumi. They sat behind a long table covered by a green cloth, while Cameron, still looking somewhat dazed, stood before them and answered their questions.
Sutsumi was not, strictly speaking, a military man, nor was the inquest a court-martial. The Imperial Adept—he was addressed by the title Sensei—was a master of the mind-control art called kokorodo. He’d designed several of the AI routines that oversaw the training of Hegemony recruits in managing implanted links. Rather than trying to punish Devis Cameron, it was the board’s duty to review his case and determine whether or not he could be of any further use to the Hegemony strider forces, and Sensei Sutsumi was present as an expert in neopsychometrics. He’d been asked to come down from Asgard and attend the inquest because the young striderjack’s problems appeared to be primarily psychological.
“Did you ever have trouble accessing weapons codes during your training?” Karl Rassmussen asked.
“No, sir,” Dev replied. His voice was, not cold, exactly, but distant, almost as though he didn’t care what was happening to him anymore.
As the questioning continued, Katya remembered the look on his face when she’d told him that once, years before, she’d been a starpilot, too.
New America was a raw frontier world, so new that it didn’t even have a sky-el yet. Like Lung Chi, 26 Draconis IV had already developed an ecosystem of its own when human explorers first discovered it in the early 2400s. All that it had needed was a slight decrease in the atmospheric CO2 and the genetic tailoring of several microbion species to help the native life adjust to the change.
Life in the young colony was hard; modern equipment and industrial nanomolds were hard to come by, the costs of shipping, say, farm machinery from Earth prohibitive.
Katya, the third daughter of a Greek-American father and a Ukrainian mother, had grown up hating that farm. Attending New America’s only technic university, at Jefferson, she’d mortgaged her expected income over the next eight years for a three-socket implant; her first job had been as a panel rigger aboard New America’s single tiny space station.
From there, however, she’d managed to get better slo
ts, first as shuttle transport pilot, then crewing aboard the Golden Aphrodite, the fifty-meter interstellar yacht belonging to Prestis Chadwick, one of the major shareholders in the New American Corporation, and a vice-president of the colony’s local branch of Bank Nakasone-America.
She hadn’t cared for life among the New American elite, not when keeping that job demanded hours and activities not listed in her job description. At her first opportunity, she’d tendered her resignation and visited the Hegemony service recruiter in Jefferson. With her experience jacking the Aphrodite, she’d been immediately slotted into interstellar transports.
Starting as reserve helm aboard the 12,000-ton Kosen Maru, she’d swiftly worked her way up to first pilot on a monster I-4K, the 1,900,000-ton Kaibutsu Maru. She’d paid off her socket loan in two years, after just one New-America-to-Earth-and-back run.
During that whole time, there’d been no indication at all that she had a TM rating of point three.
Much later, she figured out what must have happened. Working conditions aboard the Aphrodite had been unsettling enough, unpleasant enough, that her emotions had overshadowed some of her MSE responses.
In fact, she’d been very nearly emotionally dead when she tested for her slot with the service. Maybe someone in the evaluations section had been sloppy. Maybe the scores themselves didn’t matter as much as the way they were interpreted. But Katya was glorying in the raw power and wonder of the godsea, guiding her lumbering charge through the swirling blue currents that ViRsimulated the interface between normal four-space and the Quantum Sea, the K-T Plenum.
Katya knew exactly what Devis Cameron had experienced there, where energy came into existence from nothing, free for the taking, where the reality of fourspace became a fragile bubble adrift on an unimagined, unimaginable flux of quantum energy. It was so easy to ride that feeling of invincibility, to stretch the odds and take that extra chance, riding on the edge of the godsea tide. …
Warstrider Page 10
