Warstrider

by William H. Keith

  As the song told it, the warstriders withdrew before the battle, loading their heavy equipment onto the sky-el and shuttling up to synchorbit, leaving the colony on its own. Their commander, a Colonel Nagai, had ordered the foot soldiers under Captain David Morgan to withdraw as well.

  But Morgan and most of his men had refused the order, electing instead to stand and fight.

  We disobeyed our orders when they said to sound retreat

  And Morgan laughed and said “My God, we’ll see who’sthe elite!”

  For fighting steel had broken faith, the samurai had fled.

  But Morgan’s men defied Nagai, they stood and foughtand bled.

  Argos was a classic infantry holding action against superior numbers. Three hundred eighty-eight infantrymen had dug in on Mount Athos at the peninsula’s base and waited for the enemy to come to them.

  Warstriders did not make that stand, it was the infantry

  Who stood and fought and died and paid the price ofmutiny.

  We took our stand on Argos Hill, four hundred fightingmen.

  And when the smoke had cleared away, sixteen walkeddown again.

  Morgan’s Hold had taken its place in the annals of military history next to Thermopylae and the Alamo. For two bloody weeks the men and women of the 62nd held out against wave upon wave of Xenophobe Alphas and Gammas surging toward Argos. Though a few Xenophobes did break out inside the capital toward the end, the defenders bought precious time for the city to complete its evacuation. At the end of the siege, the last sixteen of Morgan’s unwounded men departed up the sky-el, the last humans to leave Herakles. An hour later, the 500-megaton thermonuclear device they’d left behind vaporized Argos and kept the Xenophobes from following them to synchorbit.

  Morgan had died on the third day.

  At golden Tenno Kyuden they cannot begin to see

  That honor’s price is paid in full while glory can be free.

  So give a cheer for Morgan’s crew, the God-damned infantry,

  The men who fought the Xenophobes, the grunts likeyou and me.

  Hegemony Command did not approve of the “Ballad of Morgan’s Hold.” It rubbed the Japanese the wrong way, reminding them of their part at Herakles. There were plenty of horror stories floating around of men and whole Hegemony units disciplined for singing it, or even for possessing a recording in their personal RAM.

  But soldiers from the beginning of history considered it a God-given right to grumble at those higher up the ladder. Perhaps because they knew that troops needed to have some outlet for their frustrations, most small unit commanders turned a deaf ear. Twenty-five years after the battle it recalled, “Morgan’s Hold” continued to enjoy an underground popularity quite out of proportion to any musical virtue it might have had.

  The deck of the APW jolted with a rapid-fire string of concussions. “That’s thirty mike-mike AC,” a dirty-looking private said from the rear of the compartment. He looked up toward the compartment’s low ceiling. “Dorsal turret’s got a target.”

  The APW was a boxy, headless beast with a flat turret mounted on its dorsal surface. If the turret’s 30-mm autocannon was firing, the enemy must be damned close. For a long moment, every person in the squad sat deathly still, straining to hear past the thud of the cannon. Dev desperately wished he could see. The lack of jack connections in this primitive vehicle was going to drive him crazy yet.

  There was a clatter from the front of the compartment, and Socho Gunnar Anderson, the platoon sergeant, dropped down the ladder, bulky in his armor and combat harness. “Listen up, people!” He had to yell to be heard above the thunder of the cannon. “We’ve reached our assigned area on the Norway Line. Prepared positions have been established along the crest of a ridge. When the ramp goes down, you will move to those positions, take cover, and engage the enemy on your front. Take time now to check your weapons and gear.” He then repeated his instructions in Norsk-Lokan.

  Dev lifted his Mark XIV plasma gun and slipped the pintle into the steadimount socket at his right hip and locked it home. The heavy weapon floated in front of him, muzzle up, its weight taken up by the complex harness Dev wore over his armor.

  “Hey, Strider-man,” Superior Private Rosen said from the seat opposite his. “Hope you’re better jacking that thing than you were striders!”

  The others laughed, and Dev managed a good-natured grin. Anyone with three sockets was assumed to have failed with either striders or the navy. Three-jackers, as they were known, were usually assigned the squad’s heavy, link-adapted weapons like the Mark XIV.

  “Don’t forget to keep monitoring your nano count,” Anderson told them. He held up a small gray canister in one gauntleted hand. “If you get hit, remember your AND canisters. They contain a counter-nano agent Use it fast enough and you’ll save yourself the muss and fuss of a breached suit.”

  There was another, heavier jolt, then silence. “We’ve stopped moving,” Falk said, staring at the ceiling. “We’ve stopped moving, guys!”

  “Easy, kid,” Lipinsky said. “There’s plenty of ’Phobes to go around.”

  “Okay, people,” Anderson continued. “Welcome to Norway Base. Helmets on!”

  With a clattering sound, the troopers donned their helmets, sliding them over their heads, sealing the gorget assemblies to their cuirass locking rings. Dev made sure the helmet’s internal jack was snapped home into his right T-socket.

  “Communications check,” Anderson said, his voice even louder now inside Dev’s helmet. “Squad, by the numbers, sound off!”

  One by one, each trooper called off his number.

  Then, “Stand up!”

  As he rose, Dev felt a peculiar sinking feeling, as though he were descending in an elevator. The APW was lowering its body to the ground. He adjusted his Mark XIV’s harness; even in Loki’s .8 g gravity, the weapon weighed over eight and a half kilos, and his armor added another fifteen. He felt awkward and clumsy.

  “Every man, check your neighbor!”

  Dev studied the readouts on Rosen’s chest panel, as Rosen studied his. Combat Armor served as a full environmental suit, with life support for up to eight hours. The readouts showed suit systems readiness and the condition of the wearer. All green. He gave Rosen a thumbs up and received one in return. He could see Rosen grinning at him through his helmet visor. “You’ll do okay, Strider,” the brown said over the squad net.

  Two troopers clashed gauntlets, a noisy high-five. “Let’s odie!” someone else called. Odie was soldier’s slang, twisted from the Nihongo word for “dance.” Morale was high, the troops ready to go.

  Movement stopped, and a warning light on the ceiling winked red. A section of the deck split open, admitting a swirl of cold and dusty air. Dev caught a glimpse of snow-covered ground below as the ramp lowered itself from the walker’s belly.

  “Squad!” Anderson called. “Let’s hit it!”

  In a rush, the two men in the rear of the compartment pounded down the ramp and into the dusty light. The rest followed after, two tight columns filing down the ramp and into the light.

  It seemed bright outside, though the sky was the usual dirty gray overcast of Loki. Norway Base was little more than a newly grown landing pad and a few RoProcess huts and storage buildings. Directly in front of him, the Norway Line stretched along the crest of the ridge like the walls and towers of some medieval fortress. The Rogan process allowed combat nangineers to grow fabricrete structures in a matter of hours wherever there was a plentiful supply of stone and dirt. Jogging across uneven ground toward the wall, Dev had a blurred impression of men, of vehicles and heavy machinery, of swirling confusion.

  Crack-thud!

  The ground lurched beneath his feet, nearly throwing him. Smoke boiled into the sky from the far side of the ridge. The squad reached the shelter of a two-meter-tall Rogan wall near the crest of the ridge and dropped to the ground. Behind them, their hulking APW rose on tree-trunk legs, its turret sweeping back and forth in quick, nervous jerks. A laser t
ower twenty meters to their right shifted, then fired at some unseen enemy toward the north with an eye-searing flash.

  Crack-thud!

  “Steady, people,” Anderson’s voice said, cool and unhurried. “Those’re ours. They’re calling in railgun packages on ’em from orbit.”

  That was reassuring… and frightening. With Loki’s cloud cover, lasers and most other orbital weapons were useless, but spotter drones could call in railgun fire with pinpoint accuracy. The crack he’d heard was the sonic boom of a high-velocity artificial meteor piercing the atmosphere from almost straight overhead; the thud was the concussion as the meteor liberated its considerable payload of kinetic energy into the planet’s crust.

  But the barrage sounded awfully close.

  Crack-thud!

  “God damn!” an unidentified voice said over the tactical frequency. “Where are the goking striders?”

  “Morgan’s Hold!” another voice called. “The bastards’re pulling a Morgan’s Hold on us!”

  “Okay, okay, people,” Anderson snapped. “Can the comments. Lock and load.”

  Dev’s external mike picked up the harsh clatter and snick of weapons as full magazines were snapped home, as charging levers were pulled, chambering rounds. He checked the play of his weapon in the steadimount, then pulled a cable from the weapon’s side and jacked it into his helmet’s external socket. Static flickered in his brain, then cleared, leaving red-glowing cross hairs superimposed on his vision.

  Suddenly the ground struck him and he was on his back. He didn’t hear an explosion, though he assumed there must have been one, because he was half-buried by dirt and gravel and shattered chunks of fabricrete.

  “Xenos!” someone screamed over the tacnet. “Xenos! They’re coming through the wall!”

  Chapter 12

  Squad Support Plasma Guns, SSPGs, fire slivers of cobalt, vaporized, stripped of electrons, and ejected by an intense magfield as finger-sized bolts of plasma, hot as the core of a sun. Cyclic rates are variable, ranging up to five hundred rounds per minute. Unfortunately, the gun is bulky enough that a level-two linkage is necessary to handle the targeting feedback, limiting its use to gunners with appropriate hardware.

  —Modern Military Hardware

  HEMILCOM Military ViRdocumentary

  C.E. 2537

  Dev lay on his back, half-buried in mud and rubble. A black, churning pillar of smoke mushroomed from the far side of the wall, the crown unfolding toward the overcast zenith like the mushroom of a nuclear detonation. His first thought was that the Xenos were using nukes, something they’d never done before. His second was that something had gone wrong, that Asgard had accidentally dropped a railgun load too close to the Wolfguard position.

  Friendly fire or hostile, it didn’t matter much. Something was pushing through the wall three meters in front of him, something with a surface like quicksilver, flowing over the splintered remnants of the RoPro wall, dissolving solid fabricrete in currents of milky white fog. It slapped a flattened pseudopod across Hadley’s back, and Dev heard the man scream in sudden, wild panic.

  Dev dragged his plasma gun around, swinging the muzzle until the glowing reticle in his vision centered on what seemed to be the silvershifter’s center of mass as it bulked its way through the hole in the wall. His right hand squeezed the trigger grip, sending white fire blazing into the Xeno.

  Each burst of plasma flame left a dancing trail of purple spots on Dev’s retinas, despite the automatic polarization of his visor. Under that deadly barrage, the Xeno machine twisted, form morphing into monstrous form as it tried to escape that searing hellfire.

  It was an awkward shot from a sprawled, seated position, but the stream of fire convulsed the Gamma’s body, splattering droplets of molten metal. The pseudopod released the struggling trooper, lashing the air. Then the life seemed to drain from the thing and it literally fell apart, pieces of smoking slag hitting the snow and mud with a sputtering hiss.

  “Nice shooting, Cameron!” Dahlke said.

  “Way to go, Strider-man!” Rosen added.

  The thing’s surface was blackening, dissolving as he watched, its edges curling away in streamers of heavy white smoke. Someone sprayed the back of Hadley’s armor with an AND aerosol canister, hosing down the crinkled scar on the ceramic surface with anti-nano; the nano-D count was high, point twenty-eight, and seemed to be coming from the disintegrating Gamma.

  “C’mon, c’mon, people!” Anderson bellowed. “Clear the hot spot!”

  The squad shifted right, following the wall in single file, moving away from the nano-D-contaminated area at a slow jog. The wall was too high for Dev to see beyond it to the north, but elsewhere, the landscape was a crawling confusion of men and machines.

  There was furious activity everywhere. Troops manned weapons behind RoPro walls, moved about Norway Base in platoon-sized bands, or spilled down the ramps of four-legged APWs. Lightly armored hovercraft shrieked along on wakes of splattering mud and snow. On the towers, the twin barrels of heavy robotic lasers dipped and turned and flashed. It looked as if the whole Wolfguard regiment—eighteen hundred men in all—had been deployed along this section of wall.

  “Gok, Sarge, where are the striders?” Lipinsky called. “What’re they thinking of, throwing light infantry against Xenos?”

  “Can it, Lipinsky,” Anderson replied. “You got your flamer. Use it.”

  “Yeah, and if we run into a stalker?”

  “Striders’re on the way,” Anderson replied. “If you want to live long enough to see ’em, keep the damned Xenos off this hill!”

  Lipinsky had a point. The squad was armed with a collection of light weapons, from combat rifles to the barely man-portable SSPGs carried by Dev and a big-shouldered trooper named Bronson. Lipinsky and Rosen had been issued Taimatsu Type-21s, squat, large-bored weapons that the troops called flamers.

  Mark XIVs and flamers might be able to damage a Xenophobe Alphas—with luck and concentrated fire—but throwing infantry against stalkers made as much sense as throwing them against warstriders, an exchange of many men for a few machines, a shocking waste of good infantry.

  Dev flinched from the thought. The idea of meeting a Xeno Alpha face-to-face without the relative safety of forty centimeters of nanofilmed durasheath and ceramic armor surrounding him was horrific, conjuring the memory of Tami Lanier’s body in the pilot’s module of her half-eaten Ghostrider. It conjured, too, Phil Castellano’s bitterness, his insistence that the brass simply didn’t care for the enlisted men and combat-rank officers.

  “Spread out, people!” Anderson yelled, gesturing with an armored hand. “Take your positions!”

  They’d reached a low point along the wall. Swiftly they fanned out, leaning their weapons across the gray-white parapets. For the first time, Dev had a clear look at the terrain to the north, across a stretch of flat valley to another snow-patched ridgeline two kilometers away. Black pillars of smoke churned skyward from hundred-meter craters scattered across the landscape, and everywhere, everywhere, the ground was crawling, as though it had taken on a life of its own. Lasers and plasma gun bolts were striking and flashing at hundreds of Xenophobe Gammas, raising gouts of earth and vaporizing snow in swirling puffs of steam. Dev saw no Alphas or Betas anywhere, only the small and slithering Gammas, fragments of quicksilver and tar. The orbital bombardment and the steady barrage from the robot laser towers, Dev reasoned, must have shattered all of the Alphas.

  Good. Gammas were deadly up close and they attacked in huge numbers, but infantry, which also relied on numbers, stood a better chance against them than did warstriders. He locked on to a meter-long crumpled-rag shape crawling up the ridge twenty meters downslope and loosed a burst of plasma flame. Gleaming metal exploded in quicksilver gobbets that steamed when they hit the mud.

  Fire swept the slope from the entire length of the Norway Line wall, burning down the advancing Xenos. Dev tracked left, acquired another target, then loosed a stream of bolts that tore the Gamma int
o hurtling flecks of liquid metal.

  The valley flashed and glowed in the actinic glare of manmade lightnings. Fires were impossible in the oxygen-poor atmosphere, but wrecked and half-melted Gammas lay smoldering everywhere on the ground.

  Dev glimpsed movement on the far ridge. A touch of a button set into his left forearm dropped foam-padded eyepieces over his eyes. Leaning into the helmet optics, he engaged the telescopic zoom. Movement became distinct shapes moving across the crest of the ridge on amorphous, shapeshifting legs.

  He recognized the combat mode of a Mamba, a Fer-de-Lance, a Copperhead, the weaving neck of a King Cobra.

  Alpha stalkers. But it would take some time for them to cross the two-kilometer valley. Dev raised his optics out of the way. The Gammas close at hand were a more urgent problem.

  “The striders!” someone yelled. Dev thought the voice was Falk’s. “Here come the striders!”

  Four ascraft were drifting out of the sky above Norway Base, blunt-nosed Stormwinds with stubby wings and Y-tail stabilizers. His external mikes caught the shrill whine of approaching fusion jet intakes. God, HEMILCOM couldn’t have cut things much closer than that. The Alphas were well into the valley now, and more hulking shapes were silhouetted against the far skyline. Dev dropped his attention back to the killing ground to the north, frying a meter-long fragment that was humping toward him like a demented inchworm.

  Somebody was shouting over Dev’s helmet phones, but he couldn’t make out the words. Static induced by the Xenophobe magnetics was so bad, Dev could scarcely hear the hiss and thunderclap of the big tower lasers, or the volleyed clatter of automatic rifle fire. Bolts of living flame keened overhead, deafening, filling the air with mind-numbing thunder, a sheer, elemental violence so raw that movement, that thought itself, was all but impossible.