Warstrider

by William H. Keith

  Dev engaged his telescopics, enlarging the image until he could recognize the lean-tailed shape of a VK-141 Stormwind at a range of eight kilometers.

  Relief flooded Dev’s mind. A Stormwind! He wasn’t alone after all! He triggered the Warlord’s communications laser before the ascraft could vanish into the overcast. “Stormwind, this is Assassin Leader!” It felt strange identifying himself with a company commander’s call sign, but he was in the command strider, and there was no time to explain things.

  “This is Stormwind Thor-Two,” a woman’s voice replied over the laser comm. “Tai-i Anders. Who the hell is this? What happened to Captain Alessandro?”

  “I think she’s okay,” Dev replied. “Her link with the AI is down. I’ve taken over.”

  “I have you in sight, Assassin Leader.” Anders probably assumed that he was Gupta or the Warlord’s weapons tech. There was a moment’s hesitation. “And someone else does, too. Bandits at your four o’clock, range three hundred!”

  Dev turned, his optics zeroing in on the black and silver shapes flowing toward him across the ground. A Fer-de-Lance, an Adder, and a Mamba, all swift and deadly, were closing in for the kill.

  Chapter 15

  The science of information—the storage, retrieval, transmission, and exchange of data—has done more to broaden the scope and reach of Man’s mastery of both his physical universe and the dark mystery of his own soul than all previous discoveries, technologies, and philosophies combined. Knowledge, as ever, is power; ignorance is damnation. Perhaps this is why we still dread that which we don’t know.

  —The Golden Apples of the Stars

  Shelly Westegren

  C.E. 2457

  “Stormwind, I need ground support!” Dev yelled. “Now!”

  “Get clear, Assassin Leader! I’m on them!”

  Dev was already in motion as the Stormwind dipped toward the battle-torn ground, sending the Warlord lunging up the ridge with long, scissoring steps. The Fer-de-Lance put a trio of nano disassembler projectiles into his back, but he fired his nano countermeasures and kept moving. An instant later, the Xeno turned away, focusing on the approaching Stormwind.

  Ascraft could not risk close passes over Xeno units. Their airspeed made AND clouds useless, and though most had layers of anti-nano-D sandwiched between sheets of armor, a hit by Threat nano could usually bring the ascraft down. For that reason, ascraft like the Storm wind relied on standoff weapons for ground support.

  Dev’s telescopic vision tracked the projectile as it detached from the Stormwind’s hull. Then rocket engines kicked in and sent the pod arrowing toward the Xeno. He recognized it, an SK3-7E Skyray air-to-ground missile. The fat, elongated snout was a Cluster Munitions Package.

  Anders hadn’t been kidding when she’d told Dev to get clear.

  Dev kept climbing, feeling the slushy yield of dirt and loose gravel beneath the flanges of his feet. Halfway up the slope, he turned, positioning his body so that he could bring his CPG to bear on the Fer-de-Lance, which was firing nano weapons at the approaching Skyray. Dev fired, the bolt staggering the hovering Xeno, bringing its attention back toward the escaping Warlord.

  Then the Skyray was overhead, flashing eighteen meters above the Mamba and Death Adder as its dim-witted brain computed that it was now as close to the target as it would get on this trajectory.

  The warhead detonated.

  To Dev, it seemed that there were two simultaneous explosions, one a fireball in the sky, the second a volcanic eruption on the ground. The Skyray’s micronuke warhead vaporized ten thousand cobalt slugs sealed in rhenium-tungstide cartridges; the same detonation powered a brief-lived magnetic field that stripped the cobalt of electrons and hurled the resulting plasma bolts on precisely aligned paths, filling a ten-by-one-hundred-meter footprint with white-hot bolts from the sky.

  The ground beneath the fireball shuddered in a thunderous eruption of flame and pulverized rock. Caught in the center of that deadly footprint, the Mamba and the Adder were shredded; the Fer-de-Lance was holed thirty times by searing lances of starcore heat; writhing fragments twisted in white heat and died.

  Dev felt the throb of the micronuke’s electromagnetic pulse. A tenth second later, a hailstorm of molten fragments slashed across his back, and the twin concussions—one from the explosions, and the second caused by the thunderclap of air blasting into the vacuum left by the fireball—hurled the sixty-ton strider facedown against the hillside. Dust sucked into that hellfury boiled skyward in a roiling mushroom cloud.

  Slowly Dev brought the Warlord to its feet, checking the RS-64D’s damage readouts. Power reserves were down to forty-eight percent, and there were holes in his armor where the nano-Ds had eaten clear through to the internal support struts. The CMP blast had peeled armor from the dorsal surface of the fuselage across an area one meter square. The left weapons pod was gone now, the broken joint still sparking fitfully from severed power leads.

  But the Xenophobes were destroyed, their fragments smoldering in the CMP’s charred and heat-blasted killzone.

  He let his AI scan the sky and acquire again the distant, circling Stormwind. “Thanks, Thor-Two,” Dev said. “Clean sweep. Targets destroyed.”

  “Copy, Assassin Leader. Listen, I don’t know if Xenies talk to each other, but I’d say now would be a good time for you to hightail it out of there. I’m picking up a lot of activity in your area.”

  “Ay-firmative, Thor-Two. Can you link me up with other striders?” He’d not seen any other human combat machines since he’d climbed aboard the Assassin’s Blade.

  “They’re pulling back to the second line. Didn’t you get the word?”

  “Negative. I was… ah… out of the circuit.” He wondered what Anders would think if she knew a legger was jacking the stranded Warlord.

  “Okay, no static. Here’s the tacsit. The Xenos hit the Norway Line hard. The Thorhammers lost four striders in seven minutes… uh, make that three striders, now that you’ve been found. The rest boarded the transports and are falling back to the Sweden Line. The Xenos are still moving toward Midgard. They’re between you and your friends now.”

  “Great. I don’t suppose I could impose on you for a ride.”

  “Sorry, I can’t,” Anders replied. “My ship’s configured for ground attack. But I’ll put through a call and have a transport out here in ten minutes.”

  “Understood.” Dev swiveled his primary optics skyward as the Storm wind passed a hundred meters overhead with a shriek of intake fans and plasma jets. He could see the strider slots beneath the stubby, canted wings, and the bulky cargo of snap-in weapons pods that occupied them. Stormwinds were designed as multiple-role ascraft, but they needed time on the ground with a maintenance crew to switch from one role to another.

  He could manage ten more minutes, especially with a heavily armed ally circling overhead.

  “Ah, Assassin Leader, I have to leave you for a second,” Anders said.

  “Why?” The thought of being left alone out here again was not pleasant. “Where are you going?”

  “Just up above the cloud deck. Radio’s still blanked by static. I need to establish a solid L-LOS if I’m going to call in that transport.”

  “Hurry back,” Dev said. “It’s kind of lonely down here.”

  “Copy that. Assassin. Back in thirty seconds.” The shrieking engines throbbed to a roar, and the Storm wind was gone, swallowed in the overcast.

  Thirty seconds. He could survive that, too.

  Only then, as he stood on that flame-scorched hillside, did full realization hit Dev. For the past half hour, he’d been patched into a warstrider, accessing, aiming, and firing his weapons; coordinating link communications with a Stormwind; engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the strangest, most deadly enemies Man had ever faced… and not once had fear or uncertainty blocked his access to the strider AI. Stress. He’d handled it as smoothly and as effortlessly as he would have handled the downloading of a comm number from his RAM… or calling to
mind his father’s face.

  The surprise, the sheer exultation numbed him for a moment. Whatever had stopped him from making full use of his linkages in his first battle was gone.

  Maybe Katya had been right. For those past thirty minutes, he’d been too busy to think, responding on instinct and training alone.

  Another crackle of static sizzled in Dev’s brain, and he ordered the AI to trace the damage. If he lost his control link with the machine’s computer, the strider would become a useless mountain of junk. His AI reported back almost at once, describing damage to the primary feed line. Backups were in place, and the AI was now programming internal repair nano to reroute the connections and restore a clean feed.

  Good. Better still, the AI had finally tapped into Katya’s medisensors. Dev still couldn’t talk to her, but the medsystems indicated that she was awake. High pulse rate and respiration suggested that she was under considerable stress. That wasn’t surprising. Dev could imagine what she was feeling, sealed inside a coffin-sized box, unable to see out or even to receive data. She would be able to feel the strider’s movements, but that was about all.

  At least she was alive. Dev ordered the AI to accelerate its attempts to repair Katya’s link. He’d gotten this far on luck and by not thinking about what he was doing. He would much rather that someone experienced jack in and take over.

  In the meantime, though, all he could do was find a good spot for pickup by the transport. The uneven ground blurred beneath his four-meter stride.

  Minutes later, he’d reached the top of the ridge and found himself overlooking a horror of death and devastation. The Norway Line’s battlements looked like they’d been assaulted by a hurricane. Walls had been torn down or pushed over, in places, solid RoPro constructions had melted like sugar in hot water.

  Signs of the battle were scattered everywhere. The shell of a Battlewraith lay faceup, torso splintered, weapons skewed, greasy smoke streaming from its engine compartment. Dev recognized the name on the blackened hull: Deus Irae.

  Across the ridgetop, human bodies and pieces of bodies were heaped about in twisted, hideous clumps where Xeno nano-D clouds had lingered. Many corpses had already partially merged with the ground or with the wreckage of vehicles or RoPro walls, grinning skulls and clutching hands straining from their fabricrete embrace, combat armor in mangled, twisted postures that spoke of agony and death.

  Dev scanned the area carefully. A check of the radio bands proved that there were Xenos nearby. Every channel was blasted by white noise. But there was no sign of motion anywhere, no Alphas, no Gammas, nothing moving at all save the smoke streaming from scattered, burning wreckage. He picked his way past the shattered RoPro barrier until he could overlook the plain to the south.

  Norway Base lay in the valley four hundred meters to the southeast. The infantry transporters were gone now, but the fabricrete landing pad remained, along with some quick-grown shelters and fuel storage spheres, all curiously intact despite the devastation along the top of the ridge. The temporary base looked lifeless and abandoned. Evidently the Xeno wave had swept on toward Midgard without pausing to destroy the facility. Dev started down the southern slope of the ridge, angling toward the landing pad. That would be as good a spot as any to await pickup by a strider transport.

  Laser light pinged on his communication receptors. “Assassin Leader, this is Thor-Two.”

  Anders was back below the flight deck, circling five kilometers to the west. Three more Stormwinds and a pair of Lightning gunships were in the area as well, just arrived from Midgard.

  “I hear you, Thor-Two. Good to see you again.”

  “Roger that. We have a transporter on the way. They say to hang on.”

  “No static. I’ll be waiting at the Norway Base LZ. There’s no sign of Threat activity here at all.”

  There was a hesitation from the other. “I’m afraid that’s not entirely true, Assassin Leader. HEMILCOM reports a force five-one DSA centered at your location.”

  Dev had to call up data fed to his cephlink RAM over a month before. DSA… a Deep Seismic Anomaly, and force five-one was pretty hefty. The Xenos might be tunneling just beneath the surface.

  Chilling thought. Dev felt a juvenile and completely instinctive twitch in the phantom soles of his feet, the remembered fear of a child dangling bare feet in the dark beside a bed that might harbor unseen monsters. These monsters were real, and only a few hundred meters from the bottoms of his Warlord’s feet.

  “What do you recommend, Thor-Two? I can move to another location if you want.”

  “Negative, Assassin. HEMILCOM thinks we have time, if we move fast. Stand by. Your ride out of there is now eight minutes out.”

  Eight minutes. Not long at all. He could wait that long, no static.

  And then the bottom dropped out of the world.

  To Dev, it looked as though a circular patch of ground nearly a hundred meters across was sinking at the base of the ridge. The fabricrete landing pad, too tough to break in half, balanced above the deepening pit for a moment, then toppled in as bedrock eroded away beneath it. One of the pressure storage tanks fell into the abyss, then another, trailing with it a spaghetti of broken struts and braces.

  Swiftly Dev moved sideways along the ridge, seeking shelter behind the war-shattered shell of a section of the ridgetop battlements. White smoke was filling the crater, swirling up from a relatively small central core. More quick-grow buildings fell into the pit as the circle of destruction deepened and expanded.

  Dev shifted to infrared optics, trying to probe the heavy white mist swirling in the crater’s depths. The stuff was hot, the core from which it was issuing hotter still, a blazing patch of white heat against the cooler reds and oranges surrounding it.

  Then an explosion smacked Dev across the bottoms of his feet and sent the Warlord crashing to the trembling ground. The noise, a deep-throated, full-voiced roar of outraged earth and stone, was deafening despite his AI’s intervention to prevent overloading Dev’s temporal lobes. Grit and shattered bits of rock began pattering across the Warlord’s armor like hot sleet; the ground itself bucked and shivered beneath him, and as Dev rolled onto his side, he could see a tongue of glowing lava extruding itself from the crater floor, white-hot under IR, a dull, throbbing orange crusted with black and red glowing within the fog when he switched back to normal vision.

  “Thor-Two!” Dev called. “Thor-Two, come in!” But the lasercom link was lost, his L-LOS cut off by smoke and billowing clouds of debris. The nano count was rising, too… point five-five and going up. The fog was lapping beyond the rim of the pit now, ground-hugging, streaming past and through the RoPro structures still standing, causing them to slump and melt, as though that alien alchemy were returning them to the rock and dirt from which they’d been grown.

  Meanwhile, at the eye of the storm, things were beginning to emerge.

  At first Dev thought that he was seeing some new kind of Xeno Alpha or other war machine; this was the way they typically emerged from underground, after all. But these jagged and sharp-edged structures rising from the fog on the crater floor looked more like living crystal. Some were black, others a translucent pearl gray or silver. They speared the murky sky above the pit, like the teeth and claws of some vast and still unseen horror lurking beneath the fog. Were they buildings of some sort… or a weapon? Flashes of light glared and shimmered in the white fog depths, reminding Dev of the radiance from a great open-pit smelter or industrial furnace.

  He made a quick check. The strider’s AI had already shifted the Warlord’s surface nano to imitate the cracked and mottled color of what was left of the RoPro wall, but enough of his armor had been melted away that less than half of the machine’s surface was still nanoflaged. Holding himself motionless, though, he might escape notice, at least for a while, another piece of inert wreckage on the battle-blasted ridge. The outside nano count was now at point six-seven. He guessed that his outer armor would survive another ten minutes under the assault of th
at molecular storm, and stood his ground.

  Damn it, though, what was he seeing down there? A building complex of some sort was his best guess, but that guess could be wildly wrong. Given that nothing was known of Xeno motives or science or even the way they thought, the guess probably was wrong.

  Whatever he was looking at, Dev thought, it was different from anything he’d ever seen before, and HEMILCOM Intelligence would want to have a close and detailed look. Automatically his AI was recording every sight and sound and sensation. If he could establish a comlink with a Stormwind for even half a second, he’d be able to dump that recording to the ascraft’s AI. HEMILCOM Intelligence would be able to share this experience in virtual reality later, if Dev could avoid being melted down with every other piece of human-manufactured scrap on this hillside in the next few minutes.

  The eruption was continuing, but fitfully now, the shriek and roar of tortured rock dwindling away. As the Warlord’s AI readjusted the sensitivity of Dev’s audio sensors, he could hear a rising susurration, like ocean surf, but throbbing as though to the beat of an unseen pump. The fog sea was thinning, revealing the crater floor. There solid rock had flowed like water, then frozen in weirdly carved, twisting pillars, arches, and towers. Strangest were the alien constructs rising in isolated clumps, eldritch shapes of nightmare, organic, surreal, and incomprehensible. Crystal-looking spires and pillars with geometric lines and topologies were still visibly growing minute by minute, their substance flowing up out of the earth itself. That fog was almost certainly Xenophobe nano, Dev thought, programmed to devour rock and sand and debris, and convert it into something else.

  Dev felt the stirrings of awe. Human nanotechnology was still a slow and cumbersome thing compared to this. Except for isolated exceptions like AND aerosols, the human nanotech required growth vats and processing tanks, and large and complicated products—a warstrider, for example, or a laser rifle—still had to be assembled by macroengineering. Theoretically a cloud of programmed nano could go to work on a heap of earth, do their work, and leave behind a fully assembled, powered, and AI-programmed strider, in fact, even the most optimistic nanoengineers spoke of generations before that kind of technological magic could be realized.