Warstrider

by William H. Keith

  Mostly I just wanted to say thanks again for not leaving me out there. I’m looking forward to seeing you at the party tonight.

  —Katya Alessandro

  The news rocked him. The Imperial Star? Gods of the K-T Sea, witnesses had nothing to do with it! The Imperials, who thought in terms of family and lineage and the responsibilities of sons for their fathers’ names, did not like to be reminded of past failures. Awarding the Teikoku no Hoshi to the son of Admiral Cameron would be like confessing that his father had been a sacrifice to political necessity. Unthinkable!

  For himself, he was just as happy he hadn’t won that damned Star. Quite frankly Dev found it astonishing that they were even giving him a lesser award instead. The Medal of Valor carried with it considerable prestige, but he’d done nothing to win it, after all, except rather foolishly risk important recon intel in order to drag a wounded buddy to safety… and it was his fault she’d been hurt in the first place. The instinct might have been brave, but damn it, he’d been scared. He was still ashamed of that mind-numbing fear, and of how Katya had had to yell to make herself heard above his screams.

  He listened again to Katya’s note, trying to reconcile it with what he knew was the truth. A hero? Him? Not likely!

  The speeches were over at last, with Dev hearing scarcely a word. Later, perhaps, he would play the ceremony back for himself from his own RAM, but for now he was reduced to stumbling through the ceremony, piloting on automatic.

  On signal from the voice within his mind, Dev marched forward, taking the corners at crisp right angles, ascended the steps to the review stand between motionless ranks of armored Imperial Guardsmen, saluted, and bowed. Expressionless, Aiko turned to an aide and took the medal from its box, a gold shield dangling from a crimson and yellow ribbon and bearing a holographic relief of the Emperor. The bar supporting the ribbon had a charged adhesive strip that would cling securely to Dev’s tunic until he touched a contact point on the corner.

  “Yukan no Kisho,” Aiko said, pressing it to Dev’s chest “The Medal of Valor, for services to the Emperor above the call of duty.” Turning, he reached for a second medal, this one silver and pearl on a scarlet ribbon. “Shishi no Chi, The Lion’s Blood, awarded to those wounded in the Emperor’s service.”

  Most gaijin simply called it the blood bar.

  “Congratulations,” Aiko added, still expressionless. Dev wondered what he was thinking now, wondered if he was remembering giving a medal to another gaijin a few years before. Did Aiko know he was Cameron’s son? Of course he did. He would have reviewed Dev’s records before seconding Katya’s request. The stiff-necked sheseiji, she’d called him. The stiff-necked bastard. But there must be more to it than that.

  “Thank you, Admiral-san.”

  “You have done great credit to your people, Sho-i,” he said, this time in heavily accented English, and with the voice circuit off, so that no one could hear but the two of them. “And to your family.”

  Now, what the gok did he mean by that? Dev wondered. The Japanese tended to be oblique, especially where politics and face were concerned, never saying things directly, avoiding any blunt statement that could carry insult.

  Dev saluted, about-faced, and marched back to ranks with the Ceremonies Master calling cadence in his head. After that, it was Katya’s turn—another order, or dan, to the Medal of Valor she already wore, and a blood bar, with no mention at all of just how she’d managed to break her leg. There was more to that story, too, he thought. He remembered her expression as she talked about her panic at Norway Ridge. There was something going on inside her, but he didn’t know her well enough to even try to guess at what it was.

  The thought led to another. He wished he could get to know her better. He knew he liked her, but wondered if it was because she’d treated him like a person back when he’d first joined the Thorhammers, or something more.

  After Katya’s award came a Medal of Valor for the Stormwind pilot who’d braved Xeno nano-D fire to land and retrieve the Assassin’s Blade, and a Distinguished Service Star for a comjack technician who’d hit on the idea for an unnamed new weapon, something that promised to turn the tide against the Xenos. There were a lot of speeches after that, until it seemed that half of the brass and dignitaries on and over Loki were being given a chance to talk.

  Finally, though, there were no more speeches to be made, no more parade or pageantry. Hidden speakers blared the “Imperial March,” followed by “Earth’s Hegemony.” The Ceremonies Master gave his final, inaudible command. “Regiment… dis-missed!”

  Dev was instantly surrounded by the men and women of the Assassins, who pounded him on his back, fingered his medal, and welcomed him back to the fraternity of the Thorhammers.

  The hero…

  That evening, as the party hit full swing in the officers’ mess, Dev and Katya managed to sneak out, making their way to the Tristankuppel’s recreational center and an unoccupied pair of comjack booths. Sealing themselves in, they linked with each other; Dev had already downloaded a visitor’s sim from the base library, a moonlit evening on a deserted, palm-lined beach at a place on Earth called Tuvalu.

  Isolated in separate modules, their sex was purely recreational, a shared erotic dream as detailed and as real and as intense as any physical coupling… more intense, even, since they used partial feedback loops that let Dev taste Katya’s slow build to a fiery peak while she experienced his faster, harder, desperate hunger and explosive release. Their mental joining began as passion, naked legs moving in the wet sand, but ended in a warm and gentle embrace beneath a tropical, star-filled sky.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said at last, her voice small against his chest.

  The illusion of sand and waves and moonlit sky was so perfect that Dev, still half-lost in the sexual afterglow, didn’t know what she was talking about. “Out? Out where?”

  “Out of these damned pods.” She shivered. “I don’t like to be alone in the dark.”

  He pulled back a little, blinking. Moonlight glistened off her skin. It wasn’t that dark at all. “Would you like a sunrise? We can tell the sim—”

  “No, I want you. Not a dream.”

  She couldn’t possibly be aware of her physical body, locked away inside the comjack module, but he broke the linkage, then slipped out of his chamber to help her clamber out of hers. She hugged him for a long time, standing there on the comcenter’s steel grating.

  They spent the next several hours in each other’s arms in an empty lounge in one of the barracks. There was no more lovemaking—real or virtual—but he enjoyed her closeness and their conversation and the way she explained how she’d won her first Medal of Valor at a place called Galahad, before she’d been transferred to Loki. Later, things turned technical as he described an idea he’d had, a way to merge ground troops and striders in a deployment that would let each support the other, and she listened with keen and intelligent interest, asking questions and pointing out flaws, helping him fine-tune the concept and encouraging him to submit a proposal to HEMILCOM.

  But he never did find out why she was afraid of the dark.

  Chapter 21

  Iask you, what good are these research facilities? They cost billions of yen to build, millions to keep staffed and supplied. Handfuls of humans isolated for years at a time in the most godforsaken places imaginable. And for what conceivable purpose?

  —Testimony before Terran Hegemony

  Committee on Appropriations

  François Dacres

  C.E. 2512

  The great wheel revolved slowly in the white glare of the star, providing spin gravity for the complement of thirty-two men and women aboard. Altair DESREF was one of fifty Deep Space Research Facilities scattered through human space to study astrophysical phenomena ranging from gravity waves to the tidal effects of Capella A and B.

  Altair, a planetless A7 star only sixteen light-years from Earth, had been under close investigation since the 2360s. Its high rate of spin—its rota
tional speed at the equator was 160 miles per second—had warranted the construction of a DESREF to study rotational effects on Altair’s magnetic field and solar wind. After nearly three centuries, Altair still had not divulged all its secrets.

  “Odd,” Dr. Jeanne Schofield said, looking up from her board with brown eyes focused on nothingness. A cephlink cable trailed from her left T-socket, feeding her raw data from the station’s scanners. “That shouldn’t be happening.”

  “What do you have?” For Dr. Paul Hernandez, life and work on the Altair DESREF had long ago settled into a comfortable routine. Statements like “odd” and “that shouldn’t be happening” usually preceded a failure of some sort, equipment breakdown or an AI program crash, usually due to human error. A mathematician, he was a man who lived by order, reason, and the comforting predictability of numbers.

  He did not like disruptions in the routine.

  “Magnetic effects on the K-band,” Schofield said, that faraway look still in her eyes. “Something’s deflecting the solar wind, and I can’t even guess what the hell it could be.”

  Hernandez set his coffee cup aside and frowned. “A ship?” Starships used powerful magnetic fields to deflect subatomic particles, dust, and stray molecules of gas that could pose a danger at high velocities. “We don’t have a ship due in here for a week.”

  “No thermal effects,” Schofield replied. Starships that had been locked away in the K-T Plenum tended to acquire large quantities of heat that could only be dumped in normal space. On infrared scanners they tended to glow like small suns for hours after emerging from the godsea. “No, nothing. Just a wake in the solar wind that looks… oh, God…”

  “What is it?”

  “Oh. My. God.” The words were spaced and planted like a pronouncement of Armageddon. Schofield’s thin face had gone white, eyes and jaw locked as her inner eye focused on… something.

  “Damn it, what do you see?” He grabbed her wrist, trying to tug her palm from the interface, but he couldn’t budge her, couldn’t interrupt the trance that appeared to have her pinned immobile at the console.

  A glance at the instrument readouts showed a solid target out there, something enormous, a kilometer long at least. He knew a thin, cold fear. There should be nothing out there. All he could imagine was that, at long last, someone had picked up the approach of a Xenophobe starship, and unfortunately, that someone was the crew of an unarmed research facility.

  Paul Hernandez then performed the most heroic action of his fifty-eight standard years of life. Seating himself next to Jeanne Schoheld, he sounded the station alarm, then pulled a linkjack from the console and, abandoning the predictable, plugged himself in.

  “We have emerged, Lifemaster.” The Third Controller secured itself to a branched projection emerging from a nearby wall. The words it chose signified completeness… and relief. “The Transit appears to have been successful.”

  “Appears?” That single, questioning word carried a great deal of meaning. “We cannot afford doubt in this mission, upon which so much depends.”

  “The Achievers have completed their assigned geometry and are now dead.” The word would have as easily translated “empty.” “We will not understand precisely what they have accomplished until we assimilate their remains.

  “In the meantime, the Perceivers are attempting to confirm the new geometry. It is difficult, as always, to make sense of their initial observations. However, the target star is near and appears, as expected, to be a close match to our home sun. The Perceivers yet search for worlds. It is possible, however, that this star is barren.”

  The Lifemaster felt a pang of anticipatory disappointment. Barren! That word conveyed such aching loss, such futility and lack of purpose. So much had depended on discovering here the source of electromagnetic radiations that seemed to promise the presence of a starfaring civilization. Was it possible that those radiations were of natural origin after all, the product of a universe that seemed, increasingly, to mock the DalRiss philosophy that held Universe and Life to be one?

  Its surroundings held no answer, filled and defined as they were by living processes. The very walls of the Ship’s bridgewere alive, revealed to the Lifemaster’s delicate ri-sense as a pulsing, energetic enclosure. He could not perceive the Void beyond the Ship’s walls, the Void that still defied DalRiss logic, belief, and experience after over eight thousand cycles. For that he relied upon the strange senses of the Perceivers, life forms designed to directly sense certain limited wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. Perceived by those wavelengths, the Lifemaster knew, the universe was turned inside out, rendered more dead—empty—than alive.

  “There remains one possibility,” the Third Controller said. “A heat source that appears dead but which seems to be a source of electromagnetic radiation.” Two of its upper appendages twitched open, an expression of concern. “There is strangeness here. The source could be artificial.”

  “Draw closer then. We will reach out and taste this source.”

  “And if it is Chaos?”

  The Lifemaster stiffened. After coming so far, and with so much at stake, failure was unthinkable. “Then we die,” it said. “As will our world.”

  Chapter 22

  In war there is no substitute for victory.

  —General Douglas MacArthur

  mid-twentieth century

  Eight months later, Dev was far around the curve of the planet from Midgard, his Scoutstrider Dev’s Destroyer standing on what might one day be the bottom of the planet’s deepest and widest ocean. Now the landscape was sere and barren, an unending, ocher flatness. Once, this plain had been a sea floor, a fact betrayed by the sparkle of various salts encrusting the ground like minute diamonds. Someday, when Loki became Freyr, salt water would cover this ground again, but without the ammonia and methane and frigid temperatures that had kept this world lifeless until the arrival of Man.

  He was less concerned with Loki’s past, however, than he was with the activity around him. Several ascraft transporters rested on the plain a kilometer away, while a four-legged cargo rig stood a few hundred meters in front of him. A dozen men in armor were guiding a pearl gray sphere from the walker’s belly as it was gently lowered by monocable to the ground.

  Other foot soldiers and warstriders had set up an armed perimeter about the cargo walker and transports. Hovercraft skimmed across the monotonous desert on plumes of wind-blasted salt, while striders of the First Platoon, Alessandro’s Assassins, restlessly patrolled the area, weapons locked but ready for immediate release.

  A familiar-looking Warlord stalked toward Dev. The Assassin’s Blade’s nanoflage was inactive at the moment, and the big machine had reverted to the company’s dress livery, blue with white trim.

  “Hello, Lieutenant,” Katya’s voice said in his mind as her warstrider stalked closer. “How’s number three?”

  Dev gestured with Destroyer’s left arm, pointing with clenched duralloy fingers at the men positioning the gray sphere. “Almost ready, Captain,” he replied. “We’ll be ready to release in five minutes.”

  “Good. Numbers one and two are set. You’re the last.”

  “Any update on the target?”

  “Negative. No movement. It looks like we caught ’em napping.”

  Dev studied the bomb team. They were detaching the monocable now. Ponderously the cargo rig walked away, leaving the men alone with their deadly charge.

  Operation Jigoku, they called it, though the Inglic-speaking troops in Dev’s team had, perhaps inevitably, managed to corrupt it to Operation Chicago, Operation Gigolo, and even the rather unlikely Gee-goke-you. Jigoku, in fact, was the Nihongo word for Hades, the underworld of ancient myth. No one had explained whether that meant the Xenophobes were themselves denizens of an underground hell, or that this was an attempt to send them there, but the name was appropriate either way.

  “We’re set here, Lieutenant,” another voice said in Dev’s mind over the tactical channel. Across the dead se
a bottom, one of the armored figures raised one arm. “Chicago Three, ready to drop.”

  “Roger that, Sergeant Wilkins,” Dev replied. “Get your people clear.”

  Two new weapons were being demonstrated here, Dev thought, and he was getting at least partial credit for them both.

  He still wasn’t sure what he was supposed to have to do with the penetrators. He’d been told that the recordings he’d made at Norway Ridge had generated the idea, but Dev was pretty sure that someone would have hit upon the notion sooner or later. All he’d done at Norway Ridge was accidentally step in a Xeno nest.

  But the crustal penetrators, as the new devices were called, promised to be the weapon that would stop the Xeno scourge at last. Each penetrator, nano-grown from sim replicants of the captured Xeno travel spheres, carried a one-hundred-kiloton fission bomb.

  A nuclear depth charge. Dev didn’t really want the credit for that one.

  The second idea, however, he was proud of, for the rediscovery of combined arms warfare promised to be at least as important as crust-penetrating nukes in fighting the Xenos, and could well revolutionize the art of war entirely.

  Combined arms was a concept that had surfaced time and time again through the course of human history. Cavalry working with foot soldiers, archers working with pikemen, tanks working with infantry, each advance in the science of war had brought together the strengths of separate military disciplines, and ultimately, each had become obsolete as technology or doctrine evolved.

  Warstriders were the modern-day descendants of the great, hulking, tracked armored vehicles of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, machines so heavily armed, so maneuverable, and so fast that infantry could do little to support them and, in fact, would only slow them down.

  As a result, while armies still fielded line infantry regiments for certain restricted purposes, foot soldiers were almost universally despised as useless for serious combat. The modem battlefield, it was commonly said, was far too deadly for foot soldiers to survive on for more than a few minutes. Warstriders were the arm of decision in twenty-sixth-century combat.