Warstrider

by William H. Keith

  Like every other soldier aboard, Dev was wearing shorts, deck shoes, and a T-shirt, but he was still hot. His clothing, fresh from the ship’s nanovats that morning, clung to him unpleasantly. Why, he wondered, had he volunteered for this?

  He had volunteered, he reminded himself. The day before being marched to the sky-el shuttles on Loki, the entire 5th Regiment had been addressed on parade by Colonel Varney, the Thorhammers’ commanding officer. The regiment, Varney had told them all, was being redeployed—though he refused to say where or why—but anyone who wished to stay on Loki could do so, no questions asked. He wouldn’t say where the 5th was being sent, or why, but he did say that the Xenophobe War was far from over, that the human success on Loki was only the first step in a very long road to victory.

  Inspiring words, though Dev and the regiment’s other old hands paid little attention to the speech. Rumors were circulating, each wilder than the last, and Varney’s talk had not even mentioned them.

  Why had he volunteered? The reason had nothing to do with bravery, that much was certain. He’d considered staying on Loki, but Katya was going, as were all of the other Assassin striderjacks. His own CAG infantry had volunteered for the deployment as well, as though they’d known that he was going.

  How could he back down in front of all of them?

  Besides, the 5th Loki Warstriders were far more home and family at this point than any world. Remaining on Loki would mean reassignment to the Heimdals or one of the local garrisons for the remainder of his hitch. Better, he thought, to stay with friends and family.

  He wondered if he would have volunteered, though, if he’d remembered how hot it was aboard a ship in the godsea. Dev plucked his wet T-shirt away from his body, trying to air it out. He didn’t remember ever being this uncomfortable during a K-T passage.

  Possibly the fact that he’d never been locked up aboard a starship with over fifteen hundred other people had something to do with that.

  He was standing in the Common Room, a precious enclosure of empty space that served as lounge, mess hall, and rec room for off-duty personnel. There was no furniture, but the decks were padded, and one entire bulkhead had been designed as a three-D screen for addressing the entire ship’s complement. For the moment, though, it was projecting a giant, three-dimensional freeze-frame portrait of the Emperor.

  The Common Room was slowly filling up. The men and women of the 5th Loki were filing in, taking seats on the padded deck tatami-fashion, row upon row facing the larger-than-life image of the Fushi-Emperor. Sitting close, side by side that way, the entire regiment could fit into the Common Room—just barely. It was used as an auditorium when announcements had to be made to the entire complement. Word had already been passed that there would be a special address at 0900 hours, ship’s time. Dev consulted his inner clock. Another twelve minutes.

  He studied again the motionless image at the front of the room. The Emperor’s face was wizened, ancient with—some said—well over two hundred years, but either bionangineering or a flattering portraiturist had given him a strong, straight body, rigid in his navy dress blacks. His tunic was heavy with medals and gold braid; his own government’s highest military decoration gleamed at his throat.

  And you can keep that Star, Dev thought, remembering Katya’s recommendation of months before. Wearing the Medal of Valor—the Emperor had one of those, too, Tenth Dan—had brought with it responsibility enough. He’d about decided that trying to live up to that damned medal had put him in this spot in the first place.

  The Emperor’s image was set against the glory of Earth as seen from orbit, white clouds twisted and feathering against the deep-heaven blue of the Pacific Ocean. That piercingly glorious backdrop reminded Dev of the godsea, and he sighed. Often he still wished he could get a chance to go up to Yuduki’s bridge and plug himself in as a pilot-observer. It had been over a year since he’d last dipped into the glory of the K-T Plenum, and he still felt a wistful yearning, almost a hunger, when he thought about it now.

  But the Nihonjin crew didn’t fraternize with their cargo, and Dev doubted that Minora Shimazaki, Yuduki’s captain, would take kindly to any request by a hairy-chested striderjack to play tourist. Dev remembered his own opinion of striderjacks, back when he’d been convinced that he was bound for a ship’s slot, and inwardly winced. It made a difference, having seen both sides.

  Sometimes during the past two weeks, though, Dev had descended to Deck 3, the lowest, outermost deck of the A Mod spin habitat, and just put his hand against the gray paint of the bulkhead. There, faintly, he could feel the trembling vibration as the Yuduki made her way through the quantum sea. Katya’s crew chief, Sergeant Reiderman, had laughed and told him he was just feeling the vibrations transmitted from the rotating sleeve that kept the quarters sections turning, but Dev had ridden the blue light of the K-T plenum, and he knew the feel of its muted thunders.

  Dev couldn’t detect the vibration now, though. Five hours earlier he’d felt the peculiar inner twist of the ship’s K-T drive fields collapsing. The Yuduki was drifting in normal fourspace now, though where and why were still unknowns.

  The Thorhammers had loaded their equipment aboard special cargo shuttle pods at Towerdown, then ridden the Bifrost Sky-el to Asgard, where they’d been herded aboard the Yuduki without even an hour’s pass to visit the Moro. The who-was gained greater and wilder proportions: Xenos had appeared in Rainbow, and the 5th was heading there; the Fifth was preparing to invade Lung Chi—or Herakles or An-Nur II—and take it back from the Xenos; a Xeno battlefleet had been encountered—at last!—near Loki, and the Fifth had been pulled off the planet to serve as a hidden force of reserves; the Xenos had invaded Earth, the Emperor was dead, Tokyo in ruins, and Hegemony forces from across the Shichiju were being rushed back to defend the Mother World.

  They were part of a fleet. Dev was sure of that much. He’d glimpsed some of the other ships through a transparency in Asgard’s curved wall—a big Kako-class cruiser and, hanging in the distance, the massive, wedge-shaped shadow of a Ryu-class dreadnought, one of the largest and most powerful warships in Human space. Smaller vessels, frigates, corvettes, and sleek Yari-class destroyers drifted in the leviathan’s shadow in schools, like fish.

  A thrilling, compelling sight… but all too soon Dev had been sealed away within Yuduki’s A Mod, and he could only wonder about the fleet gathering above Loki. Twenty hours later, Yuduki had ridden a tether out from Asgard and been released. An hour after that, the K-T drives had switched on and they were traveling faster than light.

  That had been about two weeks ago—fifteen days to be exact. And now they were stopped. Where?

  Fifteen days of travel meant—probably—about fifteen light-years, though the light-year-per-day estimate was rule of thumb only. Destroyers could travel faster, freighters and troopships were slower, and everything depended on the quality of the shipjack pilots.

  Still, it was a starting point. He reached into his implant RAM, calling up data he’d not used for a year, navigational listings and X, Y, and Z coordinates for stars in the Eagle Sector. Scrolling swiftly through the columns of numbers, he added numbers, squared them, and extracted square roots from the results. He was looking for systems fifteen light-years or so from 36 Ophiuchi C. There were several possibilities. Earth itself, for instance, lay 17.8 lights from Loki. …

  Got it.Dagstjerne/Loki to Altair, 14.9 lights.

  Altair? There was nothing there. Altair was a hot A7 star… with a main sequence lifetime of less than two billion years and a rotation so fast, it was visibly flattened at the poles. There were no planets, only a thin accretion disk of dust and planetoids. Why would they stop there?

  Dev could come up with only one answer that made sense. With an absolute magnitude of +2.2, Altair was one of the brighter stars within the boundaries of the Shichiju, an ideal beacon for a rendezvous. They were meeting someone here; they must be.

  But who?

  “So, Lieutenant. Why so serious?”


  Dev turned and gave Katya a bemused grin. “Hi, Captain. Just wondering where we are. My guess is Altair.”

  Her eyebrows arched toward the line of her close-cropped hair. “Since when did Shimazaki put you on his planning staff?”

  “That’s the way the numbers work out.” Dev looked away. Her appearance was… distracting. Like him, she wore ship’s shorts and a pullover shirt which sweat had plastered to each curve and line of her torso. They’d never been able to repeat that evening in the comm center. Privacy had become nonexistent since they’d boarded ship.

  In any case, platoon leaders could not afford to get emotionally involved with those in their command. Dev understood that, but it was hard to see her that way without remembering their linked romp on a simulated beach, or the shared tenderness afterward.

  “Well, you’re right,” she said. He looked back at her and realized that what he’d thought was irony in her voice was surprise, and respect. “The word just came down. We’re at Altair, and they’re about to give us the straight hont. How the hell did you know?”

  “Well, let’s grab some mat and maybe they’ll tell us why we’re here,” Dev said. “Altair’s not exactly prime real estate.”

  “So I gather.” They found space in one of the rows and knelt side by side. His hand brushed her thigh, and he was uncomfortably aware of her closeness.

  At last the room was filled, and the Emperor’s portrait dissolved. Facing them was another, much younger man, in his sixties, perhaps, wearing the two-toned grays of a Hegemony senior officer. Gold insignia on sleeves, shoulderboard, and collar indicated his rank was chujo, lieutenant general.

  “Good morning, men and women of the Fifth,” he said. “I am General John Howard, former commander of Hegemony military forces on Loki.”

  Former commander. Dev leaned forward, interest piqued. He’d only seen Howard two or three times during his tour on Loki. At the awards ceremony, of course, and at a formal review or two after that. Generals had little to do with mere sho-i striderjacks.

  “It is my great honor,” Howard continued, “to have been chosen to command Hegemony forces in what may well be the most important mission ever undertaken by our species. I now can tell you that which has been a carefully guarded secret for months now.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, Mankind has made initial contact with another starfaring species. Their representatives are here, orbiting the star we call Altair. After detecting our civilization’s radio emissions many years ago, they voyaged here to seek us out.

  “It has taken a number of months just to learn to communicate with them, though we did have some unexpected help with their language. They are… different from us, with an evolutionary background quite alien to our own. Like us, they have been engaged for years in a war to the death with an enemy they call the Chaos. We believe, from what their representatives have told us, that that enemy is our own, the Xenophobes.”

  General Howard’s image vanished, replaced by a camera view of space. Altair was visible in the lower left, an intensely bright disk, tiny compared to Sol from Earth or Dagstjerne from Loki, but large enough to show a discernible disk, flattened by rotation until it was twice as wide as it was thick.

  Centered in the screen, backlit by that dazzling sun, was what must have been the alien ship. Most of the hull was in shadow, masking detail, but it looked to Dev like something organic. He was reminded of a tree or giant plant of some kind, with thick, branching masses on both ends and with a gnarled, ropy texture that looked like thick bark. There was no indication of scale, but it looked huge. The shadowed side was completely black; there were no lights, no ports or anticollision beacons as on a human ship, no way to tell bow from stern.

  The overall effect was intensely alien. If this was their handiwork, Dev wondered, what were the builders themselves like?

  “We have only begun to communicate with them,” Howard continued. “Already we have had some… surprises. They call themselves the DalRiss.” As he spoke the unfamiliar name, the word typed itself on the screen. “That name seems to be a compound word that refers to certain aspects of their biology. They are friendly, highly advanced… as their being here, some one hundred fifteen light-years from their homeworld, should tell us.”

  “C’mon, c’mon… show us what they look like!” a voice said from the line of watchers seated just behind Dev.

  “What is significant is that we may have found an ally in our long war against the Xenophobes. I promise you that as more information becomes available, we will pass it along to all of you.”

  “My God,” Katya was saying at Dev’s side, over and over with a gentle rocking motion of her body. “My God, my God…”

  “In the meantime, let me just say that the DalRiss have asked us to return with them to their homeworld, and we have agreed. Needless to say, this mission will be strictly a volunteers-only assignment. Those who don’t want to go will be left with that part of the fleet that will be staying here, with the DalRiss ship.

  “The rest of us, with DalRiss guides aboard, will be embarking on an historic voyage, to meet the DalRiss on their own world, to begin an exchange of technology and culture, to lay the foundations for interstellar, for interspecies, trade.

  “Perhaps most important of all, we will be able to learn much from the DalRiss about our common foe. Possibly we will learn at last just what it is we are fighting… and why.”

  There was more, but Dev heard little of it, so great was the pandemonium that exploded in the Common Room. He was surprised to find that he had his arms around Katya. No one else seemed to care, or notice for that matter. Everyone was on their feet, shouting, questioning, all trying to talk at once.

  Another intelligent species. The news took the ship by storm. Those aboard talked of nothing else, and as more information came through over the next few days, the excitement rose in pitch until Katya predicted that they were all about to fly to the DalRiss world without resorting to the quantum sea.

  In centuries of space exploration, Man had met exactly three other species that might, might share with him the spark of intelligence. Dev had long ago committed the details to his permanent RAM.

  On the hothouse world of Zeta Doradus IV, forty-eight light-years from Earth, an Imperial explorer had encountered the Maias—Maiasedentis species—massive organisms that communicated by organic radio and sheltered their motile/sexual/juvenile-stage offspring inside their own immobile bodies. The adults were thought to be intelligent… but even that was unproven, and so far unprovable. Completely atechnic, without even fire or simple tools, or hands for manipulating them if they did have them, the Maias were so different that it was possible they would never have anything in common with humans.

  On the second world of a K3 sun designated DM −58° 5564, over thirty light-years from Earth, was a highly social species called the Communes. Like ants, bees, or termites on Earth, they showed a remarkable and extremely complex social order, apparently based on chemical communication.

  So far, though, there was no way to demonstrate that they were self-aware.

  And then there were the Xenophobes, a technical species that killed for no discernible reason, that might kill without even realizing that it was doing so.

  Those three examples had raised an important question. For centuries man had speculated about someday meeting a nonhuman species, about learning to communicate with beings who might be of an entirely different order of intelligence, who certainly had a different history, cultural perspective, and way of looking at things in general. Studies of the Maia and the Communes—and attempted studies of the Xenophobes—had raised the possibility that any alien species, no matter how intelligent, might be so fundamentally different from humanity that any meaningful communication would simply never be possible.

  Now there was the DalRiss… evidently communicating well enough with Howard and others in the fleet to make their name, their history, and their wishes known. What were they like? What did they know about the Xen
ophobes?

  With every other person in the fleet, Dev waited hungrily for news.

  Chapter 24

  Until we met the DalRiss, we didn’t know what the Xenos were. Afterward, well, we still didn’t know what they were, but we were closer to understanding what they weren’t.

  —Dr. Samuel Gold

  Senior Exobiologist, IRS Charles Darwin

  C.E. 2541

  At Altair the fleet was designated as Interstellar Expeditionary Force One.

  Officially IEF-1 was a joint effort between Hegemony and Empire. The Imperial contribution in ground forces included the Imperial First and Third Assault Legions, both just arrived from Earth, and the Imperial Guard Striders from Loki, all under the command of General Aiko. General Howard commanded the Hegemony forces, the First and Fifth Loki Warstrider Regiments, the Twelfth and Eighteenth Rainbow Regiments, and several militia outfits, including the New American Brigade and the Chiron Centaurs.

  The ships, however, were all Imperial Naval vessels, from the Ryu-class flagship Shinryu to the stores ship Ginga Maru. There were seventeen ships in all, pulled together from three separate task forces, and all under the command of Taisho-Admiral Masaru Yamagata and the civilian representative of the Emperor, Shotaro Takahashi.

  While the Hegemony was certainly represented in the IEF, it was clear from the organization that Yamagata considered the force to be an Imperial war fleet, with himself its supreme commander.

  None of that mattered as far as the Thorhammers were concerned. Volunteers already, all aboard the Yuduki volunteered again for what some were calling the Great Leap. Final preparations were made, several military vessels were detailed to remain at Altair with the DalRiss ship, and the fleet made ready to get under way. Three days after the Yuduki had arrived at Altair, the seventeen ships of IEF-1 accelerated outward, then made the translation into the K-T Plenum.