Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella Page 15

  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 Stormwind 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 Al'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 beginnin
g 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 that 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.

  The Xenophobes, obviously, possessed that magic now. They were growing their alien architecture before Dev's optics, using rock and wreckage as raw materials.

  Dev could see the tunnel mouth clearly now, as the last of the fog dissipated in the crater's central core. The white sea continued to lap in a vast circle around the crater's perimeter, but the crater floor was exposed at the center. It looked like tar or liquid asphalt, jet black, liquid, but thick and viscous. IR showed that it was warmer than its surroundings, but not nearly as hot as the lava had been moments before. The lava itself seemed to have been converted into something else, the delicate tracery of crisscrossing spires and crystal shafts surrounding the core, perhaps.

  A Death Adder emerged from the tar, blunt-nosed, sluglike, gleaming clean and gray-silver as if coated with liquid mercury. Sliding clear of the tunnel mouth, it began transforming into its combat mode, shapeshifting into a six-armed starfish armored in spines like black needles. Close behind it was the snake-shape of a Fer-de-Lance. Other shapes followed, a nightmare procession of alien geometries. They spread out around the crater perimeter, like sentries mounting guard.

  Had he been seen? Apparently not. None of the invaders appeared to notice the lone, combat-savaged Warlord lying in the rubble of the fallen battlements three hundred meters from the tunnel mouth. Maybe the strider's protective coloration was camouflaging him after all, or maybe they'd dismissed him as another piece of wreckage, junk like that broken Battlewraith nearby.

  He wouldn't be able to rely on their nearsightedness for long. If nothing else, there must be thousands of Gammas and hot-nano scraps all over the ridge, left over from the earlier fight. Sooner or later they would start gnawing on whatever they happened to find, and the Warlord would become a large and helpless hors d'oeuvre.

  There was little more he could accomplish by staying where he was, and every second he remained increased the risk that he would be seen.

  Dev started to turn away, then froze. Distinctly he could hear a heavy thump-thump-thump, a rhythmic pounding that was almost certainly coming from the Warlord's hull.

  A Gamma, he thought. A Xeno Gamma had attached itself to his fuselage and was smashing its way inside!

  Chapter 16

  No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human breast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.

  —Complete Psychological Works

  Sigmund Freud

  early twentieth century

  For Katya Alessandro, the blackness surrounding her had become an intolerable hell. She lay in the coffin-sized niche of the command module, swaying in her support web, feeling the ungainly lurch-swing-lurch of the Warlord's long-legged gait.

  Her AI link was still completely dead, and even the module's manual controls appeared to have shorted out. She'd long since given up trying to eject. Not a single gleam of light came from the small console pad, which left her muffled in a terrifying, stifling cloak of darkness.

  That darkness had brought her to the ragged edge of stark panic and held her there, held her as she battled the rising terror she'd felt once before, aboard the Kaibutsu Maru. She'd gone through a year of implant therapy before she could sleep without a light on at night, had come that close to submitting to voluntary amnesia. With a claustrophobe rating of point seven, she'd come within an ace of being rejected when she volunteered for warstrider training. During training, a simulated power failure had dropped her into a night much like this one, and she'd come damned close to washing out right then and there.

  Somehow she'd managed to hang on, going through the rote procedure to restore link power manually and not giving in to panic. Those procedures hadn't worked this time, however—her fingers were bleeding from pounding at the control pad in the dark. She wanted to scream, and knew that if she did, she would lose all control, all reason, and possibly kill herself trying to batter through that hatch.

  And what made it worse was the knowledge that they must be just outside her hatch.

  They. The bogeyman, the horror in the dark, the monsters under the bed. She remembered what had happened to Mitch, and couldn't stop shaking. She could clearly remember the moments before the power failure during the fight with the Copperhead. Suresh Gupta and Chris Kingfield had both been dead, dead . . . and when she had recovered consciousness an unknown agony of minutes or hours later, she'd felt the Warlord moving and knew that Xenophobe Gammas must have infiltrated the machine, transforming it into a zombie.

  Strange. She'd never seen a Xenozombie that still had its legs. Usually when the 'Phobes remade a human stride
r, they reworked the legs into a misshapen platform containing powerful magfield guides, letting it float a meter above the ground. She could definitely feel the thump of each foot as it hit the ground, could feel the swaying stop-and-go motion of the strider's birdlike walk.

  But the Blade had to be a zombie. The AI couldn't run the strider by itself, and Gupta and Kingfield were both dead. That meant the monsters were all around her, inside the Warlord's armor, inside its power plant and weapons and hull, eating their way toward her compartment. And when they reached her . . .

  Katya screamed, her fists pounding against the padded surface of the module's external hatch. The manual hatch release, like the eject handle, seemed to be jammed. She had to get out . . . out! . . .

  Somehow Katya had managed to free herself from the support harness and unplug her helmet from the useless link feeds, then squirm about until she could double her legs above her body, knees to chest. Kicking hard, she thought she felt the hatch give slightly. She kicked again. Thump! And again. The manual release was still jammed, but she thought she'd felt the centimeter-thick sheet of nanomolecular armor give ever so slightly. A shock might free it, might force the locking mechanism open and unseal her prison.

  She tried not to let herself think about what was going on in the Warlord around her. For a time, the strider's swaying motion had stopped, but then, over two minutes later by her internal clock, there'd been a savage explosion. The shock wave had made the walls of her metal coffin ring, there'd been the unmistakable stomach-twisting sensation of a fall, and then the Warlord had smashed into unyielding ground.

  The crash slammed her against one end of the module and nearly returned her to unconsciousness, but though flashes of visual purple danced and sparked before her eyes, she clung to her awareness like a talisman, like a weapon, unwilling to lose it when the Xenos were eating their way through the darkness to reach her.