Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella Page 16

  That thought bit, slick and panic-edged, like sharp ice twisting in her brain. Hysterical strength surged through her body, mingled with a throat-rasping scream of anger and defiance and stark terror. She kicked again, and this time she was sure she felt the hatch yield ever so slightly. Perhaps the shock of the fall had loosened the locking mechanism.

  A thin, high whistle sounded in her ears, swelling quickly into the mindless shriek of escaping air. The pressure seal was broken!

  Then the hatch snapped up and away from her coffin as a hurricane tugged and brawled against her skintight. In less than a second the pressures equalized. Cold bit the fingers of her ungloved hand as moisture turned to frost on her helmet visor. She groped in the darkness for her left glove, found it, and pulled it on. Her hands were shaking so badly, she had trouble pressing the wrist seal closed. Next she unhooked her helmet from the module's life support system and reconnected it to her skintight's PLSS. When she touched the test switch and got an answering green light gleaming in the dark, the relief was almost palpable. The pack was fully charged. How far would two hours get her? Not far enough, she suspected, but better than being trapped here in the dark, waiting to be eaten by Xenos.

  Three final checks, all by touch: her laser pistol holstered to her right hip, a medikit strapped to her left, and, most important, an AND canister in a belt pouch. Her vehicle suit wasn't equipped to warn her of nano hot spots, so she would have to use the stuff as a prophylactic and pray it lasted until she got . . . where?

  She didn't know and she didn't care. Bracing herself, she kicked up and out with both feet one last time. With no difference in atmospheric pressures to keep the hatch sealed, the outer hull access banged open, and light flooded her black prison cell.

  Clinging to the rim of her hatch opening, she raised herself on trembling knees. Light, the eerie, shifting glare of fires banked behind thick clouds, gleamed through her helmet's visor. She saw . . . strangeness, and the movement of Xeno machines. Assassin's Blade was still on the ground, and the open hatch was less than two meters above the ground.

  Where was she? What was this place? She was having trouble identifying the shapes looming from the swirling, light-charged fog, so alien were they, so far removed from anything familiar or recognizable.

  The rasp of her indrawn breath sounded unnaturally loud in her helmet. She didn't know how long the skintight's PLSS would last her, and she didn't really care. She had to get out, to get away from this nightmare of black and crystal shapes and unearthly light and smoke boiling above a lake of smothered fires. Standing erect in the open module, she swung one leg over the side, clinging to the hatch for an easy slide to the ground.

  Suddenly the Warlord stirred beneath her, a sleeping monster awakened to full awareness. The fuselage jerked up and back, throwing her forward. Katya screamed as the sharp motion catapulted her from the open hatch. Twisting, she grabbed the hatch combing, dangling by her arms as the combat machine rose on unsteady legs. The fuselage snapped forward with a piercing squeak of metal grating on metal, and her hands lost their grip. She fell, her gloved hand raking painfully across hull metal, grabbing at a foothold, then tearing free.

  Katya was still screaming as she plunged five meters to the ground. She hit hard and awkwardly, bounced, then slithered down a loose scree of rock and gravel.

  The pain when her right leg snapped was indescribable.

  Chapter 17

  Why does a man fight? Not for country or leader or ideology, despite what the ViRdramatists might say. He fights for his brothers and sisters who fight at his side.

  —A History of Human Warfare

  HEMILCOM Military ViRdocumentary

  C.E. 2533

  Dev was first aware that Katya was the cause of the ominous thumping that had convinced him the Xenos were on the Warlord's hull when his AI sent a cascade of data across his visual field, warning of a pressure loss in the command module, that the commander's strider PLSS had been taken off-line, and that the commander's access hatch had been blown.

  At that point Dev had already started to lever the strider erect, leaning against the strider's gyros to maintain his balance. He tried to abort the mental command, but too late. The brief mental conflict of order and counterorder jarred the strider to motionless indecision just as Dev felt something bump against his left side.

  He shifted visuals, switching from the main optics on the Warlord's blunt snout to sensors mounted high on the strider's left shoulder. From that angle, he could look forward and down across the hull and see the gaping maw of the commander's access hatch and two black-suited arms clinging to the opening from the outside. His audio sensors caught Katya's scream as she lost her grip and fell. Shifting optics again, he saw her hit the ground next to the Warlord's left foot, then bounce and slide down the ridge until she came to rest on a pile of loose gravel and snow ten meters below the Warlord's position.

  She was still alive, trying to sit up, cradling her right thigh and rocking side to side in pain. Damn! He couldn't leave her, but if he stayed put much longer, the images he'd been recording for the past minutes would be melted down with the rest of the combat debris on the ridge crest, just as soon as the Xenos worked their way up the slope.

  Dev checked again for one of the circling Stormwinds, but the smoke and steam from the tunnel eruption were still too thick to even let him glimpse the ascraft, much less tag them with a communications laser.

  He had only one real choice. He couldn't leave Katya to the Xenos, but he couldn't risk losing the recording either. Carefully he folded the Warlord's legs, lowering the fuselage once again to within a couple of meters of the ground.

  "AI," he thought, concentrating. "Robot mode. Receive programming."

  "Blade ready to accept programming," the AI's voice replied.

  He considered firing an AND round to shield himself and Katya from the nano count outside, but decided that the detonation would almost certainly alert the nearby Xeno machines. He'd have to trust in speed . . . and the last few shots in his hand-held AND dispenser.

  Dev gave the computer its instructions, received an acknowledgment, then disconnected from the link. In a way, Dev had just transformed the Warlord into a rather simple-minded robot. He'd ordered the Warlord to continue to scan for any of the circling ascraft, to initiate a lasercom link when atmospheric conditions permitted, and to transmit all of the recorded imagery in the Warlord's RAM as soon as that link was open. If the Warlord was attacked, it would be able to fire back with the hivel cannon, which had been slaved to the AI.

  But those simple-minded orders, with no room for interpretation, would leave it easy prey to an attacking Alpha, especially since Dev had also ordered it to remain in place.

  Sensation returned to Dev's body, and he pulled his left hand from the contact pad. The interior of the pilot's module was stuffy and hot, the padding around him slick with condensation. He unhooked harness, helmet jacks, and life support, checked his combat armor PLSS and glove seals, then cracked his access hatch with a squeal-whoosh of equalizing pressures. A ladder was stowed in an external compartment below his hatch. He extended and locked it, swung out of his compartment, and clambered down to the ground.

  Dev was scared as his boots crunched again on bare gravel. Leaving the safety of the Warlord was one of the hardest things he'd ever had to do in his life. He could feel his heart hammering beneath his sternum, and his mouth had gone vacuum-dry. From behind the tumbledown of the RoPro wall, he had an excellent and unobstructed view down the slope and into the steaming pit.

  With an almost morbid fascination, he found himself rooted to the spot, staring into the pit. Something new was emerging from the tunnel mouth, something unlike anything he'd seen before. It looked like a pearl, a glistening silver-white sphere half a meter across, rising from the pool of tar at the crater's center. Other pearls followed the first, more and more of them. They hung in the air, supported, Dev supposed, by some sort of magnetic field. Hovering anywhere from just ab
ove the uppermost wisps of fog to fifteen meters in the air, they dispersed in every direction, drifting slowly, traveling in straight lines that took them through the new-grown crystalline architecture as though according to some complex plan. One by one, like soap bubbles, the spheres sank to the ground and vanished. Since he no longer had access to the strider's telescopic optics or AI enhancement, Dev could see no details, but it looked like the top of each sphere simply vanished, while the bottoms came to rest on the ground.

  Tearing his gaze away, he leaped across the wall and scrambled down the gravel slope to Alessandro's side, rocks and loose sand scattering in a tiny avalanche. "Captain!" he yelled, not sure if her helmet radio was tuned to the tactical frequency. "Captain Alessandro! Can you hear me?"

  Her eyes opened behind her visor, showing both recognition and a sharp edge of pain. "My God, what are you doing here?"

  It was like an accusation. "Never mind that." His voice cracked from the fear-dryness, and from relief. "Let's get you back aboard the Blade. Where's your AND?"

  "Lost it." An arm gestured weakly down the slope. "When I fell."

  Glancing down the slope, Dev saw movement there. The deadly fog was creeping slowly up the ridge, and shapes, small and slithery shapes, moved there, half-visible in the gloom.

  "Medikit?"

  Katya grimaced. "I think I landed on it. Felt it smash. But I still have this." She patted the holstered lasgun with something like affection. "They won't get me alive, anyway. . . ."

  "That's enough of that kind of talk, Captain. We're going to get you out of here."

  Dev already had his AND dispenser out. Alessandro's skintight was dusted with patches of silver, like a fine, metallic flour, sticking to her shoulders and wrists and against the swell of her left breast. Nano-Ds adrift in the air were gathering in patches large enough to see. Her suit would be holed in seconds.

  He sprayed the parts of her body he could reach thoroughly, but he had to coax the last few squirts from a near-empty canister. Unless there were more counter-nano applicators stored aboard the strider, he'd just used the last there was. Discarding the empty can, he knelt beside her. He could see the kink in her leg where it had broken. There was already quite a bit of swelling.

  "How bad does it hurt?"

  A grimace was her answer. She would be working on an anodyne block through her implant, but she wouldn't be able to hold it for long.

  A wet clink nearby, metal on rock, convinced him there was no time to attach a splint. He had to move her now. Pulling his own medapplicator from his pouch, he slapped it against her thigh above the break, firing a stream of medical nano into her leg. It was strictly rough-and-ready field first aid, designed to prevent further damage, stop bleeding, and, most important if he was going to carry her back up that hill, help anesthetize the break.

  "Come on, Captain. We've seen all we want to here."

  As gently as he could, Dev slipped one arm beneath her shoulders, the other under her thighs, then scooped her up. She yelped once when the movement broke her concentration, but she clung tightly to his neck as he carried her back up the slope toward the looming gray shadow of the Warlord. Dev heard a shrill whine and glanced up. The hivel turret spun to the right, the barrel tracking something behind them. When the cannon fired, the flash was bright enough to throw shadows, and the thunder was as shrill as tearing steel. The stuttering thuds of high-speed rounds striking ground, the clatter of something scraping rock, sounded at his back, meters down the slope.

  Dev spun, searching the murk. One of the silver spheres lay a few meters down the slope, half of it melted away, and the hollow interior exposed to Loki's air.

  Inside, something moved.

  His stomach twisted. This was the first time he'd seen anything associated with the Xenophobes that actually looked and acted alive, but he still couldn't be sure of what he was seeing. A glistening wet, gray-black mass was sliding from the open sphere. It looked like an animate glob of grease . . . or a slug the size of his fist.

  Had that been the hivel's target? No. He caught the fluttering movement of a Gamma farther down the slope as it rippled toward him across the uneven ground.

  Slinging Katya over his shoulder to free one arm for balance, he jogged up the slope, cursing as loose gravel skittered from beneath his feet and nearly threw them both to the ground. As he reached the top and paused to pick his way across the fallen rubble of the RoPro battlement, something closed on his left ankle.

  Lurching off balance, he slammed his shoulder against the strider's hull and groped for the ladder to keep from falling. A Gamma, an amorphous mass the size and shape of a crumpled bath towel, jet black shot through with iridescent silver, clung to his foot, was working its way up his leg.

  He screamed and kicked against that sickening pressure, hard, his boot sinking into the thing's formless body. The Gamma was more massive than he'd imagined, and he kicked again. This time it broke free with a sucking sound and dropped to the ground a meter away. Dev vaulted the first three rungs of the ladder despite his burden. "Below you!" Katya yelled, her helmet banging against his as the ladder lurched and swayed. "It's coming up after us!"

  With her help, he managed to roll Katya off his shoulder and into the narrow hatch. The medical nano had not yet had time to do its work, and she must have been in agony, but she leaned out of the hatch and grabbed Dev's shoulder with one hand, drawing her laser pistol with the other.

  Dev tried to squeeze past her into the compartment, but the heavy thing hit him from behind, molding itself to his legs and the ladder, pinning him. Dev could imagine the machine-creature's nano already eating at his armor and boots, could imagine his legs beginning to dissolve like the bodies he'd seen. Then he felt the first real pain, a searing, burning sensation, like flames licking at his calves and the backs of his knees. Panic rose like a whirling nightmare, fire and storm in his mind, but he clung to the strider's hull and twisted, prying his feet free from the monster's grasp.

  The pain was unbearable, a searing liquid fire now flowing up his thighs. In his mind's eye, his legs were shriveling in the heat, his feet reduced to charred tendons taut across blackened bone. He'd seen recordings of people savaged by Xeno Gammas, seen the agony in their faces, and thought he understood now the hell those poor wretches had faced. He was screaming, screaming, but still clinging to the warstrider and fighting back with a near-hysterical strength, kicking with whatever was left of fire-shriveled legs.

  "Don't move!" Katya ordered, lunging her upper body past his, arm extended as she trained her laser on the black and silver amoebic horror enveloping his legs. She fired, the 30-MJ handgun's beam invisible, but its effect immediately apparent, as a dazzling point of red light appeared on the Gamma's surface centimeters from Dev's knee. It spasmed under the assault, oily black smoke boiling from that part of the slick black surface that suddenly crinkled like burning paper.

  Dev kicked again. "Damn it, I said hold still!" she yelled, but it was impossible not to thrash as agony continued to eat through his brain. The Gamma slipped, still clinging to his calves and feet but releasing his knees. Looking down, Dev could see the remnants of his armor, smoking globs of melted plastic imbedded in flesh that had the mottled look of raw, bloody hamburger. White smoke streamed from his legs, Xeno nano-Ds carrying away molecule-sized pieces of him. The sight, the realization, assaulted his mind; the emotional shock was as sharp and as deadly as any physical damage.

  Closing his eyes, Dev tried to bring his cerebral implant into play. The pain lessened now as Dev went through the mental processes necessary to switch off part of his own nervous system. Next he concentrated on contracting blood vessels already starting to pool blood deep within his abdomen, and he elevated his blood pressure slightly to keep his circulation going. Shock, both physical and psychological, could kill him now just as surely as a plasma bolt through his skull.

  Subjectively, he hung there battling his own body's reactions for an agony of time, despite the fact that his inn
er clock recorded the passing of less than four seconds. Suddenly the weight and pressure were gone, though the fire remained, and Katya was pulling him the rest of the way into the open hatch. Dev opened his eyes and looked down as he swayed precariously on the strider's hull. At the foot of the ladder, two flopping, severed pieces of Xenophobe tried to find each another again.

  He also saw the ruin of his legs, his bare and mangled feet, and the shock hit him like an electric current. Control! . . . His body sagged, limp, and Katya nearly lost him.

  Then he was sliding into the embrace of the command module. A jacking slot aboard a warstrider was cramped for one; for two it was nearly impossible. He landed on top of her. They were face-to-face, with no room to move and scarcely room enough to breathe. Somehow Katya managed to reach past him and stab at the manual panel, cycling the access hatch closed. Neither of them could reach his legs, so she pressed his medical nano dispenser against his shoulder to inject him.

  Part of his mind continued to work on his own survival. Each breath was painful now, bringing with it an acrid, biting rasp in his nose and throat and lungs. Blearily he realized that his suit had been breached, that he was breathing a rather unhealthy concentration of methane and ammonia at half an atmosphere, that his combat armor PLSS was feeding enough oxygen into the mix to keep him going but that its O2 charge must be nearly exhausted. Katya would need to hook into the Warlord's life support if she was going to jack them out of here; he damned sure couldn't do it, but he wondered if that meant he was going to suffocate.

  There were worse ways to die. He remembered the horror outside the strider's hatch, shuddered, and nearly lost his anodyne block.

  Katya must have already assumed that he couldn't pilot the strider. She'd grabbed the dangling jacks, plugged them into her helmet, then peeled off her glove to make contact with the interface plate.

  She hesitated, though, before making contact, turning her helmet so that she could look into his face. The compartment's only light was from the tiny manual control board beside Dev's shoulder, and most of that was blocked by their bodies, but he could see her eyes, centimeters from his behind the two transplas layers of their visors.