Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella Page 18

  Howard's knuckles whitened as he gripped the handline. He was angry, but he didn't want his anger to turn this interview into a confrontation. He'd had experience enough with Imperial agents to know that he would never get what he needed through bluntness.

  "Of course, Daihyo Takahashi," he replied evenly. "However, I feel compelled to point out that this new idea gives us our best chance to actually defeat the Xenophobes, rather than simply hold them at bay."

  "We've not even been holding them," Aiko put in. "Norway Ridge was a victory, true, but the Xenophobes should never have gotten that close to Midgard in such numbers." He held up a thumb and forefinger, tips a centimeter apart. "We came that close to losing it all."

  "Nuclear weaponry must remain the sole responsibility of Imperial forces," Takahashi said, reciting the old doctrinal line. "It's dangerous enough that Hegemony forces have access to tactical weapons in the fractional kiloton range. More powerful weapons require special training and handling. This new device your people have suggested has promise, but the Emperor will permit its deployment only under the control of his forces."

  Special training, Howard thought. Right. A polite way of saying they don't trust us with the damned things . . . especially if the Hegemony gets restless under the Empire's thumb.

  "We're fighting the same enemy," Howard said, pointing out the obvious. "Four days ago, we acquired new intelligence, stuff no one's ever seen before. From this data, we've evolved an idea, a weapon. But as I stated in my report, we need nuclear weapons for the idea to be viable. I would estimate fifty devices in the one-hundred-kiloton range, for a start. . . ."

  "Impossible," Takahashi rumbled.

  Aiko gave the Daihyo a sidelong glance, then turned expressionless eyes back on Howard. "There is, in fact, no doctrinal conflict here, General. Hegemony forces rely on Imperial expertise whenever a Threat tunnel must be sealed. I imagine we could work out a similar arrangement here. We could provide nuclear warheads, but their deployment and activation would be under Imperial control." He looked again at Takahashi. "Would that be satisfactory to the Emperor?"

  Solemnly Takahashi inclined his head, as though granting absolution.

  Howard had expected this battle. The Japanese had maintained strict control of all nuclear warheads for five centuries—since the Central Asian War, in fact, when they'd been the ones to go in and disarm both the Kazakhis and the Uighurs of the West China Republic. The Treaty of Karaganda had led to the Hegemony's founding and implied—in what Howard thought was a deliciously ironic twist of history—that the Japanese Empire alone had the right to deploy weapons in the kiloton-or-larger category.

  Officially, unregulated use of fission or fusion warheads could interfere with the terraforming of the Shichiju's worlds. That was true enough, Howard reflected . . . except that the Xenos had interfered with the t-form schedule of eleven worlds already far more completely than nukes ever could.

  He wondered if the Imperial staff thought that civil war, the Hegemony against the Empire, was inevitable. Plenty of Hegemony officers he knew felt it was, Howard among them. Between the Xenophobes and a restless Imperial Hegemony, the Emperor must be getting nervous.

  "I'm sure that would be the best way to handle it," Howard said smoothly. "Of course, there is a lot of resentment in HEMILCOM already. They perceive . . . mistakenly, of course, but they perceive that we are carrying the brunt of the fight against the Xenos, that the Empire is standing in the background, out of harm's way—"

  "Yoku iu-yo!" Takahashi spat. The Nihongo literally meant "How dare you say that," but in a culture where directness was insult, the phrase was as charged with anger as profanity. "You have no right to speak that way!"

  "I merely report attitudes among the soldiers," Howard said, spreading his hands.

  "A mutiny?" Aiko wanted to know. "A rebellion within the Hegemony forces?"

  "Nothing so melodramatic, Admiral-san. But there are bad feelings. How many Imperials died at Schluter?"

  "Imperial forces did not arrive until after the battle was over."

  "Precisely my point."

  "But we are on the same side!" Takahashi insisted. "Humans, together against these monsters! Earth is in as great a danger as is Loki, at least until we understand how the Xenophobes traverse space. We must cooperate together, your people and mine."

  "Tell us about this new data you mentioned," Aiko prompted.

  "One of our striders became stranded behind Xeno lines during the battle. It happened to be in the right place at the right time. Everything the pilot witnessed was recorded by his strider's AI, broad spectrum, full sensory range. One of our combat engineers, when he saw the data and recognized its significance, came up with the idea for . . . our weapon."

  "I would like to see this data for myself."

  Howard nodded. "I thought you might, Admiral. Our comjacks assembled the sensory data from the warstrider to create a detailed Virtual Reality." He gestured at Aiko's desktop com unit. "If I may, sir?"

  "Of course."

  Howard pulled himself over, placed his palm on the contact plate, and made a connection. "Gentlemen?"

  Aiko opened a panel on the desk and extracted three jack leads. Takahashi appeared reluctant to plug himself in at first, as though direct electronic contact would somehow contaminate him, but at last he extended a blunt-fingered hand, took a lead, and snicked the jack into a T-socket masked by a spread of white and scarlet feathers. Howard plugged himself in and then, exchanging glances with the others, brought his palm down on the desktop interface.

  Room, gold-orange sun, and cloud-wreathed world were gone. In their place was a desolate and war-swept landscape under oily, angry-looking clouds. A warstrider crouched atop a ridge edged with broken battlements, the ruins sharp-edged and ragged, like a predator's teeth. Three hundred meters away, a column of smoke boiled from a fog-filled valley, where an alien, crystalline architecture grew from nothing. Dust and ash trickled from the bleak sky like rain, and a sound, like tinkling chimes, could be heard above a low and grumbling thunder. It looked as though it ought to be bitterly cold, but in fact, the surroundings actually felt comfortable.

  "What is this place?" Takahashi demanded. Howard noticed with mild surprise that the Daihyo's ViRpersona was different in the AI-moderated universe of virtual reality. Here he was stocky and muscular, but not fat, and he wore the armor of a feudal Japanese warrior, a samurai. The effect was as unnerving in its way as the feathers and skin art.

  "A virtual simulation of the battlefield at Norway Ridge," Howard replied. "That's Cameron's warstrider up there on the ridge." Unlike a film recording, a ViRsim could be explored in three dimensions, with the AI filling in detail and hidden sides to create a simulated reality bounded only by the range and sensitivity of its senses.

  "I gather that Cameron survived the action," Aiko said quietly. He looked the same as he had in the real world, stiff, erect, and immaculate. The ashfall stubbornly refused to touch his black uniform.

  "Yes, Admiral-san. He was badly wounded, but both he and the company commander made it back. Cameron's still in the hospital undergoing nanosomatic reconstruction. He's become . . . quite the hero."

  "So it would seem from the man's citation I received this morning," Aiko said. "The company commander put him in for the Imperial Star. I had to turn it down."

  "May I ask why, Admiral-san?"

  "There were . . . political considerations." Aiko paused, staring at a rounded shape lying nearby. "What is that?"

  "This is what we found interesting, gentlemen," Howard said. He led them to the object, a pearl gray hemisphere, open at the flat side, lying on the gravel at the edge of a sea of fog. The smooth-surfaced hollow within was considerably smaller than the object's full volume.

  "Empty," Takahashi said.

  "This one is. Look. There's one coming up now."

  He pointed. Thirty meters out in the fog-filled crater, another sphere was rising from the ground, shimmering, supported by the pale blue w
ings of a traveler magfield viewed through a warstrider's extended senses. It hesitated a moment, then began drifting toward the three watching men, hovering a meter above the mist.

  "Did that just rise out of solid ground?" Aiko wanted to know.

  "Essentially, Admiral-san, yes. We've known for a long time that the Xenos use powerful magnetic fields to warp rock."

  " SDTs," Aiko put in.

  "Yes, sir. They create paths where the rock has become plastic, almost fluid, and they can move along these paths the way a submarine moves through water." He nudged the empty shell with the toe of his boot. "Until we caught these babies in action, the only Xeno equipment we knew of that could perform that trick were Alphas—their equivalent of our warstriders—and Betas, which are human machines they've captured and reworked. But in all the battles fought on twelve worlds during the last forty-two years, we've never been able to capture a Xeno machine. Why? Because even pieces of them seem to have a life of their own. They change shape, move . . . and anything of ours they touch, they destroy, either by dissolving it with nano disassemblers, or by changing it into something else. None of our intelligence people, yours or mine, has ever had a close look at a genuine piece of Xeno technology."

  As the floating bubble neared the edge of the crater, it slowed and descended. Touching solid ground, it rolled half over, then opened.

  Half of the sphere vanished as completely as the bursting of a bubble. The other half lay inert on the ground, the squirming gray mass within exposed to Loki's chill air. Takahashi looked startled. Aiko's eyes narrowed as he watched the creatures begin to spill onto the ground.

  "And this," Howard added, "may be our first close look at the Xenos themselves."

  They were definitely creatures, organic life forms rather than machines. Each was the size of a man's hand, flattened slug shapes like large, shell-less snails or some of the free-swimming marine worms of Earth's ocean deeps. These were dark gray in color, but their surfaces glistened with prismatic displays of rainbow hues, like oil on water catching the light.

  There must have been several hundred of them within the broken sphere. As soon as they were free, each began fanning out across the uneven ground with wet, pulsing movements of their bodies, half returning to the fog, the other half making their way across the rocks along geometrically perfect straight lines.

  Aiko stooped, looking close. "They are connected."

  "That's right. The detail at this range from the strider isn't sharp enough for us to be sure what's happening, but it looks like each slug is physically connected to those nearest to it by a slender strand."

  "Are they separate creatures then?" Takahashi wanted to know. "Or a single organism?"

  "Our bio people are still arguing that one." He nudged the empty shell again. "But this is what we found that was important."

  Howard fed a command through his link to the AI controlling the simulation, and the landscape changed. The alien structures around the crater rim were more numerous now, competing with one another in jerky, angular thrusts into the lead gray sky. There were many more silvery hemispheres scattered about on the ground now. Some had the curiously melted look of objects being dissolved by nano disassemblers, but others were fresh and new. Spheres continued to rise from the crater floor like bubbles in an effervescent drink. The warstrider on the ridge was gone, but a dozen human ascraft circled the area at the very limits of visibility. An explosion thumped at the top of the ridge . . . then something streamed fire into the midst of the crater architecture and detonated with a shattering roar.

  "This is four hours later," Howard said, raising his voice to be heard above the bombardment. "As soon as we saw what we had in the recording from Cameron's strider, we put together a special assault team. We're looking at a sim based on recordings made by a Stormwind in the area."

  Shapes appeared along the ridge, the squat, deadly shapes of Hegemony warstriders. Answering shapes emerged from the crater, the dragonish uncoiling of a King Cobra, the spine-bristling threat of a combat mode Fer-de-Lance. Battle was joined. A plasma blast sheared whiplashing tentacles from the side of a drifting Copperhead, was answered by the rapid-fire thud-thud-thud of Xeno nano-D rounds hurled at the ridge. Drifting smoke obscured the battlefield.

  Out of the haze, three armored, manlike shapes emerged, shepherded by a larger form. The shepherd was an LaG-42 Ghostrider. The humanoid forms were single-slot Scoutstriders, with arms instead of paired weapons pods.

  The Ghostrider took a covering position, blazing away into the smoke cover with missiles and laser. The Scoutstriders moved down the slope toward the empty hemispheres. Howard could hear the hollow fire-extinguisher shoosh as nano-countermeasures were sprayed over the area, the whine of servomotors as the recon striders stooped, grasped the Xeno artifacts in durasheathed hands, and picked them up.

  "One of them didn't reach the recovery point," Howard explained as the warstriders began lugging their trophies back up the ridge. "Countermeasures failed. The other two spheres were brought back to a special containment area outside of Midgard. We've been picking them apart almost atom by atom since."

  The battlefield faded from view as Howard broke the linkage. The three men floated again in Aiko's office in Asgard.

  "As a result," he continued, "we now have the molecular pattern of a Xeno magfield projector. We know how they perform their little trick of moving through rock, and we're beginning to understand how they can manipulate the planet's magnetic field to float above the ground. We're programming construction nano to build replicas, as many as we need."

  "To what purpose?" Takahashi, his pudgy legs still lotus-folded, was rotating slowly in the center of the room. Somehow his mass and the eye-grabbing details of his personal ornamentation tended to support the illusion that the Daihyo was stationary, and that Howard, Aiko, and the room all were rotating around him.

  Howard fixed his eyes on Aiko, shifting again to Inglic. "We can duplicate their trick of sending payloads through solid rock."

  "So?"

  "Don't you see? We could create nuclear depth charges!"

  Takahashi looked blank.

  "Depth charges," Howard repeated. "Bombs that would sink into the ground and detonate at a preset depth!"

  "Interesting idea, though I fail to see how such a weapon could be effective," Takahashi said. He shook his head, jowls wobbling in the zero-g. "In any case, I doubt that it would be feasible politically. There are not enough qualified Imperial officers at Asgard to supervise the deployment of so many nuclear warheads. Perhaps in time, with reinforcements from Earth, something could be worked out. . . ."

  Howard released the handline, spreading his arms. "Admiral-san, we need your help. The Empire's help. Look, the people on Loki don't give a damn for the politics of the Empire and Hegemony. What we do know is that every time the Xenos stick their noses above ground, outposts disappear, mining facilities are destroyed, cities are smashed, and our people die. The Xenos are pushing us off the planet, and so far the Empire hasn't been giving us a rat's ass worth of real help!

  "Well, now we have a way to fight back. Stop them cold and win back our world. We can't wait for things to thread their way through eighteen light-years of red tape to Earth and back." His eyes flicked to Takahashi, then back to Aiko. "The Xenos are as dangerous to Earth as they are to us. We could stop them for you, right here, right now, before they get anywhere near Earth. Isn't that worth something? A little help with the red tape, maybe? Or do we get nothing from the Emperor but promises and platitudes?"

  He stopped, breathing hard. He'd gone over the diplomatic line with that little speech, he knew, but found he didn't care anymore. Fighting with the Imperial bureaucracy could be like arguing with a Lokan methane storm: lots of noise, fury, and confusion, with little accomplished.

  Perhaps, though, if he made enough noise . . .

  Aiko was silent for a long moment, and Howard wondered if he had, indeed, gone too far. Simply by questioning the bureaucracy's efficienc
y, he could have just ended his career. The Hegemony governor would hire or fire anyone in his command whom the Imperials told him to, including the commander-in-chief of the local armed forces.

  "Tell me," Aiko said at last, "about depth charges that sink through solid rock."

  Enthusiastically, Howard began outlining the idea.

  Chapter 20

  Decorations are for the purpose of raising the fighting value of troops; therefore they must be awarded promptly.

  —Letter of Instruction

  General George S. Patton, Jr.

  mid-twentieth century

  Tristankuppel was alive with the color and excitement of military pomp and ceremony. Tons of sand had been carted in from outside and RoProed into an elegantly curved and sunburst-graven reviewing stand set squarely in front of Scandia Hall. Bleachers had been grown to either side, forming silver wings that flanked stage and podium and masked the base's drab fabricrete barracks, classrooms, and equipment warehouses. Gayly colored banners representing each of Midgard's forty-one domes plus most of the outlying settlements hung from invisible struts crisscrossing the underside of the transplas sky.

  As a very special touch, Asgard's lasers had gently nudged Loki's weather patterns the day before, creating a high-pressure zone that put all of the Midgard Plateau under a rare break in the perpetual cloud cover. Dagstjerne, Loki's orange Daystar set in a clear green sky, touched the dome's transplas with liquid ruby and bathed the parade ground in warm sunset colors.

  The grinder had been kept clear, save for three ranks of warstriders, the First, Second, and Third Platoons of the Thorhammers' A Company, walked in through a specially grown airlock the evening before. Recoated with nano armor films in the Thorhammers' blue and white colors, they gleamed in the sunlight like brand-new machines. Only someone who knew combat striders and had a sharp eye could pick out the missing weapons or armor plates or sensor clusters that showed these machines had been in heavy fighting only days before.