Warstrider: The Ten Billion Gods of Heaven (Warstrider Series, Book 7) Read online

  "Welcome to hell, Mike!" Vaughn called.

  Autocannon shells slammed into his external armor, knocking off black chunks. "You were keeping it hot for me, I can tell!" he called back. His Naga-armor was already healing itself, but the enemy fire was intensifying.

  Hallman and Vaughn were close… doshi. The Nihongo term, meaning "comrades," was one of a number of words that had spread to common English usage thanks to centuries of Imperial dominance. They'd humped it through basic together on New America, then gone into warstrider specialist training together on Madison. They'd been through more battles together than Vaughn could remember… not to mention more drinking bouts and lost weekends, more wild groundside liberties, more brothel visits, and more pub brawls. He was a good man to have at your back—the best—no matter whether the opposition was a pack of kuso-faced yoppie brawlers from a rival unit, or a pack of Imperial warstriders in all-out combat mode.

  As the Hoshi striders scattered, Vaughn managed to get all of the surviving members of his flight lined up and moving in the right direction. The idea was to push the Hoshis south and out of the city. Any enemy combat machines still in the city proper could be handled by the local rebels. The Black Griffins would help form a perimeter around the city, and clear out the Hoshikumiai semimobile fortresses on the nearby heights. Once that chore was complete, the Confederation Navy could begin bringing down supplies, equipment, and men.

  Of course, much would depend on the reaction of Imperial forces. If they decided to send combat units to Abundancia to reinforce their Hosikumiai allies, the Confederation would have a nasty decision on its hands… whether to abandon the rebel forces here, or fight it out and risk a wider war with Imperial Japan. The Confederation had a significant technological advantage right now in their use of Naga symbionts and living-nanotechnic computronium. The Japanese, more conservative, more fastidious in their willingness to merge with alien artificial-biologicals, hadn't embraced the new tech, at least not in anything like large-scale.

  What they did have in their favor, however, though, were numbers. The Japanese Empire could draw on the resources of hundreds of worlds scattered across a sphere almost two hundred light years wide. The Confederation numbered just twenty-five systems within a region forty light years wide set within the Imperial periphery. If the Japanese decided to respond with an all-out assault on Connie holdings, New America's technological advantage likely would count for very little.

  Hallman strode up alongside Vaughn. "Where are the bastards?"

  Vaughn gestured with his strider's left arm. "They scattered off that way. Toward the cliffs. And the mobiles."

  "Kuso. They'd make it a whole lot easier on themselves if they just gokking surrendered right now."

  "Mike… one of them was carrying a mon."

  "Kuso! What clan?"

  "Hojo."

  "So we're facing Imperials here?"

  "I don't gokking know, Mike. Maybe they just want us to think we are."

  "But you don't think so, huh?"

  "No. I don't. We'll know more when we develop some G2… but for now I think we have to assume there may be some Japanese impies serving in an advisory capacity, y'know? Or maybe they're mercs hired by the yaris." The slang term was drawn from roiyarisuto, and meant loyalists—colonists fighting to remain under Japanese rule.

  "Shit. The bunditos didn't say anything about fucking yaris."

  "No. You think New America would have sent us in if they'd known it was a civil war?"

  "I don't know. Probably not. Okay, flight leader. What's the plan?"

  "We find bad guys—yaris, hoshis, or impies, it doesn't fucking matter… and then we kill them."

  "Sounds like a plan, Sosh."

  Socho was sergeant major, the highest enlisted rank in the Japanese armed forces. Inevitably, the New Americans had bastardized it even as they'd accepted it for their own military. Hallman was a gunso, a sergeant.

  A heavy mass-driver round slammed in among the buildings to the north, and Vaughn felt the ground lurch beneath his strider's feet. A building collapsed with a roar.

  "Let's get out of here, man," Hallman said.

  They spread out to avoid presenting too tempting a target, and began moving through rubble-clogged streets. Although the larger buildings provided a measure of cover, moving armor through city streets was flat-out tempting the deities of war. Warstriders in the streets were funneled together by the surrounding walls, and the buildings provided excellent cover for ambushers.

  In fact, warstriders were the modern incarnation of three ancient combat modes—tanks, close-support aircraft, and individual infantrymen in battle armor. Theoretically, they possessed the strengths of each—the heavy firepower and sheer, brute strength of tanks; the flight and high-speed maneuverability of strike aircraft; and the ability to maneuver and seek cover of soldiers.

  Unfortunately, and so far a Vaughn was concerned, they also had the weaknesses of each. If you put enough armor on a tank to shrug off most of what might hit it, you got something like those semimobiles up on the cliff-tops over there—large, slow targets. If you took to the air, you instantly became a target for every enemy particle gun, laser, and railgun in the battle zone, and at high speed you would miss a lot of what there was to see… like enemy troop concentrations.

  And no matter how good the technology, armored soldiers never had enough armor, or good enough communications, or enough firepower, or unit coordination, or a way to peer through the fog of battle. Further up the street, a Griffin warstrider staggered as an antimatter round vaporized its upper torso with a flash and a thin spray of red mist. As the smoke dispersed, the machine took a couple of steps back, auto correcting itself, then collapsed to the ground in a tangle of metallic limbs like a string-cut puppet.

  Vaughn's implant picked up the strider's ID: Gocho Krysta McIntyre. Damn. It didn't look like here was enough left to bury.…

  "Where the hell did that come from?" Lance Corporal Jason Kiel called.

  Vaughn was already analyzing the trajectory, captured by his strider's radar. "Up there," he said, painting an icon on the flight's battle map. "On those cliffs."

  They were emerging now from the built-up portion of the city periphery, entering the belt of parkland and habitat domes surrounding Abundancia. From here, as they moved clear of the taller buildings, the Catarata Cliffs were visible some twenty kilometers off, rising against the high-stacked billows of orange clouds, golden in the early-morning light. The water of the falls tumbled into space above mist and a spectacular rainbow, its thunder muted by distance. From the cliff's edge on the near shore, a semimobile brooded.

  Semimobile fortresses were just that… massive fortifications that could be moved at need, but slowly. They were tanks taken to the extreme, mounting dozens of heavy weapons and with armor meters thick, but their diamagnetics could just barely lift them from the ground, and it took nearly their entire power output to move at a man's slow walking pace.

  But once positioned, they had the firepower of a major planetary fortress. These commanded the city of Abundancia from their overlooks.

  The orbiting Confederation cruisers had been picking off the semis one by one, but that was tricky work. Heavy shielding tended to deflect incoming kinetic-kill rounds and particle beams which might take out a large swath of the city with a ricochet. "Forward shields up, people," Vaughn ordered, and the four other surviving warstriders of Green Flight began spreading out as they advanced, putting a hundred meters between each machine. High-velocity gatling fire swept down on them from the heights. Under that onslaught, the NewAm striders were changing form again, morphing into low-slung, organic-looking shapes with the bulk of their Naga-mass piled up forward in a shield. KK projectiles slammed into Vaughn's strider, staggering him, but he kept moving. Those shields weren't enough to shrug off antimatter rounds, and the larger high-velocity kinetic rounds could pound a warstrider to fragments in fairly short order. But they did do a good job of dispersing the heat from l
aser and particle beam fire, and they protected the soldier on board from small-caliber stuff and high-velocity shrapnel.

  A string of hivel rounds slammed into a church off to the right, bringing down the steeple in a showering cascade of debris. Vaughn's external mikes picked up the shrill screams of civilians. Ah… shit!

  "You!" he called, his voice booming across the church compound. "Are you okay?'

  Faces peered from a mangled, open doorway. Women and children…

  "¡Esconderse!" he yelled. Vaughn had downloaded Spanish into his implant as soon as he'd learned he was being deployed to Abudancia. "¿Tiene las iglesia un sótano?"

  "¡No hay un sotano!" someone yelled back. Shit. No basement in the church. An explosion ripped through the street behind the structure, showering the surrounding area with debris.

  Vaughn felt an agony of paralyzed indecision. What the hell could he do with all of those civilians? Should he tell them to stay put… to make a run for the rear?…

  ¡Refugiarse!" Vaughn called. "¡Mantanerse abajo!"

  Telling them to take cover and stay down might help… but what would help a hell of a lot more was to stop the shelling. He considered telling them to get out of the church and move to the rear… but discarded the idea. The life expectancy of a human caught in the open in this kind of firefight was measured in seconds. They would be cut down almost immediately.

  "Vaughn! This is Vanderkamp!"

  "Yes, Ma'am!"

  "You think you can suppress that nearest fortress? We're getting clobbered down here!"

  Vaughn considered the implant display painting itself inside his mind. The nearest semimobile fortress was over twenty kilometers away and at the top of a thousand-meter cliff. Getting up there without getting killed would be… challenging.

  "Yes, Ma'am!" He hesitated. "Bravo is down to six effectives, sir! Can we have some help?"

  "You'll have back-up. But get your asses up that cliff now before I have to come over there and kick them up!"

  "Yes, sir."

  Asshole…

  "C'mon, people!" Vaughn called. "Time to get ourselves airborne!"

  And he broke into a run.

  2

  Japan, a tiny island nation with few resources and too many people, seemed an unlikely candidate as a significant world power, but these limitations served in the long run to make the Kogane Jidai, her Golden Age, all but inevitable. Where the earliest advocates of space exploitation fell by the wayside—the Soviet Union, the United States, and the People's Republic of China all collapsing in political turmoil, corruption, economic chaos, and governmental myopia—the Empire of Japan managed to hang on, and eventually to prosper. By the late 21st Century, she had grabbed the high ground of space, and she never let go.

  —Man and His Works

  Dr. Karl Gunther Fielding

  C.E. 2488

  Chujo Yoichi Hojo kneeled on the tatami in his office, relaxed, tranquil, allowing the sights and sounds of battle wash through him. The sensation, channeled through his cerebral implants, was… stimulating, even cathartic, and served as a kind of meditation. The appearance of Confederation rebels in this sector had been unexpected… but was not in the least unwelcome.

  The images were coming in from optical scanners mounted on the upper deck of Yosai Ichi—of Castle One—positioned atop the stunning cliffs overlooking the rebel city. Telephoto enhancements showed the near edge of the city, alive with erupting geysers of black earth and the bright flashes of explosions as Ichi and the other mobile fortresses continued to hammer the place with hivel kinetic-kill rounds, particle beams, and plasma fire. The AI flagged movement, and he ordered the cameras to zoom in for a closer look. Yes… as he'd expected, the newly arrived rebel warstriders were deploying for an attack.

  "Colonel Tamaguchi!" he snapped over the mind link with his subordinates. "You see?"

  "We see them, Lord General. We will sweep them from the sky!"

  "Allow them to get close, Colonel," Hojo replied. "Keep them from landing on the fortress itself, but permit them to approach. I intend to destroy them with our special reserves."

  "As you wish, Lord General."

  Hojo wondered if he heard disapproval in the Colonel's mental voice… but decided that he had not. Tamaguchi was an excellent chief of staff and a good soldier. He would not permit emotion to ruffle a link with his superiors.

  Light flare in the sky, a second sun flaring close to the zenith, then fading. Those two rebel cruisers had been launching heavy KK rounds at the fortresses from orbit and managed to destroy two of them. One ship was passing over the horizon now, however, and the other would not be overhead for another thirty minutes. Smaller projectiles launched by other ships in the enemy fleet—destroyers and frigates—were easily handled by counter fire from the fortresses. Another projectile streaked in from the west, a line of white fire. Yosai Ichi's planetary defense batteries tracked it and fired… and, again, a new sun shone briefly in the sky.

  If the enemy warstriders were fighting in close to the yosai, the next cruiser to pass overhead would hold its fire for fear of hitting rebel troops.

  And it would let him unveil… something special.

  "Tai-i Yamatami is here to see you, Lord General," the voice of his electronic secretary announced.

  "Very well. Have him come in."

  The shoji doors at the far end of the room slid open, and a man in a black Imperial special forces uniform entered and formally bowed. "Tai-i Yamatami, Lord General. Reporting as you commanded."

  Hojo nodded his response, and gestured for Yamatami to kneel on one of the tatami mats on the floor. The room, as tradition demanded, was spartan, almost bare—a return to the classical kanso, the aesthetic simplicity of earlier ages. Hojo's private quarters within the fortress were far more luxurious, but he preferred to display the traditional values of Shinto and bushido to his subordinates, a means of focus, a memory of origins and purpose, a lack of distractions.

  "The enemy approaches," Hojo said, inviting the army captain to link in through the implant display. "When he reaches the fortress, he will either plant explosive devices or attempt to gain entrance… probably the latter. The Nekomata will stop them."

  Yamatami bowed deeply. "As you command, Lord General."

  Hojo had to work to overcome the distaste he felt. Even after several years with the Nekomata project, the basic idea was… unpleasant. Through his implant link, he could feel the alien crawling in Yamatami's brain… or he imagined he could.

  "Your unit is ready?"

  "We are, Lord General. We await only your order."

  "You have it."

  Yamatami bowed once more, rose, and left the bare room.

  Hojo returned his full attention to the battle unfolding outside. Much depended on the success of his plan, not least of which was the name and honor of his family. Clan Hojo once had been a powerful offshoot of the Ise family, and related by marriage to the Imagawa Clan. In the 15th Century, a member of the Ise family had taken the name Hojo after the earlier line of Kamakura Shogunate regents, and in the 16th Century their power had rivaled that of the immortal Tokugawas. All power and high station were transitory, however, and the clan fell at the Siege of Odawara. Hojo had remained a fairly common family name throughout the centuries that followed, but no longer were they intimates of shoguns, emperors, or the halls of power.

  The family had regained some measure of power with the rise of the Empire in the late 21st Century, however, primarily within the military sphere. After today, however, the ancient clan would attain true immortality, and all would know the prominence of the dragonscale mon, Imperial and rebel alike. Hojo had managed to get hold of Naga fragments, and with them he would transform the Imperial warstrider regiments.

  For almost a century, the alien Naga had been completely misunderstood. Found inhabiting a number of worlds across the human sphere, they'd been called Xenophobes, with the assumption that their merciless onslaughts against human cities and their apparen
t unwillingness to communicate indicated that they feared all life other than their own.

  In fact, the Naga—while technically alive under the best definitions for that state available—were an artificial life form created by a machine intelligence at the Galactic Core, a poorly understood network mind called the Web. The Web had designed the Naga many tens of millions of years in the past to prepare new worlds for assimilation. Rebel forces had managed to make direct mind-to-mind contact with the Naga several years before, and the alliance had resulted in a true interspecies symbiosis, with humans merging with aliens to create… something new. The Naga appeared to be nothing more or less than nanotechnic lifeforms, their fluid bodies composed of individual cells of nanoscale size operating as minute, massively parallel computers joined into networks of staggering complexity. Such material, organized for maximum efficiency in data processing, colloquially was known as computronium.

  So-called Naga-chunks of computronium broken from the main bodies could merge with human nervous systems, link with human cerebral implant technology, and boost human neural responses and functioning to unimaginable heights. There were rumors that one of the humans who'd discovered this, a rebel named Dev Cameron, had used his symbiosis to transcend corporality… to become a kind of high-tech god.…

  Most civilized people—meaning those of Japanese ancestry, of course—were both conservative and fastidious, especially when it came to allowing outside contamination—osen—to come into contact with their bodies. General Hojo, however, knew that sacrifice could be necessary to achieve victory. The one reason the rebel forces had survived as long as they had, he was convinced, was their willingness to merge with the living alien computronium. Imperial intelligence had been quite clear on this point; rebel troops with Naga-infected implants possessed an advantage on the battlefield that simply could not be measured.