Warstrider: All Six Novels and An Original Novella Page 7

  By then it was time for breakfast, and Dev had long since decided that he didn't care much for the Guard.

  After a meal where they took trays, filed through the mess line, sat, and ate by the numbers, they were marched to still another building. There their heads were shaved . . . a tragedy in the case of Jacobsen, Dev thought, as he stood waiting his turn, watching her luxurious blond hair drop to the floor a handful at a time. Their stubble-darkened scalps and exposed T-sockets made them all look more naked than they'd been before, and far less like individuals.

  And that, of course, was the idea, the reasoning behind the humiliation, the shaving, the loss of personal identity. From that moment on, they ceased to be individuals.

  They were on their way to becoming soldiers.

  The first few days were called orientation, though Dev and the other seito-recruits universally referred to that hell of sleeplessness and steady harassment as disorientation. They ran everywhere. The exercise regimen was intended partly to toughen them, partly to get them used to moving and working as a unit, but mostly it was designed to make them work up appetites for five meals a day. The medical nano in their bodies was working round the clock to rebuild their systems, and food was the necessary raw material for the construction.

  Existence become a hazy blur of standing in line, filling out forms, plugging into AI evaluation programs, and dazedly responding to orders that seemed to make no sense at all. Much of each day was spent on the grinder, either marching senselessly back and forth in a ragged pretense of drilling or performing calisthenics en masse, listening all the while to Maxwell's nonstop harangue as he continued to list in exacting, precise, and improbable detail their mental, physical, and moral shortcomings, individually and as a group.

  Even more than marching and calisthenics, though, was the time spent "under instruction," the cadets lying in long lines on narrow cots, their brains plugged into AI programs that fed them a seemingly endless mass of data, information on tactics and strategy, military history, nanotechnics, machine repair, tool making, electronics, AI diagnostics, systems analysis, nanomedical theory and first aid, survival, planetography, and even exobiology—at least to the point of downloading what little was known about the Xenophobe enemy. Since all of this information was transmitted through direct AI to cephlink RAM, it was difficult each evening to even be sure what had been learned that day. Most of the cadets spent the hour or so before lights out lying motionless on their bunks, retrieving and cataloging the day's feeds.

  His disappointment at having failed to get a navy slot was keen, but he had little time to think about it those first few weeks. Life swiftly settled into a routine of linking, eating, drilling, and sleeping, with a two-hour stint on fire-and-security watch every third night. By the morning of Day Four the company had its first attrition. A surprise middle-of-the-night barracks check by Gocho Delaney had caught Seito-recruit Gehrling asleep in the wrong bunk.

  The girl was transferred to a tech support company as soon as it was determined that she'd been an active participant—a self-evident conclusion given the proximity of over thirty sleeping recruits and the fact that the double-tiered bunks tended to rattle and squeak with all but the gentlest movements. While there were no specific rules against sexual fraternization among the recruits, the unspoken assumption was that if you had the time or the energy for extracurricular pursuits, you simply didn't have the dedication necessary to be an officer.

  For Gehrling, the situation was much worse. He'd been on fire-and-security watch at the time, and sleeping on watch was the unforgivable transgression. There was talk at first of a court-martial and hard time with a prison battalion, but he agreed instead to transfer to the leg infantry, and that was the last Dev heard of him.

  Leg infantry. That quickly became the terror, the personal bugbear of each of the recruits in Company 645. Within the Guard there were two classes of infantry. At the top were the strider forces, highly mobile, heavily armed and armored, powerful units answering to the tank units or attack helicopters of twentieth- and twenty-first-century warfare.

  Then there was the leg infantry, enlisted personnel considered unsuitable for link-jacked machinery. Most were men and women who, because of poverty or technophobia or religious conviction, had never received the interfaces that let them control full-sensory sockets. Too, the leggers had long since become a dumping ground for undesirables and untrainables from the other branches of the Guard. For a strider recruit to be sent to the leggers was considered the ultimate humiliation, a public acknowledgement that the man simply could not be trained to serve in any useful capacity on the modern battlefield.

  Unofficially the average life expectancy of a leg trooper, wearing nothing but combat armor against the deadly environment of the modern battlefield, was measured in minutes.

  Dev decided that he would have been terrified if they hadn't kept him and the other recruits so busy. It was Day Six before the enormity of what had happened to him actually struck home. That was the day that two men and three women were cut from the company for no better reason than that they were the last to complete a running ten-times circuit of the grinder. The leg infantry, Maxwell told them, might be able to find a place for them, but the warstriders needed sterner stuff. An hour later they were gone.

  Dev later learned they'd ended up as techies, but the dread of transfer to the leggers continued to hang like a shadow over the seito-recruits. The incident escalated Dev's disappointment to an impotent rage. For no better reason than a blown psych test result, his life had been rewritten by someone else. It wasn't fair!

  His survival seemed to depend on remaining unnoticed in the ranks of seito-recruits. "You might get another crack at the navy," Lieutenant Commander Fisher had said. "After you qualify as a cadet." Dev clung to those words with an unreasoning hope that bordered on desperation. Six weeks! He could endure anything for six weeks, even this. All he needed to do was follow directions and stay out of trouble.

  He would stick it out, then put in for transfer to the navy. Things couldn't get much worse than they were by Day Six.

  On Day Seven the company began simulator training, painfully simplistic, basic stuff at first for someone who'd jacked thousand-ton freighters into Orbital Dock, but quickly growing more detailed . . . and more difficult. Dev began to think he might be in his element.

  But they still had to run everywhere.

  "God!" he panted, late on the afternoon of the eighth day. They'd just finished running four kilometers, twelve times around the grinder, and he was stooped over, hands braced on knees, trying to beat down the fire consuming his lungs. Suresh Gupta panted next to him. "God," he said again. "I thought they were training us for warstriders. What does running have t'do with jacking?"

  "Quite . . . a bit," Gupta replied, catching his breath. The air was chilly, but both were coated with sweat. "We have to be ready physically before they start working on our minds."

  "I'm not sure I want them goking around with my mind." A part of Dev realized that his language had become rougher during this past week, rougher and more bitter. "Kuso, what do they expect us to do, carry the goking striders into battle on our backs?"

  "If we have to. Haven't you noticed? We're getting stronger."

  "After only a week? No way!"

  "Remember those shots on Day One?"

  Dev straightened and rubbed his left arm, which was still a bit sore. Most of the recruits still bore traces of bruises on arms and buttocks from those injections. "The antigenics, yeah. How could I forget?"

  "Some of them weren't antigenics. Meteffectors, man. They're rebuilding us. Haven't you noticed? You're putting on mass."

  The information was part of a data feed from several days earlier, but Dev somehow hadn't applied it to himself. Meteffectors, though, were the only way that HEMILCOM Training Command could hope to turn over- and underweight, understrengthed civilians into soldiers in a scant six weeks. Rather than hunting down bacteria like the antigenics, nanotechni
c metabolic effectors increased the efficiency of his metabolism, turning fat to energy and food into muscle. Since muscle tissue, gram for gram, was denser than fat, he'd put on some weight as muscle replaced fat. It was the same for the others in the company. The fat ones were slimming down, the skinny ones building up.

  "What," he said, still gulping for air. "They want us to live forever?"

  "Hardly that, Dev." Gupta's white teeth flashed against his dark skin. "Haven't you heard? Life extension's just for us Japanese."

  "Wouldn't want to live forever," Dev said. "Not if it means running around this grinder again!"

  "All right, you two scuzzbutts!" Maxwell's voice rasped across the panting, sweating mob of recruits. "If you can still work your mouths, you haven't had enough yet. You've just bought another twelve circuits for the whole company!"

  A chorus of groans rose from the yellow-clad recruits as they started to hit the track again in ragged formation. Someone punched Dev hard enough on his sore shoulder to make him curse through clenched teeth.

  Company 645, down now to twenty-five recruits, began circling the field again.

  Chapter 7

  When an army is being trained to fight, it must begin by weeding out those whose character or temperament makes them incapable of fighting.

  —The Anatomy of Courage

  Lord Moran

  mid-twentieth century

  The line of war machines worked its way up the slope. The landscape was barren and uninviting, a sameness of gravel, rock, and sand beneath a burning, featureless sky; the only terrain feature visible was the hill itself, a cone-shaped peak with the triangular silhouette of an atmosphere generator one hundred meters high, flattened at the top.

  That was where the second line of warstriders awaited the first.

  The defending line atop the hill consisted of four two-man LaG-42 Ghostriders and four RLN-90 Scoutstrider one-man recon machines, their nanofilm colors glowing a dazzling red. Opposing them were five Ghostriders and two Scoutstriders, all showing blue colors, carrying more firepower but disadvantaged by being forced to attack uphill. Each step kicked more dust into the crystal air, dust that blurred the striders' legs and clung to bare metal like mud.

  Laser light flared from the hilltop, striking a blue LaG-42. Armor splattered like water as the left weapons pack was blown away. Smoke boiled from exposed circuitry, but the Ghostrider, taking a backward step to steady itself, shrugged off the blow, then kept advancing, the massive flanges of its feet scrabbling for purchase on the loose gravel.

  "Smoke!" came the shouted command. Canisters arced from the advancing blue line, bursting on impact. Cottony blossoms of white smoke expanded in smothering clouds, blocking visibility for both sides. Lasers continued to flash and snap, visible now as dazzling traceries in the fog and attenuated by the drifting aerosol. Another blue strider was hit, but the armor on one slender leg merely glowed briefly.

  "Blue Leader to Blue Scouts!" The voice was Suresh Gupta's, pitched a bit high with excitement but otherwise steady and clear. "Break left and right! Flank 'em! Blue Ghosts, follow me, up the center!"

  The Scoutstriders, looking like squat men in bulky, headless full-armor suits standing three and a half meters tall, angled to either side through the fog, cutting across the slope to get on the enemy's flanks. The Ghostriders, over four meters tall and looking more like enormous, flightless birds with their long legs and strutting gait, moved in a ragged V straight up the hill. The defenders, unable to halt the attackers with laser fire, switched to machine guns, grenades, and rockets, fired in staccato bursts from the Kv-70 weapons packs that served as arms for the Ghostriders.

  Katya watched the battle unfold through a godview, looking down unseen from the air just above the blue formation with a gaze that penetrated fog and dust alike. "A frontal assault on a prepared position?" she asked in her mind.

  "They haven't been fed much in the way of formal tactics yet," Shosa Karl Rassmussen's voice replied. She couldn't see the training battalion commander but knew he shared her aerial viewpoint. "All we're looking for now is initiative, quick thinking, and raw guts. This is a rough simulation for both sides. No cover, poor footing, and limited weapons. Red's got some cover with the hillcrest, of course, but he's got to stay put to cover the flag. Blue's completely exposed but has room to maneuver."

  Abruptly the blue Ghostriders emerged from the drifting smoke, twenty meters below the Red line. Red immediately shifted to laser fire from the turrets mounted beneath their blunt torsos. Unguided rockets and laser-guided missiles scratched white trails across the hilltop, and the thunder of explosions drowned the squeak and clank of machinery. The thud-thud-thud of a heavy machine gun hammered away at advancing armor. Rocket grenades arced high into the sky, then fell, detonating with sharp bangs and actinic flashes of light.

  "Who's the Blue team leader?" Katya asked as a blue strider's right leg was blasted from its body. The machine toppled, its left leg clawing at the hillside as it struggled to right itself.

  "Gupta. Earth kid."

  Another blue strider took a hit, a near-miss that gouged armor from its back in a long, jagged furrow. "Looks like he's learning about frontal attacks from experience."

  But the rush had carried the Blue wedge to the crest of the hill, and now there was no advantage for either side. Smoke canisters popped, adding to the confusion. A red LaG-42 was down, both legs burned away by laser fire. Magically the color faded to steel grey, indicating that both pilots aboard had been tagged "dead" by the AI running the simulation. Smoke continued to pour from the crater that had peeled open the pilot's module like the unfolding petals of a flower.

  It was, Katya reflected, a fair simulation of combat. The entire battle existed only in the mind of the AI creating it—and in the linked brains of the twenty-five seitorecruits taking part and the dozen-odd instructors, monitors, and observers. The warstriders were a bit too clean to be mistaken for the real thing, too gleaming, too lacking in dents, nicks, grime, and patched-over hits to be believable.

  Like the landscape—too perfect, too neat, too clean. A battle in virtual reality, with none of the blood or agony.

  But the recruits were conducting themselves as though the fight were a real one, a battle to the death between two halves of Company 645.

  One of the blue RLN-90 recon Scouts, identified by a white number twelve on its upper left chest, came in from the flank. It carried a 100-megawatt laser mounted on its right arm. It fired, sending a flash of coherent light into the back of a red Scoutstrider, melting steel and duralloy and dropping the machine to its knees.

  The blue Scout panned the weapon to the right, sending bolt after bolt of laser light into the red Ghostriders. Blue and red striders were mingling now, a colorful melee, smashing at one another with rockets at point-blank range. The Scout sidestepped as a red LaG-42 opened fire with a rocket barrage, sending a trio of laser bolts snapping into the Ghostrider's torso in return.

  One hundred megawatts was enough to crack a Ghostrider's armor, but it took several hits to pierce the duralloy shell and cause any real damage. The RLN-90 fired with deadly accuracy, aiming not for the LaG's main hull, but for the joints that mounted legs and weapons pods to the hull.

  "Who's in the blue Scout?" Katya asked. "Number twelve."

  "Name's Cameron," Rassmussen said. "Another Earth kid."

  Katya remembered him well, the tall, bitter-sounding young man, one of the new batch of recruits she'd met in Fisher's office three weeks earlier. The one so determined to join the navy, whose father had been some kind of hero. She watched him maneuver with approval. The guy was good, surprisingly good for a kid in his third week of Basic.

  The Scoutstrider stepped in close, inside the reach of the Ghostrider's chin laser, and fired a quick succession of bolts into the same spot in the bigger machine's armor, eliciting a flash and a curl of black smoke from its left hip. The LaG took another step, hydraulics straining to keep it balanced as the left leg sagged. Then the jo
int gave way, pitching the twenty-five-ton combat machine nose-first into the gravel. Swiftly the RLN crouched behind the wreckage, as another red Ghostrider, aiming for the Scout, slammed four bolts into the downed LaG instead. The Scoutstrider returned fire with a cool deliberation that made Katya want to sing.

  "He looks good," she said.

  "I'm not sure he's going to make it," Rassmussen said. "He's a loner. I think he's nursing a grudge."

  "What about?"

  "Here. Scan his records."

  With half her mind, Katya absorbed the flow of data from the training command's data stores. With the rest, she continued to watch the number-twelve Scoutstrider.

  The melee on the hilltop had claimed more casualties. The second blue Scoutstrider was down, the gray color of the wreckage showing that the pilot had been declared KIA. One blue Ghostrider—Gupta's machine, battered and missing its right weapons pod—remained on its feet, squared off against two red striders almost as badly damaged as it was. The last remaining red RLN-90 struck number twelve with a burst of laser fire, and the light recon strider toppled, its torso armor gashed and torn. Another red LaG-42 went down, savaged by Gupta's hammering rocket fire. The surviving red LaG and RLN closed in on the Blue leader's mangled strider. At their backs, the red flag snapped in a nonexistent breeze.

  Katya took in Cameron's bio. She'd gone through his records once before, in Fisher's office, but she scanned them again now. BosWash . . . yeah. Unusual for a kid from one of old North America's crowded metroplexes to get the socket and link hardware that would take him off planet. Gupta was from Earth, too, she remembered, but he'd come from a province of Dai Nihon. There were advantages to being a citizen of Greater Japan, even a second-class citizen, and one of them was easier access to Japanese nanotechnology.

  She came to the notation about Admiral Cameron . . . the Admiral Cameron. So that was how a metroplex kid had gotten a nano-grown implant. And Dev Cameron's father wasn't a hero, as she'd half remembered. That tended to explain what the son was doing out here on the frontier.