Authors: William H. Keith
Turning slowly, she walked that twin stream of stuttering, full-auto death across the line of Imperial Marines, cutting them down like a scythe slashing down wheat. Her external mikes picked their screams, masked by the roar of heavy weapons fire. A rocket-propelled grenade streaked low across the field, slammed into her left leg, and glanced off without exploding. She flicked left and chopped down the gunner, almost regretting it; the guy’s antiarmor round hadn’t had time to arm itself, so close was his target. His mistake cost him his life.
But she couldn’t concentrate on the marines, not now. The Katana was already struggling back to its feet. Bringing a fallen warstrider upright after it had been knocked down was always tricky, requiring the pilot’s full concentration. Katya pivoted hard, then sent the last of her rockets screaming into the rising machine. Explosions flashed across the KY-1001’s hull. The concussion popped an access hatch in a puff of smoke, exposing the colorful bundles of circuit wiring and parahydraulic tubing stuffed beneath the stricken machine’s skin. Broken wiring sparked and smoked.
Lipinski still had control of the Ghostrider’s main gun, but Katya could show him where she wanted him to shoot.
“Targeting!” she yelled, and in her mind’s eye a bright red set of brackets closed on the gaping, sparking wound, which slashed across the Katana’s dorsal hull centimeters from the blister housing one of its two pilots. “Hit him. Georg!”
The laser fired, the hundredth-second pulse flashing into the open panel with a sputtering eruption of molten insulation and circuitry. Warnings flashed across her visual display. “We’re gonna lose the laser!” Lipinski yelled.
Then the laser circuit went dead as the core overheated and the cooling jacket ruptured. Steam clouds enveloped the Ghostrider in white mist as coolant gushed past melted seals and boiled into the open air.
She shut down the circuit and kept advancing. On the stricken Katana, lightning arced and snapped between the smoking crater in its hull and the ground, and then Katya was hurling the yammering fury of her machine guns at that pried-open chink in the bigger machine’s armor. She was so close now to the fallen hulk that shrapnel pinged and ricocheted off her own hull. The enemy strider started to rise once more, and then an internal explosion savaged the Katana, slamming it down, tearing a twin-88 from the side of the fuselage and peeling back a meter-wide strip of duralloy like cardboard.
Shifting, she turned back to face the Tachi, which was hurt but not yet out of the fight. Her rocket volley and Rudi’s full-auto cannon barrage had knocked the Tachi back against the side of the monorail and disabled its right leg, but it was still pumping laser fire into Braun’s Rhino from an unsteady, leg-bent crouch. The four-legged constructor was standing motionless now, unable to burn in the oxygen-poor air, but with black smoke pouring from its gashed-open hull.
Katya advanced, pounding at the Tachi. She had no weapons left now save for her machine guns, and the ammo loads on those were rapidly dwindling toward zero as she kept hammering round after stuttering round into the chaos of fallen striders and struggling men before her. Dust and smoke gouted from her exploding rounds, and bits of wreckage were flung into the sky from strikes against the monorail’s hull. The surviving marines were pulling back now, snapping off shots from their laser rifles that flashed ineffectually from Katya’s armor, scattering back into the forest, twisting and dying and falling as Katya’s heavy machine guns swept through their ranks. Smoke from the smoldering striders hung like a blanket across the battlefield.
Unstoppable, Katya strode forward, driven now by battle lust. She was a giant on the battlefield, a steel-and-duralloy Valkyrie striding forward in wreathed smoke and flame, death hammering from her weaponry pods. The Tachi’s damaged laser turret whined through ninety degrees, taking aim…
Then a thundering pulse of explosions shredded the Tachi’s armor, smashed aside the laser turret in a tangled ruin, then nearly tore the Tachi’s body in half. Lee Chung had arrived from the switch house, his curiously anthropoid RLN-90 Scoutstrider hammering away at the Tachi with a stream of high-explosive shells.
The battle ended with stark abruptness; according to Katya’s internal clock, eighteen point two seconds had elapsed from first shot to last.
“Lee!” she called. “Where’s Simone?”
“Still in the switch house, Captain.”
“Stay with her. I don’t want those marines circling back and finding her alone. Darcy! Are you okay?”
“Still here, Captain,” Darcy’s voice replied. “Power’s down thirty percent but I’m still moving.”
“You’ve got overwatch,” she told him. “Watch that those Impie leggers don’t try a counterattack.”
“Yes, sir.” There was no resentment, no hesitation in his voice now.
“Lipinski, unbutton and come with me.”
She coded the shutdown sequence for the Ghostrider, then pulled her hand from the palm interface. She woke up inside her link pod, a close, dark, chokingly hot tube in a claustrophobic darkness relieved only by a small, wan lighting strip. Removing her cephlink helmet and the connections to her bodysuit, she pulled on a breather mask and life support pack, then donned a pair of gloves that sealed themselves against her cuffs. She slapped a release and the Ghostrider’s dorsal hatch whined open. Releasing an access ladder, she climbed to the smoke-clotted rail cut. Lipinski, breathing hard behind his mask, joined her a moment later.
She unholstered her sidearm, a ProTech M-263 rocket pistol, and touched Lipinski’s shoulder. “Stay with me,” she told him. “We’ll check Rudi’s strider first.”
The Lokan striderjack hadn’t had a chance. His light machine was gutted, his link pod torn open by the deadly kiss of a plasma bolt. The pod’s interior was splashed with blood and shredded, meaty fragments, very little of it recognizable as human.
Behind her, she heard Lipinski’s gasp of recognition, followed by the fumbled sounds of him removing his mask before he vomited explosively. Katya struggled to contain her own rising gore. She’d seen death as violent and as bloody, but it was always a thousand times worse when the broken wreckage was what remained of someone you’d known.
Ghosts, Chris Kingfield and Mitch Dawson and other men and women she’d known through too many years, moaned and whimpered in her ears.
“C’mon,” she said roughly. “Get that mask back on.”
Lipinski, already pale, tried to draw a shuddering, gasping breath and nearly strangled on the thin, CO
2
-heavy air. His eyes bulged in his face.
“Now!” Katya barked, and with trembling hands he pulled the mask back on. She reached over and pressed the feed rate control on his chest pack, giving him an extra kick of oxygen to purge his lungs. CO
2
poisoning could be an insidious thing, unfelt and unsuspected until the victim keeled over unconscious.
He took several deep, shuddering breaths, then nodded, eyes blinking at her against the harsh light.
“Your gun,” she reminded him. “We have to check the train.”
She led him across the rocky clearing, ducking under one maglev rail and approaching the second, where the two monorail cars lay silent behind the scattered heaps of dead Imperials and the smoking ruin of two warstriders. The Katana, she saw, had been wrecked as badly as the Swiftstrider, with both linkage pods slashed open. The headless and armless torso of one of the pilots hung upside down from a jagged finger of hull metal, still draining into the dust. The black, scorch-streaked fuselage was splashed with blood.
With difficulty, Katya and Lipinski picked their way past the debris and heaped bodies. Some of those men, she noticed with sick horror, were still alive, moving legs and arms in nightmare slow motion.
She wanted to help, but there was nothing to be done for them now. Her unit was too small, their numbers too few, to even think about stopping to render first aid. The suits of most of the wounded had been breached; anoxia and the carbon dioxide in the air would claim them in minutes.
Scrambling up crumpled metal, Katya peered into the second car’s interior, ready to duck back if some surviving marines were waiting for her approach. The monorail car was empty. It was dark inside, though sunlight spilled through the open loading door and painted the sharply canted floor with a dazzling slash of white. By the reflected glare. Katya could see the large horizontal braces that had been used to transport the two warstriders. Judging by the speed of their reaction, though, the striders must have been powered up and battle-ready, their pilots already sealed in and linked. Seats lined the car’s walls, all empty now. There were weapons lockers tumbled in a pile on the floor, open and empty, and several crates of ammo and weapon power packs. Two armored bodies, marines who’d tumbled back into the open car after being hit, sprawled unmoving at the angle of floor and wall.
There was nothing that might be the prize they sought.
“Forward,” she said, gesturing with her pistol. The second car was joined to the first by sliding doors. The first door opened smoothly; the second ratcheted halfway open and then hung up in its twisted frame, but Katya was able to turn sideways and squeeze through. The forward car was smoke-filled and dark, dark enough that she had to switch on the light mounted on her belt. There were more dead marines here—unarmored men who’d died when cannon fire and lasers had slashed open the vehicle—and the hull-crumpling wreck had slammed men, seats, and cargo into a tangled pile at the forward end of the compartment.
Lipinski found what they were looking for after nearly five minutes of desperate searching, a large safe with a palm ’face reader to open it.
The owner of the interface that would have opened that safe was dead. Katya opened it the hard way, burning through the locking mechanism cover with her hand laser, then twisting together a pair of wires inside. A circuit completed and the door hissed open.
Inside was a metal box, as long as her forearm and twenty centimeters deep. A simple touch-lock opened to her thumb.
Within the box was a comel.
She stared at the prize, heart quickening. It was still alive, a rippling, translucent slug perhaps the size of a basketball. She hoped it would stay alive in Eridu’s atmosphere… but she knew from experience that the bioengineered creatures were uncannily tough, able to survive in a broad range of atmospheres and conditions. Lipinski produced an empty knapsack of heavy plastic-weave cloth, and she sealed the box and packed it away.
“Company coming, Captain.” It was Simone’s voice, speaking over the radio compatch behind her left ear. “Aircraft, from Babel.”
The marines would have radioed for help when the first shots had been fired. Reinforcements would have been dispatched at once.
“On our way out,” she replied. “Darcy! Start setting the charges!”
“Already done, Captain. Just give the word.”
“Let us get clear first.”
Katya and Lipinski scrambled clear of the wreckage and back into Marduk’s burning daylight. Crossing to the waiting Ghostrider, they swarmed up the access ladder, wiggled back into their pods, and sealed themselves in. Moments later, Katya was linked in again, the daylight outside now dimmed to human levels by the strider’s AI. Data cascading across her visual display identified three incoming aircraft as probable Hachi fliers.
Hachis—the name was Nihongo for “Wasp”—were swift and deadly air-to-ground killers, ascraft designed to provide close air support for infantry. They were coming in low and fast, with an ETA of less than three minutes.
“Into the jungle,” Katya ordered. “Simone, you climb in with Chung. It’ll be a tight fit, I’m afraid.”
They waited while Dagousset climbed aboard the Scout-strider and wriggled legs-first into the open hatch. Katya knew what it was like riding that way, squeezed body-against-body in near-total blackness, and she sympathized. Simone would have an uncomfortable ride back to base.
Hatches sealed again, the three warstriders turned from the wreckage and with swiftly scissoring strides plunged back into the jungle. It was urgent that they get well clear of the battlefield fast. The surviving Imperial Marines might still have strider-busting shoulder weapons; worse still, those Hachis had IR sensors that would be able to pick up a warstrider’s heat through the forest canopy. It wouldn’t take long, however, for the vastness of the jungle to swallow them up. The enemy fliers would have their figurative hands full tracking the scattered marines.
Behind them, a thunderous blast echoed off the mountains to the south, followed swiftly by a second, a third, a fourth. Charges placed by Darcy one by one disintegrated the wrecked striders. If the rebels couldn’t use them for spares, then neither would the Imperials.
Katya regretted not being able to take the time to give the wreckage a more thorough search. They’d hoped to be able to load Braun’s Rhino with captured weapons, but the four-legged walker was still smoking furiously, its hull utterly charred and gutted. As they left, Lee had stooped and retrieved one squad support plasma gun from among the Impie bodies, and he carried it now like a handgun in his strider’s massive, armored fist; that SSPG and the comel would be their only prizes this day.
That sharp skirmish, less than twenty seconds in duration, had been a victory… but it was a victory with a high price. Two of the Freestriders’ nine striders had been destroyed—twenty-two percent of its entire mechanized strength. Two men had died… one of them Rudi Carlsson, whom Katya had known since their campaign on Loki. In exchange, they’d destroyed two of the Empire’s inexhaustible supply of warstriders, killed perhaps twenty marines, and scattered another ten or fifteen into the jungle.
The rebellion could not afford to trade the Empire and the Hegemony strider for strider, not even if the exchange was Rhinos for Katanas. Katya thought about the comel, tucked away beside her inside the pod, and wondered if the damned thing was going to be worth it.
Chapter 14
Is a Xenophobe intelligent? Or a Barnard’s sky island? Or a comel? What about dolphins, gorillas, elephants, or the other fabulous beasts of Terra’s recent past that pique our curiosity with largely anecdotal records of their use of language, memory, or tools? I think the question we must set for ourselves is not whether a given life form is intelligent, but whether or not that intelligence takes a form that we conceited and self-centered humans can comprehend.