Symbionts (7 page)

Searing hot air roared and snapped around Katya’s head. The ascraft’s engines spooled up, carrying it in a tight arc clear of the hilltop. The other striders were unfolding now, arms and weapons pods sliding out from beneath articulated armor panels.

Warnings flashed across
Blade’s
visuals.
Missiles incoming…

“Kurt!” she yelled over the Warlord’s ICS.

“Tracking!” the weapons tech called back. “On auto!” The Warlord’s high-velocity rotary cannon, under the direction of the strider’s onboard AI, whipped about in its mount faster than human nerve impulses could have guided it. White flame spat from the whirling barrels.

A trio of explosions slammed out of the sky as missiles detonated short of their target, but other missiles continued to arrow in from the south at Mach 5, too fast to dodge, too fast, in this rugged terrain, for the hivel cannon to kill them all. Their target, however, was not the grounded warstriders, but the tempting bulk of the ascraft, still meters above the slope and just beginning to accelerate clear of the drop zone. Hivel cannons on the Stormwind’s hull fired in automatic response to the approaching threat; more missiles detonated, but two plunged through the expanding clouds of smoke and debris to slam into the ascraft’s side. The twin concussions staggered Katya; the containment fields in the Stormwind’s fusorpack collapsed, releasing microfusion blasts that shredded the air/spacecraft and sent a fireball washing across the hell-blasted hillside, a tidal wave of searing heat and light that scoured the nanoflage from
Blade’s
upper hull.

Automatic filters built into the sensors darkened the landscape for a second, then faded, restoring Katya’s vision. Sublieutenant Green dropped the warstrider into a half crouch as bits of shrapnel sang off the dorsal armor. Burning chunks of wreckage were pelting like hail from the sky, but in seconds, Green had the Warlord in motion, charging up the last few meters of hillside toward the crest.

They’d been spotted too early, but maybe…
maybe,
Katya thought, willing it to be so, the enemy forces on the other side of the hill could still be taken by surprise. If the enemy forces thought the Stormwind had been destroyed before it could drop its payload of warstriders…

“Assassins!”
she yelled over the squad comnet. “Deploy! Deploy! Spread wide! Move it!” The second element’s Stormwind thundered in low two hundred meters to the east, spilling its cargo of four more warstriders. Through boiling streams of smoke, she saw Hagan’s Ghostrider,
Mission Link,
touching down, followed by Jacobsen’s lean, long-legged Stormstrider and a pair of Scoutstriders.

Gravel sprayed from beneath the Warlord’s feet as it crested the hill. Beyond, sheltered in a bowl-shaped valley, was the enemy artillery park, rank upon bristling rank of track- and leg-mounted field artillery, squat-bodied Calliopedes and Basilisks and chunky-bodied Gorgons, off-line and, for the moment, unmanned. Katya could see crew personnel in red running among their machines or clambering into open hatches. The camouflaged domes of a major encampment were clustered on the far side of the valley.

And warstriders. Damn!
Those
hadn’t appeared on the satellite scans, at least a full platoon of medium to heavy warstriders, deployed in a defensive perimeter about the powered-down arties. Katya knew in that moment that she’d just bitten off a hell of a lot more than she could chew.

She could still hear Vic Hagan arguing with her, just hours ago. “Damn it, Colonel, regimental commanders do
not
go on combat drops,” he’d bellowed. “And they damn sure don’t go behind enemy lines in squad-strength deployments!”

She’d had reasons to make the deployment, however, reasons that she didn’t particularly want to discuss with her regimental number two. She was going to pay for her stubbornness now, she knew.

But it was going to be worth it!

“Assassins, this is Assassin Leader!” she called. “Ignore the striders. We’re here to cripple the arties if we can. Pour it on!”

Laser and missile fire volleyed from the long crest above the valley, slashing into the parked combat machines. Katya had decided that morning, judging from the satellite imagery, that the equipment sequestered in the shadow of Hill 232 was the enemy’s primary strategic reserve. Smash that, and his forward lines would have no support when the main attack went down in another… make it thirty-five minutes. His front line was already desperately thin; one good push and it ought to crumble, so long as there was no rear echelon mobile artillery to plug the gaps or lay down long-range fire on the advancing strider assault groups.

As unit commander, Katya was supposed to stay off-line from her Warlord’s control and weapons systems. Fighting the machine was what Kurt and Ryan were aboard for. Instead, Katya concentrated on the cascade of data and AI-generated graphics moving across her visual display. It was hard to resist the temptation to take over part of the RS-64’s weaponry, though. Its main armament, massive charged particle guns mounted to left and right like blocky, thick-muscled arms, discharged in flaring blasts of raw current, punching through the dorsal armor of a Qu-19E Calliopede with a blast that hurled bits and pieces of its internal mechanism high into the air. Lightning forked and crackled from the stricken vehicle to the ground as excess charge bled away; debris rained from the sky as oily black smoke boiled overhead. The Warlord’s other weapons were in action too, grenades and explosive chaingun rounds from the ventral Mark III weapons pod, 50-MW pulses of energy from the stubby, twin lasers mounted to either side of the fuselage. Striker missiles shrieked from the dorsal Y-rack, arrowing into the hellfire chaos of the valley in a pair of blindly slashing salvos.

The other striders of the Assassin strike team kept up a slamming, devastating barrage. Two more mobile artillery pieces exploded into flame. An instant later, a pile of 112-mm artillery rockets stacked for loading aboard a line of vehicles detonated in a rippling chain of blasts that swept across the valley, toppling men and warstriders alike, scattering them like ninepins.

Incoming laser fire struck the rocks five meters to Katya’s left. Moisture flashed to steam and the rocks exploded; gravel shrieked and rattled off the Warlord’s armored flank. The enemy warstriders, taken by surprise, were starting to move toward the Assassins’ positions now, their return fire heavy, and growing heavier. Sebree’s RLN-90 Scoutstrider staggered under a triplet of direct hits, 90-mm high-explosive rockets spearing squarely into its pilot’s module, shearing off one arm and the upper half of the machine’s fuselage and leaving the rest standing, legs frozen, upper hull peeled open like a fire-blackened tin can. Kilroy’s Manta took a high-powered laser hit on the ventral surface of the flattened saucer shape of its main hull. Duralloy flared with white heat; blackened, twisted wiring and severed power conduits dangled from the gaping wound, a smoking, oil-bleeding disembowelment.

But the Assassins held their ground, lowering their fuselages to take advantage of the cover provided by height and the rugged ground, slamming round after round into the packed and unmoving targets below at a range of less than a hundred meters. As the destruction continued, the valley began filling with dense, white smoke, partly from the savage detonations of the Assassins’ barrage, partly from the shrouding smoke screens generated by enemy striders both to cloak their movement and to attenuate the savage laser fire snapping down from the crest of the hill.

Katya estimated that at least half of the mobile artillery walkers and vehicles had been destroyed outright or so badly crippled they would never participate in the coming battle.

A missile detonated against her right shoulder, jolting her hard. There was no pain, but she did feel as though someone had landed a solid blow on her arm, and alerts began scrolling down the right side of her visual display, warning of a short-circuiting power couple, damaged kinesthetic relays, and a failure in
Assassin’s Blade’s
right CPG targeting system. The strider was moving and firing, so both Kurt and Ryan were still on-line; Katya implemented the primary damage control sequence, then checked the lasercom link with the surviving Assassins. Two dead, so far, three badly damaged, including the
Blade.

Radar showed a solid return less than thirty meters ahead, advancing up the slope toward Katya’s right. She shifted to infrared, adjusting the wavelength reception until haze coalesced into the glowing image of a warstrider.

She recognized that machine, a KR-200 Battlewraith, a fifty-four-ton monster sporting a left-side electron cannon and a heavy assault arsenal of lasers, missiles, and short-range cannon firing explosive shells. More to the point, she recognized that specific machine, for it had a General Command module strapped to its dorsal hull, a GC modification identical to the one mounted on her own Warlord. It was moving swiftly upslope, angling toward Hagan’s warstrider element to the east.

“Kurt! Ryan!” she called over the ICS circuit. “I’ve got control!”

A mental code switched command of the Warlord to her cephlinkage, leaving Green and Allen interested spectators. Suddenly, Katya was occupying the warstrider’s body as though it were her own; her right arm was out of action, but she could bring up her left, dragging the targeting cursor blinking on her display up and onto the Battlewraith’s upper hull. The target was closer now, less than twenty meters, and apparently still unaware of the
Assassin’s Blade
crouched among the boulders on the hilltop. A
push
with her mind, and the charged particle bolt lanced through smoky air, striking dead on target with a flash and a crack of thunder.

Got you, Travis Sinclair!
she thought with savage satisfaction. Another push sent the last of the Warlord’s M-21 rockets slamming into the Battlewraith’s side.
You goking bastard…

The Battlewraith staggered back a step, then turned, its electron cannon sweeping up, seeking a target. Katya was already in motion, however, sprinting those last twenty meters in an all-out charge downhill, stepping beneath the wicked-looking muzzle of the EPC, slamming against unyielding armor with the deadweight of her damaged right arm/CPG mount.

The collision loosed a savage thunder and jolted Katya so hard that her data feed momentarily winked out. When it switched on again, her right arm was on the ground, torn away by the impact, while her foe’s Battlewraith, caught off-balance, was rolling back down the hill, an avalanche of black duralloy. She followed…

… and caught a 100-MW laser burst squarely on the Warlord’s forward glacis, a slashing attack that peeled back armor and severed her primary actuator links. She felt her legs go numb, but she was able to shift the strider’s command function back to Ryan, hoping that it was her linkage that had been damaged, not his. “C’mon, Ryan,” she cried into the ICS. The Wraith was getting up again, staggering erect. Sinclair’s machine was terribly damaged, but still more than a match for the smaller, lighter Warlord. “Move! Move!”

A salvo of M-21 rockets slammed into the RS-64’s already battered glacis. Explosions tore through the heart of
Assassin’s Blade,
and Katya felt her linkage slipping.…

Katya found herself blinking at the smooth, gray metal of a link module’s overhead. Numb with the aftereffects of battle lust, it took her a moment to remember where she was… what she was doing.

Today’s engagement had been a full-realism sim managed by an entire orchestra of AIs to allow thousands of striderjacks and technicians to experience the joint virtual reality of a full-scale war. Katya’s new unit, the 1st Confederation Rangers, had been up against warstriders jacked by the Confederation’s staff command and naval contingent.

She’d not really expected the exchange to become so…
personal.

“Colonel?”

Turning her head, she saw Allen’s face peering into the module’s opening at her. Ryan Green stood just behind him. “Hi, Kurt, Ryan. I guess we lost, huh?”

“Something like that,” Allen said. “You okay?”

Deftly, she unplugged herself from the three feeds jacked into her temporal and cervical sockets. Her hair, short on the sides and neck to keep it clear of her hardware, was longer on top and in front and had plastered itself across her head. She ran her fingers through it, dragging it off her face.

“Not bad, considering I just took a hundred megs through my belly.” Unstrapping herself from the link module, she swung long legs off the padded couch, stooped to get through the opening, and stood up on the gleaming white deck outside. Dozens of other link modules surrounded her, some occupied, most empty.

“Colonel Alessandro?”

Turning, she saw the gray-uniformed figure of one of the games monitors, standing behind her with a compad in her hand. “That’s me.”

“You’re dead, Colonel. You and both of your crew members.”

“So I gathered.” Her eyes narrowed. “Do you have an active link with the Rogue? How about my opponent in that last exchange?”

The technician glanced down at her pad, palming the interface to open a new feed. “According to the battlesim AI,” she said, reading the screen, “you inflicted sixty percent damage on the Battlewraith you attacked. One of its crew members was killed, one more badly hurt. The third was able to return fire. His missile barrage touched off your Warlord’s fusorpack.”

“The one I killed. Who was he?”

The technician checked her pad again. “The
simulated
casualty was General Sinclair himself. But you must have known that, Colonel. Your initial shot was quite accurate.”

“Hey, if we’re dead, when’s the funeral service?” Ryan wanted to know. “I’d like to attend.”

“That may depend on my court-martial,” Katya said. She meant it as a joke, but she couldn’t help wondering what was going to come of her actions this morning. She’d broken several regulations in today’s full-combat simulation, as well as showing some rather impetuous recklessness. There was bound to be some fallout.