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  WARSTRIDER

  SYMBIONTS — 04

  WILLIAM H. KEITH, JR.

  AVON BOOKS • NEW YORK

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  WARSTRIDER: SYMBIONTS is an original publication of Avon Books. This work has never before appeared in book form. This work is a novel. Any similarity to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

  AVON BOOKS

  A division of

  The Hearst Corporation

  1350 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, New York 10019

  Copyright © 1995 by William H. Keith, Jr.

  Cover art by Dorian Vallejo

  Published by arrangement with the author

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 94-96361

  ISBN: 0-380-77592-1

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. For information address The Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency, 548 Broadway, #5E, New York, New York 10012.

  First AvoNova Printing: April 1995

  AVONOVA TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES. MARCA REGISTRADA. HECHO EN U.S.A.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  RA 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Epilogue

  TERMINOLOGY AND GLOSSARY

  Japanese Words and Phrases

  Prologue

  It was early morning and the tiny, arc-brilliant disk of Alya A was just rising above the mountains to the east, setting golden clouds aflame in a silver-and-violet glare that touched the domes and upthrust commo towers of the Imperial base with white flame. A storm the night before had left puddles of highly acidic rainwater steaming on the pavement. That once-smooth surface was going to need replacement soon; the elements on the world called ShraRish were hard on structures and materials fabricated by Man.

  Inside the perimeter fence that surrounded the human base, a warstrider stood watch, an Imperial KY-1001 Katana, five and a half meters tall and massing thirty tons, its jet black, armored hull bristling with articulated lasers and missile pods. Servos whined as one great, flanged foot lifted clear of the pavement, then set down again with a heavy thud, a three-meter step. External sensors were fully deployed, scanning in a complete circle around the lumbering machine.

  Shosa Shigetaro Tsuyama had been on duty that morning since the end of the first watch. His number two aboard the two-slotter Katana was Chu-i Yoshikata Sanada, jacked into the strider’s right-side pod. At the moment, Sanada had control of the Katana’s main gun, the big, blunt 150-MW laser in its universal mount set beneath the strider’s flattened, aircraftlike hull, while Tsuyama had reserved piloting functions and the secondary weapons to himself. Briefly, he halted the Katana’s pacing and focused his main sensor array toward the sunrise.

  Linked through the web of nano-grown threads riding in and over the folds of his cerebral cortex, jacked into the Katana’s artificial intelligence through feeds plugged into sockets behind each ear and at the base of his neck, Tsuyama was for the moment completely unaware of his flesh-and-blood body, tucked away within its coffinlike command slot inside the warstrider’s hull. As far as he was concerned, he was the warstrider, the big combat machine’s precise and graceful movements guided directly by his brain’s neural impulses, which were rerouted through his cephlink and the Katana’s AI before they reached his spinal column.

  The sun climbed slowly higher, clearing the mountains and brightening in his vision until the automatic filters in his optics cut in. Beyond the blasted patch of naked ground staked out by the electrified perimeter fence, the ground cover, ruffled clumps of gold and yellow, began its writhing dance.

  Sugoi, he thought. The Nihongo word could mean mar­velous or wonderful, but the taste he gave it now in his mind carried the connotation of weird, even ghastly. Tsuyama longed for a decent world, one where a man could breathe the air and where the plants didn’t crawl, where there were colonist girls to jack with and where the native population didn’t look like some horrid mixing of eyeless monstrosities best left in the blackness of the ocean depths.

  With an inward sigh, he checked the time. Another two hours to go. Warstrider sentry duty here, he decided, was a complete waste of time. The security watch behind the perimeter fence could just as easily have been left to robots or to the automated laser cannons in their teleoperated turrets. The DalRiss were harmless, and everyone knew that the Xenophobe on ShraRish was dead.

  Everyone.

  “Shosasan?” his number two said over the strider’s inter­com. “Are they sure the Xenophobe here is dead?”

  The sublieutenant might have been echoing Tsuyama’s own thoughts.

  “Certainly, Sanadasan. The creature is no more. Otherwise it would have eaten us in the night, neh?”

  Things weren’t quite that simple, of course. During the past half century, the life-form originally labeled “Xenophobes” had been encountered on half a dozen inhabited worlds of the Shichiju. Their seemingly irrational attacks on human colonies, the mass murders of entire populations on planets like Herakles and Lung Chi, were assumed to be the result of some xeno­phobic twist in their psychologies, hence their name. Contact, when it was made at last, had demonstrated that the Xenos—renamed “Nagas” after the pacific serpent deities of Hindu mythology—had not even been aware of humans as intelligent individuals. Indeed, their introspective and strangely inverted worldview had kept each world-Naga from realizing that there was any intelligence, any life in its entire inside-out universe of Rock and not-Rock other than itself.

  The DalRiss also had an odd way of looking at things, though their worldview didn’t seem so alien to Tsuyama as did that of the Naga. They, at least, possessed a technology of sorts, and cities, and starcraft… though they seemed to have developed that technology along almost entirely biologi­cal lines, breeding their machines rather than manufacturing them.

  “Shosasan!” Sanada sounded worried.

  “What is it, Sanadasan?”

  “I… I think something is moving out there.”

  “Where?”

  “At zero-eight-five degrees. Just outside the fence.”

  Almost directly into the rising sun. Tsuyama squinted against the glare, dazzling even through his stopped-down optics. Briefly, he shifted to radar, then to ladar ranging, and finally to infrared, heavily filtered. “I see nothing but the city,” he told Sanada, interpreting the radar and laser returns as DalRiss buildings. The alien city, if that was what that strange clumping of organic forms really was, lay just beyond the perimeter fence to t
he east.

  “Something is moving there! I’m sure of it!”

  “Kuso! Everything on this accursed planet moves!” Motion sensors here were all but useless, fooled by the peculiar­ly twitching plant life. Even the DalRiss buildings—if you could call them that—could move at times. Tsuyama had seen one once, slowly gliding into the nearby city like an enormous slug.

  The DalRiss moving about? Possible. Even probable, though the aliens, like most of the rest of the life on this star-baked hothouse of a world, got much of their energy directly from sunlight and rarely stirred until later in the day. Certainly the Rebellion posed no threat, this far from the Shichiju. Or so he and Sanada had been repeatedly told.…

  Still, Tsuyama was fully on his guard now. While the Rebel­lion that was tearing the Terran Hegemony apart was a long, long way from ShraRish, he’d still heard plenty of rumors brought in by the shipjackers aboard freighters and escorts that continually came and went between the Shichiju and the twin Alyan suns. According to some stories, the rebels and their so-called Confederation had won a battle against Imperial forces on a planet called Eridu… and during the bat­tle the Eriduan Naga had appeared from underground, attack­ing Imperial forces as though it had allied itself with the enemy. Even stranger things were rumored to have happened in a space battle a few months ago in the Heraklean system. The cargo jacker who’d whispered that story to Tsuyama had insisted that an Imperial Ryu-class carrier had been destroyed. Ridiculous, obviously… and yet the rumors, as they so often seemed to, were taking on a greater and greater life of their own.

  A rebel treaty with aliens? No one seriously believed that creatures as alien as the Naga or the DalRiss could understand the intricacies of human politics… or care enough about them to ally themselves with one side or the other. But here, in this harshly alien setting, it was possible to imagine almost anything.…

  An alarm shrilled in Tsuyama’s mind, a harsh ululation relayed through the Base Military Command Center. Warnings scrolled down the right side of his visual field; something… something big was coming through the fence.

  Tsuyama urged the Katana into a lumbering run, thumping across the uneven pavement to take the target, whatever it was, out from between the strider and the rising sun. “Shiro Hana! Shiro Hana!” sounded over his communications link, the code name for his patrol. “Fence breach, section two-one! What do you see?”

  It looked like one of the bizarre, living DalRiss buildings, tangled in the fence, but Tsuyama wasn’t sure enough of what he was seeing to want to report it. The fence, eight meters tall, was a crisscrossed weave of conductive ferrofilament, each line thread-slender but with a superconducting core that charged the entire structure with high-amperage current. The… the building, if that was what it was, had blundered into the fence forty meters from the nearest gatehouse, snapping the lower portion of the mesh in a crackling haze of sparks and lightning.

  DalRiss buildings—when they were stationary, at least—had always reminded Tsuyama of enormous gourds or sum­mer squash, shiny, smooth-surfaced, organic shapes eight or ten meters long and perhaps half that in diameter. Moving, they appeared more worm- or sluglike, crawling along with slow-motion contractions of their bellies that could propel them at a good half kilometer per hour or so across level ground.

  The front end of the one on the fence gaped like a distended, open mouth; less identifiable growths, like great blisters or air sacs, were scattered randomly across its back. Ancestors! Was the thing sick?

  It was still twitching as the lightning played across it, but surely it must be dead by now, the body convulsing with the arcing current. But another DalRiss construct was press­ing up close by… and beyond that another… and anoth­er…

  “Command Center!” he called. “This is Shiro Hana! It… it looks like DalRiss buildings on the move. Gods! The whole city is moving! Coming this way!”

  “Muri-yo!” Ops Command snapped back. “That’s impos­sible!”

  “It’s true! I see ten… twelve of those building-creatures! They’re smashing through the fence!”

  With a final crackle of electricity, a twenty-meter section of the fence went down. Three of the DalRiss buildings lay partway into the compound, motionless now, but the others were still coming, sliding over the dead bodies of their fellows like enormous, shell-less, cave-mouthed snails.

  From his new vantage point, Tsuyama could see that hun­dreds of the huge, slow gourd creatures, the entire DalRiss city, were moving now, all traveling in the same direction. The place where the city had rested was almost deserted, a barren and rugged expanse of rock so pocked with holes it looked like a granite sponge.

  “All units! All units!” sounded over the comlink. “Code Priority One. Weapons release!”

  From behind Tsuyama and to his right, a turret rotated, tracking, then fired, the laser pulse superheating dust and air in a dazzling streak of blue light accompanied by a thunderclap. A massive, wet chunk of one of the moving gourds spun through the air, but the thing kept coming.

  “Fire, Chuisan!” Tsuyama yelled over the strider’s ICS. “Open fire!” He loosed a salvo of M-21 rockets, sending them slashing into the tangle in the perimeter breach on trails of fire. Sanada triggered the main laser an instant later, and in seconds the advancing wall of DalRiss constructs was masked by a churning cloud of smoke and steam.

  Other parts of the fence were going down now, despite the barrage of laser fire and missiles from the base defenses. It was as though the entire alien city had suddenly decided to launch an unprovoked attack against the Imperials on ShraRish.

  “Fire!” Tsuyama yelled, his cephlinked voice shrill with growing panic. “Fire! Fire!…”

  Chapter 1

  It was Dai Nihon that exploited Man’s first few, tentative steps into space from Earth’s cradle, Dai Nihon that built the first orbital factories and Lunar mines, Dai Ni­hon that developed the first Quantum Power Taps, sub­sequently making possible the miracle of entering the Kamisama no Taiyo, the Godsea that gave Man the stars.

  How strange, then, that Dai Ninon’s children through­out the Shichiju grow restless, when Greater Japan remains the fountainhead of technological innovation. Or perhaps it is not so strange after all. Children often grow impatient with the wisdom of their elders and need to be reminded of their on, their moral and devotional obligations to parents and Emperor.

  —Man and the Stars: A History of Technology

  Ieyasu Sutsumi

  C.E. 2531

  Falling through star-scattered night, the Confederation destroy­er Eagle had already matched course with the two targets. White plasma tinged with violet glowed in the throats of her aft thrusters, then faded. Eagle would be within visual range of her prey within minutes.

  Dev Cameron was linked into the destroyer’s tactical pro­gram. His body lay comatose within one of the ship’s com­mand link modules, but through the metallic traceries of the cephlink, his awareness was centered within the virtual reality of Eagle’s combat direction center. In his mind’s eye, he stood with the ship’s senior bridge officers, as glowing paths traced themselves in the air above a 3-D projector.

  Voices murmured at the edge of awareness, spills from other channels, reminders that he was part of a network of hundreds of people working the ship. Eagle’s AI would see that he heard those conversations he needed to hear. Printed data scrolled past his awareness as well, words and figures overlaying the edge of his vision describing range, approach vectors and velocity, and the design and weaponry of the two ships ahead. Most of the information was being relayed to Eagle’s CDC from a small fleet of remotes, meter-long probes directed by ViRcom-linked pilots aboard the destroyer, fanning out ahead of the ship, and now closing to within a few hundred kilometers of the targets.

  His first guess had been correct. The Imperial ships were a freighter and an escort. Though details were tough to glean at this distance, Eagle’s AI estimated an eighty percent chance that the freighter was a Type IV, grossing at le
ast forty-five thousand tons, with an even higher probability that the escort was a Chitose-class corvette. They were inbound toward New America; it had been their bad luck to emerge from K-T space within half a million kilometers of where Eagle had been lurking, well beyond the immediate response radius of any of the Imperial ships orbiting the planet.

  “They’ve detected us, Captain,” Lieutenant Commander Kelly Grier reported. She was Eagle’s bridge scan officer and was receiving data feeds from twenty tech stations and several remotes. “The corvette has gone end-for-end and is decelerating, putting itself between us and the freighter.”

  “I see it,” Dev replied, watching the symbols shift on the 3-D display. “He’s going to fight. Weapons!”

  “Ready to fire,” Lieutenant Commander Tomid Messier, Eagle’s senior weapons officer, snapped back. “In missile range in thirty seconds.”

  “I want a single Starhawk,” Dev told him. “Canister war­head, and I want a cripple, not a kill. Put your best operator on it.”

  “I’ll take the bird in myself, Skipper.”

  “Grier? How long do we have to make a clean getaway?”

  Dev glimpsed a flicker of alternate projected courses and situations in front of the sensor officer’s slender, blond-headed analogue, sensed rather than heard the rustle of parallel compu­tations through her linkage. “Twenty-eight minutes, Captain. If we’re not aboard by then, there are at least two Impie destroyers at New America that would be able to intercept us on the way out, no matter what evasive action we took.”

  “Not very long. We’re going to have to hustle, people. Engineering!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Acceleration to four Gs.”

  “Four Gs, aye, aye, Captain.”

  “That’ll make docking a problem,” Eagle’s executive offic­er observed. Her name was Lisa Canady, and she was a full commander only recently transferred to Eagle from the Con­federation Yards at Rainbow. “We’re going to have a hell of a time matching velocities. Especially with the corvette.”