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  “I doubt that you can imagine what such an addiction is like,” Sutsumi said. “Certainly you want to experience the feeling of power again. But you control that desire.”

  “Maybe.So far, maybe. Sometimes I wonder if I’m losing it.”

  “Tell me, Devsan. Do you wish to repeat the experience with the Naga?”

  Lightning! A bolt of raw light, radiating far into the ultra-violet, as mass shredded air, hurtling skyward…

  “Huh? No way! Believe me, I thought about it and no. I didn’t want to be a god, throwing mountains and knowing I could kill those people in orbit just by flexing my will, no. But I’m afraid that what I felt then is, well, spilling into what I feel when I jack a starship. Or take people into combat.” He held his hands before him, then slowly flexed them into twin fists. “My God, the power…”

  Sutsumi’s image was silent for a long time, and Dev wondered what was going on. An AI program could “think,” if that was the right word, far faster than any human, considering thousands, even millions of possibilities in fractions of a second. The delay might be meant to reassure Dev that his problem was receiving careful consideration.

  But more likely, the problem had no solution. Like any other citizen of the Frontier, Dev was going to have to come to grips with it himself, without help from a programmed analogue.

  “Devsan,” the image said at last, “all I can tell you is that the fact that you are concerned enough to bring this to me suggests that you have not lost a proper perspective. If you insisted that there was nothing to worry about, that you had been untouched by your experiences, well…” The old eyes twinkled in a passable simulation of humor. “Then I would worry!”

  “Maybe,” Dev said. He was unconvinced. Lightning against a blackening sky; peals of thunder, like battle cries of the gods. “I wish I could forget what happened on Herakles, though.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I have the damnedest feeling that, well, that the only way I can become complete is to merge with one of those things again and…” He shuddered, trying to shut out the memories. “I don’t want to do it again, to lose myself that way. At the same time, I find myself wanting it, needing it.

  “I’m wondering, Sensei, if I’m addicted, somehow, to the Xenolink.”

  Chapter 4

  4. Armor

  a. The primary mission of armor units is the attacking of infantry and artillery. The enemy’s rear is the happy hunting ground for armor. Use every means to get it there.…

  —Letter of Instruction

  General George S. Patton, Jr.

  C.E. 3 April 1944

  Tucked in beneath the overhang of the VK-141 Stormwind, Colonel Katya Alessandro could neither move nor deploy the hull sensors of her warstrider. She was linked, however, with Major Benjis Nadry, the Stormwind’s pilot, and she could see, as he could, the torn and convoluted landscape blurring past the combat carrier’s belly scant meters below.

  The ascraft was flying NOE, nape-of-the-earth, following a path worked out hours before through careful examination of 3-D radar holographs relayed by satellite. Their assigned drop zone glowed against her view forward, marked by a green square shimmering near the crest of a shell-blasted slope designated Hill 232.

  “DZ in sight,” Katya said, her words relayed through the air/spacecraft’s intercom to the other three warstriders suspended from the carrier’s external riderslots. “Thirty-second warning.”

  “Copy that, Assassin Leader,” Captain Frank Kilroy replied.

  “Assassin Three copies,” Lieutenant Virginia Halliwell added.

  “And Four copies. Let’s kick ass!” That was Lieutenant Hari Sebree.

  She could sense the other three warstriders, armored, multiton monsters cradled in their riderslots beneath the stubby, anhedral wings of the ascraft, voices and the steady pulse of data feeds over hard-jacked interfaces. Katya shifted her visual display to a view aft. A second Stormwind followed in the wake of the first, a hundred meters back and so low the wind of its passage kicked dust from the hilltops and set the scrub brush to thrashing. Each Stormwind carried one element—four warstriders; Katya was descending on what should be the enemy’s main artillery reserve with eight machines, a full squad. She’d have been happier with a sixteen-strider platoon at least, but there hadn’t been time to scavenge more from a hard-pressed and rapidly thinning front line. She wished, too, that she could talk with Major Vic Hagan, the CO of the second element, but the assault platoon was observing strict communications silence.

  “Ready for drop, Colonel,” Nadry announced. “I’m picking up heavy H-band radar. Somebody just got curious.”

  “I see it,” Katya replied. Alerts flickered across the bottom of her visual field, warning of a weapons lock, probably for a battery of strider-mounted missiles. “Kurt? What do you make of it?”

  Warrant Tech Officer Kurt Allen, one of two men crammed into her Warlord with her, was already scanning the radar traces, searching for a point source.

  “I’ve got a dozen different transmitters, Colonel,” he replied, his voice as calm and steady as always. “Probably remotes, set up so we don’t get an active lock on the launch platforms.”

  “No problem,” Sublieutenant Ryan Green, her pilot, said. “We’ll spot ’em when they launch!”

  A green light flashed in her display. “Five seconds!” Nadry announced. “Cutting internal feeds!”

  Power and sensor feeds from the ascraft switched off, and Katya’s view of the outside world was replaced by a claustrophobic half darkness: duralloy armor and a tiny wedge of moving ground beneath her feet. Display feeds and alerts glowed balefully at the periphery of her vision. “You’ve got the legs, Ryan,” she told the pilot.

  “Rog!” His mental voice was high-pitched, taut with excitement. “Jets hot!”

  Abruptly, the Stormwind went nose high, bellying toward the hill at a point just below its crest. Air roared through the ascraft’s intakes; fusion-heated plasma shrieked from directional, ball-pivot Venturis directed forward and down, blasting at rock and sand in swirling, superheated clouds.

  Ten meters above the slope, Katya gave a mental command. Magnetic grapples released their hold on her warstrider, and she fell from the ascraft’s riderslot, a clean drop. The ground rushed up at her, and then the jump pack strapped to her Warlord jolted her with the savage kick of twin jets slamming upward against almost sixty tons of falling mass.

  Contact! She hit gravel and dirt with a savage jar, the flanged feet of her RS-64GC Warlord gouging into the ground before whining gyros helped her recapture a precarious balance. Since Green had the Warlord’s legs—meaning control of its movement—Katya simply watched as the combat machine unfolded itself into combat mode, the sharply angled, digitigrade legs taking the weight of the fuselage with the high-pitched whine of servos. The strider lurched as the left foot slipped in soft earth, then steadied itself. Nanoflage layers on the outer hull lightened to a pale, mottled tan in response to the brightly lit surroundings. The machine’s name, painted on either side of the blunt, heavily armored snout, was Assassin’s Blade.

  Katya scanned the surroundings on broadband receptors. Ten meters away, Kilroy’s KR-9 Manta dropped from the sky on jets of flaring plasma, landing with a crash as better than forty tons impacted on the hill. Overhead, the ascraft continued to drift upslope, spilling two more combat machines as it moved. Halliwell’s Ghostrider and Sebree’s Scoutstrider fell clear, triggered their jump packs, and slammed into the hillside.

  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 dir
ection 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 st
rapped 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!”