Battlemind Read Free Page B

uncertain. Core D9837 orbited no sun but was an orphan, a mote adrift with other crumbs left over from the rubble of an extravagantly wasteful Creation. The only light was the soft and ruddy glow from the background stars, highlighted here and there by the sharper brilliance of blue-white flares or hotter suns, or by the softer arc-light glow of the Annihilator’s polar jets.
    The other forty-seven warstriders of the Phantoms rode their own craft toward landing, burning off excess speed in glowing friction with the atmosphere. Operating now strictly according to programmed instructions loaded into their striders’ AIs, the warcraft descended in gradually flattening trajectories, steering by powerful magnetic fields interacting with the magnetic fields of this world and this alien, flame-ridden sky. Part of their mission was survey mapping; strider AIs processed streams of data as they overflew a strangely shaped and ordered topology, a gray terrain that should have consisted of stark, raw deserts, barren canyons, heat-weathered mesas—and probably once had been just that—but which at some point in the remote past had been extensively reworked.
    It almost looked as though some child giant had used this world as clay, sculpting bizarrely twisted and alien forms from naked rock and leaving them to bake beneath that searing sky. Kara could see walls, towers, domes, and less readily namable structures, linked together by a subtle architecture that obeyed no human laws of perspective or design. Towers speared the heavens, ebon-black or mercury-silver in color, with angles oddly distorted from geometries used by Man. A deep, convoluted, and black-shadowed canyon reaching for fully a thousand kilometers across the planet’s face had been turned into an elaborate trench lined with machine hardware, spanned by glittering bridges and floored by forests of antennae and mechanisms of unknown and unknowable purpose.
    At an altitude of less than a kilometer, Kara pulled her nose up, spilling energy freely in a burst of high-intensity magnetics, supplementing her rugged deceleration with the whining shriek of plasma jets. The new setup and link with the Mark XC striders permitted accelerations and decelerations unheard of in human-occupied flyers, with the thrust limited only by the tolerances of the machine’s drives and hull strength, though the visual cues unfolding on the view-screen in her head took some real getting used to.
    So far, there’d been no response from the defenders of this alien place. Past the trench now, still descending, she led her company toward the landing site chosen from space just moments ago, an open patch of gray plain partly surrounded by spiked, bristling towers each half a kilometer tall or more. Surface-penetrating radar and IR traces gave indications of a labyrinthine tangle of structures hidden beneath the surface.
    “There’s the LZ, gang,” she called over the tactical frequency. “Let’s take ’em on in.”
    “Roger that, boss,” Lieutenant Hochstader replied. “Looks like we caught the gokkers napping.”
    “Don’t count on that, Lieutenant,” she replied. “They know we’re here.”
    “I wonder,” Warstrider Miles Pritchard said. “I get the feeling that maybe they know, but they just don’t care.”
    That was a frightening thought… beings so advanced, or so different, that human beings had little or no impact on their plans. But then, Core D9837 seemed to be a very minor part of their operation in this place, a debris pile with no significance to their vaster strategies and goals.
    “Maybe they don’t care,” Sergeant Willis Daniels, her top sergeant, added. “Yet.”
    “Well, we can damn well give them something to care about, Will,” Kara said. Extending her craft’s flight surfaces, she flared out above the selected landing zone, her warstrider’s outer hull, a Naga-grown composite, changing both shape and texture as surface-mobile modules unfolded. Normally in a