Judas Unchained

Up above them, the wormhole closed. It had been open for about ten seconds, just long enough to shoot them out. Back on Wessex, the gateway had been surrounded by a giant mechanical loading system, resembling a scaled-up version of an artillery gun magazine, with over a thousand bubbles sitting on conveyor racks ready for the assault. Parallel racks carrying wedge-shaped combat aerobots moved forward smoothly beside them, their separate ranks merging at the gateway amid the weird cluster of lithe malmetal tentacles that was the actual launch delivery mechanism.

Cat’s Claws had joined several hundred other troops lined up on one of five gantry ledges as the bubbles trundled past in stop-start sequences. Along with the rest of them, Morton had finally been given the activation codes for the aggressor systems wetwired into his body. Now the squad were all making nervous, jokey comments about those systems not firing outward, war tourism, which body parts you protected above all else, alien rights lawyers suing them, and other stupid stuff. Trying to bull out the wait.

After a surprisingly short time Cat’s Claws was at the head of the line. Morton pulled his armor suit helmet down, checked his breathing circuit integrity, and slithered through the slit in the side of his bubble. As soon as the straps closed around him, the gel was pumped in under pressure. His e-butler integrated itself with the bubble’s array, confirming internal systems functionality. By then he was already ten meters down the conveyor rack.

The Elan strategic assault display flashed up across his virtual vision. He saw batches of wormholes opening a hundred kilometers above the planetary surface. They would remain in place for several seconds, disgorging a phenomenal quantity of munitions: missiles, ground-attack warheads, electronic warfare pods, decoy vehicles, beam-weapons platforms. It was all covering fire, a diversion while other, smaller wormholes opened just above the surface, deploying squads all around the fringes of Prime installations and bases. The Primes were fighting back, sending up flyers and big ships, their beam weapons punching through the scuzzy continent-wide clouds to intercept the rain of lethal machines as they sank down through the ionosphere. There were also flyers scouring the ground as the troop wormholes flipped in and out of existence. But electronic warfare aerobots were causing havoc with the Prime communications and sensors, hampering the flyers. Initial reports indicated that the landings were succeeding, by which the navy meant beachhead casualties were under thirty percent.

Morton hit the ground. The impact wasn’t as bad as any of the bone-buster hits they’d given him in training. His bubble bounced twice, the plyplastic flexing and bending to dissipate as much of the shock as it could; pressure waves moved sluggishly through the gel to squish lightly up against him. On the third landing, it sagged like a punctured balloon and stayed on the ground. “Down,” he told the rest of Cat’s Claws.

According to the inertial navigation readout, he was within half a kilometer of his predicted landing coordinate. The land immediately around him was flat, a field that had been seeded in springtime and had run rampant before starting to decay. Some kind of bean crop, judging by the yellow-green mush pressing against the lower section of his bubble. Abrupt climate change hadn’t helped this land’s recent delicate conversion to cultivation. It was raining in the Highmarsh; a thick blanket of dark turbulent cloud was stretched across the roof of the valley, flowing slowly from east to west. It produced a constant downpour of gray water that had overwhelmed the drainage dikes and beaten the surviving crops into a straggly mat of insipid green stalks lying flat against the sodden soil. Tall liipoplar trees that had been planted in long lines up and down the valley had been battered by the nuclear blast and subsequent storms, few of them were still intact; the majority had snapped to crash over the roads they once marked.

Morton checked around, and found the mountain he was supposed to be heading for, three kilometers away. The bubble started to stiffen up again, reverting to its standard spherical configuration. His virtual hands zipped over a sequence of control icons, and the single broad caterpillar track running around the compact machine’s vertical equator began to spin up. The bubble began its stabilized counterspin, keeping him perfectly level. Dips and lumps in the ground jounced him from side to side, but in the main it was a smooth ride, the gel acting as the ultimate suspension system.

External sensors showed Morton water spraying out from either side of the track. A rigid trail of squashed muddy plants lay behind him. “Goddamn!”