by Ian Douglas
Most inhabitants of the outworlds tended to ignore the political tug-of-war between Japanese Empire and Terran Hegemony. In general, the farther away a colony world was from Earth, the less meaningful Solar politics were. Katya's own New America, 26 Draconis IV, was a case in point. Her home system was thirty-five light-years from Loki, but over forty-eight lights from Sol, one of the most distant of all the human-colonized worlds. A Colonial Authority governor kept his office and residence in the capital at Jefferson, and the Hegemony seal appeared on the world flag, but few of the Terran Hegemony's pronouncements, debates, or laws had much bearing on the day-to-day lives of the colonists, not when the travel time, Earth to New America, was over seven weeks.
Everyone on New America knew about Lung Chi, and most knew about the young Imperial admiral who had destroyed the Manchurian colony's sky-el rather than risking the evacuation fleet parked at synchorbit. Life on the frontier, making an inhospitable world habitable, was a daily parade of tough decisions; in New American ViRdrama, the hero was often the person faced with disaster who tried to do something, even if that something ended in failure.
Admiral Michal Cameron would have been ideal cast as a New American ViRdrama hero.
Katya was realist enough to know that there was another factor in her distinctly New American feelings about Michal Cameron. Chien, Lung Chi's sun, was less than twenty light-years from 26 Draconis. The reality of Xenophobe attacks on human colony worlds was far sharper in most New Americans' minds than the rather remote theory of Hegemony legislation and Shichiju frontiers.
She wondered if young Dev Cameron's determination to join the Hegemony Navy had anything to do with his father. It had to, she reasoned. She wondered if Dev Cameron himself knew why he'd sought to follow in his father's footsteps.
Perhaps more to the point, though, was what he thought about ending up in the strider infantry.
"Ah," Rassmussen said suddenly, interrupting her thoughts. "Looks like we have two Reds ganging up on that last blue. I'd say Red's got this one sewed up."
"Cameron's strider is still showing color," Katya said. She called up a window overlaying the scene in her mind. The display let her tap into the blue RLN's system controller. "Damage doesn't look too bad, actually," she said. "He could be . . . yes! There!"
On the hilltop, Cameron's Scoutstrider stirred, then rose unsteadily to its feet. It appeared to hesitate, staring at the backs of the two surviving red machines, then broke into a ground-eating lope away from the showdown between Red and Blue.
Gupta's strider was down now, its torso torn open and its internal wiring spilling onto the ground like ghastly intestinal coils. Alerted by their all-round scanners, the red LaG and RLN both spun, weapons tracking, but it took a precious second to acquire the rapidly moving target. The blue Scoutstrider vaulted a crumpled pile of wreckage, whipped around, then hoisted the limp ruin of the second Blue Team RLN-90, holding it in front of its body like a shield.
The second Scoutstrider had been declared a kill, its blue coloring dissolved to gray. Red Ghostrider and Scoutstrider opened fire together, but their laser bolts struck the wrecked RLN, burning off chunks of armor and one of the limp-dangling arms. Cameron's Scoutstrider began moving backward step by step, edging toward the fluttering Red flag and dragging the dead RLN with him. The two Red machines advanced, splitting up to hit him from opposite flanks, but they were too late. Still supporting the wrecked Scoutstrider in front of him with one arm, Cameron reached behind him and brought down the Red flag.
A warning klaxon sounded, and the simulation ended. Katya found herself lying in a comfortable recliner, temporal feeds in place. She broke contact with the palm 'face and unjacked. Across the room, Rassmussen unplugged as well and sat up. He was a tall man, a native of Loki with yellow hair and intensely blue eyes.
"You see?" he said. "A loner. Faked critical damage while his teammates were getting mopped up. Then he used one of them as a shield while he sprinted for the flag."
"What were the op orders?"
"To seize the flag—"
"And the other blue RLN was already dead. He showed initiative."
"In a real battle he wouldn't have known that Jacobsen was dead. Damn it, she might have been trapped inside the wreckage, wounded or unconscious. His action would have killed her. You don't do that to squad mates."
"But he fulfilled the conditions of the op. Sometimes you have to make tough decisions."
Rassmussen spread his hands. "Hey. I just call 'em as I see 'em. I think he's going to be trouble."
"With a TM of point four, he could be a hell of a problem," she conceded. "He could also be the hottest damned striderjack we've seen in a while. Put a tag on him, Major. He's mine."
"As you say, Katya. Your company. Anybody else?"
"That Blue leader, certainly. What was his name? Gupta. He's got some things to learn about strategy, but he was steady right to the end. Now, I need eight people—"
"But so do three other companies, Katya, and we only have this one crop of recruits at the moment. I can promise you those two guys, at least. Maybe one or two more."
"I'll be back in two, three weeks and see how they're getting on."
"If they're still here."
If any of us are still here, Katya thought. There'd been no more sightings or breakthroughs since the Battle of Schluter, but HEMILCOM had been picking up strange noises and seismic disturbances ever since, most of them within a couple of hundred klicks of Midgard and Bifrost. Something was happening out there in those methane-lashed wastes, that was for damned sure. Nobody knew how the Xenos perceived humans or their cities, but it was a sure bet that they knew the city and the sky-el were there. It couldn't be much longer before they made some kind of move against them.
Katya just hoped her people would be ready for them when they did.
Chapter 8
Cephlinkage was the great nanomedical breakthrough opening the science of the mind. With teleopsychology and neopsychometrics, the mind, at last, became quantifiable. Though critics deny that numeric values quantify the man, it is upon this rock that all modern psychological research is founded.
—Man and His Works
Dr. Karl Gunther Fielding
C.E. 2488
From his steel-caged vantage point four meters above the deck, Dev stared from an access gantry platform across the cluttered expanse of the company's maintenance bay. The dome, adjacent to the Tristankuppel and joined to it by a pressurized, hundred-meter walkway, was called Mjolnirkuppel, and it was home and workplace to the three platoons that comprised A Company, First Battalion of the Fifth Loki Thorhammer Regiment.
Cacophony assaulted his ears. The maintenance bay, a domed-over expanse the size of a sports arena, was a rattling, clanking, booming confusion of men, women, and machines, of towering gantries, massive carryalls, and heavy equipment, and everywhere the hulking steel and carbocomposite armor of warstriders. Sun-bright flares dazzled and showered sparks where teleop welders touched plasma arcs to metal. Elsewhere, white fog roiled from cryo-H storage tanks, and a massive sheet of armor released from a carryall's meter-long duralloy grippers struck the dome's deck with a ringing crash of durasheath plate on steel.
The fog boiling off cryo-H tanks added a chill to the air that reminded Dev of the minus-eighty temperatures and sleeting, poisonous winds outside. The sharp bite of ammonia—some of the stuff crept inside the pressure dome every time the big, ten-meter airlock doors at one end of the bay were opened, no matter how thorough the decon wash afterward—still brought tears to Dev's eyes, though he'd been told he'd get used to it after a while. He palmed the smartpatch on his coveralls, turning up the garment's heat.
Four days earlier, Dev and twelve other survivors of Company 645 had completed their final recruit exercises, and four of them had been assigned to field training slots with Company A of the 1/5. Recruit trainees no longer, they were now full-fledged seitos, officer cadets, entitled to wear brown coveralls instead of yellow during
their day-to-day duties, and dress gray uniforms bearing the cadet's one slender gold stripe on sleeve and shoulder board. But the architecture designed for giants rather than humans, the massive shapes of the warstriders themselves embraced by their service gantries and power feed cables, the noise, stink, and orderly confusion, were all still strange and a bit overwhelming.
For the past three days Cadets Dev Cameron, Erica Jacobsen, Suresh Gupta, and a young, blond Lokan named Torolf Bondevik had been discovering that the real training started now, as they sought to apply the data feeds of the past six weeks to the realities of operating, maintaining, and repairing the huge and complex link-operated machines called warstriders. Each had been assigned to a different machine, Jacobsen to Hagan's 'Phobe Eater, Bondevik to Nicholsson's Battlewraith Pacifier, and Gupta to the Company Commander's Warlord Assassin's Blade.
Dev's assignment was with Sho-i Tami Lanier's Ghost-rider, a two-slot recon strider named High Stepper.
Warstriders were large and complex machines, virtually solid masses of wiring, pumps, circuits, hydraulic systems, and the myotensor bundles that imitated the muscular action of a living organism, all encased in durasheath armor shells and layered nanotechnic films. Lots could go wrong with them, as Dev was beginning to find out. He'd spent most of the last three days submerged in the wiring and dry-slick silicarb used as a strider internal lubricant, learning mechanical systems, diagnostics, and repair with a thoroughness that his training feeds in boot camp hadn't even attempted.
"Cameron!" Lanier's voice snapped at him from above.
Clinging to the gantry platform's guardrail alongside one massive leg actuator, he turned, suppressing the burned-in instinct to respond with a shouted "Linked, Sir!" That recruit nonsense, he'd been told several times already, was no longer required. Spit and polish in the field was virtually nonexistent.
"Yes, sir!"
A chunky, heavy-set woman with sandy hair peeking from beneath her vehicle link helmet appeared, squeezing her head and shoulders from the narrow commander's access hatch. "Git yourself up here, newbie. It's about time we got you and Stepper formally acquainted."
"On my way." He'd been working at the acetabular myocircuitry, and his hands and arms were slick with black silicarb. Pausing only to wipe off what he could on an already blackened rag, Dev grasped a rung welded to the warstrider's curved hull, then stepped off the gantry and started pulling himself toward the pilot's access.
High Stepper was armed with a 100-megawatt chin laser and a pair of Kv-70 weapons pods on either side of the fuselage, like stubby, handless arms. Stepper's hull was currently a glossy black but patchy, showing scars where combat had blasted away some of the nanoflage film, inactive now, that covered all exposed surfaces. The access hatches were on the dorsal hull, one on each side of the centerline, the commander module to the right, the pilot module to the left.
Squeezing through the pod hatch, he dropped into the embrace of a padded, horizontal couch that all but filled the cramped pilot's module. Normally, as soon as he entered the strider, his first task would be to hook a web of control and monitor cables into his vehicle skinsuit, which took care of such pedestrian necessities as monitoring his heart rate and breathing, eliminating body wastes, and controlling bleeding. Since this linkage would only be for a few minutes, he didn't bother.
Instead, he pulled a VCH, the Vehicle Cephlink Helmet, from a recess in the bulkhead to his right and settled it over his head. Reaching up beneath the helmet's rim, he snapped the interior jack cables home in each of his three sockets, then locked the unit in place.
"Okay, newbie," Lanier's voice said over the VCH speaker. "Let's get 'er revved up. Switch on."
The manual control panel was a small console set above Dev's face next to the access hatch. "Power on," he said, as he touched a series of contact pads. Beneath him, the warstrider's massive Ishikawajima-Harima Y-70A fusorpak came to life with a low hum that built slowly to a muted whine. The strider's on-board computer, a series 7-K manufactured by IBM-Toshiba, signaled readiness to link with the steady pulse of a green indicator light. Another touch pad closed the access hatch. He was alone now, cloaked by darkness save for the glow of pinhead-sized indicators on the manual console.
Wiggling in the seat so that he could reach above and behind his head, Dev extracted his three cephlink leads and snapped them home, one after another, into his VCH external sockets.
"Make sure the link setting's on neutral," Lanier warned.
"Neutral," he repeated, checking the light display. "Got it."
He pressed his palm implant against the interface contact to the left of his couch. Something like light flashed behind his eyes, accompanied by a hissing ache between his ears. The strider's Artificial Intelligence had to be tuned to his cerebral patterns, a process that would take several moments.
Carefully he thought the alphanumeric sequence that unlocked the AI access codes stored in his cephlink RAM. Numbers and letters flickered against the static. A sense of inner completion, of rightness, indicated that he was linked.
"Pilot replacement," he thought, concentrating on the words. "Reconfiguration, Code Three-Green-One."
"Think of the color blue," the strider's voice said in his mind. It was a bland, neutral voice, recognizable as neither male nor female. "Picture a red sunset, viewed from a beach on the shore of an ocean. . . ."
Dev had never seen an ocean, but part of his training had included downloaded images keyed to generate the appropriate responses in his mind as he brought them again to mind. The AI continued asking for specific thoughts—numbers, colors, simple mental images. The process was largely automatic, and Dev performed effortlessly, just as he had dozens of times before in simulation. Next time, High Stepper would have his cerebral patterns stored in memory, and this break-in process would not be necessary.
"Reconfiguration is complete," the AI said several minutes and many questions later. "Enabling cephlink, full control to Module Two."
The familiar flash of linkage, a tiny explosion of light and static, filled his brain, and the narrow confines of the pilot module, the lights, and the primitive, hard-wired board vanished. He was standing in the company maintenance bay, braced by the zigzagging struts and braces of the gantry, surrounded by the dangling power cables and cryo-H pipes and electronic data feeds that wired him to the base complex like the strings on a puppet.
He was aware of another presence, a watcher sharing a small, bright part of his mind. Power flow brought a second pod in the strider to life.
"Well done, Cameron," Lanier's voice said in his mind. "Now that Stepper knows you, I'm sure you'll be the best of friends."
Dev scarcely heard her. He was tingling now to the familiar thrill of full linkage.
Though he could never have explained the difference, linking with a jack-bossed machine, whether it was a warstrider or a starship, felt different, more real, more solid than a ViR communications or entertainment feed, even a feed with full sensory feedback. He felt large, powerful, and more alive than he ever had before. This was reality, and no matter what the engineers and designers said, it was not the same as a ViRsimulation. You weren't supposed to be able to tell the difference; sensation, after all—whether it was the feel of the metal deck beneath his feet, the sound of hissing steam and shouted commands, or the sight of Victor Hagan's squat, black KR-9 Manta shrouded in the maintenance gantry opposite his—manifested itself in the brain and ought to be the same whether the incoming nerve impulses carrying that sensation were from the body's organs of touch, sound, and sight, or generated by an AI and fed through sockets and cephlink.
Power. A movement of his left foot would topple the fragile crisscrossings of his own gantry, would send him striding out across the maintenance bay deck. A battery of weapons—100-megawatt laser, Kv-70 weapons pods, chemical flamer—were his to command.
Not the same as swimming the Kamisamano Taiyo, the godsea of the K-T Plenum, perhaps. Still, Dev felt purpose, order, and strength, just a
s he did when he was linked to a starship's AI.
"Hey, newbie!" Lanier's voice cut through his thoughts, knife-edged. "Wake up in there! I said let's begin the weapons system check."
"Uh . . . right." Pulling new access codes from his RAM, Dev engaged the Ghostrider's left and right Kv-70 weapons pods. Those mounts could accommodate rockets, a variety of tube-launched 30-mm grenades, heavy machine guns, or a combination of the three, though neither was loaded yet. Dev read the data scrolling past his mind's eye, however, as he'd done countless times in ViRsim. "Both Kv-70s show full function," he said. "Acquisition, tracking, and firing systems are go."
"Chin laser."
"Check."
"Wait one." There was a moment's hesitation. "Cameron, you have an outside call. Channel one."
He accessed the communications code, felt the click of a completed circuit. "Cameron here. Go ahead."
"Cameron, this is Captain Alessandro. I need to see you ASAP, my office."
Now what?
"On my way, sir. Five minutes."
"What did you do now, newbie?" Lanier asked.
"I don't know. I've been doing my best to stay clear of trouble. I'll be back soon as I can."
"You do that. We still need to go through the on-board stores."
Calling up the codes to break link, he felt again the slickness of the interface plate beneath his left palm. Lifting his hand sharply, he broke the connection. He lay again inside the narrow confines of the pilot's module.
He stabbed at the touch pad, and his access hatch hissed open. Wiggling back into the light, he squeezed out of the module, dropped to the gantry deck, and started down. The captain's office was at the back of the dome, past the gantries shrouding a line of strider hulks, corpses kept for spares. The damage evident in those shattered, half-melted frames—and the mild depression that always set in when he emerged from full-sense link—always made Dev feel a little cold.
But he didn't turn up his coveralls' heat again.
