by Ian Douglas
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 strapped 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!"
A salvo of M-21 rockets slammed into the RS-64's already battered glacis. Explosions tore through the heart of Assassin's Blade, and Katya felt her linkage slipping. . . .
Katya found herself blinking at the smooth, gray metal of a link module's overhead. Numb with the aftereffects of battle lust, it took her a moment to remember where she was . . . what she was doing.
Today's engagement had been a full-realism sim managed by an entire orchestra of AIs to allow thousands of striderjacks and technicians to experience the joint virtual reality of a full-scale war. Katya's new unit, the 1st Confederation Rangers, had been up against warstriders jacked by the Confederation's staff command and naval contingent.
She'd not really expected the exchange to become so . . . personal.
"Colonel?"
Turning her head, she saw Allen's face peering into the module's opening at her. Ryan Green stood just behind him. "Hi, Kurt, Ryan. I guess we lost, huh?"
"Something like that," Allen said. "You okay?"
Deftly, she unplugged herself from the three feeds jacked into her temporal and cervical sockets. Her hair, short on the sides and neck to keep it clear of her hardware, was longer on top and in front and had plastered itself across her head. She ran her fingers through it, dragging it off her face.
"Not bad, considering I just took a hundred megs through my belly." Unstrapping herself from the link module, she swung long legs off the padded couch, stooped to get through the opening, and stood up on the gleaming white deck outside. Dozens of other link modules surrounded her, some occupied, most empty.
"Colonel Alessandro?"
Turning, she saw the gray-uniformed figure of one of the games monitors, standing behind her with a compad in her hand. "That's me."
"You're dead, Colonel. You and both of your crew members."
"So I gathered." Her eyes narrowed. "Do you have an active link with the Rogue? How about my opponent in that last exchange?"
The technician glanced down at her pad, palming the interface to open a new feed. "According to the battlesim AI," she said, reading the screen, "you inflicted sixty percent damage on the Battlewraith you attacked. One of its crew members was killed, one more badly hurt. The third was able to return fire. His missile barrage touched off your Warlord's fusorpack."
"The one I killed. Who was he?"
The technician checked her pad again. "The simulated casualty was General Sinclair himself. But you must have known that, Colonel. Your initial shot was quite accurate."
"Hey, if we're dead, when's the funeral service?" Ryan wanted to know. "I'd like to attend."
"That may depend on my court-martial," Katya said. She meant it as a joke, but she couldn't help wondering what was going to come of her actions this morning. She'd broken several regulations in today's full-combat simulation, as well as showing some rather impetuous recklessness. There was bound to be some fallout.
Katya didn't care. It had been worth it, damn it. Worth it and then some.
She felt lots better now, having killed Travis Sinclair.
Chapter 5
Most of the worlds of the Shichiju have at least one sky-el, a space elevator that makes travel between the planet's surface and synchronous orbit cheap and simple, if considerably slower than ascraft passage. Grown from synchorbit by enormous factories that nanotechnically transform carbonaceous chondrite asteroids into duralloy, sky-els have proven vital in the terraforming of prebiotic worlds, an inexpensive conduit from space to ground for the nanofactories and equipment necessary to rework a planetary atmosphere.
In the two and a half centuries since the first sky-el was demonstrated on Sol IV, there have been remarkably few system failures, even including those, like the one on Herakles, that were the result of deliberate action.
—Man and the Stars: A History of Technology
Ieyasu Sutsumi
C.E. 2531
The hell of it was, Katya had once damn near idolized the man. General Travis Sinclair was more than the leader of the Confederation in its rebellion against Hegemony and Empire. A member of the Confederation Congress from New America, he'd been appointed commander of the rebel army at a time when a unified army as such didn't even exist. Single-handedly, he'd begun building that army . . . and a navy as well, recruiting key people like Katya and Dev Cameron and turning them loose with money, personnel, and equipment raised from God knew where.
Sinclair's genius had, at the very least, avoided a crushing defeat by the overwhelmingly powerful forces arrayed against them. More important than that, he'd been the principal author of the Declaration of Reason, a document that, like another Declaration penned over seven centuries earlier, outlined the philosophy of the revolt. By condemning the evils of the centralized state and its attempts to unite disparate worlds and cultures, it had become the focus of the entire Rebellion. In many ways Travis Sinclair was the Rebellion.
Somehow, though, Katya's hero worship of the man had gradually been transformed . . . not into hatred, precisely, but into a distance as cold, she thought, as the cold, political calculation that had led Sinclair a few months ago to abandon her beloved New America to the Empire. Oh, she knew the reasons, the rationale for the Confederation's retreat from her homeworld. What hurt, though, were the friends, the comrades at arms left behind while a scant, chosen few had fled here, to Herakles. She'd just begun assembling and training the 1st Confederation Rangers on New America when Sinclair had issued the order to abandon the place for a secret base on this empty world. He'd brought with him a select handful of people, including Katya and Dev and a few others with experience or key skills, but the majority, of necessity, had been left behind.
How many, she wondered, were still alive, after months of guerrilla warfare against Imperial warstriders? While she was here playing war games!
Katya had met Sinclair on New America, where he'd recruited her to the cause. Her experience leading a Hegemony strider company had come to his attention, and he'd suggested that her talents might be best employed helping to create a Confederation armored unit that could replace the wide-scattered and poorly trained militias that were currently carrying the brunt of the fighting against the Empire. Local militias had won impressive victories early in the war, on Eridu, on Eostre, and on Liberty, but those victories had proven temporary. Eridu was again in Imperial hands after a brief period of self-rule; at New America, Imperial Marines now maintained a harsh and bloody peace while battle squadrons kept watch from orbit.
She thought about Dev, raiding the Imperial supply lines on the outskirts of the New American system.
No. Best not to think of that. Or of him. . . .
The hell of it was, moving the rebel government to Herakles hadn't purchased much time. The Imperials had figured out where they were and sent a battle squadron in, coming that close to annihilating the Confederation Congress and the Rebellion in one swift strike. All that had stopped them was Dev's bizarre union with the Naga lurking in the depths of Herakles's planetary crust. Three months had passed since then, with no sign of the Imperials, but everyone on Herakles knew their return was only a matter of time.
The sacrifice of New America had been wasted . . . wasted.
Now, scant hours after the end of the simulated battle, Katya was aboard an air/spacecraft outbound from New Argosport. The hotbox booster engines had fallen silent, and the arrowhead shape of the ascraft fell through the night above Herakles, anticollision strobes pulsing with metronomic precision at dorsal ridge, wingtips, and belly. She'd received the message from Rogue only moments after her own simulated death, a summons to join Travis Sinclair in orbit. She'd barely had time to return to her quarters and pack, arriving at the port just fifteen minutes before the scheduled launch.
Sinclair had told her nothing during their brief conversation, but she was under no illusions about why she'd been summoned so precipitously to orbit. Vic had been right. Regimental commanders don't join squad-level deployments, and they don't mix it up in strider-to-strider combat. Having logged orders to ignore the enemy strider force and concentrate fire on the artillery, they don't then disregard those orders to chase after the enemy commander's Battlewraith.
And they certainly don't turn a training simulation into a personal vendetta.
Linked, Katya tried to concentrate on the panorama spreading out around her. Astern, Herakles was a smear of oceanic blue-violet and the white gleam of clouds and ice, a vast sphere half-illuminated by the brassy, subgiant's glare of Mu Herculis A. To the right, Mu Herculis B and C were a tightly paired, ruby-gleaming doublet. Left and below, the star Vega, only a few light-years distant from the Mu Herculis system, was a dazzling gleam in the blackness, so bright it washed
other stars from the sky and touched the clouds on the nightside of Herakles with ghost-pale silver.
Katya's attention was held, however, by a tight-stretched thread of silver suspended directly ahead against blackness and the glare of Here A. Razor's-edge crisp and straight, the line seemed unmoving, though ladar returns indicated it possessed a speed of several kilometers per second and was rotating end over end. As Katya continued to watch, a subtle shift in perspective and in the silver-gilt terminator between light and shadow demonstrated movement, and a rapidly closing range.
Herakles, Mu Herculis A-III, was unique among the worlds of the Shichiju, for its sky-el was no longer attached to the planet's equator. Instead, the structure fell around Herakles in an eccentric orbit that brought one end within two hundred kilometers of the surface each week, though most of the time its center of mass was located well beyond synchorbit. Some thirty thousand kilometers long now and only meters thick, it was held taut by centrifugal force as it spun.
Katya was jacked into the ascraft's command link. Technically, she was a passenger aboard the ground-to-orbit shuttle, but Captain Chalmer, the ship's pilot, had invited her to link in from her module aft shortly after launch from the New Argos port complex. She could see the rogue sky-el ahead with the crisply detailed, unimpeded clarity of sensor feeds direct from the ascraft's visual scanners. Numbers flickering past the right side of her awareness gave range and target vectors, angle of approach, and closing velocity. The ascraft was closing with the lower arm with a relative velocity of only fifty meters per second.
"So what brings you up to synchorbit?" Chalmer asked, his voice sounding close beside her in the dark. "We don't often get to see you infantry types here on the whirligig."
"They've been keeping me pretty busy," Katya replied, distracted. "Building an army from nothing is a job for magicians, not a brain-burned striderjack like me."
"Brain-burned? You? Nah, the way I heard it, Captain Cameron's the one who's brain-burned if anyone is."
