Recovering, Ferris darted ahead, zigzagging lightly across the gently descending ground to make things as interesting as possible for the Imperial gunners and to avoid presenting an analyzable pattern to the MilTech facility’s defensive AI. The MilTech lab perimeter was just ahead; the facility was still brightly lit, and he could see the dark, scrambling shapes of people dashing among the buildings.
Heavy fire was coming from the lab now. God, the place was armed and armored like a fortress! Ferris paused to deliver a volley of suppressive laser fire at one of the enemy batteries, then pressed forward, sending his strider skimming across the ocher sand in uneven swerves.
Despite his maneuvers, a hivel round slammed into Saberslash. The shock rang through the warstrider and it dipped wildly to the left… then recovered on magnetic lifts. Panels opened and closed on stubby fins, using airflow to adjust the machine’s attitude. A missile streaked across the desert at an altitude of two meters; his AI spotted it, calculated that it would strike within two seconds, and destroyed it with a hivel burst that erupted across the desert floor like a thundering line of geysers.
“Sandman! Striker Two!” he yelled. “Where’s that goking air support?”
“On the way, Two. Hold on!”
And then the aircraft were there, four A/V-48 Gyrfalcons, booming up over the dune ridge at his back, great, black, complex shapes held aloft by stubby, variable-geometry wings and howling air-breather plasma jets. Laser fire flashed from chin nacelles and ventral turrets, lighting the sky. The deadly fire being concentrated on the warstriders shifted suddenly as the gunners retargeted on the aircraft.
Larger than warstriders, the Gyrfalcons were also more powerful, more heavily armored, and capable of astonishing stop-and-go pinpoint maneuvers. One machine darted overhead, came to a halt, hovering, turning slightly as it bathed the lab complex in searing, rapid-fire pulses from its autolasers, then skittered to the side to avoid an answering barrage. Ferris saw sparks struck from its nanoblackened hull, but the machine recovered, then darted ahead once more with a high-G acceleration that would have made any nonlinked pilot black out. Air-to-surface missiles shrieked overhead, lancing into the lab compound and detonating in quick-fire thunderclaps.
“Move it, Striker Two!” he yelled. “Rush ’em! Now!”
Under cover of the hovering, darting Gyrfalcons, the Third Squadron hurtled forward, hitting the facility’s mesh-fence perimeter and smashing through. Saberslash faltered momentarily as it drifted over a low-gauss patch of the ground suspensor field, and Ferris put out two legs to steady the strider and pole it forward a few meters. Then the field reestablished itself and he was levitating again. A shoulder-launched rocket exploded against his armor, scouring off a patch of nanoflage. The other striders were losing their ebon-black invisibility, too, as repeated hits scraped off their light-drinking coats faster than they could be regrown.
No matter. The night no longer afforded concealment. Firing a rippling volley of grenades to spread the surface nanofield well into the compound, he edged forward, returning fire when he received it, spraying anything that looked like a possible weapons hard point as his AI pointed it out.
“Striker Two, this is Sandman.”
“Sandman, Striker Two! Go ahead!”
“Strikers One and Three are moving now. Watch your fire and wait for solid IDs.”
“Roger that. Two! Did you all catch that? Watch who the gok you’re shooting!”
Operation Sandstorm had called for an initial three-part assault, with Squadrons Two, Three, and Four splitting up at the landing zone, then converging on the MilTech Lab from the north, west, and—wading through the shallow waters of the bay—south. First to engage the enemy, Third Squadron had caught the brunt of the resistance in the center, serving as a diversion while the other two squadrons swung out and around and into position, squarely on the Imperials’ northern and southern flanks. Shifting his view to the right, he could see two of Fourth Squadron’s Cutlasses emerging from the inky waters of the Labyrinthine Bay, clambering up onto the waterfront between a pair of sleek hydrofoil skimmers moored at the piers. Gunfire from the base greeted them, but it was scattered and ill-coordinated.
There is in every battle a tempo, a sense of the pace of things, that lets those attuned to it feel which way the fight is going. Ferris felt that tempo now throughout the combat link, an electric excitement in the voices of his squadron mates over the tactical channel, that told him that the enemy defenses had broken, that they were victorious.
An Imperial strider emerged from cover, adrift on its own QEC nano, already badly damaged and barely able to move. Ferris tracked, targeted, and fired in a seamless series of mental commands, and the enemy machine exploded in hurtling, flaming fragments.
“Sandman, this is Striker Two!” he called. “Nike! Nike!”
The name of the ancient Greek goddess of winged victory was the code word to initiate the next phase of the operation.
Kara heard Ran’s “Nike” call, but she was too busy to pay attention at the moment. Aresynch’s communications center had just received a report of an enemy attack at Labyrinthine Bay, and with a Priority Urgent flag. She’d already intercepted eight similar reports of increasing urgency and priority, downscaling each to routine, but at last a transmission came through with a coded priority that she could not touch… and seconds later, a search ordered by the communications officer of the watch discovered all of the “routine messages” reporting an attack by unidentified enemy armored forces at the MilTech lab complex at Noctis Labyrinthus, and repeated desperate calls for help.
The alarm was out; Kasei’s military command knew now both that they were under attack and that something was amiss within the Kasei Net. Instantly, the security level for the cybersystem flicked up to full alert, and a search was begun for intruders.
She would not be able to remain undetected for much longer.
Chapter 13
Never forget. A computer ViRsimulation is just that, a simulation. Its sole reality is in the interplay of informational input and electrochemical impulses within the brain.
Of course, it has been argued that the physical universe around us has no objective reality at the quantum level, save what is instilled in it by our own brains. So perhaps there is at some level an element of real-world reality in the ViRsims after all.…
—ViRsim Journeys: A Personal Voyage
A. V. BARKER
C.E. 2440
The outside battle for the MilTech lab compound area was nearly over, though hivel bursts and laser fire continued to shriek and howl above shattered fabricrete walls and burning buildings, and numerous Imperial strongholds continued to loose sharp volleys at random intervals. The warstriders had secured the compound area, however, ringing the buildings to protect them against the expected enemy counterattack, and moving through the facility on foot, rooting out the stubbornly resisting survivors pocket by pocket. As the Gyrfalcons circled overhead, providing covering fire, two massive Vz-980 assault transports roared over the rise to the west, skimming scant meters above the ground.
The lead Vz-980 cut its suspensors as it drifted over the open ground immediately in front of the lab’s main building, descending gently with legs unfolding, grounding on yielding landing jacks. Hatchways popped open on both sides and in the rear, disgorging armored ground troops who spilled across the lab grounds, weapons at the ready.
The ground strike force’s commander was Lieutenant Hal Clifford, who at forty-one standard was one of the oldest of NAMA’s graduates and certainly was old for his relatively new lieutenant’s commission. The marines had a tradition, though, one extending back to a time when “marines” meant troops who came ashore from the sea in amphibious operations, of giving NCOs with leadership skills and plenty of combat experience the opportunity of taking a commission.
Which is what Clifford had done. He’d seen action on New America during the Rebellion, twenty-five years ago, and had been in plenty of scrapes since. T
hree years ago he’d been offered a chance to attend the Academy and become an officer.
Most long-time career sergeants held the virtually traditional opinion that NCOs were the real leadership of any good army, that the best officers were those who actually bothered to listen to what their senior sergeants told them. Clifford shared the opinion—but he’d also seen stupidity enough in the ConMil command that he’d decided that maybe he could make a difference if he wielded the authority of an officer instead of that of a grizzled, foul-mouthed noncom. Assigned now as CO of Alfa Platoon, Company D, 12th Regiment, First Confederation Marines, he had as much combat experience as anyone in the unit. He was also, still, a grizzled, foul-mouthed noncom in spirit, a fact that his own troops took considerable pride in.
“Okay, you goking leggers!” he bellowed over the platoon circuit. “Move! Move! Move! You want to toast marshmallows in the transport’s jets? Or earn your goking yen transfer?”
The marines dispersed rapidly and with practiced efficiency, forming a broad, protective perimeter around the transport’s LZ. With armored resistance within the compound largely crushed, Clifford and his marines had the assignment of clearing key buildings and actually snatching what they’d come here to snatch. He didn’t know what the target was, though he could guess that it was some kind of high-tech horror the Impies were cooking up in their Kasei labs. Dr. Carol Browning and a small team of linksystem experts were along to handle the actual search and grab; Clifford’s part of the job was to get them inside the building so that they could do their work and to keep them safe while they completed the mission.
With his Mitsubishi Mark XVII plasma rifle at the ready, he trotted clear of the grounded transport, feeling like he was slogging through wet sand. Movement was difficult, almost like trying to walk underwater or in high gravity. This entire area had been saturated with QEC nano, and the magnetic field resisted his movement through it. His armor, his weapons, his other gear had very little ferrous material in them—iron or steel was all too easy for an enemy to detect with magnetic scanners—but the little there was in various items of circuitry fought him step by torturous step.
Gunfire crackled and barked; an explosion to the north sent fire boiling into the sky. Not all resistance had ended yet, by any means. The Imperial striders had been neutralized—destroyed or driven off—but there were plenty of holdouts dug in among the blast- and fire-shattered buildings.
Clifford dropped behind a low stone wall and studied the target through his helmet display. His Companion was interfaced directly with the helmet’s electronics, processing both scanner information and data being relayed from Sandman, the ops field HQ at the grounded Artemis ascraft. The main building of the lab complex was a dome-topped, two-story structure ringed with transplas or glass windows—he couldn’t tell which—and circled by a kind of park with flower garden plots, meter-tall walls, and benches. As he studied the building through enhanced optics, his Companion painted blobs of color moving behind the upper-story windows marking infrared sources that might be technicians or lab personnel but could also easily be waiting Imperial troops.
A stray round sighed overhead. Gunfire chattered, a light machine gun somewhere to the north.
There was only one way to find out who the silently glowing heat sources were, and no point in waiting. “Okay, people!” he called over the tactical net. “Let’s take ’em down!”
He rolled over the wall and started forward. To either side, other armored figures rose and advanced. Almost at once, a hail of gunfire opened up on the advancing marines. A pulse laser stuttered silently, a dazzling, fast-strobing flicker of intense light that chopped through Corporal DeLattio’s breastplate and gorget in a splatter of molten duralloy and vaporizing blood. DeLattio shrieked—once and very briefly—and went down. Private Redding lost his left arm as the light exploded through pauldron and rerebrace.
The sudden, devastating fire coming from the building stopped the marines before their rush had gained momentum enough to carry them forward. Most of the troops dropped back behind the wall or into sheltered nooks in the garden-park that lay in front of the building’s main entrance.
“Move! Move! Move!” Clifford screamed as automatic fire howled overhead and the laser continued its relentless, deadly pulsing. “You want to just stand there and take it? Get inside there and give ’em some back!”
But the advancing line wavered, then broke, and he had to vault back behind the wall or be the only marine left standing in the park. At his back, the transports, their troops disembarked now, lifted from the LZ, pivoting, rising slowly, their weapons mounts unfolding on stubby wings, seeking the enemy. Hivel rounds slashed toward them from the lab building’s second story; one transport took a hit and staggered, its belly slashed open, but then its pilot applied more thrust and the craft straightened out, still rising.
Hivel cannon fire, missiles, and laser pulses snapped and hissed as the transports laid down a devastating covering fire. Infantry—leggers in military parlance—stood very little chance of survival for more than scant minutes on the open battlefield. Their transports were designed to provide them with an extra few moments in the form of overwhelming fire support.
But the damaged transport was in trouble. It had taken too many hits, and white steam was spilling from a ruptured fuel tank, hydrogen slush boiling into atmosphere. An incendiary round slammed into the hull, and in a literal flash, the hydrogen tank exploded, erupting in a savage detonation that broke the transport’s spine. Gunfire continued to reach toward the craft as it spun wildly across the compound’s airspace; it struck a line of sand dunes just above the beach, exploding for a final time in a billowing mushroom cloud of orange and jet black.
Clifford winced and ducked below a laser-scored wall as the sky turned a dazzling, day-bright orange. Damn! That was the San Jacinto! Just moments ago, he and his boys and girls had been aboard her. Gok… he’d been talking to the major piloting her.…
There would be time to think about that later, if they didn’t get swept off the front porch by the gunfire coming from inside.
If they could get some support from the other transport…
But the Vera Cruz loosed only a brief burst of laser fire, scoring the lab’s domed roof, then broke off and circled south, out over the bay. The fire coming from that building was just too hot for a relatively vulnerable aircraft to stand and face.
They needed heavy fire support if they were to get inside that fortress.
Levering himself up to peer across the top of the wall, he studied the building’s facade. Most of the fire appeared to be coming from the second floor; he could see the twinkle and flash of small arms up there, the repeated flicker of the laser. Those windows were glass after all. They had to be, to be so easily broken. Made sense. One thing Kasei had a lot of was sand, and buildings here tended to be raised with glass facades instead of plastics.
He opened a tactical channel in his helmet com unit. “Striker, Striker, Striker, this is Red Rover! Do you copy?”
“Rover, Striker Two-one. Go ahead!”
“Striker Two-one, we could use some big-foot help over here.” He rattled off coordinates, ducking once again as a grenade fired from the building detonated a few tens of meters away.
He sensed motion and turned. A warstrider floated a meter above the ground a few meters away, a huge, black, fire-blasted shape that was all curves and smooth surfaces except for the evil-looking snouts of weapons and wave guide antennae protruding here and there from recesses in the armor. Fear stirred in the back of Clifford’s mind. Please, God, let it be Striker Two-one!
“Red Rover?” a voice said over his radio link. “It’s me, Striker. Where do you want me to put it?”
Sagging with relief, Clifford jerked a gloved thumb over his shoulder. “That building. They’ve got a small, do-it-yourself fortress up there, second floor, just above the main entrance. They’re dug in with grenade launchers, small arms, a hivel, and at least one 2cm pulse laser. Think
you can take that out for us without bringing down the whole damned structure?”
“Well, that’s the trick, I guess,” the warstrider answered. “Taking ’em down is easy. But as for not knocking down the building—”
“That’s our objective in there, striderjack. I’d rather not go after it with a shovel, thank you.”
“I understand. Okay, keep your head down.”
The warstrider drifted past, clearing the top of the wall and moving into the open in front of the building. The gunfire from inside doubled and redoubled; bullets sang and whined off the armor; a grenade exploded close beside the upright machine, rocking it to the right.
A hatch popped open in the strider’s side, and a snub-nosed cylinder nosed forth. There was a shrill whine and a stabbing jet of flame, the sound so piercing that Clifford raised his gloves to cover his ears—uselessly, since he was wearing an enclosed helmet.
The hivel cannon hosed the entire second story of the main building, starting at one end and sweeping to the other. Glass exploded, showering out into the night in a glittering cascade. Bodies fell as well, most mangled almost beyond recognition. The interior of the second floor was intermittently lit from within by exploding rounds, but when the hivel gun fell silent, the gaping holes that had once been windows remained black and silent.
There was no answering fire from the structure.
“Pest control done while you wait,” the warstrider’s pilot said. “Anything else?”
“Thanks, striderjack. If you want to hang around, you’re more than welcome, believe me!”
“I think I’ll wander. There’s a firefight on at the landing field. But give a yell if you need anything else, right?”
“You got it! Thanks!” He shifted frequencies. “Okay, you leggers. Let’s move it! Move it!”
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