Warstrider 06 - Battlemind

by William H. Keith

  “Brad! Where are you? I can’t see?”

  “Kilo! That’s a kill!”

  “Gokkin’ straight! Look at that kicker burn!”

  More Web devices burst past her, streaking sunward, and she captured their images, enhancing and enlarging them in her mind. Could any of these devilish machines detonate the sun… or only certain ones? Human experience was nec­essarily limited when it came to deliberately exploded suns, but those Webber devices seen entering the atmosphere of stars in the past had always been fairly large, eighty or a hundred meters in length at least, and massing a good many thousands of tons. It seemed unlikely that the smallest could do anything that would disrupt something as huge as a star.

  Indeed, as fast as they were vaporizing under the caress of Kara’s lasers and those of her company, she found it hard to believe they could even approach a sun closer than a few million kilometers.

  “All Phantoms!” she called over the command circuit. “This is One-one! Ignore the small stuff! We want to wax the big ones! I say again, leave the small stuff under a meter or two for the mop-up. Concentrate on the big kickers, the real ships!”

  One by one, the individual members of her company ac­knowledged.

  “My God, look at ’em come!” Carla Jones exclaimed.

  “Easy pickings,” Ran added.

  “Keep the chatter down, people,” Kara warned. Now was the time for concentration… not losing your combat edge gawking at the opposition. “Set your weapons triggers on automatic, with targeting parameters set at three meters plus. Remember, these things are fast and they’re maneu­verable. Watch your six, everybody.”

  And then they were in the heart of the cloud, and there was no more time for speeches.

  Falcon warstrider/flyers and a bewildering menagerie of Webber devices passed one another faster than a blink, the human flyers and Web machine cloud interpenetrating one another in a furious exchange of laser fire, particle beams, and fusion warheads. Letting her AI take over the targeting of her lasers, Kara used her Falcon’s V54 Devastator par­ticle gun to target a larger, more distant enemy machine—a flat, silver-blue, oblong shape with oddly sculpted an­gles—and fired. One face of the distant machine exploded in a brilliant eruption of pyrotechnics; pieces glittered in the sunlight as they spun away from the shattered craft.

  Battle filled the night, raw and furious, and the sky was filled with fire. Savagely, she decelerated at full thrust, pull­ing Gs that would have reduced her body to blood-smeared jelly if she’d been physically aboard her machine. A fusion warhead—she had no idea whether it was a human nuke or something fired by the enemy—detonated, a silent pop of intense light that burned furiously against the night for sev­eral seconds before cooling to invisibility.

  Kara brought her Falcon around, still dumping speed as fast as she could and firing her lateral thrusters at full G thrust. The Webbers had slowed sharply as they neared the sun, possibly to allow room for maneuvers, possibly because they were aware of the human ships materializing in their path and needed to leave themselves combat options.

  She closed on a cluster of silvery devices, scattering to­ward the sun. The Web machines reminded Kara of insects, glittering and faceted, some with spindly and many jointed arms or appendages, some with spines or fins serving uni­maginable purposes. Triggering the V54 again, she watched three of the kickers vaporize and a fourth begin tumbling wildly, spilling a cascade of white sparks from a shattered pylon. Vaguely, she was aware of the big lasers from Fudo-Myoo striking home on a dozen more Web machines, aware of other warflyer squadrons entering the fight. Everywhere she turned her enhanced senses, she could see Web kickers and twisting, dogfighting Falcons, Hawks, and P-80 Eagles. Hundreds of Web machines had been destroyed within the past few seconds… but a glance at her formation status board showed that the Phantoms were taking losses too.

  Five down, so far. She hoped all of the striderjacks were waking up okay, back aboard the Gauss.

  Then something hit her, hard, and she heard the shriek of tearing metal, felt the jolt of a misfiring thruster until she was able to override the jet and correct her tumble. Her sensors warned that she’d taken a direct hit from a particle beam; her port-side attitude control systems were on the verge of total shutdown, and there was a fire in the port electronics module. It’s okay if you take the big one, she told herself, a mantra of survival, of sanity. You’re safe. You’re aboard the Gauss. This isn’t happening to you.…

  But to fly, to really fly, she had to be part of her strider. Savagely, she hit the system override, then waited as the damage control routines opened her damaged module to space and suppressed the flames.

  It’s okay if you take the big one.…

  Chapter 18

  Throughout history, certain key technological devel­opments or inventions have become drivers, advanc­ing not only the particular field within which they were made, but the entirety of civilization. Fire was one, the domestication of animals another, the inven­tion of movable type still another, discoveries that ushered in whole new ways of living, of learning about the world, of thinking.

  Ultimately, it was the cephlink and its Naga-biolink successor that utterly revolutionized society, trans­forming the very nature of Man and how he saw himself to a degree greater than any invention or dis­covery that had come before.

  —Drivers of Change

  KELLIN JANDBRVOORS

  C.E. 2570

  Dev was following the battle from his vantage point at Hachiman, on Luna, where streams of data from Mars, from the battleline before the sun, and from Earth-Lunar space were cascading through the combat center’s big quantum Oki-Okasan high speed computers.

  The picture, Dev realized, was far too large and too com­plex for any one human mind to perceive. It was a little frightening, in fact, to realize that he was perceiving much of it, more than he possibly could have followed in his or­ganic body. His interface with the Net, however, gave him a tremendous advantage in speed and processing power, when he used the Oki-Okasan as an extension of his own facilities. He wondered, though, if it might not be a good idea to try doubling himself again. Perhaps two of him… or four, or even more, could have better made sense of the flood of data cascading through his consciousness.

  The battle near the orbit of Mercury seemed to be turning in Humanity’s favor at last; most of the largest Web ma­chines had already been picked off by the Fudo-Myoo, which had been selectively targeting them since shortly after they entered the system. On Mars, things were not going well at all; at last report, Web kickers in huge numbers had brushed past or destroyed most of the Imperial Navy war­ships based there and were pounding both the planetary de­fense facilities at Phobos and military and civilian bases on the surface. Yamato was disabled and adrift. A dozen other ships had been destroyed or so badly damaged that they could no longer fight.

  And closer at hand, in the volume of space encompassing Earth and Luna, the battle was still seesawing back and forth, with neither side yet winning a clear upper hand. The Web cloud detailed to strike at Earth and the Moon had been blasted down to a fraction of its original size, which meant that local planetary defenses and the Imperial ships stationed close by at least had a chance.

  At the same time, though, the remnants of the Earth-assault cloud had been so badly scattered that many kickers were slipping through just because of their small size. Ships and ground facilities were being knocked out when tiny Web devices, some the size of a man’s hand, latched on and began eating their way through armor and hull metal; it was impossible to get them all, and the damage suffered from these leakers was building fast. More damage had been in­curred from laser-sail impactors and nano-D pellets, driven at high velocity into human ships and base defenses.

  More alarming still was the number of large kickers that had broken through the Imperial defenses and entered Earth’s atmosphere. Reports from the surface were confus­ing, often incoherent, but it sounded as though Web units were attacking cities and
facilities across much of southern Asia, eastern Africa, and the Americas. Dev could track the enemy assaults by noting the deployment of Imperial Marine and Army warstrider units to key defensive positions. The foci of the kicker attacks were the sprawling city complexes at the bases of Earth’s three sky-els, at Quito, in the Andes; at Nanyuki, near Mount Kenya; and at Palau Linggae, south of Singapore.

  But the major attack was developing in space, around the synchorbital facilities 36,000 kilometers above Earth’s equa­tor. Through his far-flung electronic sensors, Dev watched several hundred large Web kikai—the biggest were nearly the size of a small Imperial frigate and must have massed three thousand tons apiece—attack Earth’s synchorbitals, the three separate clusters of habitats, factories, shipyards, and nanomanufactories that spread out along synchronous orbit at the top of each of Earth’s three sky-els. Each facility possessed massed banks of lasers, particle beams, and mis­sile launchers; the possibility of a Confederation attack on the seat of the Empire’s government had long been a major concern of the Imperial Staff Command.

  All three synchorbitals had taken heavy damage already, most from the laser sails and the smaller Web machines that had slipped past right under the guns of the trio of big ryu carriers and some hundreds of Imperial warflyers that served as the Empire’s innermost protective bastion and had begun eating away at the facilities’ outer hulls. The carriers Gin­garyu, Shinryu, and Hoshiryu had maneuvered themselves close to each of the sky-el orbital complexes and deployed squadron after squadron of their best warflyers—mostly Ryusei- and Suisei-class fighters, though the larger and deadlier Shugekisha assault striders were in the fight as well.

  Small warflyers were maneuvering among the girders and support beams of the synchorbitals, burning Web kickers off the structure wherever they could be found, and joining into squadron-sized assault units to hunt down and kill the larger enemy machines as they approached.

  As Dev watched, a nuclear fireball blossomed, bringing a short, false dawn to the skies over South America; a Web machine had just turned itself into a small fusion warhead and detonated against the Quito Synchorbital, and wreckage was spreading out from the sky-el towertop in a glittering, sparkling haze.

  Everywhere, the skies were sorcery unchained, an Ar­mageddon of fire and death and destruction.

  “I’ve got three big kickers,” Kara reported over the com­mand net. “Five thousand kilometers, directly ahead of me, and on a flat, all-out run. They’re either headed for the Gauss or breaking through on a straight run for Sol.”

  She was accelerating hard now, with the sun a swollen brilliance directly ahead. Her Falcon’s sensors were editing what she saw, of course, cutting down most of the light which, unfiltered, would have blinded her instantly. With computer processing and enhancement, even the granulation of the photosphere was visible, and she could make out the bright red arcs and geysers of the solar prominences rising above the raging star’s limb.

  Her targets, three unusually large Webbers each about the size of a 3,000-ton frigate, were deployed in a perfect equi­lateral triangle, each craft a half kilometer from its neigh­bors. These things tend to travel in clusters, she thought. I wonder if that’s the key to their coordination program? If the Webbers operated as a group mind, they would need a way to communicate with one another and coordinate their actions. At Nova Aquila, the Alphas had been the coordi­nators. Here, though, the Web forces must be running their equivalent of control programs on multiple kickers, each, perhaps, serving as a node in a widely dispersed network. It couldn’t be too dispersed, however, since too great a dis­tance would introduce a nasty time lag due to speed-of-light limitations. That need to stick together, to maintain a close and tight line of sight, might be a clue to the way they were coordinating their efforts.

  The analysis flashed through her mind in less time than it took to select one of the three targets and lock in her Devastator. A coded thought fired the weapon, and a portion of the flat, angular Web craft vanished in a puff of vapor and sun-flashing fragments. She fired again, and the beam ripped through the target’s side halfway from stern to prow; as vapor exploded from the stricken craft, sending it tum­bling wildly in the opposite direction, Kara shifted targets to one of the two remaining kickers, locking in and firing in a fast-paced succession of control thoughts. The second kicker exploded, fragments glowing white-hot as they spun through space. “Kilo!” she shouted, using the K-for-kill code current in warflyer ops. “That’s two!”

  She was pouring fire into the third target when a K-242 Starstreak with a micronuke warhead streaked in from Ka­ra’s left and detonated, the tiny matter-antimatter charge in its detonator generating the flash and the surplus of neutrons necessary to trigger a relatively small but precisely placed tenth-kiloton blast.

  “Kilo!” Ran called over the tactical net. “That’s three!”

  “Two and a half,” Kara said, correcting him with a laugh. It sounded harsh and a bit brittle to her ear, and she wondered if Ran could hear the strain in her mental voice. “Let’s keep it straight!”

  Ran’s warstrider flashed past, a few hundred kilometers distant. Ahead now, a hundred thousand kilometers away, Gauss and Shralghal hung in space, keeping up a running, long-ranged sniping against the larger kickers, and awaiting either the battle’s end or the announcement that an Achiever was ready to carry both vessels to the safety of another system.

  Kara pulled her Falcon around, dropping into a gentle, sweeping turn that put her on Ran’s tail.

  “I think we’ve got ’em about licked,” Ran told her. His excitement, his buoyant attitude, were infectious. “We’ve killed all the kickers over a meter or two in this cloud. From here on, it’ll be a mop-up!”

  The laser-driven nano gossamer streaked in so quickly that neither Kara nor Ran saw it coming. One moment, she was tucked in behind him, flying in close formation as they shaped a new vector out-system. The next, Ran’s Falcon was an eye-searing splash of blinding light, a radiance that briefly outshone the huge and swollen sun. Her flyer hit the expanding debris cloud, which rattled off her armor like hail in a fierce-driving storm and jolted her Falcon like the det­onation of a bomb.

  “Ran!” His flyer was gone, disintegrated utterly by the high-kinetic impact of an object traveling at well over half the speed of light. It had been so sudden that she still couldn’t completely register that it had happened. “Ran!”

  “We’re on it, Captain,” a voice from Gauss said. “We’re trying to revive him now.”

  Kara struggled for control, righting down rage and horror and stark fear. Ran was okay. He had to be. He would wake up in a few moments back aboard the Gauss, disoriented, confused and dazed, perhaps, but still well. Still with his mind intact.

  He had to.…

  For the Dev-copy that had remained in the Solar System, the battle continued to unfold as a titanic, sprawling mosaic of countless pieces, slowly coming together as he manipu­lated the streams of data flowing from ten thousand separate sources. For a time, he’d tried to influence the battle at var­ious points and from different nodes in the Net, but he’d given that up at last. The battle now was less a matter of strategy and tactics—or even of creative solutions to new threats—than it was a bloody and patient contest of numbers versus will. Hundreds of thousands—possibly millions—of Web kickers were now everywhere throughout near-Earth space, clustering most intensely at the major concentrations of human technology, the sky-els, the synchorbitals, and the big orbital facilities around Luna and at the Earth-Moon LaGrange points.

  One unfolding drama, however, captured Dev’s attention. The enormous ryu warflyer-carrier Hoshiryu, the Star Dragon, was moving slowly past the Singapore Synchorbital space docks, a massive, armor-hided leviathan nearly one kilometer long, with the needle-slim spires of weapons na­celles and sensory antennae stabbing forward like the thrusts of multiple bladed weapons.

  Hoshiryu, Dev saw as he called up the data, had been positioned a few hundred kilometers ou
t from Singapore Synchorbital, adding its considerable firepower and the war-flyer squadrons stationed on-board to the already titanic mis­sile and energy output from the synchorbital planetary defenses. Until the appearance of the Web clouds, the carrier had been in space dock for routine maintenance and repairs. She was operational, but her K-T drives were off-line and she would be limited to normal-space operations for the du­ration; Hoshiryu would win in her coming battle… or die.

  Dev’s attention was attracted to the huge dragonship sec­onds after a long, needle-like Webber flashed in with drives full-on. Measuring perhaps fifty meters from prow to stern and massing less than three hundred tons, it was a sliver compared with the ponderous mass of the dragonship, but it was traveling at something like two hundred kilometers per second. It streaked in out of the fire and the blackness so fast that the carrier’s defensive beams and point-defense turrets missed entirely… or had time only to caress its outer layers of armor. It struck the Hoshiryu amidships, burying itself in the bigger ship’s flank like an old-time har­poon plunging into the side of a whale.

  Then it detonated, a staggering release of kinetic energy that sent ripples cascading along the ryu’s length. The big ship shuddered, yawing hard to port, as glowing-hot frag­ments spilled from the burning rent in its side.

  Within seconds, three more Webbers flashed in, angling toward the stricken Imperial giant. One vanished in a light­ning-flash of raw energy, trapped in a crossfire from ryu and synchorbital, but the other two plunged past the expanding shell of gas and debris and pierced the grievously wounded ryu forward of her main spin-grav module, and aft, near the clustered slush-H storage tanks.

  Damn! Dev thought with growing horror. They’re using the ryu for a suicide bombing target!…

  Hoshiryu was out of control now. Huge gaps showed in her hull where armor plates had been eaten or blown away, and a dozen craters pocked her hull, some still glowing red-hot from the energies that had been loosed there. Much of the aft end had been literally melted away in the starcore heat of that fusion blast.