by J. F. Holmes
They continued to discuss ongoing operations, and Warren emphasized the personnel aspect of the war. “I know, down to the last nut and bolt, what we have in storage, as far as weapons and fighting systems. What we need are people. The Main Force units have done a good job of training who they can, but make no mistake. The entire WORLD is going to have to be behind this effort, or we’re doomed. We need every damned trained pilot, mechanic, infantryman, scientist, whatever.”
“The Scout Teams are shifting priority to recovering assets,” said Dalpe, “and we’ve got a raid planned on the Invy research compound on Long Island tonight.”
“Good. We need those people,” answered Warren. “Any tech we can get, or build, will help.”
They closed up, with a promise to let him know if there were any new developments. He unjacked, and the world shrank, making him merely human again. Swinging his legs off the couch, he stretched, wounded shoulder aching, and looked around for a place to piss, making a mental note to have a unit fly out here and start getting the base re-established.
“DAVID!” boomed a voice from a speaker, and Warren jumped, urine splashing on his boots. He pulled up his pants and grabbed at the VR jacks, feeling momentarily disoriented as the world swam around him.
When it settled, in front of him stood his friend, the AI named Hal. He shared a similar appearance to David, except now he clutched at his side as blood ran freely from a wound. Warren knew it was merely a representation of damage the program had suffered, but it was very bloody.
“Hal, what the hell is going on?” he asked. The AI had been on a mission to disrupt the Invy ansible communication networks, but that should have taken minutes.
“There’s been treachery in deep places,” his friend gasped, then looked over his shoulder. And turned and ran.
Across the virtual room, another figure appeared, striding steadily. It slowly resolved into an avatar of a…something hideously ugly, sucker-faced with longish, matted grey hair, dressed in combat gear and carrying a rifle. The creature made a grimace of a smile and said, “Greetings, General Warren.”
“You…you’re the Invy AI!” the human sputtered.
The smile grew wider and it said, “Correct,” in a flat, metallic voice. “You biologicals amaze me. I didn’t predict this, but it’s a good challenge.” The English was precise, but mechanical.
At that moment, the end of a shotgun barrel appeared inches from the thing’s head, and a flat BANG sounded. The avatar was flung to one side and disappeared, to be replaced by Hal again.
“That should take care of him for a while.” He stood straight, closed his eyes, and the blood seemed to disappear.
“Is it dead?” asked Warren, still stunned by the fast action.
Hal shook his head and said, “No, I wish it were so easy. I’ve been slowly severing the Invy’s ansible connections between Earth and Schickard base, where the physical sentience banks reside. That was the last, and I can rest for a while.”
“Can he, it, whatever it is, repair them?” asked Warren.
“Probably. The Octos are good programmers, and there are many here on Earth working on it. In fact, if you can find out if we have any information systems people still alive in the CEF, that might help. They can use the access at Raven Rock.”
“Are…are you OK?” There was genuine concern in his friend’s voice, but also fear. He hadn’t realized how critical this end of the fight would be. A mistake on his part.
“I’m missing some of my core programing. For example, I cannot recall who won the siege of Acre in the Napoleonic Wars. Or who Bill Clinton was.”
“No big loss. Can you still fight? How long do we have?”
A look of concentration passed across the AI’s face. “It depends on how Lex does. Taking on those cruisers is going to be tough. I’d say a week. The primary ansible relay back to their next system with reinforcements is located in what used to be the Congo.”
“Can we hit it?” asked Warren, and before them spread out a topographical map of the eastern Atlantic with positions of CEF units and weapons range circles. Hal marked a point approximately three hundred miles inland. It was just outside the reach of a circle marked “Samson”, stopping just short by perhaps fifty miles.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Hal. “It’s buried deeply inside a mountain.”
“Can you destroy it?”
The avatar shook his head no, and said nothing more. Although they were full sentient beings, AIs often lacked the imagination humans possessed, tactically. It was why they’d been partnered, one for one, with the kids of Project Brightstar.
“What about using a Special Operations team in bio gear? Jump in?” Then Warren discarded the idea; the suits would be a killer in the jungle. “Maybe the Apes will help us. I can ask.”
“Maybe. And if they don’t?” said his friend.
“Then we have to take out the AI itself at Schickard base. Can you disable their defenses?”
Hal thought, then said, “I would have to open an ansible connection, and it will be waiting for me, with all the knowledge it has gained. I may not survive this time. It would be better to deliver a hard connection directly to the AI intelligence units at Schickard.”
“That will take…a lot. Let me think and confer with General Dalpe.”
“Understood, David. I must go.” And the avatar dissolved.
Chapter 89
At first, Lex wasn’t concerned about the ansible going silent. The ship was slowly accelerating, leaving behind the debris field of the battle. It had dispersed some in eleven years, various pieces going in directions imparted by the kinetic energy of explosions. She regretted the thousands of bodies, shattered and frozen, that spun through space, but victory would be their revenge. It was a human concept, one she thought she understood.
As time passed, and the connection wasn’t reestablished, she tried to open a connection to CEFHQ. Nothing, not even a carrier wave. She ran a diagnostic on her systems; maybe some damage had gone unnoticed, but all coms showed green. That meant it was on the Earth side. Well, she had patience. There were many reasons, from the heat of battle to simple equipment failure. Meanwhile, she could try to track the battle by listening in on the radios coming online from the battles on Earth.
“Lost Boys, this is Foehammer, one minute out, mark targets, over,” came crackling over the radio. It was accompanied by the roar of jet engines she instantly identified as an A-10.
“Foehammer, we are approximately one zero zero meters forty degrees magnetic of the target, along the runway, target marked with orange smoke, over,” came back the strained answer of a man in combat, punctuated by gunfire and the static overload of plasma.
She pinpointed the source, an extremely low-power tactical radio on the east coast of North America.
“I COPY ONE ZERO ZERO FORTY, ORANGE SMOKE!” came back the strained voice of the pilot as she fought against G forces and the shaking of her fifty-year-old plane. “Twenty seconds, I can only give you one pass, guns and cluster!”
Oh, to be in that fight! Other signals cropped up as the world turned and, just over the horizon in Asia, aircraft radio sparked across the upper atmosphere. The Japanese was instantly translated into the American English she’d been programmed to think in.
“For your Empress, for our ancestors, and for us all, let’s do this! Sixteen element, stay and cover the submarines. Remember, their interceptors are not really designed for atmosphere. We can outmaneuver them. KEEP THEM OFF THE SUBS! Meinu,” called the woman, “follow me on high altitude intercept.”
Well, hell, that was frigging thrilling. She called up the files and did a voice pattern analysis. Captain Kiyomi Ichijou, Japanese Defense Force, ace veteran of the Spratly War, CEF instructor pilot. Damn, good for her, GO GO GO, cheered Lex.
“TALLYHO! Six, no, eight Invy approaching at angels 30! Vector 195 degrees, engaging!” It was followed by the light of a nuclear sun, and through the interference, she heard an exultant "BANZAI!�
��
Insane laughter echoed through the ansible, and Lex felt the first attack on her logic circuits, a burning pain that felt like a knife driven into her. At that, the carrier Lexington shut down her ansible completely, cut her reactor, and went dark, disappearing from the Invy sensors searching far and near.
Chapter 90
She drifted in the black, sight limited to passive monitoring only. Slight burns from maneuvering thrusters sent her reeling off her attack trajectory, to try and confuse any Invy sensors that might have been tracking her. She didn’t think they had; radar and lidar would have painted her hull long before they got enough of a return to track, and she’d sensed nothing.
Earth’s sole remaining ship was running silent, calculating angles, vectors, thrust, and a thousand other things to make a successful hit on the cruisers. The new approach made the attack harder, but their drive lights still burned hotly, now in deceleration. Because of their drives being slightly pointed toward her now, Lex was, in effect, invisible.
She powered up the railgun at two hundred thousand kilometers, feeling the life course through the circuits. Come on, hold together. This one’s for Ben! she thought, referring to the America’s AI. A few last moment corrections, and the ship’s speakers shouted into the empty hangar bays and crew compartments, “FIRING, FIRING, FIRING!”
That the only ones who could hear her were dead and frozen solid didn’t matter. She was sure their spirits were with her. Two dozen steel and depleted-uranium sabot rounds ripped their way down the magnetic rails, one every three seconds. Coolant washed through the magnets, but the gauges immediately started jumping into the red. She shifted fire to the other cruiser, both still moving forward blindly toward Earth, but only managed to get six rounds out before an enormous crack of discharged electricity arced from the railgun.
Despite the enormous pain that ran through her at the discharge, Lex remained focused on the scopes, waiting. Active search with radar would alert them, and fast as they were, the time of flight of the rounds was almost half an hour. Her first indication of success would be, hopefully, a flash of light, or even better yet, two.
After what seemed to be an eternity, there were sparks of light, hits signifying penetration, almost hidden by the glare of engines, as the unguided rounds slipped through the opening in the magnetic shields required by the drive. One, two, then nothing. She cursed and would have wept if she could, and lit off her own engines, pushing to thirty gravities of acceleration.
A moment later, a blinding flash reached her as the second cruiser’s antimatter containment unit let go. They were delicate constructs, and a hit on a critical part would be catastrophic. Fierce joy swept through the electronic circuits of humanity’s child, and she charged into battle, lighting off her radar and lidar, readying her fighters in their hangar bays. The Invy cruiser blasted powerful electromagnetic radiation and light waves, trying to identify her attacker.
David Warren’s plan was, in essence, to create a ghost fleet. Both fighters were armed with single three hundred kiloton warheads mounted on missiles. In essence, unlike the F-87 Vipers, designed for dogfighting, the F/B-90 Mantas were instead bombers, stealthy, made to sneak in and deliver punches from bomb-pumped x-ray lasers.
The missiles were launched as soon as the Mantas cleared the landing bays, using the glare of the Lexington’s drive to mask their engines. Each ship then peeled off to either side, and Lex used data gathered long ago to mirror the cruiser’s sensor frequencies. The signal was sent back amplified, to match the signal that would have been generated by CEF battleships. In essence, the Invy would see a CEF squadron bearing down on it, a carrier with its two escorting gunships. A smart Invy commander would run, leaving their drive exposed to the x-ray lasers. Well, a smart human commander would, but Warren and Lex were counting on the Invy’s marked arrogance to lead them into the trap.
The two missiles shut down their drives after a few moments of hard acceleration, the distance between them and the Lex growing with their greater speed. Made of carbon fiber composites and other radar absorbing materials, the matte-black weapons were invisible against the backdrop of space.
The Lexington, and its two ghost escorts, were not. The Invy cruiser bore straight in on the carrier, even as their two particle beam turrets sent lances of fire at each “battleship”. The computers on the first managed to maneuver so the beam seemed to hit the fake ship, but in reality passed through it, missing by a thousand meters. The second wasn’t so lucky; it detonated the bomber in midflight, and several grams of antimatter and matter mixed, erupting with the power of a small sun.
Lex maneuvered violently, trying to anticipate the Invy shots. The cruiser, though, focused its particle stream to fire on the remaining ghost ship, using railguns to hammer at the carrier. “Closer,” whispered Lex to no one. “Closer!” Although most of the shots were deflected by her makeshift shields, one bore through and plowed down the length of her remaining hangar deck. It was as if someone had fired a small but high-powered rifle bullet through her arm, and she screamed with agony.
At the same moment, the second bomber was hit and exploded. Wrenching her mind from her pain, Lex fired maneuvering jets, spinning on her axis and dumping reaction mass into her engines. She ran, and the cruiser followed, pumping round after round at her as she maneuvered wildly. Most disappeared into the burning hell of her exhaust, but one more shattered her hull, opening the Lexington’s engineering section to the void, scattering frozen bodies.
The cruiser passed the two missiles, running a path directly between them. Their computers watched for the opening in the shields, shimmering through the spectrum, and when it appeared, for the briefest moment, engines fired, throwing the missiles forward. Both detonated and, milliseconds later, the pulse of the fusion reaction, guided by devices that disappeared microseconds later, generated intense, directed x-rays. They slammed into the engines of the cruiser, sleeting into delicate electronics and burning them out, giving the crew a massively lethal dose. Dead in space, one maneuvering jet firing wildly, the Invy ship began to yaw completely out of control.
Lex turned and burned, headed for Earth, a fierce exaltation coursing through her. For a second, she opened up her ansible connection. The assault was immediate, a screaming of alien language, and she took an instant to scream a very human, very heartfelt, “FUCK YOU!”
“When the Federal Republican Constitution of their country, which they have sworn to support, no longer has a substantial existence, and the whole nature of their government has been forcibly changed, without their consent, from a restricted federative republic, composed of sovereign states, to a consolidated central military despotism, in which every interest is disregarded but that of the army and the priesthood, both the eternal enemies of civil liberty, the everready minions of power, and the usual instruments of tyrants…
…The necessity of self-preservation, therefore, now decrees our eternal political separation.”
Declaration of Independence of Texas, 1836
Deep in the Heart of Texas
Outside the ruins of Austin, Texas, Third day of the war.
Chapter 91
"Got you, tricky bastards," the man whispered, as the camouflaged Invy sniper position appeared in his vision. It was well hidden, but a telltale movement had given them away.
Sergeant Billy Keith checked for windage, exhaled, and squeezed the trigger. The Mosin jumped, he racked the bolt, and when the scope settled again, he saw the Wolverine that had killed five of his friends, or what was left of him, sprawled backward over the concealing foliage. Another Invy, the spotter, whipped up his plasma rifle, and another 7.62mm bullet, packed in its cartridge a hundred years ago to fight German invaders, raced the stream of fourth-state matter to their respective targets. The calmer shooter won, and Keith didn't even flinch as the air over his head crackled with free electrons.
Counter-sniper artillery fire was another matter. It didn’t care how calm he was; a high-explosive round would ru
in your day. So he fled forward, downhill, and into the small gully that separated him from the Invy position. As he ran, he counted. When he got to twenty, the Central Texas Volunteer Militia soldier dove to the ground and curled himself up in a ball around his rifle, trying to burrow into the ground.
His firing position, where he’d lain for four hours, disappeared in a fountain of debris, and overpressure hammered at his ears and lungs. The former Force Recon Marine didn’t even wait for the dirt to stop showering down on him; his only thought was that he was grateful the Invy hadn’t started using radar proximity fuses. Losing air superiority had really hurt them, and the aliens were scrambling to reorganize their forces and adapt their tech. A running start back uphill, and he landed in the hole that had just been blasted in the forest floor, and waited out the next half dozen rounds, earth shaking around him.
It probably would have been more, but here outside the ruins of Austin, the Invy base was an isolated post, far from their base in Houston. One that, in a conventional war, would have been left to die on the vine. This wasn’t conventional, though, it was a war of liberation, and it wouldn’t end until every last damn one of the aliens were gone off Earth. Maybe the CEF military had a bigger strategy, but this was his land, and no Texan who’d survived the occupation would rest until the bastards were all dead.
In his former life, Keith would have waited until nightfall before moving again, but the Invy sensors were just too damn good. Better daylight and stealth, especially since he didn’t have his own night vision. Well, he did, back at the patrol base, but no batteries for them. No, it was good old hunting and stalking skill that got him back to his unit.
