Jackers

by William H. Keith

  Eagle was the Confederation flagship, formerly the Imperial destroyer Tokitukaze, captured by Dev during the Battle of Eridu and fresh now from repairs at New America’s orbital yards. Spread out behind her were three converted commercial vessels, the hydrogen tanker Tarazed and the Commerce-class freighters Mirach and Vindemiatrix. They were fifth-generation K-T drive ships, three of the very few such vessels in New America’s inventory, and all had been radically modified in the Newamie yards during the past six busy months. The freighters had been converted to lightly armed transports, each massing just over 25,000 tons, each carrying four air-space shuttles, five hundred armored troops, and a company of warstriders.

  Tarazed’s conversion had been more radical. Originally designed to transport cryo-H, the tanker was huge, five enormous spheres strung like beads on a wire between a tiny bridge-hab module and the boxlike bulk of her mammoth drive and power section. Her lead containment sphere had been gutted of cryogenic gear and field generators and rigged with hab modules and a makeshift hangar deck. Airlocks grown through the hull gave access to vacuum; Tarazed carried as payload eighty-two warflyers, the equivalent of an Imperial carrier wing aboard one of their big dragonships.

  Those three vessels, plus Eagle, were all that New America had been able to spare for the Athenan expedition. The rest of their space forces, including those being rushed in from other Confederation systems, were being organized against the probability—no, the certainty—of an eventual Imperial attack against the Frontier.

  Raids like this one, directed against Imperial shipbuilding facilities across the Shichihju, were an important source of new ships for the nascent rebellion. And possibly, Dev thought as he plunged toward the glittering constellation of lights that marked the Imperial ships and facilities orbiting Daikoku, just possibly such raids would buy the Confederation another desperately needed resource: time.

  Chusa Randin Bradley Lloyd was the senior Hegemonic Guard officer aboard the huge and sprawling orbital complex of habitats and nanofactories called Daikokukichi by the Imperials, but which most of the Hegemony personnel simply referred to as “the Yards.” As he floated onto the main control deck and pulled himself hand over hand toward the link pods lining one bulkhead, he thought again about Tanemura and his fat toad of a flunky and bit off a sharp curse.

  Lloyd had only two superior officers on the station, both of them Imperials. Taisa Tanemura was the base commander, while Chusa Kobo was CO of the facility’s marine contingent. Under their direction, Lloyd was in charge of all of the base technical facilities, including both the sizable civilian population and the orbital defense lasers.

  Senior he might have been, but he’d been having trouble lately applying that seniority in any meaningful fashion. Morale among the gaijin both in orbit and on the planet’s surface was low, so low that Lloyd had had to seriously consider the threat of mutiny. Discipline among the petty officers and lower-ranking commissioned officers was almost nonexistent. Why work hard, why obey orders, when the Imperials seemed only to care about the color of your skin and the cant of your eyes?

  Right now, Lloyd’s temper was frayed short by the attitude of his commanding officers, both of whom subscribed to the theory that, in the field at any rate, Hegemony officers were required to defer to all Imperial officers, regardless of rank. Two days ago, Lloyd had received a twenty-minute tail-chewing from the arrogant little shosa who was Tanemura’s fukkan, or adjutant, and he was not happy about it. Since a shosa was equivalent to an army major or a navy lieutenant commander, one step below Lloyd’s naval rank of full commander, he was hardly impressed by the rank alone. Shosa Hagiwara was simply a self-important little bastard who thought all gaijin foreigners were spies or rebels. Unfortunately, he was a powerful, self-important little bastard, and his report carried considerable weight both with Tanemura and with the Hegemony review board back at Singapore Synchorbital.

  And Tanemura disliked Lloyd for his religion.

  Lloyd’s conversion to Mind of God Universalism had pretty much destroyed his Hegemony Guard career. He acknowledged that now, though it didn’t make things any easier. A creed holding that all intelligences throughout the universe are evolving toward godhood, that all beings are equal, none better or worse than any other, was almost guaranteed to push the wrong download contacts on the Nihonjin, who tended to be conservative in their acceptance of new philosophies, rigid in their understanding of the barriers between classes, and mistrustful of any gaijin, whether it be human, nonhuman, or artificial.

  Lloyd could have kept his conversion secret, of course, but that would have betrayed Universalism’s Third Directive, that the gospel must be downloaded to every rational creature with the wetware to receive it. Two days after passing his conversion creed to his department head aboard the Guard corvette Epsilon Lyrae, he’d found himself transferred to Daikokukichi.

  That had been seventeen months ago, almost three times the normal assignment to a hardship duty station. Imperial COs had come and gone, and he remained here, buried and forgotten. He’d been passed over twice for promotion, both of his wives and his husband had severed contract a year ago, and he’d been routinely denied extrasystem leave. He wanted to go home before the tedium killed him.

  He wanted to live again.

  Life, however, would have to wait. The duty officer had called a class-five alert…then almost immediately upgraded it to a class-two.

  Who the hell was attacking this ’troid-cluttered garbage pit of a system? Settling himself into the commander’s slotseat, Lloyd jacked in his T-sockets and palmed the chair’s interface. Instantly, he was hanging in space, the great, black bulk of Athena turning slowly beneath his feet. The two red suns shone bright against the panorama, their red-mottled surfaces cool enough that he could stare into their disks without discomfort. The faces of both suns were heavily blotched with ragged black sunspots, and he could see the rough-textured granulation of their photospheres, the fire-fountain arc of their prominences.

  “Whatcha got, Manuel?”

  The voice of the duty scanner officer, Chu-i Manuel Rodriguez, spoke in his ear. “I’m not sure, Commander. At first I thought an incoming rogue tripped our approach vector alarms. But we’ve got QPTs out there. One of ’em might be an Amatukaze.”

  “Where?”

  A bright green triangle appeared in his vision, hanging in empty space opposite the planet from the two suns. “Coming in toward our night side,” Rodriguez said. “Four separate targets. On their current vector, they’ll pass within a few million kilometers.”

  “AI, enhance,” Lloyd ordered.

  Four points of light appeared in the triangle, as yet too distant for details to be visible. Data wrote itself next to each in small, neat blocks, giving estimated mass, angle of approach, speed, and course relative to the base. They were definitely ships; their neutrino glow spoke of fusion plants and power taps.

  Lloyd pursed virtual lips, giving a low whistle unheard by anyone save himself. One of those babies massed better than eighty thousand tons, and its IR signature matched that of an Amatukaze-class destroyer. The two smaller ones were lesser ships, large patrol vessels, possibly, or corvettes. The fourth could be almost anything, from a transport or tanker of some kind to a frigate.

  Imperial ships?Had to be. The Hegemony had nothing like the Amatukazes. But what the hell were they doing sneaking into the system, without IFF or clearance requests, without even running lights or anticollision strobes?

  “Tanya! Anything from commo?”

  “Negative, sir. We’ve been hailing on standard Imperial and Hegemony secure frequencies, both radio and laser. No response.”

  And analyzing that approach vector…

  “Full power to X-raysers,” he ordered. Still unsure of the target’s identity, he was taking the standard precautionary steps when dealing with a potentially hostile target. “Track and lock. Stand by to fire.”

  Then the cloudscreens appeared.

  Coming to an immediate decis
ion, Lloyd opened the station’s com channel and raised the alert status to one.

  “Battle stations!Battle stations!” The voice of Daikokukichi’s AI sounded through the link. “We are under attack!”

  Randi Lloyd heard the AI voice giving the alarm through his link but managed to push its insistent clamor to the back of his mind. As the targets grew closer, as the base AI assimilated more and more data on power curves and radiation signatures, the ship ID became more certain. And when the cloudscreens appeared in response to his command to power up the X-raysers, he knew that this was an attack. Damn, that largest one was an Imperial destroyer… but why the hell would it be attacking Daikoku?

  Lloyd’s first thought was that this was some sort of drill, a test of the combat readiness of his men. The destroyer had snuck past the system’s outer defenses and was now preparing to throw a scare into the startled defenders. It would be just like those Imperial bastards to try something dramatic like that.…

  His second thought, close on the heels of the first, was that these were rebels, ships belonging to the so-called Confederation that was challenging Imperial and Hegemony authority throughout the Shichiju. That hardly seemed likely, though. It was widely known throughout Hegemony service that the rebel malcontents were scattered and few, that they had no warships, no leadership, nothing at all to unite them save a vague and hazy opposition to Earth and the Empire. One might as easily believe in space pirates. And surely the authorities would have passed the word down the chain of command if the Confederation had access to Amatukazes!

  Xenophobes? Again, hardly likely, though there was still plenty of who-was circulating about Xenophobe war fleets. All of the downloads he’d taken on Xeno updates indicated that they had no fleets, that their spread from system to system had occurred long ago, the result of some kind of weird panspermia rather than anything as high-tech as a starship.

  Of the three possibilities that leaped immediately to mind, then, Lloyd decided that the first one was the best. This had to be some kind of test. Very well. He would follow the procedure by the book, proving to his superiors that even gaijin had their uses; at this point, most of the battle would be fought by high-speed computers in any case, leaving precious little for him to do.

  The attacking force had released cloudscreens, in a classic attack deployment. They were certainly going for realism. One question nagged at Lloyd, however. If he had a chance at a shot with one of his X-rayser batteries, should he take it and risk holing an Imperial warship?

  The damnable part of all of this was that his operational orders said nothing about possible war games or tests. The base’s defensive posture was tested frequently through ViRsimulation, not by live actions with real warships.

  The safe play would be to pretend that those attacking ships were enemies and fight just as hard he would if he knew them to be Xenophobe warships. They were almost certainly Imperials. The Hegemony, he was pretty sure, didn’t have any warships larger than small, Yari-class destroyers or large frigates. If he scorched the armor off a careless Impie ship or two while living up to the spirit of this game, that was their lookout, not his.

  Nonetheless, he punched through an urgent summons to both Taisa Tanemura and Chusa Kobo, calling them to the facility’s main control deck. If those bastards wanted the glory of running this godforsaken shipyard, let them have some of the responsibility as well!

  “I’m registering multiple QTP start-ups,” Tarazed’s captain, Jase Curtis, announced over the squadron taclink. “At least four separate sources.”

  “Roger that,” Dev replied, trying to keep his mental voice steady. Most of those stars represented the thin neutrino glare from fusion power plants, but four were significantly brighter and almost certainly marked quantum power taps.

  Starships.Capital ships, monsters as big and as powerful as Eagle… or worse.

  “Fifteen seconds until we’re in range of primary laser defenses,” Captain Anders reported. “They’re tracking us on K-band.”

  Weapons-guidance radar. “Okay, Tarazed,” Dev ordered. “Time to loose your pups.”

  From the airlock bays of Tarazed’s lead storage sphere, bundles of tiny craft spilled into space. Most were decoys, computer-directed pods with IR and radar characteristics similar to the larger craft hidden among them. The rest were warflyers, DY-64 Raidens and DR-80 Tenrais, most of them, with a few older and much-patched models thrown in as well.

  If the principal weapon of land combat was the warstrider, jacked by a cephlinked pilot, the mainstay of close-in space combat, especially for the Confederation and its limited ship assets, was the warflyer. Little more than a warstrider modified for operation in zero-G, it measured a scant few meters in length and massed eighteen to twenty-four tons. Weapons and manipulators were folded into recesses in the armored hull, with fusorpack thrusters and cryo-H tanks mounted in the place of legs. Each was a single-slotter, with one man jacked into the link circuits and with a level-two AI handling the number-intensive functions like targeting and vector computation.

  “They’re charging their primary lasers.”

  “Cloudscreens,” Dev ordered. “Now!”

  Magnetic launchers slung explosive pods ahead of the Confederation ships. Seconds later, EWC-167 nanomunitions packs detonated in swift, silent flashes, loosing swarms of microscopic particles in a silvery, laser-devouring fog. From the framework of the orbital base, an X-ray laser winked on, the beam invisible until its energy was reemitted by the fog as dazzling, violet glare.

  Dev watched impassively as the squadron deployed according to plan, sheltering behind cloudscreens as they fell toward the Daikoku base. Fear nipped at the back reaches of his mind. Had he foreseen everything possible? Was this a trap?

  He was new to this business of commanding a squadron, and the hardest aspect of the job was knowing that now that the op plan was complete, the assault itself unfolding, there was little more he personally could do… but watch, a spectator as Lara Anders spun Eagle’s nearly four-hundred-meter bulk end for end, then applied full thrust, braking sharply at 4 Gs.

  Now that the battle had begun, he couldn’t even boss the other ships in the squadron. Communications between ships during combat was always less than perfect. Radio might be tapped by the enemy, the codes broken by AI decrypto programs and false orders fed into the command net. Lasers offered relatively secure, direct-beam communications, but the beams could be broken by any change of course and speed by either ship, and as the battle continued, more and more of the huge, ghostly cloudscreens drifted through the combat volume, dissolving lasercom feeds into crackling static.

  Dev was listening in on the channels assigned to the other three Confederation ships, of course, but what came through was fragmentary, useful only to confirm that the other ships were still in action.

  “… ach! Mirach! Watch… X-rayser… up at three… niner!”

  “… see it, Tara… pla… in… ling left… and high!”

  “I’ve got a power build… grid… eight-three… on top of it!”

  He could have fed them orders, but anything he told them would have been as garbled as what he was hearing. Broken and incomplete orders in combat, Dev knew well, were worse than no orders at all.

  It would be far worse for the enemy, he thought. Space fleet tactics relied on close, tight formations, working on the theory that ships that moved together could comlink closely enough to fight as a unit, coordinating their movements and their firepower against their opponents one by one. When one side was surprised in dock, however, there was an inevitable delay before they could work clear of their berthing facilities and establish comlink networks. This entire raid had been based on the assumption that the four Confederation ships would enjoy a golden few moments of that most precious of tactical advantages, communications superiority.

  The question was, would it be advantage enough?

  Chapter 3

  It is well that war is so terrible. Otherwise we should grow too fond of it.
<
br />   —General Robert E. Lee

  C.E. 1862

  Enhancing a portion of his vision, Dev peered past Eagle’s cloudscreen as the paths of the ship and the nanocloud diverged, getting his first good look at the facility that was their target.

  Daikokukichi was a roughly cross-shaped assembly of open girders and struts. Fuel and cryo-tanks, storage areas, and hab modules were mounted around the perimeter, while three massive hab modules rotated about the hub on arms to provide spin gravity. Second, third, and fourth levels housed nano storage chambers, pumping stations, and neat arrays of growth vats and molds, the station’s fitting and drawing yards; a fifth was devoted to zero-G derricks and gantry arms, to finishing hangars, berthing areas and docks, where finished or near-finished ships were moored. Running through the center of the structure was an axis, a long, spindle-shaped central core connecting a power plant module at one end with a control and communications center at the other. The defensive lasers—designed for meteor protection in this rubble-strewn system, but equally effective against marauding starships—were mounted outboard, on raised structures giving them the widest possible zones of clear fire.

  Captain Anders was figuratively looking over Dev’s shoulder at the same virtual reality display. “Big goker,” she said. “Commodore? You think they have close-in reserves, maybe hidden behind the planet?”

  Dev almost didn’t react to the unfamiliar title. He wasn’t used to the strictly honorary and unofficial promotion he’d been given when Travis Sinclair had put him in charge of this mission. The Confederation was still in the process of converting from the Nihongo rank structure employed for the past several centuries by the Hegemony, by resurrecting the system used by Western military forces before the Japanese ascendancy. Dev’s formal rank of naval captain, equivalent to an army colonel or the Imperial Hegemony taisa, was new and uncomfortable enough, but by a custom old before Man first had left the world of his birth, there could not be two captains aboard one ship. To be called commodore by people who had more experience at command than he did was unsettling.