Jackers

by William H. Keith

  Ignoring the strangeness, he concentrated on the question. “If they have ships behind the planet, they’re powered down right now, or we’d see their neut emissions,” he told Lara. “Actually, this place looks a lot quieter than I was expecting.”

  “Our intel said that there’d be eight or ten capital ships in the Yards,” Lara agreed. “Not just four. I wonder where they are?”

  The question was a disturbing one. A handful of warships patrolled the outer marches of the Athenan system, but it would be hours yet before they knew anything was amiss, so vast were the distances within even such a pocket-sized star system as this. During the final moments of their approach the attackers had picked up four different energy sources that might be warships powering up, but there could well be others lurking nearby. In fact, the Impies should be keeping a small squadron close at hand for just such surprises as this, either docked at the shipyard itself or in near orbit. Where were they? What were they? If the Impie squadron included another destroyer or something larger, this raid would be one of the shortest and most inglorious on record.

  “Well, those ships in the docks are operational,” he told her. “Or they will be when they get their pods manned. But tell your scan personnel to keep their eyes open and their links clear. I don’t want anyone surprising us. And tell them to watch for nukes.”

  The greatest danger at this stage of the attack was that the enemy would toss a nuclear warhead at the warflyers. Cloudscreens couldn’t stop missiles or hard radiation, and a nuke could be detonated beyond the range of point defense lasers and still do a hell of a lot of damage to a ship.

  That possibility, fortunately, was a remote one. According to intelligence, Daikokukichi possessed both Imperial and Hegemony personnel. Long-standing policy restricted nuclear weapons to Imperial forces alone. Hegemony officers were not trusted with them, and even the Nihonjin skippers of any Imperial ships present would need release authorization from much farther up the chain of command before they could turn scourging blasts of nuclear fire against the swarms of attackers.

  Still, it wouldn’t do to get complacent. Policy could have changed since Dev had last read an Imperial Fleet directive, or the Imperial officer in command of Daikokukichi could be an unstable son of a bitch who nuked first and got authorization later.

  “Commodore!” Lara warned. Colored lines highlighted parts of his view, indicating four separate points within the shipyards. A red diamond flashed insistently, indicating a ship rising above the clutter of gantries and open, duralloy-strut frameworks. “Imperial frigate boosting clear of the Yards! Range nine-five-zero-zero, boosting at point five.…”

  “Got it,” Dev snapped back. “Hit him before he fogs our lasers.”

  Data cascaded through Eagle’s sensors; the target was broadcasting standard Imperial IFF, which included ident and stats. According to the warbook readout unfolding in Dev’s vision, the moving ship was Senden, Flashing Lightning, accelerating clear of the orbital docks and repair gantries on white-blazing drives. Since she was listed in the datanet—the newly constructed warships had not yet been named or given net IDs—either she must have been docked at Daikokukichi for repairs or else she was part of the Imperial garrison force here. An Inaduma-class frigate, she was over 100 meters long, massed 1,800 tons, and carried a crew of 210. Though no match for the much larger and more powerful Eagle, she could still cause a hell of a lot of grief for the destroyer at close range. Possibly, Senden’s skipper was simply trying to win free of the Yards before he was attacked, but Dev couldn’t take that risk.

  Lasers flicked from Eagle’s starboard bow mounts, invisible bolts that turned duralloy sun-bright at their caress. Metal vapor puffed into space, briefly and silently illuminated by starcore energies.

  “She’s launching,” a voice on Eagle’s tactical net reported. More colored graphics winked on in Dev’s vision, highlighting a cloud of stars curving out from the frigate under 60-G boost. “Missiles incoming!”

  “Tracking,” another voice said, calm despite the stress of the moment. “AI targeting lock. We’ll take them with the PDLs.”

  PDLs—Point Defense Lasers—were batteries of one hundred-megawatt coherent light weapons deployed in clusters about the warship’s outer hull, arranged to give maximum coverage from every side and angle of approach. Too weak to penetrate a starship’s armor, indeed, too weak to make much of an impression on any hardened target through the light haze of antilaser fogs that quickly filled the battle volume, they were hot enough to burn through a missile’s relatively thin outer skin in milliseconds. One by one, then in groups of two and three and five at an instant, the incoming missiles flared white-hot within Dev’s virtual reality panorama.

  Space combat was primarily a war of maneuver. With nano-based cloudscreens to block incoming laser fire, with banks of AI-directed lasers to take out enemy missiles in lightning, close-in point defense bursts, ships had to draw fairly close before they could do serious damage to one another. Exotic beam weapons, like kaon cannons, CPGs, and electron guns, could usually be dispersed by manipulating hull magnetic fields; the most effective weapons were long-range Starhawks that could be remotely jacked by human pilots all the way to the target.

  At point-blank range, then, the ship that could outmaneuver an opponent—ducking in and out around drifting cloudscreens, loosing clouds of missiles from precisely calculated points, pulling the unexpected maneuver, finding blind spots on an opponent’s hull—was the ship that would score the kill.

  Four Starhawks left Eagle’s forward missile bays with a jarring thump that rang through the destroyer’s hull. Guided by jackers aboard the Confederation ship, they twisted past Eagle’s dissipating cloudscreen, locked onto the accelerating frigate, and went to full throttle up. Lasers winked from Senden’s port side. Two of the Starhawks vanished in white-hot balls of plasma, followed an instant later by a third.

  The fourth, already locked onto a collision course, was detonated by its jacker before the frigate’s PDLs could find it.

  Lloyd was directing the base’s defenses, calling laser batteries on line and ordering all ships to launch, a headlong scramble to get clear of the vulnerable Yard docks before the attackers could get a solid target lock on them and melt them down into slag. Senden was clear, accelerating toward the hostiles now at 5 Gs. Her sisters, Shiden and Raimei, were nearly ready to launch; power cables and umbilicals were being freed now. A fourth Imperial ship, the Yari-class destroyer Asagiri, was bringing its fusion plant on-line and would be ready in minutes.

  With stunned horror, Lloyd realized that this was not, could not be a drill. The attackers had fired their lasers, scoring several solid hits to the Senden’s hull while she was still working clear of the docks. Senden had replied with a missile barrage, and the volley had been returned. The base’s radar and AI analysis painted the detonation of that last Starhawk warhead as a blue-white spray of tiny sparks, fireworks against the night.

  The Starhawk’s warhead was canister, a modern twist on an ancient artillery weapon. After boosting a full ten seconds at 50 Gs, the thousand or so depleted uranium ball bearings packed inside the warhead were whipping along at nearly five kilometers per second, a deadly spray of ultradense shrapnel following the same path that the Starhawk had been taking at the moment of detonation.

  The warhead was twenty-five kilometers from Senden when it exploded, spraying the load of ball bearings toward the target in a diffuse, slowly expanding cloud. Point Defense Lasers flicked and snapped, directed by the frigate’s sophisticated, AI-linked radar tracking system, but there were simply too many targets, and too little time. In five seconds, Senden was able to decelerate enough that perhaps half the incoming slugs missed, flashing silently past her bow, while her laser defenses took out perhaps four hundred of those that were left.

  Approximately one hundred depleted uranium bearings slammed into Senden’s armored hull in a shattering demonstration of F=ma. Laser turrets were swept away in the storm; sensors were sm
ashed; the port-side drive venturi crumpled like paper; whole sections of duralloy armor peeled up like shingles beneath a hurricane. At the same instant, hits rang through Daikokukichi’s main control center, an insane hail of shot that had missed the smaller target. Red warning flags flashed up in Lloyd’s mind as an AI voice intoned the damage: pressure loss in sections eighty-one through eighty-eight; damage to secondary base IR sensor suite; minor damage to laser batteries seven, nine, and eleven…

  He was beginning to respond when, with a chilling abruptness, the scene of battle surrounding him was wiped away. There was a burst of static… and then he was lying in his slot on the control deck, blinking up at a gray ceiling covered by painted-over cables and power conduits.

  “What the goking hell…”

  At first he thought the base link network had gone down… a serious failure and one that should never have happened, so many redundancies were built into the system. But the constellation of green and amber lights flickering and shifting across a readout console close by his head showed the system to be functioning normally. He brought his palm implant down again against the sweat-slick coolness of the interface. There was a burst of static, an unfolding view of ships and orbital base and the looming bulge of Daikoku…

  … and then he was bumped off again, hard.

  “You are relieved, Chusasan,” an electronic voice said in his ear. “We will take it from here.”

  Lloyd recognized Tanemura’s dry and matter-of-fact phrasing. So, that was it. Tanemura had come on-line and booted him off. Elsewhere on the control deck, Lloyd saw other men and women, all gaijin, rising from their link couches with looks ranging from bewilderment to anger. The Nihonjin had kicked every non-Japanese off the net, had decided to fight the battle themselves without gaijin help!

  Their very evident lack of trust burned in Lloyd’s gut like a hot coal.

  Even now, after so much had happened, it seemed strange to be on this side of Hegemony targeting radars and lasers. Just a couple of years ago, he’d been a loyal soldier of the Hegemony, a warstrider, and well on his way to a command of his own. By being the first human to establish peaceful contact with the alien Xenophobes, Dev had been made a hero of the Empire despite his gaijin status. As a koman, an Imperial military advisor, he’d been sent to Eridu, Chi Draconis V, to help suppress the rising tide of anti-Imperial, anti-Hegemony discontent there. He’d cast his lot with the rebels, however, when his warstrider unit had been ordered to destroy one of the colonists’ domed cities.

  There were some deeds for which orders—even orders backed by threat of court-martial or of summary execution—were simply not enough. He’d mutinied, refusing his orders, and had been arrested and interrogated by Imperial agents as a result. Katya had gotten him out.

  Katya Alessandro. He missed her, missed her more than he’d expected to. He would have liked it if she could have accompanied him on this mission, but she was back on New America, busily trying to hammer together something like a decent warstrider force out of raw recruits and Hegemony expatriates. Once she’d been his commanding officer, but that seemed like ages ago, back when they’d both been warstriders in a Hegemony unit, fighting the Xenophobes on Loki, then venturing with the First Imperial Expeditionary Force into the true Frontier beyond human-inhabited space.

  That had been when Dev had finally made meaningful contact with a Xeno. As a result, he’d received the Imperial Star and been made an Imperial koman. Katya had rejected the Empire, returning to her native New America to work with the Confederation government, and with Travis Sinclair.

  She’d made the right choice, and Dev had made the wrong one. He knew that now. A government system as corrupt as the present Imperial/Hegemony stewardship of Terra could not be reformed from within. Maybe reform would have done some good once, but the rot had gone too deep, the people in power now had too much vested interest in maintaining that power, at any cost. Human governments had followed the same pattern time after time after bloody time in the past, reaching the point where only revolution could cleanse the slate and let people start anew.

  With little choice in the matter, then, Dev had joined the rebels and participated in the Battle of Eridu, leading the assault team to capture the Tokitukaze at the planet’s synchorbital station while Confederation warstriders and native Eriduan militias had held off the Imperial Marines at Raeder’s Hill. They’d fought the Imperials to a standstill, partly because Dev and his raiders had dropped the captured Imperial destroyer into an orbit that took her across the battlefield. A salvo from the destroyer’s shipboard laser batteries had been more than enough to break that final Imperial attack.

  Dev had no regrets about joining the rebellion… not really, though he’d frequently questioned the rebellion’s chances for any outcome in this war short of complete annihilation. It was just that he still wondered sometimes what he was, and why.

  Senden, demolished by the shotgun blast from the teleoperated Starhawk, appeared to be adrift now, powerless, her weapons down. Smaller ships accelerated out from Daikokukichi, only to be met by searing laser bursts from the hard-accelerating warflyers. The enemy’s defenses appeared uncertain, almost hesitant. Had the surprise been that complete?

  A familiar, pulse-throbbing excitement surged behind the flutter and scroll of data cascading through Dev’s awareness. The sensation was an alluring one, enough so to bring with it a twinge of guilt. Sometimes, Dev wondered if he hadn’t begun enjoying war too much. It was at times like this, jacked into the AI of a ship going into combat, that he began to feel more than human, somehow, almost as though he were addicted to the surge of power, to the exultation thrilling through his being, and the feeling of invulnerability.

  Full linkage often had that effect on him, especially in a tight meld with a good AI either aboard ship or within the towering, durasheathed embrace of a warstrider. In some people, the feeling arising out of such a union could be one of godlike power, a conviction that nothing was impossible as the linker wielded unthinkable energies through the medium of thought alone. Taken to extremes, that feeling could be classified as a psychotechnic disorder, TM, or technomegalomania, and it had grounded plenty of striderjacks and shipjackers in the past.

  Gently, Dev disentangled himself from the pulsing, triumphant joy of electronic battle. “Communications,” he snapped. “Order all units to converge on the station. Keep repeating until they acknowledge.”

  “Affirmative, Commodore.”

  Concentrate on the fighting, he told himself. The warflyers are getting close now. The enemy’s fire was increasing again in volume. Possibly, their fire control had just been briefly knocked off-line.

  Damn, casualties were going to run high on this one. Dev just hoped the catch would be worth the butcher’s bill.

  Chapter 4

  Where warstriders are the descendents of twentieth century tanks, for all that they move over rough terrain on articulated legs rather than treads, warflyers trace their lineage back to the combat aircraft of the same era. Similar to conventional warstriders overall, they are equipped with fusorpacks and thrusters that give them a measure of maneuverability in zero-G conditions.

  Scorned by the pilots of conventional space fighters, they are considered undergunned, over-armored chimeras, composites neither fish nor fowl designed to do all things, consequentially doing nothing well.

  —Armored Combat: A Modern Military Overview

  Heisaku Ariyoshi

  C.E. 2523

  Long before his arrival at New America, Dev had downloaded to his personal RAM the complete text of Ariyoshi’s exhaustive study of armored warfare, a work already well on its way to becoming a classic of military history. He knew that Ariyoshi, together with most modern Imperial tacticians, still considered the warflyer to be something of a makeshift and make-do weapon, even though it had been in existence now for well over three centuries.

  It had been a makeshift weapon, once. They’d started off as workpods adapted to the needs of warfare not
long after the first combat use of warstriders; originally conceived as manned constructors designed to haul building materials and manipulate large, free-floating structures during work on space stations, synchorbital facilities, and other large, zero-G projects, they had considerable endurance, but all of the grace and maneuverability of a small asteroid. Even now they weren’t much more than jacked-up workpods fitted with missile batteries and lasers and run by a low-will onboard AI. They were so small that, as with warstriders, their jackerpilots thought of themselves as wearing the things rather than riding them, and a large number of flyers could be carried aboard even a moderate-sized ascraft. Their greatest disadvantage was still their low thrust-to-mass ratio, which was rarely more than 4 Gs or so. That made them slow in combat, and they had nothing like the high-G maneuverability of a true space fighter.

  That meant that in any kind of stand-up fight, in orbit or in deep space, they were going to take heavy casualties.

  Casualties were very much on Dev’s mind as Tarazed’s wing of warflyers dispersed, each pursuing a separate, parabolic path toward the orbital facility expanding in the ViRsimulated view ahead. Nine out of ten were decoys, piloted by low-level AIs too simple to understand their own deaths. The remaining tenth were better armored, yes, but vulnerable still to even a light caress of a 100-MW point defense laser.

  What hurt was that most were piloted by children… well, by men and women younger than Dev’s twenty-seven standard years. He wondered if all revolutions were fueled by the idealistic fervor of children. Realistically, Dev knew that he could scarcely be considered old.