Jackers

by William H. Keith

  He just felt that way sometimes.

  They’d started calling him Lucky Rol, and that was the name painted on the blunt prow of his DR-80 warflyer.

  Tall, flamboyantly blond, with ice blue eyes, Torolf Bondevik was Lokan-Scandinavian, born and raised in Midgard in the shadow of the Bifrost Towerdown. He’d become a warstrider during the fighting with the Xenos there, joining Alessandro’s Assassins and participating in the Alyan Expedition of 2541. He’d stayed with the unit when it opted to join the Confederation forces and had gone to Eridu to support the Rebel Network’s rising there against Hegemony and Empire.

  He’d been with the jackers who’d boarded an ascraft at Babel in a desperate bid to seize an Imperial destroyer docked at Babel Synchorbital. During the attack on the berthed warship, he’d remote-jacked a warflyer from the ascraft, his mind riding the craft into a barrage of laser fire until it was destroyed.

  Torolf had been unharmed, of course. With the remote link broken, he’d simply awakened back aboard the ascraft, but he’d later joked with the other rebels about having been fried by a gigawatt laser during his approach. The tag “Lucky Rol” had naturally followed.

  He hoped the name held true today, because he wasn’t jacking remote this time. He was tucked into the coffin-sized jackslot aboard the stubby DR-80, with nothing between him and the Imperial base’s laser batteries but a few centimeters of durasheath armor.

  “Red Squadron!” he called over his tactical link. “This is Red Leader. I’m going to try for that array of struts and cross supports near the cryo-H tanks at two-five-zero.”

  “Rog… that, Red Leader.Red Two, Red Three… with you!”

  “Copy, Red… dron… on our way!”

  The replies, blasted by ECM static and interrupted by his own movements and those of his fellow flyers, were fragmentary. Coordination at this point was nearly impossible; all he could manage was a ragged “this way!” and a hope that enough of his people saw what he was doing to follow.

  A beam flashed, a dazzling green thread that seemed to miss him by meters, then brushed a decoy a kilometer to his rear, dissolving it in a soundless flash. The graphics had a feeling of unreality to them, like the cartoon images of a training ViRsim; the warflyer’s AI was painting in the beams to help him pick his approach.

  Not that seeing the beams was any great help. How do you step out of the way of something that announces its arrival with the same gigawatt flash of light that turns the toughest armor to a flare of exploding plasma?

  Still, the display did help him spot active laser batteries, in particular a bank of squat, staggered turrets arrayed stepwise along a parapet of open struts overlooking the main shipyard. Colored indicators flickered across his vision, each color, each shape bearing additional information. Two of those batteries had just bathed him in radar illumination, tracking him, locking on; their turrets were swinging toward him now, their charge coils building toward release…

  Now! Decelerating savagely, he backed down on a stream of white-hot plasma, careless of where that seething cone of tortured atomic nuclei washed across the framework of the orbital base. A ship’s plasma drive, even one as relatively small as that rigged to a warflyer’s hull, could be a deadly if short-range weapon, but the base’s crew were the enemy, weren’t they? Parts of the open structure glowed red hot in his exhaust as he spent delta-V like water. Maneuvering thrusters fired, and he thumped into a girder hard enough to momentarily blur his visual feed.

  “I’m down!” he called over the tactical link, though “down” was strictly a term of convenience in zero-G. Panels opened in his black hull, like a flower’s petals unfolding. Jointed arms unlimbered, telescoping clear of the warflyer’s body. Two clamped to the girder with nano-hardened fingers, gripping fast, halting the flyer’s clumsy rebound and sideways drift; a third trailed the power cable for a bulky, 250-MW laser.

  Their radar lock on his flyer broken, the laser turrets on the parapet rotated, weapons elevating to track other, incoming targets. More decoys flared and vanished… as did two DR-80s with flesh-and-blood jackers aboard. Bondevik sensed their screams an instant before contact was broken.

  Another warflyer pod struck home, fifty meters to his left. Passion Flyer was the name painted on its armored prow just below a garish image of a nude, seductively posed woman. Sublieutenant Enrique St. John was New American, fresh out of recruit training and just assigned as Torolf’s wingman.

  “Whee-oh! What a ride!” St. John called, jubilant. His DY-64 Raiden was longer and bulkier than Torolf’s Tenrai, massing a good twenty-four tons. The arms were heavier, the blunt snout of an electron cannon more threatening than the ’80’s laser.

  “Rocky!” Torolf called. “Cover me, at two-five-zero!”

  “You got it, toke!”

  Levering past the duralloy struts and beams, Passion Flyer released a cloud of dumb missiles, then loosed a bolt from the electron gun. Lightning arced, violet-white and jagged, as it grounded from one of the laser turrets.

  Torolf was moving in the same instant, propelling himself across the gantry framework with smooth, powerful articulations of his multiply jointed arms. Targeting sensors detected an energy flux building, his AI threw a red targeting reticle over a power feed juncture…

  Fire!

  Metal vaporized in white heat; a pressure hull breached, spilling atmosphere in a silver cloud of swiftly crystallizing air and moisture. Something dark tumbled after, a body, possibly, rapidly swallowed by the night. Torolf shifted targets, firing again, and all the while he kept his flyer moving toward the lasers, now some two kilometers distant. It occurred to him how silly the machine must look, skittering leg-over-leg across the gantrywork like some outlandish, metallic spider.

  Other warflyers landed, grappling with the gantry framework, swaying themselves across gaps in the structure on jointed arms, or firing harpoons trailing buckythread cables and reeling themselves across on hard-driven winches. A few tumbled past, helpless or dead, some with hulls still glowing white-hot and softened to featureless lumps.

  The Confederation had adopted the Imperial system for deploying fighters and warflyers: two ships to an element, two elements to a flight, three flights to the squadron. Six squadrons, seventy-two ships in all, plus another ten as spares, recon vehicles, and worker drones. He was skipper of Red Squadron, twelve paired Raiden and Tenrai warflyers so newly organized they hadn’t even had time yet to choose a unit name. How many of them had been lost already, Torolf wondered. Three? Four? No time to think about that, no time to think about anything except knocking out those batteries.

  A laser bolt seared close, brushing a squat, gray sphere embedded in the framework like a fly in a spider’s web. Metal sparkled, turned to vapor… followed close by a jet that looked like steam, which was actually slush hydrogen boiling free into space. Who’d fired? It didn’t matter. The vapor cloud, briefly opaque, offered cover. Torolf focused a coded thought, triggering his boosters. The kick sent him soaring low across the station’s framework, plunging into shadow as he moved behind the rapidly expanding cloud. Emerging into red-hued sunlight once more, he found himself with a better vantage point. The laser turrets were clearly visible from here, lined up as neatly as ViRsim targets in a newbie recruit’s shooting gallery.

  Anchoring himself, Torolf locked on to the nearest turret and opened fire. A tiny sun flared at the breach of one of the two mounted lasers; chunks of metal and freezing air wafted into space, along with the slow, end-for-end tumble of a 10cm laser’s barrel. He shifted his aim to the next turret, then the next…

  “Lieutenant!” St. John’s voice was shrill, near ragged panic. “To your left!”

  He was already reacting when the bolt hit, moving left and rotating his flyer’s torso. Red alerts flashed across his vision, warning of energy overload, of charged particles washing across the smooth surface of the warflyer, channeled by the network of fine, superconducting threads embedded in the armor.

  Lightning arced. Three
of his sensors went dead, leaving him blind to port, but he’d turned far enough to see the enemy warflyer, angling toward him across the station’s framework like a knobby, black-shelled crab.

  He didn’t recognize the model, though it looked a bit like a spacegoing version of the Daimyo warstrider, powerful and heavily armored. Torolf snapped off a laser shot even as he was casting free from his anchor point. One of his arms came free, still clinging to metal, its struts melted through by the overload from other’s proton cannon. Damn. That black hull seemed to drink laser light.…

  At his mental command, another arm dropped from a ventral hatch, an arm bearing a bulky cylinder perforated on one end with four-centimeter holes that flashed and spat rippling flame. Recoil acted like a rocket, accelerating Torolf’s DR-80 backward and giving it a slight tumble; the projectiles, M-490 4cm rockets with deplur penetrator warheads, slashed through the enemy warflyer’s armor shell like fléchettes through flesh, plunging deep, then detonating with sharp, rapid-fire explosions that sent chunks of duralloy spinning through space.

  Swiftly, Torolf reached out with his remaining grasping arm, snagging a crossbeam and arresting his tumble. His laser was up and locked in, ready for another shot, but the enemy was dead, a black hulk trailing wires and interior plumbing like entrails as it fell away into blackness.

  A shadow passed over him and he shifted to his dorsal sensors.

  Eagle was there, slowing on forward maneuvering jets. In every direction, other Confed warflyers were either under thrust or moving along the Daikoku base’s framework, making their way toward a central, domed tower crowned by antenna arrays that must house the facility’s control center. The defensive laser fire seemed to have fallen off.

  Cautiously, he released his handhold and boosted forward.

  Randi Lloyd bit off a curse, then pushed off from a bulkhead, sailing across the control deck to an EC panel. “Randi!” Sho-i Cynthia Collins said, pleading in her voice. She was struggling to unsnap herself from her link couch. “What’s going on?”

  “We’re under attack, damn it,” he snapped back in reply. “And the sheseiji won’t let us fight!”

  A babble of voices reached after him but he ignored them, as he ignored the distant shrilling of a pressure alarm elsewhere in the station. Bumping to a halt at the environment control panel, he dropped his palm on the interface and phased the overhead dome to transparency. He wasn’t sure what he expected to see; the attackers had been too distant to make out with the naked eye when he’d been linked seconds before. But as he floated up into the dome, he could see suns and the curved horizon of Daikoku, the complex sprawl of the Yards, and the leapfrogging motion of advancing warflyers.

  And ships. There was Senden, still close to the station, drifting free now, a lifeless hulk. Another ship, the Amatukaze-class he’d IDed on his original scan, loomed overhead like a great, black cloud, slowly eclipsing first one of the red suns, and then the other. The ship was staggeringly huge this close up, almost four times longer than the battered Senden, far bulkier, and massing over forty-five times as much in sheer gross tonnage. Paired anticollision lights flashed, marking off the bulk of star-swallowing blackness, shaped like a fat cigar embraced by streamlined fairings and cupolas. He found himself staring up into the wicked, crystalline eyes of gigawatt lasers and felt his heart hammering inside his chest. There was no way the Yards could possibly resist such firepower at point-blank range.

  A flash caught his attention—its brilliance stepped down by the dome’s optics to protect human vision—and he turned in time to see the last of Daikokukichi’s defensive laser batteries tumbling into space.

  Still palming the interface, Lloyd requested more data. Shiden and Raimei and Asagiri… where were they?

  Colored symbols flickered across the dome, almost as stark and clear as if they were part of a projection within his own brain. Shiden was under boost… but away from Daikoku on a parabolic path that would take her out through the planetoid belts. Raimei and Asagiri were still in their berths, both powering down in token of surrender. Evidently, their captains shared Lloyd’s appraisal of the tactical situation.

  The battle, mercifully brief, was already over.

  And it serves the bastards right! The thought, fierce and unrelenting, caught him by surprise. Just where did he stand in this unexpected fight?

  Randi Lloyd was from Earth, from Metrochicago in the North American Hegemony Protectorate. He’d been in space back in ’36, the year of the Metrochicagan Riots, but when he’d heard about them at his next planetfall, he’d assumed, as had the rest of the Earth-born crew, that rabble-rousers and troublemakers had broken the peace, had provoked the slaughter of civilians as a means of making a political point. He’d not learned that his sister was numbered among the dead until he returned to Earth almost a full year later.

  So many months robbed his loss of urgency, if it could not ease shock and grief. Who was to blame? Who could be blamed for what was officially a miscalculation—a junior Guard officer had panicked as the mob spilled out of Grant Park and advanced onto the Michigan Moving Way, and summoned Imperial reinforcements. The crime had not been so much in the shooting—the mob was breaking the peace, after all, and had been warned to disperse—but in the way they’d kept on firing after the crowd had begun to scatter. Was the system to blame, Lloyd had wondered, or a handful of poorly trained Imperial peaceforcers caught up in the moment’s bloodlust?

  Lloyd had decided to blame the individuals, if only because there was nothing within the vast and impersonal bureaucracy of Earth’s Hegemony and the Nihonjin Empire for him to point a finger at and say, “There! That is evil, and must be changed.”

  He’d shipped out aboard a merchant ship as quickly as he could, putting distance between himself and Earth; several years later, given a chance at converting his merchantman’s second officer’s stripes to a shosa’s commission in the Hegemonic Guard, he’d grabbed at the opportunity, passed the tests and officer’s training, and been assigned to a ship, the Guard corvette Epsilon Lyrae.

  Two years and one promotion later, he’d ended up… here, on a shipbuilding yard on the backside of nowhere, booted off-line by officious Imperials, watching unknown forces swoop down on his station.

  Still at a level-one link, he felt something happening. Querying the base AI, he learned that Tanemura was busily purging data files. Reluctantly, he drew his hand away, breaking the link. His eyes met Cynthia Collins’s. “What is it?” she asked. “Who’s attacking us?”

  “Must be rebels,” he replied, grinning wryly as he said it. Damn, either the rebels had picked up one hell of a lot of delta-V, lately, or the government had been lying to them all about how good the rebels were. They’d snuck on Daikoku out of nowhere, launched a sharp, short, professional attack, and crippled the station in the space of seconds.

  Through the dome, the destroyer loomed above the station, terrifying in its size, its scale made evident as a second ship passed slowly between the destroyer and the Yards. The newcomer looked like a K-T drive freighter, considerably modified; there were laser turrets attached to its long, square-angled body, but they had the look of improvisation about them… as well as haste.

  Thrusters flared briefly, outshone by the pulse of anticollision strobes. The freighter was drawing closer to the control center’s external lock.

  Lloyd squared his shoulders. “I guess we’d better square away to receive visitors.”

  As if to prove his words, a hollow clang sounded from the main airlock beneath the control deck.

  Chapter 5

  In all the military works it is written: To train samurai to be loyal, separate them when young, or treat them according to their character. But it is no use to train them according to any fixed plan. They must be educated by benevolence. If the superior loves benevolence, then the inferior will love his duty.

  —Tokugawa Ieyasu

  early seventeenth century

  Resistance had ceased throughout the Daikoku or
bital base, a victory more sudden and more complete than Dev could possibly have hoped for. With Vindemiatrix docked directly with the station’s main airlock, New American troops were storming aboard, armed with laser rifles and slug pistols and wearing combat armor instead of their accustomed warstriders.

  Dev remained aboard Eagle, surveying the prize through electronic senses. Though he was linked to the tactical channel being used by the boarding party, his attention was on the take. Eighteen warships, including three Yari-class destroyers. He felt a thrill there. His father had been put in command of an Imperial Yari destroyer, the Hatakaze, the ship with which he’d saved the refugees over Lung Chi.

  They’d done it! He’d done it, and with only four casualties out of his strike force, and seven warflyers damaged.

  It was too bad, he thought, that there wasn’t some way to take over this entire facility. New America and a few other worlds in the Confederation had shipyards, but they weren’t as large or as well equipped as this one.

  In theory, it would one day be possible to grow an entire starship, complete right down to the brightwork and the loaded AI programming, by turning appropriately instructed nano loose on a lump of asteroidal iron and assorted, raw trace elements. In practice, the sheer size and complexity of even a small starship required each vessel to be grown in sections, which were extracted from the nanovats and assembled like enormous three-dimensional puzzles by swarms of remotes, workpods and constructors, or even genegineered workers. The assembled hulls were then repeatedly bathed in a nano flux that added their durasheathing, layer upon layer of diamond, monomolecular duralloy, and ceramics, together with the microscopic superconducting grid that afforded protection from charged particle radiation in space. Finally, highly specialized nano flowed through the ship’s interior nervous system, programming AI components, plating out and completing electrical connections, and hardwiring the control circuitry. Weapons, except for the largest and most massive systems like spinal mount PPCs that were part of a ship’s overall design, were added later, dropped into hardpoints and wired into the control network by specially programmed nano.