Jackers

by William H. Keith

  Movement… nano-shrouded, but large and heavy. The Warlord’s CPGs barked again; steam exploded from a tumble-down of water-smoothed boulders. A laser flashed in return, an emerald sparkle in the fog-heavy air. Katya felt the beam hit. Pain was not transmitted through the link, of course, but the sensation was one of being lightly punched, a solid thump against her side.

  Fire! She willed the return volley, though she didn’t verbalize the order. Francine returned fire with left-right-left hammerblows from the CPGs, a salvo of rockets from the Warlord’s ventral Mark III weapons pod.

  The target, revealed now as a KR-86 Tachi, was half the Warlord’s bulk, lightly armored, built for speed rather than endurance. Explosions savaged its side and dorsal surfaces, gouged holes through layered duralloy, smashed the left leg motivator assemblies in a fine spray of broken parts. Another CPG struck home, a bolt of blue-white light that melted through the machine’s left side. Oily smoke boiled from the crater, where wires and circuitry glowed red-hot. The Tachi twisted right, shuddered, and fell, right leg twitching spastically with the final nerve discharges of its dying pilot.

  The AI in Katya’s Warlord keened warning: an unidentified strider to the rear. Maubry spun in time to catch another Tachi rising from the water, twenty meters offshore. Evidently, some of the incoming assault striders had undershot or overshot the narrow cape that was their target and come down in the sea. Francine hit with a twin laser-CPG blast that sent great clouds of steam boiling into the sky and ripped the right arm from its joint. The Tachi swung fast, trying to bring its electron cannon to bear, but Francine completed the destruction with a long burst from the hivel cannon, slamming fifty rounds through the Tachi’s armor and punching it back beneath the rolling tumble of the surf.

  “Watch yourselves!” Katya warned over her company’s tactical channel. “We’ve got some with us in the water!”

  To her right, another Warlord, jacked by Captain Vic Hagan and his crew, lumbered onto the sand, water streaming from its armor. Nanoflage blurred its outlines and color, save for a bright patch of nose art—a shaggy blond caveman shouldering a club beneath the legend Mission Link. Hagan’s strider had just smashed a third Tachi at the water’s edge.

  “Hey, Boss!” Hagan’s voice rasped across the tactical lasercom channel. “Easy pickings!” Katya’s command Warlord was The Boss, though no nose art accompanied the name.

  “These guys were stragglers,” she replied. “It’ll be tougher with the guys already ashore.”

  The rest of her ambush company was emerging all along the beach. She’d placed her most experienced people and her only two heavies—the Warlords jacked by herself and by Vic—near the center, the greener striderjacks on the flanks. If this counterpunch had any hope of success, it would be with an all-out, strength-in-the-center punch. “Come on, Rangers!” she called over the tactical link circuit, urging her people forward. “Move! Move!”

  Pacing Hagan’s Mission Link, her Warlord stilted up the last few meters of beach. An RLN-90 Scoutstrider, a Confederation machine, lay in a shattered heap of barely recognizable fragments at the top of the beach, still burning. Farther in, on the unyielding surface of the fabricrete apron, her optics picked up the fallen hulk of a Newamie Militia Manta and, close by, the bodies and body fragments of an infantry squad, cut down by heavy autofire.

  They were heaped up together in tangled clumps, with a few isolated bodies marking men who’d tried to run and been hit before they could get away. Katya saw loose arms and legs, a blood-smeared spill of intestines, and at least one severed head still strapped into its helmet.

  Katya shuddered… or rather, she felt the icy mental shiver that would have accompanied such a purely physical response, even though her body was now out of the circuit in its padded slot. As often as she’d seen such things, she could never get used to them.

  Damn, damn! Infantry against goking warstriders. Unless the infantry had some high-powered support, the contest was always hopeless. Those troops had been wearing combat armor; it might as well have been garlands of flowers. The weapons they’d carried had been chemflamers and satchel charges, thumpers and rocket launchers, all designed to knock out light warstriders; they’d never even gotten a chance to use them.

  There was such an awful lot of blood.…

  Dev Cameron, Katya remembered, had pioneered joint infantry-strider close combat tactics on Loki. They’d worked well enough against Xenos, but Katya still had her doubts about the place of infantry in strider-to-strider combat. Infantry, even civilian mobs, had faced striders on Eridu… but casualties had been heavy in what had been acts of sheer desperation.

  Well, so, too, was this. With so few recruits available with the three sockets necessary for jacking a warstrider or other large, full-linkage combat machine, the only option open to the Confederation was to find ways to employ infantry—lightly armed and armored foot soldiers—against enemy warstriders.

  It was no wonder, though, that striderjacks referred to infantry as “crunchies,” supposedly because that was the sound they made when stepped on by a strider.

  “Stay… stay with me, Vic,” she told Hagan. “Stick close.”

  “You got it, Boss.”

  Passing the tangled bodies, the two Warlords angled toward the main spaceport buildings. The entire line, according to plan, switched on their radars. That illuminated themselves as well as any targets, of course, but they had to see. Katya’s AI processed the returns, showing massive shapes moving eighteen hundred meters ahead, and they weren’t showing the flashing white star the Confederation AIs were using to flag friendly IFF signals.

  “Take them long-range,” she told the others. Her tiny command was heavily outnumbered; they would accomplish more by sniping at the enemy than getting into knife-fighting range, at least to start with. Later, perhaps, as the assault developed further…

  There was no time to think about later, only now. Francine bracketed a ghostly, slow-moving radar target and loosed one of the Warlord’s Striker missiles, which slid off the RS-64’s aft-mounted Y-rack with a hiss like tearing paper. To left and right, other missiles arrowed into the murk, which suddenly began to flash and strobe with brilliant, internal lightnings. The Confederation line advanced, still firing, tracking and firing and firing again. Something exploded beyond the low-lying cloud, sending up a fireball visible even through the gloom. So thick was the smoke now that Katya found it hard to remember that it was, in fact, afternoon, that outside the battle area the sky was clear and the sun was brightly shining. Fire!

  Then the first Imperial volley slammed a reply into the advancing Ranger line, rocking the warstriders with thundering explosions. Two of Katya’s striders went down, limbs thrashing; a third, a Ghostrider, was badly damaged, the duralloy peeled back from its dorsal hull like the ragged edge of some terrible, deep-slashed wound. Her own Warlord, under the faster-than-human reflexes of its AI, knocked down two incoming rockets a split second before they hit, whipsawing them from the sky with bursts of deplur slugs from the hivel mount.

  Damn! How many of the enemy machines were there? During their planning for this engagement, Katya and the members of Sinclair’s combat staff had estimated that the Imperials would allot at least two companies of assault striders to the capture of the spaceport, and more likely a full battalion. The volume of highly accurate rocket fire thundering in from dead ahead had convinced Katya that she was facing a battalion, possibly more.

  “Keep firing!” she ordered, as Francine launched the last of their Striker missiles. Now it was unguided rockets… until they were close enough to the enemy that they could engage him with beam weapons.

  Thunder rolled low overhead, passing west to east, an ascraft of some kind, though bigger and more powerful than the air-space interceptors they’d seen so far. Katya ignored it. Damn it, though, it would have helped if they could have held onto air superiority here, instead of just surrendering it to the Imperials.

  “Let me take it,” she told Maubry, iss
uing the mental code that shifted control of the big Warlord from his cephlinkage to her own. Her reflexes, her linked control, were better than his, faster and more automatic.

  Mostly, though, she had to be doing something. The Warlord lurched toward the enemy line, a bipedal carnosaur with mincing gait. A pair of Tachis confronted her and she exchanged salvos, shrugging off a pair of rockets that slammed against her armor, then burning the legs off one of her opponents as Hagan lumbered up to engage the other.

  “Nano count!” Maubry warned, his voice sharp. “Point three-one, and rising!”

  Those warheads had packed nano-disassemblers instead of conventional explosives; the stuff was deadly, programmed to attach to any artificial material within reach—like duralloy—and begin taking it apart molecule by molecule. The point number was a measure of concentration in the air. The higher the number, the faster a strider’s armor was dissolving.

  Alert flags were already flashing in her field of view. “I see it! Francine! Pop the AND!”

  Point three-nine, now… and thicker to the right. She moved left, as Francine triggered the Warlord’s hull-mounted AND canisters. A fog of anti-nano-D shrouded the warstrider, nano hunting nano in a deadly, invisible, and ultrahigh-speed battle in the air around the machine.

  Then the battlesmoke parted in front of her just as three Tachis sprinted forward, their nanoflaged hulls shimmering between fog gray and dappled where a sudden shaft of sunlight touched their flanks. An explosion just in front of the Warlord staggered her, opening a pit in the fabricrete pavement and pelting her with gravel.

  She felt her footing give way, struggled to regain her balance. An electron bolt caught The Boss in the left flank, arcing through control circuits and power feeds, jolting her with all the force of a lightning bolt. There was a searing blast and a howling noise, both abruptly chopped short as her sensor feeds failed.

  All sensation vanished, and she toppled forward.…

  Chapter 9

  Someday, military commanders will be able to cut through the fog of war to see both the dispositions of their forces and those of the enemy, to fully direct the course of battle. On that day, military science will become worthy of the name, a true science, instead of the fuzzy, half-blind guesswork it is now.

  —General Saiji Hatanaka

  After his rout of Manchurian forces

  at T’ungchou, near Beijing

  C.E. 2212

  Battle management for the Confederation defenders was in the hands of General Mathan Grier, a big, bluff man with craggy features and a fanatic’s absolute dedication to the Confederation cause.

  Born on Liberty to wealthy parents, he’d been sent to Earth to attend school, first MIT and then, after his acceptance by a Hegemony Guard educational program, the Osaka Military Academy. His Hegemony military career had been long, if undistinguished. His only combat experience had been against Xenos—as a sho-i, a sublieutenant, on Herakles in 2515, then again as taisa in command of a regiment on Lung Chi twenty-two years later.

  His disaffection for Hegemony and Empire had followed, as he watched the government laying the blame for the Lung Chi disaster with the gaijin in Imperial service, then later as Imperial troops were dispatched to Liberty to quell the rioting there. He’d resigned his commission immediately after the Commons Massacre of ’38, returning to Liberty to take command of a militia regiment. Six months later, the Confederation’s General Darwin Smith had offered him a place on the Confederation Military Command staff.

  Grier was a competent enough officer, if not a particularly imaginative one. His elevation to the CONMILCOM Battle Staff was at least partly political—a means of answering Liberty’s fears that New America was set upon dominating the new Confederation—and he knew it, but his fervent belief in independence transcended politics. As a commander, he was both conservative and cautious. Watching the battle for Port Jefferson unfolding in ViReality, he knew that his key concern there was not so much winning as it was not losing.

  Linked into the CONMILCOM Battle Direction Center’s AI, his body was in a secure bunker half a kilometer beneath the rugged, bunker-studded slopes of Stone Mountain overlooking the town of Henry. In his mind’s eye, however, he was hovering above Port Jefferson, looking down on the battle.

  The display was precisely like those of the war games he’d played at the Academy. Sensors scattered about the battle area, including small remote flyers, relayed a steady stream of data back to the BDC’s AI—energy discharges, radiation signatures, radar returns, visual images, RF leakage, even the sounds of moving warstriders—all fed through an enhancement program, matched against a comprehensive data base, and displayed as a three-dimensional map surface crawling with centimeter-high, red and blue holo-images of warstriders. Smaller, slower moving flecks of blue marked Confederation ground troops, tagged by their armor IDs and comm channels.

  The mapping wasn’t perfect. Their speed and their nanoflage-stealth characteristics made warstriders surprisingly hard to locate precisely on a battlefield, and what he was perceiving was actually the AI’s best guess as to dispositions and identities; large portions of the field were blanked out, uncomfortable zones from which no data was available and where anything could be hiding. Not even Artificial Intelligences or cephlinks could completely penetrate the age-old fog of war.

  Still, the command system gave him a measure of control over the battlefield that Napoleon or Patton or even Hatanaka had never enjoyed, or even dreamed of. By visually tagging any one strider’s image, he could get a complete readout of all available data, its type, its vector, and full pilot data for Confederation machines; with a thought, he could open a comm channel to any of the strider commanders, if necessary, though such communications were generally reserved for Colonel Weiss, the senior officer on the field.

  Grier knew well the dangers of micromanagement from the rear.

  From his unique vantage point, however, he could sense the flow, the pacing of the battle, from the circular expanse of Port Jefferson to the clustered glass towers of Jefferson itself. He’d watched the Imperial assault troops land, watched patches of the terrain stained red, showing areas of Imperial control. Weiss’s 1st Rangers and battalions of local militia were moving to cut off the incursion. Their main defensive line had been thrown up along the northern outskirts of Port Jefferson, in the sprawling manufacturing center and spaceport strip known as Braxton.

  He’d seen Colonel Alessandro’s dramatic emergence from the sea off the coast, a single line of over thirty striders sweeping across the fabricrete apron and neatly trapping over a hundred of the Imperial Tachis near the spaceport’s main buildings.

  But Grier, trained in Imperial military theory, could not shake certain of its basic preconceptions. A weaker force could not drive or pen a stronger one; at least a three-to-one advantage was necessary for attack; internal lines of communication and movement were superior to LOCs around the outside of a circle; infantry could not stand in the field against warstriders.

  The Confederation forces, though they possessed larger and more powerful striders, only roughly matched the attackers in numbers. The Japanese commander surrounded at Port Jefferson could move in any direction and find only a single, slender line of Confederation machines blocking his path. Breaking that line would be easy, and the first step toward annihilating the defenders piecemeal.

  Worse, at least two Imperial assault companies had come down on the mainland, scattered across a broad area of towns, ridges, and farmland between the spaceport and the capital; the Newamie militia under General Kruger was giving a good account of itself so far, but inevitably the invading warstriders would pull their scattered forces together and begin pushing the defenders back, isolating Cape Dickson from the mainland. When that happened, the 1st Rangers still at the spaceport would be trapped, cut off from the rest of the Confederation defenses. Grier could see the trap unfolding, could see it… and know just what he had to do to stop it.

  Grier had considered calling in T
ravis Sinclair, Darwin Smith, or one of the other senior Confederation leaders, but immediately discarded the idea. Grier had become comfortable with the idea of himself as savior of the New American forces; Sinclair had approved his deployment and his battle plan. He would show these New Americans what a man from Liberty with a real military education could do!

  “Colonel Weiss,” he called, searching for the tagged holographic image of the Rangers’ CO. “Colonel Weiss! Come in!”

  There was no reply, and Grier wondered if Weiss had been killed. Who was Weiss’s 2IC? Downloading the Rangers’ command structure, he frowned. Alessandro? Technically the woman was a colonel, but Grier scarcely regarded that. Until last month she’d never topjacked anything bigger than a company, and he frankly doubted her ability to handle anything so complex as a regiment now.

  Chikusho! Where the gok was Weiss?

  As he studied the neatly ordered arrays of colored figures on the map, he was briefly tempted to let things go a while longer. The ambush by Alessandro’s forces certainly appeared to be driving the Imperials, knocking them off-balance and sending them reeling back.

  But no, the danger was simply too great. The blank spaces on the map were spreading across large areas of the spaceport and the terrain between Cape Dickson and the capital. That meant remote sensors were being knocked down or were succumbing to the corrosive effects of nano agents hanging over the battlefield. If he waited much longer, he would lose control of the situation entirely, and the Rangers, the only specifically Confederation force on the planet, could be lost.