Jackers

by William H. Keith

He wouldn’t risk it. Saving the army, in Grier’s opinion, was far more important than winning the battle.

  “Colonel Weiss! This is General Grier, CONMILCOM! Come in!”

  “This… this is Weiss.” The voice was ragged with strain. “I’m… kind of busy right now. General.”

  Zooming in closer from his gods’-eye point of view, Grier could see Weiss’s machine now, a command-rigged Warlord highlighted by a flashing star. The machines with him were crouched behind a hastily nano-fabricated barricade protecting the industrial facilities and manufacturing plants of Braxton. The defensive line was solid at the moment, sealing off Cape Dickson, but pressure from the assault force had been mounting steadily for several minutes. A steady flow of infantry was already streaming back off the spaceport and through Braxton, in full retreat from the clash of titans behind them.

  “Weiss, listen to me! The spaceport is lost, and you’re in danger of being cut off. Open your link for a tactical download.”

  “Link open.”

  With a thought, Grier sent a summary of the mapboard simulation funneling through Colonel Weiss’s link. The data showed clearly what Weiss could not see for himself, that the broad peninsula he was defending was in danger of being cut off by the Imperials between him and Jefferson.

  “I… see it, General,” Weiss flashed back after a moment. “What do you recommend?”

  “Fall back to Monroe.” Monroe was a large town, a suburb of Jefferson on the mainland squarely between the capital and Port Jefferson. “Consolidate your line with General Kruger. I’m dispatching the reserves to back him up.”

  “Order acknowledged,” Weiss replied. “We’re falling back.”

  “Colonel Alessandro,” Grier called. “Do you copy?”

  Again, silence. This was what Grier disliked most about topjacking a large unit. Individual commanders tended to be independent, too caught up in battlelust, with no time to spare for the senior officers overseeing the battle from behind the lines. Katya Alessandro, from what he knew of her, was no exception.

  Colonel Alessandro! This is CONMILCOM! Respond!”

  “CONMILCOM, this is Captain Hagan,” a man’s voice replied. “The Colonel’s down, and I think her comm’s out.”

  “Understood. Who is senior officer in the detachment, Hagan?”

  “Uh, I guess I am, sir.”

  “The order is break contact and retreat. Rally with Colonel Weiss at Monroe.”

  “Uh, CONMILCOM, that isn’t possible just now. We’ve got—”

  “Don’t tell me what is possible, damn it! You’re in danger of being cut off and surrounded! Now get your people and machines out of there. Captain! Now!”

  Sometimes, Grier thought, you just had to know how to deal with these stubborn junior officers. They tended to see only their narrow slice of a battle and forget that there were much larger things at stake. He noted with satisfaction that Weiss’s warstriders were already falling back through the manufacturing complex, abandoning their jury-rigged barricade. Hagan’s thirty-some striders were isolated far around the enemy flank but appeared to be breaking off all along the line. Good. If the Imperials gave them half a chance, they should be able to get clear, swing around the Imperial flank, and easily reach the rendezvous at Monroe.

  A brilliant maneuver, he concluded, requiring only immediate obedience on the part of his officers.

  Almost imperceptibly on the map, the pace of the retreat was increasing.

  “Chikusho, Captain!” Sublieutenant Witter’s protest mingled anger and hurt. “We were winning! Why are we retreating now?”

  “I guess they know something we don’t know,” Vic Hagan told his pilot, already coding the general message to the rest of the unit ordering them to break off and retreat.

  He was worried, though. Confederation and Imperial forces were by now so intermingled there was no front line, and breaking contact with the enemy at this point was a hell of a lot easier ordered than done.

  Besides, Katya was down… her position overrun moments before by a pack of swift-moving Tachis. He could see her machine, inert on the fabricrete a hundred meters away, but with no telemetry from her Warlord he couldn’t tell if she was alive or dead.

  “We can’t just leave the Boss in there,” Sergeant Toland, his number three, said.

  “Agreed. Witter, take us in closer. Sarge, give me the lasers. You take the rest. I want those Tachis down!”

  “Now you’re talking, Captain. Let’s get the gokin’ sheseiji!”

  But Vic was more concerned for Katya.

  One of the two Tachis had stopped meters from the fallen strider, was stooping, bringing a heavy laser to bear on the wreckage. Hagan cut loose with the twin, fifty-megawatt lasers mounted like an insect’s pincers to left and right of the Warlord’s fuselage. The bolts seared into the Tachi’s side; Hagan thrilled to see the machine twist and snap back, looking for all the world like some huge, two-legged beast that had just been sharply stung.

  The second Tachi took a step forward and opened fire.

  Katya was not sure whether or not she’d been unconscious. When her linkage with The Boss’s AI was broken, she’d awakened inside the narrow, padded coffin of the machine’s center linkslot, with no light at all save that from a tiny constellation of green and amber marking the slot’s manual controls. Claustrophobia encircled her. Her breathing came in short, hard gasps as she slapped her palm across the interface, trying to relink.

  Nothing. The Warlord was dead.

  She knew how lucky she’d been. That surge of power from the Tachi’s electron gun could have fried her brain. Fortunately, the link safeties had worked as advertised; the Warlord’s AI had cut her out of the circuit even as it died.

  Had the others aboard come through too? Using the auxiliary interface, she opened an intercom line. “Francine! Ken! Are you there?”

  “God, what happened?” Maubry asked.

  “Okay, Skipper,” DelRey said. “I’m in the dark, but okay.”

  “All systems are off-line,” she told them. “Time to odie, gang.”

  Odie, soldier’s slang from the Nihongo word for “dance,” meant to get the hell out, fast. Swiftly, she unhooked the wires and feed tubes that connected her with the Warlord’s now-dead life-support system from her bodysuit receivers, then removed breather helmet and gloves from a side compartment. New America might be one of those rare worlds in the Shichiju where humans could walk and breathe unaided, but the modem battlefield was deadly to anyone foolish enough to enter it unprotected. Poisonous fumes from wrecked striders, volatile gases from binary explosives, and, most deadly, unseen mists of nano-D guaranteed that unprotected humans would be dead in minutes.

  She made a final check through the interface—good, local concentrations of nano-D were low—then broke contact and sealed her gloves. She typed a code into the panel manually, then braced herself as the outer hatch slid open.

  As always when she stepped in person onto a battlefield, she was surprised by how dark and murky the air actually was. When she was linked, her AI provided an enhanced view of the world around her; like most jackers she tended to forget just how much a strider relied on superhuman sensors, on fog-piercing radar and infrared, and on the combat-loaded AI’s educated guesswork.

  It was like stepping into a heavy, silver fog. Her Warlord lay nose-down on a broken rubble of shattered fabricrete, one leg folded beneath the hull, the other extended behind it like a broken trail of steel struts and wreckage. The other two slots, set to either side of hers on the dorsal hull, were open, and their occupants were scrambling out, like her attired in gray bodysuits and transparent life-support helmets. Francine DelRey cradled a PCR-28, the high-velocity combat rifle she’d brought with her from her days in the infantry. Maubry and Katya both wore megajoule hand lasers holstered on their hips.

  Toys against warstriders, useless. Katya sensed motion close by and looked up.

  Looming out of the fog, the Tachi stood only a bit more than twice as tall as
a man but was bulkier, twenty tons or so precariously balanced on slender legs angled sharply back at the knees. Its hull rippled through shades of gray as its nanoflage responded to changing light. The legs and gait gave it the menacing look of some huge and dangerous bird as it stilted over cracked pavement and loose rubble… or of a carnivorous, bipedal dinosaur.

  Only the hazy outlines of the thing were visible through the drifting smoke. Katya raised her hand, warning the others in her crew to silence. The audio sensors on a strider were quite good, as were its visual and motion sensors. Damn, it ought to see them already.

  Ah! That was why. The Imperial strider was busy with something else, a Confed strider lurking unseen somewhere in the murk. Black smoke was curling from a gash in its side, and its stubby weapons packs were tracking something in the mist to Katya’s right. There was a flash and a sound like swarming bees, and Katya was left blinking purple afterimages from her eyes. A moment later, a triplet of explosions cracked off the strider’s ventral hull, sending a patter of shrapnel across the ground. With dawning horror, Katya realized that the three of them were in danger of being caught in the open between two warstriders in combat. The only thing worse from a crunchie’s point of view was having a warstrider actually chasing you.

  Urgently, she signaled the others. This way! Fast!

  They ran as a CPG bolt caught the Tachi in the side, ripping it open, gutting the machine and spilling its internal assemblies in smoking fragments across the pavement. The three kept running, picking their way across blocks of broken fabricrete.…

  … and stopped. A second Tachi was there, lurching forward out of the smoke just ten meters away, each footstep a clash of metal on stone, the monster close enough that Katya could see the surface nano rippling back from an ominous bulge mounted on its flank. The black muzzle of an AP pod gaped at her like a questing eye.

  “Down!” Katya screamed. “Cover!”

  The 40mm cannon mounted in the Tachi’s antipersonnel pod barked as she dove for the nonexistent shelter of the mangled pavement.

  Chapter 10

  Time is everything; five minutes make the difference between victory and defeat.

  —Admiral Lord Nelson

  ca. C.E. 1805

  The weapon was called sempu, “whirlwind,” and it was built into the hull of some warstriders as a close-range antipersonnel measure. Often it was set to fire automatically and indiscriminately, when any moving target came within range. A 40mm shell disintegrated as it cleared the weapon’s muzzle, loosing an expanding cloud of lead pellets like a shotgun blast. The pellets were strung together by tangled meters of monofilament, threads no thicker than a single molecule and far stronger than steel. Dispersing in a filmy, high-velocity cloud, the stuff sliced through everything in its path, vegetation, light armor, muscle, bone, all with equal ease.

  Lying facedown in the pavement rubble, Katya felt the ripping wind of the horror’s passing half a meter above her back. An instant later, a CPG blast struck the Tachi like a lightning bolt, dazzling her even through tight-shut eyelids, ripping the strider’s dorsal armor apart in a splatter of molten duralloy. It took another step, then crashed forward, and the concussion jolted Katya through the ground.

  There was a long moment of relative silence; the roar and thud and crackle of battle still thundered all around her, but it was quiet here. Then she heard a stifled sob over her helmet’s speakers, and something that might have been a groan.

  Shakily, she rolled over, looking back. Francine, blood-splattered but not obviously hurt, was lying on her side, staring with shock-gilt blankness at a nearby tangle of steaming, neatly diced flesh and viscera. The sempu blast must have caught Ken Maubry full-on as he dove for cover. The left side of his head from nose to ear lay unmarked on the ground, the unwinking eye staring at Katya with something that might have been accusation.

  “Come on, Francine,” she said, rising to her knees.

  “He… he…”

  “We can’t help him.” That was obvious. “Let’s move!”

  Francine tried to sit up and her left arm dropped from her body in a sudden gush of blood. The weapons tech just sat there, staring stupidly at the limb, severed just below her elbow, where it lay on the ground in front of her.

  Damn! A loop of the sempu cloud must have snicked through her arm, and she hadn’t even felt it. Shock was numbing her now, could kill her if Katya didn’t move fast.

  Moving to Francine’s side, she gentled the woman to the ground, then used a length of bloody flexcloth—she thought it must be a strip sliced from Maubry’s bodysuit—to tie off the stump.

  She was giving Francine an injection of emergency medical nano from her belt first aid kit when the hum and creak of a moving strider close behind her made her turn and look up.

  Relief flooded through her. It was Mission Link, the Warlord’s hull torn and scratched in places, but undamaged. The big machine’s blunt fuselage dipped toward her, a parody of a bow, and the central bulge of the commander’s module opened up. Vic Hagan sat up in the slot and waved. “Katya! Katya, you all right?”

  She waved back. “I’m okay! Francine’s hurt.”

  “We have to odie, Boss. They’re pullin’ us out.”

  He slid out of the open slot, clambered to the ground, and hurried across to Katya and Francine. Together, they half carried half dragged the woman back to the motionless Warlord. The medical nano was already taking effect, sealing off the bloody stump and easing her into a painless haze. If they could get her back to a med center, nanosomatic engineers would take care of the rest, right down to growing her a new arm.

  If they could get her back. According to Vic, the Confederation forces were already in full retreat from Cape Dickson and the spaceport.

  “Kuso!” she swore. “Who gave a nullheaded order like that?”

  “It was right from the top,” Vic replied. “General Grier. At least he was the one who told me.”

  Katya shook her head. “But we were winning, damn it!”

  “That’s what Witter said. I dunno, Boss. I just work here.” Carefully supporting the almost unconscious Francine, they scrambled up the Warlord’s flank, then squeezed into the riderslot together. Warstriders weren’t designed with passengers in mind; the commander’s module was coffin-sized, large enough for one person lying down… or possibly two if they were very friendly.

  Or for three squeezed in and sitting upright with the hatch open. Katya clung to a handhold on the hull as Vic barked an order and the machine straightened upright again. He spoke again, his words picked up by the strider’s external audio sensors, and the warstrider pivoted sharply, then swept forward with long-legged, ground-eating strides.

  Odd. When she was linked, Katya was never aware of this lurching, swaying motion as the machine paced across open ground. She hoped she wasn’t going to disgrace herself by being sick inside her helmet.

  Vic had his glove off, his palm pressed against the command module’s interface, an expression of studied concentration on his face as he stayed in communication with the strider’s pilot.

  “Okay,” he said, opening his eyes and pulling his hand off the contact. “Bad news, I’m afraid. Witter says a lot of our people got hit while they were trying to disengage. The line’s falling apart.”

  Katya could picture it. Of all tactical maneuvers, the hardest are those carried out in the face of the enemy, especially if they require a force already engaged to break off the action. When the force trying to withdraw is composed primarily of newbies and raw recruits, the maneuver is almost certain to disintegrate into a confused, every-man-for-himself rout.

  This was not the way it was supposed to work, Katya thought. The plan had called for her ambush force to punch the invaders off the north end of the spaceport, sweeping across the apron like the swinging of a gate, then joining up with the rest of the 1st Rangers in the spaceport strip. If the Imperial assault unit could be driven into a tight enough pocket, its numbers sharply reduced, it would be tra
pped against the sea, unable to maneuver, unable to do anything but surrender or be destroyed.

  The order to retreat with the maneuver still only half-completed had turned the situation completely upside down. Katya’s striders were streaming off toward the east and southeast now, desperately vulnerable to a sudden counterpunch from the hard-pressed Imperials.

  “I’m going to have some words with Grier when I see him again,” she promised.

  If I get out of this alive.

  “What the hell were you thinking of!” Sinclair demanded. Held up in a meeting at the new government headquarters under Stone Mountain, Sinclair had arrived on-line only moments ago, to find the battle already begun… and already lost. Floating above the sprawl and color of the virtual reality battlefield, he could see the Imperial striders emerging from the pocket into which they’d been jammed, rushing forward in fireteams of two and four machines, slicing into the disorganized rabble that was the Confederation retreat.

  Grier bristled. “What do you mean? Kuso, Travis, Alessandro’s wing was dangling way out in the open, completely exposed! If I hadn’t given the order to retreat, she’d have been cut off and destroyed!” He pointed, a sweep of a virtual arm. “And these Imperial landings on the mainland! All they have to do is move here, and our entire army on the cape is trapped!”

  Sinclair studied the flow of red and blue for a moment. “Your timing, General,” he said slowly, “is off. Another twenty minutes, and Katya would have had the lid welded shut!”

  “I saved the army!”

  “I think, General, that you don’t fully understand what is at stake here. If we simply hold on, if we simply survive, we lose.”

  “But—”

  “We needed that spaceport, General! To get our people out. Our only hope was to bloody the Imperials badly enough to make them pull back and maybe reconsider a second landing. Now… I don’t know.”

  “We… we could order our people back into the attack.” Grier sounded contrite now. “The Imperials aren’t well organized yet. We could still throw them off the spaceport and into the sea.”