Jackers

by William H. Keith

  “No. Look there, and there. They’ve already taken the offensive back. And our people are too disorganized to stop them now. It’s going to take hours to form them up again. We’ve already lost it.”

  Minutes more passed, and the retreat continued all along the line. In the air above the spaceport, a tiny, golden beetle flitted across the battlefield, moving west to east. It was followed closely by a second… then a third.

  Sinclair knew instantly what those glittering objects were without having to tap the AI’s data base. Ascraft—big transport ascraft, Stormwinds and Typhoons—dropping down from orbit, circling the battle-torn spaceport and settling to the apron on blasts of fusion-heated plasma. Focusing closely on one, he saw new warstriders unfolding from the riderslots in their bellies.

  Other ascraft were coming out of the west in waves.

  “That’s it,” he said slowly. “The heavies are coming down. All we can do now is save what we have.”

  These, he was sure, were the Imperial heavy striders, the second assault wave consisting of powerful Daimyos and Katanas and Samurais. Too massive to pod-drop from orbit, they had to ride down aboard ascraft, landing at a spaceport already secured by advance forces. No doubt the enemy commander’s plan had called originally for seizing the spaceport so that the heavies could land, then throwing the newcomers against Jefferson itself.

  Obviously, the enemy had altered that plan; as long as they could find a place to touch down, the heavies could be used as effectively as reinforcements at the spaceport as anywhere else.

  And they were coming down squarely in the rear of Colonel Alessandro’s forces, trapping them between themselves and the surviving Tachis.

  Sinclair blamed himself. He might pride himself on his ability to choose good people, but, though Grier was not a bad officer, he’d been a poor choice for this particular slot. He’d been the weak link in the chain, and Sinclair should have been here, helping to manage the battle.

  “Okay, General,” he said gently. “Let’s see what we can salvage out of this mess.”

  Donryu remained in orbit about New America, close beside the planet’s space station. Though her weapons personnel were all linked in, her most powerful laser and CPG batteries ready to fire, she did not participate in the fighting for Port Jefferson. For one thing, since she was in low orbit, her actual time over a given target was measured in minutes, an extremely brief period of time for sensor scans to be updated, then evaluated by AI terrain and military specialists in order to single out worthwhile targets. More important, the landing forces were everywhere closely engaged with the rebels, both on the spaceport apron and on the mainland outside of the capital. Nowhere could the orbiting forces target rebel warstriders or equipment without risking hitting their own people, and Tetsu Kawashima, like every good military commander, was well aware of the dangers posed by so-called friendly fire.

  Better to remain patient, keeping Donryu and her consorts here in command of local space, and leaving the fighting on the surface to the men trained to do it. Ozawa and Mishima, Kawashima’s two assault commanders, were the best there were for this sort of combat. The heavy assault striders under Takeo Fuchi would be touching down by now as well, and Fuchi was a veteran of Lung Chi, Loki, and Alya A-VI.

  It was always chancy, launching an invasion from space against any world. Even with complete control of local space, orbiting spacecraft could scan and track only a fraction of what was going on in and beneath a planet’s atmosphere. Too, they were operating against an entire world, with a population of tens of millions, a surface area composed of hundreds of millions of square kilometers of ocean, woods, mountains, and rugged outback terrain. There were too many hiding places, too many villages, settlements, remote encampments for space or ground forces to control everything. The best the invaders could hope for was to seize and hold certain key positions—factories and manufacturing centers, the spaceport and airfields large enough to serve as ports, the capital.

  Fortunately, that was all that was really necessary. With those in Imperial hands, resistance might continue in more remote areas, but it would be isolated and scattered, and it would be the Empire that controlled the planet’s production and economy. Complete victory was only a matter of time, if the invaders moved with deliberation, calculation, and overwhelming force.

  Kawashima knew well that it was still possible to lose what he had already gained here, through carelessness, through haste, through ill-preparedness.

  He was determined to make no such amateur’s mistakes.

  “Vic! Watch it! Hang on!”

  The Warlord dipped and spun as heavy caliber rounds snap-snap-snapped overhead. Vic, still sitting in the open command module with Katya and her unconscious weapons tech, leaned forward against Katya’s back, pressing her forward into the slot. “Hide your eyes!” he snapped, and an instant later, the Warlord’s left CPG discharged with a crackling blast of blue-white energy and the acrid stink of ozone. The fog lit up, though Vic could see neither the target nor the effect of the shot. Above and behind him, the Warlord’s rotary cannon suddenly spun and shrieked, the racket tearing at his ears for an agony of seconds.

  “Okay, Captain,” Witter’s voice said, speaking in his mind. Somehow, despite the commotion, Hagan had managed to keep his palm implant against the interface. “We got him.”

  “What was it?”

  “Another Tachi. We fried him, don’t worry. You guys okay up there?”

  He leaned back, letting Katya straighten up again. In front of her, Francine DelRey was still slumped back into her lap. Turning, Katya met his eyes and nodded, her short, dark hair bobbing inside her transplex helmet.

  “We’re okay, Witter,” Hagan said. “Keep moving.”

  “I’m getting targets all over the place, Captain. Movement and heat. Negative on IFF. Y’know, I think we’re surrounded.”

  “Keep working east. There’s got to be a way out, even if we have to wade through the sea to find it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Katya eased herself back, pressing against him. “Captain?” she said over his headset. “Helmets off.”

  He hesitated. In the past few minutes they’d had to take several detours to avoid low-lying patches of nano-D, and removing their helmets could be deadly. Still, they were on the fringe of the battle here. The smoke was thinning, enough so that the sun was sending dusty shafts of yellow light slanting down through the overcast, and there’d been no nano warnings for some time now. The warstrider swayed gently beneath them as it continued pacing off the meters. Reaching up, he unsnapped his helmet release and pulled it off, as she did the same with hers.

  “Just for a moment, Vic,” she said, turning in the slot so that she could look back at him. “I didn’t want your crew eavesdropping.”

  “Sure. What’s on your mind?”

  “I want you to drop me off. Here. Right now.”

  His throat tightened, and he shook his head, an almost convulsive denial. “Negative! No way!”

  “Captain Hagan, use your head! You can’t fight this machine with the damned hatch open. The first time an Impie takes a shot at you, he’ll fry you, me, Francine, and half your control circuits. You have to button up if you’re to have a chance of getting out of here.”

  “But—”

  “Shut up and listen. There’s room in there for you and Francine. I know. I shared a ride that way once. It’ll be tight, but you can link while she rides on a PLSS. The portable life-support system’ll keep her alive until you can get her back to a med center.”

  “What about you? Damn it, Katya, I can’t just drop you off here, a million klicks behind enemy lines!”

  “We’re not a million klicks behind enemy lines. It’s more like five or six, okay? And there’s plenty of cover. That’s the strip district up there, and beyond that, Braxton and the port manufacturing center. I’ll be able to lie low, move quiet, and slip through the lines when it gets dark.”

  “That’ll be hours, yet!” His
heart was hammering in his chest. Damn it, she couldn’t ask this of him!

  He knew he was more than half in love with this woman, that he had been for a long time. He’d served with her for six years, ever since the days of the old 2nd New American Minutemen, and then later on Loki, on Alya B-V, and Eridu. His had always been a kind of love from afar; she was his commanding officer, and though neither Hegemony nor Confederation regulations forbade such a relationship, it was never a good idea for the grunts to become romantically involved with their commanding officers.

  Too, he’d been well aware of her close relationship with Devis Cameron. He’d deliberately kept his distance then, sensing Katya’s interest in Cameron, and knowing the dangers of lovers’ triangles in any mixed military unit.

  Of course, he’d also been aware of the fact that Katya and Cameron had become more distant again, starting with an argument they’d had on Earth just before the Eridu mission. Ever since, he’d been wondering whether that meant he actually now had a chance with her.

  Except that he knew Katya, knew that she was a professional and that she didn’t like mixing that profession with close, personal entanglements, especially now, after her breach with Cameron. Hagan rather suspected that she’d broken some self-imposed rule by getting involved with the guy in the first place, and that she now regretted it.

  And Vic Hagan, for all of his years in the militia, the Hegemony Guard, and now in the Confederation Army, was shy, at least when it came to women. Hell, he’d not even been able to ask Katya to recjack with him, though he’d had plenty of opportunity aboard the Eagle and here on New America. He was afraid that she would think he was just looking for entertainment, a jackin’ Jill for a quick plug-in. As a result, much of his RJ downtime was spent in erotic simulations with AI personas that looked and sounded and smelled very much like Katya Alessandro.

  And now the real Katya was wedged into the open slot with him, practically in his arms… and she was telling him to drop her off, to save himself and the others while she wandered around the battlefield on foot.

  “Damn it, Katya, you don’t know what you’re asking!”

  Reaching up, she touched his lips with one gloved forefinger. “I think I do. Vic.”

  The way she stressed his name sent a shiver through him. Did she know what he felt for her? How could she? He’d never said a word.…

  “Vic, if I stay, the next time we run into an Impie strider the three of us get fried, and maybe your crew as well. Do you want that? I’m not going to abandon Francine.”

  “Look, we can put you in one of the other slots. If you snuggled up with Witter or Sergeant Toland—”

  “No!” The negative was so sharp, so urgent, it startled him to silence. “No,” she said again, more gently. “Damn it, Vic, just follow your orders, okay?”

  “I don’t understand. This is a three-slotter. We could make it, all of us.…”

  She sighed. “Maybe I don’t either. I… I don’t like being shut in, Vic. I don’t think I could take it!”

  “But you’re a striderjack, for God’s sake!” By definition, that required her to shut herself up in darkened, narrow cubbyholes. “Look, we can jack you to Mission Link and I’ll be the passenger.”

  She shook her head. “It would take too long to reprogram your AI to accept my patterns, and we should keep moving, anyway. Vic, if you’ll just—”

  The explosion tore into the ground meters away, sending great clods of earth and gravel hurtling into the air.

  “Captain!” The voice came from his helmet phones, tinny and distant with the helmet beside him. “We got two bandits, comin’ in on our six! They were hiding behind that building!”

  He resisted the urge to look. What Witter could see through the strider’s optics would still be invisible to him. The warstrider lurched hard to the left, pivoting, its weapons coming up. Battle fog swirled past, impenetrable.

  “Come on, Katya! Squeeze in with—”

  “No!” Reaching up, she gave him a quick, hard kiss on the mouth. For an instant, he felt her warmth… and then she was gone, grabbing the PCR-28, rolling over the side of the Warlord’s fuselage and dropping three meters to the ground.

  “Katya!”

  “Go, Vic!” Scrambling to her feet, she waved him on. “Go!”

  Another high explosive shell snapped overhead, as the Warlord reared back on angled legs, then loosed three quick CPG bolts at the unseen attackers. Hagan dropped back into the slot, pulling Francine down on top of his legs and stomach. He fumbled with the console, unable to find the right button… and then the module hatch sealed shut, plunging the two of them into crowded darkness. One-handed, he managed to reach various cables and feeds, plugging them into her bodysuit. It was a tight squeeze, and he had to wiggle back and forth to make the connections, but the life-support feeds would keep her alive and out of shock. That done, he jacked three plugs home into his sockets, two temporal, one cervical, and palmed the interface.

  With a crackle of light, sight and sound were restored. He was again a warstrider, his vision piercing the encircling fog. Two… no, three Tachis were moving in, range two hundred meters and closing fast. The Warlord was tracking them, weapons ready. Another shell whizzed in, detonating with a ringing crack against the Warlord’s upper hull. Katya had been right. If the module had been open when that shell had hit…

  Where was Katya? He extended his scan left and right, searching. There… darting away swiftly past the warehouse wall, heading in the direction of the spaceport strip.

  What the hell was that all about?he wondered.

  “What was that, Captain?”

  He’d not been aware that he’d put his thoughts out over the link. “Nothing, Ken.”

  “Where’s the Boss off to? She won’t last ten—”

  “Never mind that!That Tachi on the right. We’re gonna take him! Lewis!”

  “Sir!”

  “Target! Bring him down!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  He watched Katya vanish into the rubble of a fallen building. He felt sick.

  Chapter 11

  Historically, of course, economic access was the great divider of society. There were the rich, upper classes which didn’t need to work and could devote their time to recreation or to the management of their society; the middle classes which used their skills and their limited economic access to acquire the means of joining the upper classes; and the lower classes, condemned by their lack of economic, educational, and political access, by and large, to remaining where they were.

  Early developers of cephlinkage hardware were confident that the old rules of power and class distinctions had been broken at last, that direct, electronic linkage to global information nets would at long last provide economic and educational access for all, abolishing forever class distinctions.

  Of course, we now know that they were completely wrong.

  —The Rise of Technic Man

  Fujiwara Naramoro

  C.E. 2535

  What’s wrong with me? Why couldn’t I go with him?

  Katya leaned back against a cracked and smoke-stained wall, gloves and helmet off, the combat rifle cradled in her lap. It was growing dark at last, the long, long New American day dragging to an end with the sun’s slow drop below the horizon. It was a true night, too, with both Columbia and the bloody pinpoint of 26 Draconis B already long since set. Through a shattered wall and ceiling on the other side of the room, the sky glowed an angry orange-red, reflecting the light of burning buildings. The crump and thud of far-off gunfire proved that the battle continued.

  She’d found this building—a bar called The Newamie’s Down—hours earlier, while it was still light, choosing it partly because it was a large building, offering plenty of hiding places, but mostly because she thought she might find food and water there. Though her warstrider umbilicals kept her blood chemistry balanced and kept her from becoming dehydrated while she was linked, they did nothing for her physical hunger. She’d not eaten for nearl
y fifteen hours, since she’d been back at the 1st Rangers’ Port Jefferson headquarters, and her stomach was growling.

  So she’d devoted several hours to exploring The Newamie’s Down, using its sanitary facilities, prowling the mealprep area in search of food, helping herself to a glass and some water from a still-working sink behind the bar. Finally she’d settled down here to wait, in the bar opposite the tall, arched entrance to the main dining area.

  Obviously, the place had taken a direct hit sometime during the fighting that had raged back and forth across this part of Cape Dickson that morning. Tables and chairs had been swept to one side of both the bar and the restaurant in smashed tangles of plastic and carbonweave, and the area behind the bar was awash in broken glass, mingled with pooled liquor and those bottles that had miraculously escaped intact. The mealprep area proved useless; the building’s power was out, and she hadn’t been able to open any of the storage lockers or vats where food cultures were grown.

  She’d finally found several packs of soy crackers and settled for those and water as dinner. It was ironic; there was a bewildering variety of alcoholic drinks available in those bottles that had somehow survived the battle without being broken, but Katya didn’t drink liquor, wine, or beer. She’d tried one or the other a time or two, of course, back in her shipjacking days, but she didn’t care for the taste of the vile stuff, nor did she like the loss of control or the false values it created.

  The alcohol did tell her something about this place, and this neighborhood, though, as did the Level 1 comm banks in the building’s foyer and the lack of full-link ViRcom pods or sim modules. This was definitely a lower-class neighborhood, and Katya was glad that patrons of this place were gone.

  The people who came here would have Level 1 hardware, no more, and many might even be nullheads, kept at the very bottom of the economic and educational ladder by being unable to interact with technic society at all. Level 1 hardware—distributed free by the state—consisted of a palm interface and a single T-socket, sufficient to download ID and credit information, to interact with computers and AIs, and to receive low-res input from public entertainment channels.