Jackers

by William H. Keith

  To her left, Lauber’s aging Calliopede exploded, red flames licking up into the night. “Colonel!” Chet yelled over the link. “Check your nine!”

  As quickly as it had come, delight and excitement were gone, replaced by the battle-keen awareness of danger. Movement, silhouetted against the burning night. Warstriders, Imperial warstriders, were racing toward her from the left. The crawler’s support force had been spread out farther ahead but was reacting now to the rebel close-assault with a thundering charge. As the skeleton of Lauber’s Calliopede crumbled in the flames, a pair of Tachis opened fire on Katya’s Ghostrider, their twin, 88mm lasers in a flat dorsal turret lancing through the smoke- and dust-laden air.

  A KR-9 Manta, Gerris Fitzhugh’s machine, staggered beneath the touch of diamond-hard laser light. His left weapons pod detonated, a reserve of chemflamer fuel ignited. The wreckage flared, then burned like a torch. Katya saw none of the crew eject.

  Then the Tachis were on her. Concentrating fire from her chin laser on the closest one, she saw it stagger, its dorsal turret flaming. Rockets slammed in from somewhere, toppling the machine as she shifted her targeting to the second Tachi.

  Explosions flashed like lightning, and their thunder was an endless, keening roar. Something hit her Ghostrider hard, square in the torso, and the ready light for her laser winked out.

  She was completely unarmed now, save for the McEverett Pack, and the surviving Tachi was blocking her path.

  From behind a tumbled-down wall, Tharby rose, the satchel charge clutched in one hand. “Let’s go!”

  The genies weren’t supposed to be here, weren’t supposed to be anywhere within ten kilometers of the fighting, but when he’d heard that the Colonel had volunteered to try to take down the moving, armored mountain he and the others had seen in the valley, Tharby had known that, once again, the genies were going to demonstrate their newfound capability for disobedience. The Port Jefferson Scouts had slipped out of their encampment shortly after Colonel Alessandro had departed, hours before. They’d trailed her at a safe distance, then found hiding places of their own in the ruins. Tharby knew in principle what those huge McEverett Packs were supposed to do, since he and some of the other techies had helped assemble them. It had been simple to put together smaller packs of HE, massing thirty kilos apiece and easily genie-portable.

  The initial flash and thunder as the ambush erupted had caught all of the genies by surprise, and several had scurried away into the night. More had fled with the approach of the ascraft, or with the attack of the Imperial stilters seconds later.

  Tharby and four other techies had held on, however, eyes narrowed to yellow slits against the glare, hands cupped over ears as peal followed deafening peal. No one, genie or full human, could survive unprotected in that hell of fire and noise, but Tharby was determined to wait for his chance.…

  Then he’d seen the Colonel’s machine engage one of the stilters and knock it down. There was a whirlwind exchange of fire. Flame roared; the Colonel’s machine had been hit, and hit hard.

  “Now!” he yelled, leaping forward. “Take th’ bastards!”

  Their original idea had been to attack the siege crawler, but watching the monster lumber forward out of the night, Tharby was realist enough to know that his paltry, thirty-kilo charges were not going to even scratch that massive armor. But another target had presented itself… the small strider squaring off now against the Colonel’s bigger machine.

  The five genies bounded across the open.…

  The laser ready light winked on as Katya willed a bypass circuit to life. Ignoring warnings of coolant leaks and overheating, Katya triggered the chin laser, spearing the Tachi in front of her with white light. The nano aerosols and anti-laser fogs were heavy here, drinking the energy like a sponge, but at point-blank range she was bound to do some damage.

  The Tachi staggered, a section of its left torso glowing like a red-hot coal, but it didn’t fall. Katya took a step closer.…

  Movement caught her attention, stayed the thought that was about to launch another bolt of coherent light. Were those crunchies swarming over the Tachi’s feet?

  The Tachi seemed to detect this new threat at the same moment, its angular torso bobbing in an almost comical parody of a bird doing a double take at its own feet. A point defense machine gun mounted in a ball turret pivoted.…

  * * *

  A gun on the Tachi spoke and Nomet was torn open from throat to crotch, the splatter of his blood as black as ink in the dim light. Tharby leaped onto the stilter’s broad, flanged foot as gunfire shrieked. Close beside him, Kanned threw up his long arms and went down in a bloody, thrashing tangle, but Tharby managed to cling to the monster’s leg with one hand as he jammed his satchel charge into an unarmored gap in the thing’s foot just where it joined the massive upright of the leg.

  Kanned was sprawled motionless on the ground now, but Yodi and Leddun were on the strider’s other foot, ramming their charges home. Overhead, the machine gun spoke again… then exploded as the Colonel’s Ghostrider lanced it with a dazzling beam of light. The flash was blinding, and nail-sized chunks of metal pinged and bounced off Tharby’s body armor. Then the Tachi’s leg started to come up, and he just had time to yank the arming string before the foot snapped forward, whipping him off like a dog shaken from the back of an angry bear. Leddun screamed, his body writhing in a halo of white flame.

  An instant later the charges went off with a triple thunderclap of sound. With a shriek that was almost human, the Imperial strider twisted wildly, fighting for balance, then toppled to the side.…

  Now was her chance! Katya urged the Ghostrider forward as the second Tachi fell, still startled by the boldness of the assault she’d just witnessed. Three of the five genies were down, the others bolting for cover, but they’d blown one foot clean off the Tachi and badly mangled the other.

  No time to wonder. Ten more strides and the LaG-42 was alongside the crawler, badly hurt, but still advancing with all the relentlessly unstoppable power of an incoming tide on New America. Smoothly, concentrating on moving her hardpoint arm like her body’s real arm and not like the more familiar Ghostrider weapons pod, she extended the remote gripper, still clinging to the McEverett Pack.

  A sharp crack sounded close beside her, and duralloy bearings and shifting clouds of monofilament wire sang through the air, clattering off her armor like hail. The crawler’s skirts were protected by auto-triggered frag launchers and sempu, deadly against infantry, but of little effect against a warstrider. Stepping through the hail, she swung the McEverett Pack, lobbing it underhanded onto the track in the space between two massive wheels.

  Monofilament wire from the sempu blast tangled her duralloy armor, peeling off flakes of metal, binding her gripper hand to the pack. Panic gibbered, not far beneath her surface control. As the crawler continued forward, the McEverett Pack began slipping beneath one wheel, tugging her irresistibly forward.

  With an almost explosive, coded thought, she jettisoned the arm. Her Ghostrider took a staggering step backward, suddenly freed. Then she pivoted and ducked, knowing that at any instant the detonator’s pressure trigger would—

  WHAM!

  The blast picked the LaG-42 Ghostrider up off its feet, depositing it in a clattering, tumbling tangle of legs and hull extensions ten meters away. The fireball arced into the sky, blinding, dazzling in its intensity, and one of the house-sized wheels bounced and rolled past Katya’s vision like a rim-bent child’s hoop.

  “Chet! Are you okay?”

  No answer… not even a feed link through the strider’s inboard ICS. Either Martin was off-line, or he was dead.

  There was nothing to be done about it now. Raising the Ghostrider unsteadily to its feet, she turned, scanning the crawler. One hundred kilos of C-30 downloaded nearly a billion joules of energy in an instant, approximating the sheer destructive power of five hundred 100-MW lasers discharging at once. Katya saw chunks of duralloy spinning away through the smoke. The armor s
kirt had peeled up and away as though gashed by a giant’s talon, and the port-forward tread had disintegrated into hurtling slabs of jagged metal.

  The crawler, Katya saw, was no longer moving, no longer firing back. Either its crew was dead, or they’d been knocked off-line. The siege crawler had been reduced now to an inert, smoking mountain of duralloy.

  Fifty meters away, one of the ascraft was landing, balancing to earth on shrill-whistling plasma jets. Katya tagged it with a comm laser.

  “That,” she said over the link, “was definitely in the proverbial nick of time!”

  “Not really,” Dev’s voice replied. “We should have been here three hours ago.”

  Katya’s heart leaped. It was him! It was!

  “We landed at Stone Mountain first,” Dev continued. “About three hours ago. I met General Sinclair at the field apron, and he told me where you were, what you were doing. Our ascraft are brand-new. They had mounts, but no weapons. We had the maintenance crews at the Mountain install the lasers and power packs and, well, here we are.”

  “Another five minutes and you would’ve been too late,” Katya told him. “That’s still pretty goking good timing!”

  “Can that thing you’re wearing still move?”

  Katya turned sensors on her own hull. Most of her nanoflage had been stripped off right down to flame-scorched bare metal. Her left weapons pod was missing, as were half a dozen scanners and instrumentation pods. She estimated her input feeds were down by at least forty percent.

  But a level one diagnostic showed that the battered machine could still stride. “Just watch me!”

  “Come on, then. We’ll give you and your people a lift back to Stone Mountain.”

  “On our way!”

  Chapter 18

  There is a great deal of talk about loyalty from the bottom to the top. Loyalty from the top down is even more necessary and much less prevalent.

  —War As I Knew It

  General George S. Patton, Jr.

  C.E. 1947

  There was no sign of what was left of that unexpected infantry support team, but all four surviving warstriders boarded the grounded Typhoon, slotting into external rider slots in its belly, tucked away beneath the anhedral slant of its stubby wings. Eight minutes later, they were descending toward Stone Mountain Field, a stretch of camouflaged fabricrete apron surrounded by towering, feather-topped trees.

  Katya’s first need was to find out what had happened to Martin. The external controls to his module were dead, so a maintenance tech used a locking tool to crank it open manually.

  The young pilot blinked up at her from his coffin, then shook his head. “Don’t know what happened, Colonel. I got booted off-line and couldn’t get back on.”

  “That’s okay, Chet,” she told him, relief turning her weak. “You stuck with me, didn’t you?”

  He grinned. “Not that I had much choice!” He was going to be okay.

  “Hello, stranger.”

  Katya turned. Dev was there, tall and haggard-looking and grinning broadly. She fell into his arms, surprised by her own response… as was he. They kissed.

  “That’s a nice welcome,” he said, his eyes laughing. “I’m glad to see you too. You look wonderful!”

  Her jacker’s bodysuit had molded itself to her torso like a second skin, plastered down by sweat. Her hair was dripping and smelled like the fur of a wet, long-haired cat. She felt dirty… no, filthy, and could smell her own stink clinging to her like a program-active nano-D cloud. She was in desperate need of a long shower and at least twenty hours of sleep.

  And this guy thought she looked good?

  A nearby entrance, concealed beneath armor, earth, and nanoflaged sheets of plastic, led through massive blast doors into the mountain’s interior.

  Sinclair was waiting for them in a small, bare-walled conference room, part of the complex of underground vaults known to the striderjacks as “the Bunker.”

  “We were watching your performance through drone sensors,” Sinclair said as Katya took her place next to Dev at the long, synthwood table. Other officers were present as well: Generals Smith, Kruger, and Grier, as well as some members of their staffs.

  “Colonel, that was a magnificent performance!” Smith enthused. “Congratulations!”

  “It was Dev here who pulled it off, sir,” she said. Enthusiasm bubbled, barely suppressed. She was alive… and so was he! “He pinned enough of the brute’s PDLs that I was able to get a charge placed.”

  “Well, you did everything you said you’d do,” Sinclair told her. “Preliminary reports have the rest of the Impie striders in full retreat. This’ll hold them up for another day or two at least. We all owe you, owe you both a tremendous debt.”

  She looked at Dev. “Did you bring reinforcements from Athena? How many?”

  He shook his head. “Sorry, Katya. I’ve already gone over this with these gentlemen. When I heard that a Ryu-class was going to get here before me, I sent the fleet elsewhere. To bring it back here would have been suicide.”

  “Surely it would be better to try!” A cooler rationality reasserted itself then, smoothing over the warm flush of victory, and survival. “Okay. No reinforcements. At least we have a breather, now. But I’m not sure it helps us much. Even if they only brought one crawler, it won’t be long before their strider force wears us down. And we have no place else to go.”

  “But we do,” Sinclair said gently. “Katya, it’s time to carry out the rest of the plan. We’ve got to leave, for Herakles.”

  She stared at Sinclair for a moment, uncomprehending. Tired to the point where she could scarcely stand, with the pulse of combat still thrilling at her temples, the general’s words didn’t at first make sense. Leave? Now?

  After she and the people with her had suffered so much, had invested so much in defending this place?

  “Most of the delegates slipped out just ahead of the invasion,” Sinclair explained to Dev. “They should be nearly at Mu Herculis by now. They took Fred with them.”

  “How many more do you want to get out?” Dev asked.

  Sinclair glanced around the room at the others. “Senior staff,” he said. “Myself… though I hate like hell abandoning ship in the middle of this.”

  “You have to go, sir,” General Kruger said. Unlike Smith, Grier, or Sinclair, he was unshaven and his uniform blotched with dirt and sweat. The militia general had been in the field almost continuously since the invasion had begun. “We’ll keep fighting the bastards here. They’ll have to level every damned mountain in the Outback to root every last one of us out.”

  Katya felt cold. The exultation of victory had soured.

  “That’s… it then? We’re just leaving?”

  “We have no choice, Katya,” Sinclair said. “Now, people, I can’t stress enough the need for complete secrecy. We will be limited as to how many people we can take out. Captain Cameron has only a single ship. This evacuation will be restricted to only absolutely essential personnel—”

  “Excuse me, General,” Katya said. “But what about the Rangers?”

  “We’re going to be too tight for space,” Dev pointed out.

  “We can bring out a few of your best people,” Sinclair added. “We’ll need them for the nucleus of a new 1st Confederation Rangers, on Herakles.”

  “You’ll have a couple hundred troops to work with,” Dev said, grinning. “Remember, I stole half of your Rangers for the Athena raid.”

  “That’s not the point! I can’t just abandon my people here!” Emotions seethed as rigidly held self-control cracked. She could feel the tears on her cheeks, the stinging in her eyes, but she didn’t care. “My… my place is here! I can’t go with you!”

  “I’m sorry, Colonel,” Sinclair said gently. “But you must. That’s an order. You and Captain Cameron are the only two people who’ve had more than cursory contact with the Naga so far. And we’re counting on you to establish contact with the Heraklean Naga. Everything depends on that. Do you understand?
”

  She looked at Dev, who stared back at her with a hard, level gaze. “Linked,” she said. “But it’s one goking hell of a way to run a war.”

  Hours later, she entered the encampment set aside for the genies, nearly ten kilometers down the slope from the landing field. It was almost full dark, though Columbia shed a blanket of cold, silver light across forest and looming mountain face. The sky was empty, and there was no threat on the southeastern horizon save the pale skyglow of Jefferson.

  It was almost possible to forget that there was a war.

  “Wait for me,” she told the jacker of the magflitter that had brought her here, then opened the bubble top and stepped off into the brisk evening air. Squaring her shoulders, she got her bearings, then strode toward the main gate.

  She was dreading this encounter.

  A young soldier in armor stopped her and demanded her palmed ID before admitting her to the camp. The site itself was little more than a clearing lined with hastily erected plasform barracks half-buried in dirt and roofed over by meter upon meter of nanoflage sheeting. There were no open lights, no fires. The building she was looking for was at the end of what might generously have been termed a street.

  The camp’s official name was Bravo-three-seven, though the troops quartered there had taken to calling it Camp Baka… Camp Fool. Most of them were local militia, though this one round-roofed building housed the Port Jefferson Scouts. A guard—a human—admitted her past the guard station at the front door.

  With the front door sealed off by a blanket hanging from the ceiling, there was light inside… and music. She was embraced by both as she stepped into the warmth of the barracks.

  … and Nagai had withdrawn.

  But Morgan called us to his side, Hegemon infantry.

  And let us choose to stand and die, or choose instead to flee.