Warstrider 05 - Netlink

by William H. Keith

  “I understand. Okay, keep your head down.”

  The warstrider drifted past, clearing the top of the wall and moving into the open in front of the building. The gunfire from inside doubled and redoubled; bullets sang and whined off the armor; a grenade exploded close beside the upright machine, rocking it to the right.

  A hatch popped open in the strider’s side, and a snub-nosed cylinder nosed forth. There was a shrill whine and a stabbing jet of flame, the sound so piercing that Clifford raised his gloves to cover his ears—uselessly, since he was wearing an enclosed helmet.

  The hivel cannon hosed the entire second story of the main building, starting at one end and sweeping to the other. Glass exploded, showering out into the night in a glittering cascade. Bodies fell as well, most mangled almost beyond recognition. The interior of the second floor was intermittently lit from within by exploding rounds, but when the hivel gun fell silent, the gaping holes that had once been windows remained black and silent.

  There was no answering fire from the structure.

  “Pest control done while you wait,” the warstrider’s pilot said. “Anything else?”

  “Thanks, striderjack. If you want to hang around, you’re more than welcome, believe me!”

  “I think I’ll wander. There’s a firefight on at the landing field. But give a yell if you need anything else, right?”

  “You got it! Thanks!” He shifted frequencies. “Okay, you leggers. Let’s move it! Move it!”

  For the second time, he rolled over the wall and started forward, his troops following. It was the stuff of a classic nightmare, trying to run across ground permeated by a QEC mag field, each step mired in slow-motion, and all the while enduring that prickly feeling at the back of his neck that someone up there was taking aim and about to fire.

  And then suddenly he’d broken through, staggering into the open, almost as though emerging from hip-deep surf or wet sand. He’d fought clear of the caged electron field and was moving over normal ground once more.

  Gunfire continued to bark elsewhere in the compound, but the main lab building was silent now… as silent as death. He reached the entrance and backed up against the wall, plasma rifle ready. Bradley and Chung slammed into the wall oppo­site, exchanged nods with him, and braced themselves. Chung tossed a grenade through the blast-shattered door, and when the fragments of ceiling stopped falling, they rolled around the corner and plunged inside, one-two-three.

  There was nothing inside the entrance foyer but shattered glass and dead Imperial soldiers.…

  Watching from Aresynch, Kara followed the raid as it un­folded before her eyes. Resolution through the sky-el’s op­tics was good; at infrared wavelengths, she could see individual troopers as they scattered from the armored car­rier and raced into the nearest of the lab buildings. Incoming fire continued to probe and flash. The battle proceeded in an eerie silence; Kara kept expecting to hear the crash and howl and thunder of detonating rounds, the shriek of hivels, the yells of men and women, and the clatter of small-arms fire, but the entire scenario unfolded before her eyes in complete silence.

  She wished she were down there with them. With Ran…

  Kara had already tried several times to access the computer system at the MilTech labs through the Net, but, as expected, there was no direct access. Even the most sophisticated AI system couldn’t talk to other computers if they weren’t linked in, though she could sense where those node access points were when the communications lines were open.

  Had she been able to access the lab computers directly, she might well have been able to carry out this mission—or the major part of it—herself, without the need for warstriders or marines. In fact, the lack of access was a confirmation that sensitive data on the I2C might well be stored at Noctis La­byrinthus. Severing the lab’s on-line connections with Are­synch would be one of the most basic of security precautions they could take.

  A warning tone caught her attention. Shifting to another window, she checked the strategic map, which showed every­thing in the battle area from the foot of Pavonis Mons to Oud­emans.

  There… that was what had triggered the alert. A flight of aircraft—and from their ID tags on the tracking screen, they were damned big transports of some kind—was lifting off from a base in Syria Planum, south of the Marineris Sea. Touching the icon with her thoughts, she requested a magni­fication of the image and more data.

  And she got it. The aircraft were four Kaba transports, enor­mous, lumbering beasts that could easily be hauling a full reg­iment of heavy warstriders between them. They were already clear of their base control area and were winging across the Labyrinthine Bay, headed north. Aresynch Military Command listed the flight as assigned to the 5th Imperial Hi Division, stationed at Syria Planum.

  That made sense, now that the alarm was out. They would be on the way with a regiment of crack Imperial striders at least; they wouldn’t know for sure what they were up against, but there would be enough of them to deal with anything short of a full-scale invasion. They would walk right over the Con­federation forces on the ground, no problem and no questions asked.

  What to do?

  Kara stared at the four tiny symbols streaking north across the waters of the Labyrinth of Night and knew that she had very few options.

  “Strikers! All Strikers! This is Sandman! Priority flash, ur­gent!”

  Lieutenant Ferris paused his strider, listening.

  “We are tracking incoming aircraft,” Sandman reported. “Bearing at one-eight-two, range seven-five kilometers. They’re coming in fast and low, skimming the sea, and just cleared the horizon. We think they’re transports from Syria Planum.

  “All striders, assume defensive order Gamma. Initiate!”

  From the south, Ferris shifted his Red Saber, studying the dark horizon. He could see nothing, even with enhanced senses, but the Artemis had senses better than his by several orders of magnitude.

  Swiftly, he began moving south, toward the coast. He had to find a good place to hole up and get ready, because when those bastards arrived, they’d be eager for a fight.

  The Planetary Defense System’s weaponry control was clear. Ishimoto had thought it would be… but he’d had to make certain. More, he wanted to be very sure there were no unchecked hiding places at his electronic back as he closed in, relentlessly, on the most probable location of the intruder. He’d already alerted both the AI ICS and the other human operators on the current security watch. They’d in­formed him that, yes, one of Aresynch’s ranging lasers had been firing continuously, unnoticed by anyone in the De­fense Command. It almost certainly was being used as a beacon to mark the MilTech labs as a target for the enemy raiders.

  A small and simple program had been running the software end of the laser in the weaponry control banks, a shadowy something revealed by the ViRsimulation as a small and brightly colored fish circling above a particularly ornate head of coral. He reached out with a thought… and the alien pro­gram evaporated. Another thought, and the laser was switched off. Not that that would do any good now. The damage was done, the raiders landed, the attack under way. Someone, Ish­imoto reflected, was going to wish he’d never been born, once the Kasei Imperial Military Command got through with him.

  He devoutly hoped that that someone was not going to be Genji Ishimoto.

  But it might well be. He had been in charge of security on the Kasei end of the Net when an enemy agent had slipped in, turning the Net against its owners to assist the attack on MilTech. It might not be enough that he’d been performing his duties to the best of his abilities… and it was no excuse that the Net was far too vast for any one human to monitor it thoroughly from within.

  But it would help, it would help a lot if he could catch the intruder. And he thought he knew now how he was going to do just that.

  Obviously, the intruder had penetrated the Planetary De­fense System’s computer network, using it to access the tar­geting laser and paint the MilTech facility for the raide
rs. He would have been stupid to remain, since sooner or later someone was going to realize that the laser was still running and come in to check it out. No, the intruder was hiding someplace else, someplace nearby. The question was… where?

  And where would I go if I wanted to oversee the action on the surface of Kasei? Ishimoto thought to himself.

  The answer was obvious—so obvious that it seemed almost too easy.

  Carefully, he moved toward the Network’s surface moni­toring node.

  Kara realized she was going to have to break cover if she was to provide any help to the ground forces at all. Worse, she was going to have to retrace her steps, returning to an area she’d already visited, one which by now could well be crawl­ing with Imperial computer security programs, both AI soft­ware and organic.

  No matter. Part of the reason she was here in the first place was to do anything she could to delay, confuse, or break the Imperials’ response to the MilTech raid. Her shell as a house­keeper program ought to give her cover enough to make the transfer, so long as no one examined it too closely.

  Uploading a transfer request, she slipped from the surface monitoring node back into weapons control.

  As he was going in, something else was coming out. Ishi­moto caught only the flash of a shadow, a dull and undetailed fish-shape that, as he brushed it lightly, told him it was a routine housekeeper program, searching for lost clusters to eliminate from the system. Ignoring the program—it was little more than a miniscule portion of the system’s overall back­ground—he pushed past it and entered the surface monitoring node.

  Kara was sure that she’d just brushed past a security pro­gram of some sort, one going in as she was coming out. It might have been an automated program, or it could have been something more dangerous, an AI-generated hunter-killer rou­tine, or even a human operator, working, like herself, within the Net. If she was right in her guess, though, security was close to tracking her down. She would have to work fast.

  But she also felt a degree of freedom now that she’d not possessed earlier. During her first penetration of the Net, she’d had to move cautiously and with great circumspection to avoid calling attention to herself. Somehow, she’d alerted the system anyway—she still wasn’t sure what she’d done to trigger that initial alarm—and moments after that the transmission of a high-priority bit of radio traffic from the surface had signaled the fact that there was indeed an intruder loose on the Net.

  She could move boldly now, without worrying that a mis­take would give her away.

  Slipping herself into a quiet corner of the Aresynch Defense Network node, she addressed the monitoring AI. “Targeting,” she said.

  “Targeting accessed.”

  “Fire request.”

  “Please upload target coordinates.”

  “Target is a flight of transports with changing coordinates. Link to Aresynch Traffic Control screen and accept ID upload.”

  A pause. “Upload accepted. System is now tracking four air/space transports, designated Target 01. Weapon select.”

  Kara took a deep, mental breath. “Any available laser in the five-hundred to one-thousand-megajoule range, with ac­ceptable targeting parameters on designated targets.”

  “Weapon designated, quad-mount 600 MJ beam laser, tur­ret three-one, section twelve. Confirm.”

  “Weapon designation accepted and confirmed.”

  “Please upload clearances and authorization codes.”

  Kara braced herself mentally. This would the high-risk part… and where the information provided by CMI’s agents on Earth would really prove itself. She had a code authoriza­tion for a fire control request, but it was an old one, and no one knew if it would be accepted by the system or not.

  “Authorization code Okha,” she said.

  She waited… and waited… and just when she thought that a silent alarm must have been given and that she’d better back out and run for it now, the AI replied, “Authorization code Orange Blossom accepted. Weapons release approved. Proceed.”

  “Initiate target lock and automatic fire sequencing,” she said. “Code red-one-one, priority immediate. Execute.”

  “Firing…”

  On the ground, Ran Ferris was picking his way through a heap of smoking rubble, trying to find a good site that would give him a clear field of fire to the south. Updates from Sand­man had verified the approaching force, almost certainly four Hippo-class transports coming in big-time, hard, heavy, and ready for anything.

  A counterattack had been inevitable, of course, and much time had been devoted to a counterattack scenario both in op planning and in the rehearsal simulations. The only real chance the strike force had was to get in, get the goods, and get out before the locals could respond.

  Obviously, they hadn’t moved quite quickly enough, and now the whole character of this op was about to change. It would be up to the three warstrider squadrons and the marine leggers to hold off all comers until the specialists finished their analysis of what was in the main building. And then—The southern sky lit up.

  Lieutenant Clifford was inside the main lab building as a half dozen civilian specialists in heavy combat armor gathered about a communications module. One of their number, Carol Browning, had shucked her armor down to skintights and climbed inside, hoping to make direct connection with the lab computer. Clifford had just walked toward the shattered win­dows on the south side of the building when the sky in that direction lit up, a glaring white and silent flare that dazzled off the water.

  “What the gok…?”

  Several other soldiers and most of the technicians joined him, staring out the open window as the light swiftly faded. A second flare ignited, glowed, faded. And then a third.

  “Sandman, Red Rover. What the hell’s going on in the southern sector?”

  “Sorry you weren’t informed,” Sandman’s voice replied a moment later. “It took us by surprise, too.”

  “What did? What’s going on?”

  “Someone up in Aresynch’s having some target practice,” Sandman said. “With Imperial troop transports as targets.”

  A fourth flare lit up the night. There was a long silence after that. “Okay, everyone,” Sandman’s voice announced. “That’s four up and four down. I think someone upstairs just saved our bacon. Now let’s get this job done so it wasn’t a wasted effort.”

  Clifford knew what Sandman meant. “Someone” would be their covert helper smuggled into Aresynch. If that guy had managed to subvert the synchorbital’s defensive lasers to take out incoming Impie transports, it was a sure bet that all hell had just broken loose at the top of the Pavonis Mons sky-el.

  He decided that he was very happy to be safely down here in the middle of a firefight, and not up there, inside a computer Net that must be on full emergency alert by now.

  Soldiers, he reasoned, were paid to take risks… but there are some risks with such goking bad odds that accepting them wasn’t a matter of following orders.

  It was more like… suicide.

  Chapter 14

  The aim of military study should be to maintain a close watch upon the latest technical, scientific, and political developments, fortified by a sure grasp of the eternal principles upon which the great captains have based their contemporary methods, and inspired by a desire to be ahead of any rival army in securing options in the future.

  —Thoughts on War

  B. H. LIDDELL HART

  C.E. 1944

  To Kara, it felt as though the walls of the undersea cavern where she was currently residing were suddenly collapsing in upon her. All Aresynch was on full alert now, and she could sense the closing of gates across various nodes, sealing them off from the outside and making them as inaccessible as the MilTech labs. The emerald swirlings around her were filled with shadowy objects, programs suddenly activated; some might be defensive hunter-killers.

  She signaled her Companion, releasing a shape of her own into the swirling mix. The program was unintelligent and of li
mited power, but it did a good job of imitating an intruder who was clumsily trying to escape a system node and making a great deal of noise while going about it.

  Abruptly, her control of the Aresynch defensive lasers was terminated, the shock like the swinging of a blade.

  “Targeting,” she said.

  “Targeting access denied.”

  “Accept Authorization Code Okha.”

  “Authorization denied.”

  Evidently, the system had gone to a higher alert level, one specifically designed to deal with intruders like her, and was refusing to deal with input commands unless they were from someone with a higher authorization code than Orange Blos­som.

  But there was one more trick she might try.

  “Housekeeping.”

  “Housekeeping access granted.” She was, after all, still wearing the shell of a housekeeper subroutine, and access to the housekeeping subnodes was more or less automatic. In a system as complex as this, only the most sensitive nodes and operating areas would be restricted… and no one paid atten­tion to the housekeepers.

  “Accept Authorization Code Baika.”

  There was a pause. “Authorization Code Plum Blossom accepted. Awaiting uploaded instructions.”

  The AI began accepting her upload, a bundle of special instructions for that part of the system that dealt with routine housekeeping chores. Piggybacked with those instructions, though, were hidden codes that allowed her to continue her monitoring of surface communications. AI systems were im­mensely powerful and capable of tremendous intelli­gence… but in routine or low-level matters they often betrayed their evolutionary origins as relatively simple-minded calculators.

  Sometimes, in fact, they really weren’t very bright at all.

  Hal Clifford leaned over the console, staring at the com module. It was a custom model with a transparent door, and he could see Carol Browning lying on the couch inside, ap­parently unconscious.