Dev had never seen an ocean, but part of his training had included downloaded images keyed to generate the appropriate responses in his mind as he brought them again to mind. The AI continued asking for specific thoughts—numbers, colors, simple mental images. The process was largely automatic, and Dev performed effortlessly, just as he had dozens of times before in simulation. Next time, High Stepper would have his cerebral patterns stored in memory, and this break-in process would not be necessary.
“Reconfiguration is complete,” the AI said several minutes and many questions later. “Enabling cephlink, full control to Module Two.”
The familiar flash of linkage, a tiny explosion of light and static, filled his brain, and the narrow confines of the pilot module, the lights, and the primitive, hard-wired board vanished. He was standing in the company maintenance bay, braced by the zigzagging struts and braces of the gantry, surrounded by the dangling power cables and cryo-H pipes and electronic data feeds that wired him to the base complex like the strings on a puppet.
He was aware of another presence, a watcher sharing a small, bright part of his mind. Power flow brought a second pod in the strider to life.
“Well done, Cameron,” Lanier’s voice said in his mind. “Now that Stepper knows you, I’m sure you’ll be the best of friends.”
Dev scarcely heard her. He was tingling now to the familiar thrill of full linkage.
Though he could never have explained the difference, linking with a jack-bossed machine, whether it was a warstrider or a starship, felt different, more real, more solid than a ViR communications or entertainment feed, even a feed with full sensory feedback. He felt large, powerful, and more alive than he ever had before. This was reality, and no matter what the engineers and designers said, it was not the same as a ViRsimulation. You weren’t supposed to be able to tell the difference; sensation, after all—whether it was the feel of the metal deck beneath his feet, the sound of hissing steam and shouted commands, or the sight of Victor Hagan’s squat, black KR-9 Manta shrouded in the maintenance gantry opposite his—manifested itself in the brain and ought to be the same whether the incoming nerve impulses carrying that sensation were from the body’s organs of touch, sound, and sight, or generated by an AI and fed through sockets and cephlink.
Power. A movement of his left foot would topple the fragile crisscrossings of his own gantry, would send him striding out across the maintenance bay deck. A battery of weapons—100-megawatt laser, Kv-70 weapons pods, chemical flamer—were his to command.
Not the same as swimming the Kamisamano Taiyo, the godsea of the K-T Plenum, perhaps. Still, Dev felt purpose, order, and strength, just as he did when he was linked to a starship’s AI.
“Hey, newbie!” Lanier’s voice cut through his thoughts, knife-edged. “Wake up in there! I said let’s begin the weapons system check.”
“Uh… right.” Pulling new access codes from his RAM, Dev engaged the Ghostrider’s left and right Kv-70 weapons pods. Those mounts could accommodate rockets, a variety of tube-launched 30-mm grenades, heavy machine guns, or a combination of the three, though neither was loaded yet. Dev read the data scrolling past his mind’s eye, however, as he’d done countless times in ViRsim. “Both Kv-70s show full function,” he said. “Acquisition, tracking, and firing systems are go.”
“Chin laser.”
“Check.”
“Wait one.” There was a moment’s hesitation. “Cameron, you have an outside call. Channel one.”
He accessed the communications code, felt the click of a completed circuit. “Cameron here. Go ahead.”
“Cameron, this is Captain Alessandro. I need to see you ASAP, my office.”
Now what?
“On my way, sir. Five minutes.”
“What did you do now, newbie?” Lanier asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve been doing my best to stay clear of trouble. I’ll be back soon as I can.”
“You do that. We still need to go through the on-board stores.”
Calling up the codes to break link, he felt again the slickness of the interface plate beneath his left palm. Lifting his hand sharply, he broke the connection. He lay again inside the narrow confines of the pilot’s module.
He stabbed at the touch pad, and his access hatch hissed open. Wiggling back into the light, he squeezed out of the module, dropped to the gantry deck, and started down. The captain’s office was at the back of the dome, past the gantries shrouding a line of strider hulks, corpses kept for spares. The damage evident in those shattered, half-melted frames—and the mild depression that always set in when he emerged from full-sense link—always made Dev feel a little cold.
But he didn’t turn up his coveralls’ heat again.
He touched the door annunciator. “Enter,” Alessandro’s voice called from inside.
“You wanted to see me, sir,” he said, stepping into her office. It was small and utilitarian, rather spartan save for a framed holoview on one wall, a tropical-looking landscape of feathery trees and white buildings under a golden sun.
“Yes, Cameron.” She gestured to the room’s only other chair. “Come in and dock yourself. How are you getting settled in?”
“Fine, I guess. There’s a lot to learn they never fed us in boot camp.”
She smiled at that. “Welcome to reality. Always a shock.” She hesitated, as though wondering how to put what she had to say into words. “I guess the best way to do this is to give it to you straight I’m turning down your request for a retest.”
He felt the anger rising, the protest at the blind unfairness of it all, but bit it back.
When he said nothing, Alessandro continued. “I was impressed with what I saw of your simulations in Basic. You have the makings of a terrific striderjack. Now, I know Mr. Fisher said you could retest and put in for a transfer as soon as you were out of basic training, but our reasoning still stands. The numbers on your MSE still say the navy won’t want you.”
“I guess I wasn’t expecting any different.”
That was true enough. He’d put in the request the day he’d checked in with the 1/5, but with no hope that he’d get what he wanted. He extracted a memory from his implant RAM. A tiny window opened in his mind, Castellano’s arrogant face grinning at him. You think anybody gives a rusty jack about you? The bastards upstairs’ll stick you wherever they’ve got a slot. …
Castellano was right. They—the ubiquitous and all-powerful They of HEMILCOM Training Command, and Alessandro herself—would all do as they damn pleased to make their numbers balance.
“I want you to give us a try for a while. In, say, six months we’ll talk about it again. Who knows? Maybe with some experience, your MSE scores will change.”
She didn’t sound as though she believed that. “Will that be all. Captain?”
“No. I want the straight hont from you. I want to know how you feel, right now, about winding up here instead of in a navy slot.”
“The truth? I’m not happy about it. I’m beginning to think I made the wrong choice when I palmed up.” He shrugged. “I’ll do what I’m told, take it a day at a time, and try to stay out of trouble.” He stopped. He wasn’t sure what the woman wanted from him.
“Why were you so set on the navy, anyway?” When he didn’t answer right away, she added, “Was it your father?”
“I guess so. You know about him?”
“I don’t think there’s a New American who doesn’t. If it’s any help, I think he did exactly the right thing at Lung Chi. He had a couple of seconds to make a decision no man should ever have to face. He made it, and I for one think it was the right one.”
Dev nodded. “You know, I always thought I could… I don’t know, prove something, I guess, if I could join the navy.”
“What? That he knew what he was doing? How could you prove something like that?”
“Sounds pretty silly when you put it that way. I know. Maybe I just wanted to prove something to myself.” He leaned back in the chair, crossing his legs.
“For as far back as I can remember, I wanted to be a starship. First helm. Once I got a taste of it with the Orion Lines—”
“Swimming the godsea.”
He caught the look in her eye, the note of… wistfulness? And wonder. “You… know?”
“I used to link starships too, Dev. Back in my youth, I jacked a little fifty-meter racing yacht. So later, of course, when I palmed for Hegemony service, they slotted me in an I-4000.”
Dev whistled. Ishikawajima 4Ks were the largest interstellar carriers in human space, kilometer-long monsters usually used as colonization transports. The military used them for moving whole regiments and their equipment from system to system.
“I’m impressed,” Dev said. Memory clicked. “Hey, you said you had a high TM rating. How—”
“Boring story,” she replied. “Tell me what you would do if you had a chance at starships.”
“I don’t know anymore. Maybe nothing. Once I thought I’d be, I don’t know, able to set the record straight, somehow. Now… well, I’m not so sure.”
“What’s changed?”
“That goking TM rating,” Dev said. His fists, resting on his legs, clenched hard. “Captain, I always thought that a man was something more than just numbers. But there are damned numbers on everything today. Psychotechnic disorders.” He worked his mouth around the phrase as though it tasted bad. “It’s like they have us programmed. Download our RAM and they know everything about us, right down to when we use our finger to pick food from our teeth.” He stopped, then looked up at Katya. “Captain, do you think my father could have screwed up because of his TM rating? That he, I don’t know, miscalculated, maybe tried to cowboy things and made a bad call?”
Katya shook her head. “I told you I thought he made the right choice. More than that, I can’t tell you. Look, I’ve seen Xenophobes in action. You haven’t, not for real. Once the Xenos were in the sky-el, nothing could have saved the colonists still on Lung Chi. You have my promise on that.”
“I keep wondering if I would have done things any differently if I’d been on the Hatakaze. Hell, who am I kidding? I’ve seen Xenos in training sims, and… I’ll tell you the truth, Captain, I’m scared. I don’t know how I’ll do out there, realworld.” His mouth pulled back in a rueful grin. “It’s not quite the same as jacking star freighters.”
“You’re good, Dev. I’ve watched you.”
“In sims—”
“They’re as real as reality. I think what you need to do is stop being so damned introspective.”
“Huh? What—”
“Stop worrying about it so much. If you stop to think about it in combat, you’re dead. Believe me, I know.”
Dev saw pain in her dark eyes. “You’re not going to leave me hanging there, are you, Captain? What’s the story?”
She appeared to consider it, then shrugged. “Let’s just say that my first time under stress, I screwed up, okay? And it was because I was thinking too much. I damn near bought it, too.”
“What happened?”
“I fought it. I’m still fighting it, every day.” She paused for a moment, quietly studying her hands folded on her desk. “Dev, you told me you think you’re more than a number. If that’s true, you won’t let the numbers back you into a corner. When I lost it as a starship, everybody figured I’d quit and go home. I could have, too.” She tapped the side of her head. “I was pretty badly dinged up in here. I think maybe the fact that I knew they expected me to quit was what made me keep going.”
“Are you telling me to fight your decision to keep me in the Assassins?” He managed a smile. “Wouldn’t that be mutiny?”
“No. I’m telling you to make the best of it, don’t dump program over the MSEs, and try again in six months. I think you’re more than a number, too, Dev. And that means you can be whatever you want to be.”
More than a number.
Ever since his father’s promotion to admiral, Dev realized, he’d been fighting the impersonal and faceless system that transformed humans into ciphers, statistics to evaluate, numbers to shuffle, equations to balance.
Funny. He’d been furious at Alessandro, furious with the whole system, but the anger was gone now. And all because this captain with the brush-cut hair had actually treated him like an individual.
It was an unusual feeling.
Chapter 9
In combat, man and machine must become one, the machine taking on the man’s life and vitality, the man assuming a machine’s emotionless and unwavering purpose. There can be no thought of fear.
—Kokorodo: Discipline of Warriors
Ieyasu Sutsumi
C.E. 2529
“C-Three, this is Gold Seven,” Dev reported. “We’re at the crater and moving into position.”
“Roger that, Seven. Stand by to copy new orders.”
“We’re ready, C-Three.”
“Transmitting, Seven.” Data flickered across Dev’s awareness, an illegible muddle of alphanumerics without the necessary decryption codes. He shunted it into the strider’s AI.
It was snowing heavily, the wind swirling flakes of mingled ice and frozen CO2 past the Ghostrider as it moved along the crater rim. It was midmorning, but the thick and leaden overcast kept the tortured landscape under a gloomy, gray-green dusk. Several times Dev had considered switching on the LaG-42’s external lights but settled instead on increasing the sensitivity of his optical scanners. There was no need to call any more attention to High Stepper than was necessary. The strider’s surface nanoflage mimicked the gray-white-brown gloom of the Lokan surroundings. In the snow, at ranges of more than a few tens of meters, the strider was quite difficult to see, a fuzzy, gray ghost.
He wondered if the camouflage made any difference to the Xenos.
“Okay, newbie,” Tami Lanier told him. “I’ll take it now.”
The Ghostrider’s commander had been running her own check of the strider’s weapons, leaving him to communicate with HEMILCOM C3 and navigate the strider up the crater slope. Now, though, she was relegating him again to passenger status. He wondered if that was because she didn’t trust him.
“Orders just in from C-Three,” he said. “I parked them in Stepper’s RAM.”
“I saw ’em. HEMILCOM probably wants another inspection, full kit, just to impress the Imps.” She brought the strider to a halt, overlooking the twenty-meter expanse of snow-covered crater floor. “Keep watch while I see what they want.”
“Right, Lieutenant.”
Dev panned the twin stereoptic cameras mounted in the chin laser turret housing, scanning his surroundings. To his left, the dome of the Schluter mining facility emerged from its hillside, barely visible through the blowing snow. C3—militarese for command, control, and communications—was watching over the deployment from there. Straight ahead, well beyond the crater and present only as a shadow behind a curtain of snow, the pyramid of the atmospheric plant rose above the more distant mountains. To his right, a kilometer away, stripping and fractionating towers vanished into the low, churning overcast of the sky.
Few signs of the Xenophobe attack at the Schluter facility remained, except for the crater itself, the tunnel mouth through which the attackers had emerged seven weeks earlier. The facility dome had been repaired, and constructors had cleared away most of the blast-shattered wreckage. Line soldiers, crunchies in gray and black combat armor, were helping to position huge Rogan molds slung from the bellies of lumbering four-legged constructors. Inside the molds, engineering nano was converting rock and dirt into fabricrete, growing defensive walls in position.
The rest of the company’s striders were gathered near the dome, but the two recon machines—High Stepper and Rudi Carlsson’s LaG-42 Snake Stomper—had been deployed to the crater rim, where a half dozen Rogan-grown gun towers thrust like teeth from the broken rock, maintaining their robotic vigilance.
The Imperial Marine unit that had relieved the Assassins at the Schluter facility was still at the site, but fresh signs of Xenophobe a
ctivity—the ground-transmitted rumblings of movements deep beneath the ground—had been detected, and HEMILCOM had ordered the Assassins to redeploy back to the crater at Schluter to reinforce the marines against the possibility of another Xeno attack.
Dev focused on a squad of Imperial Marines, six hulking Daimyo striders protecting the facility’s small landing strip two kilometers away, their surface films jet black even through distance and snow. Those, Dev thought, were the real machine-warriors, men trained in the martial art called kokorodo—the Way of the Mind—to control their striders with an almost inhuman speed and efficiency. There weren’t many of them available, but it was said that their presence alone had turned the tide against a Xeno assault more than once.
He knew he should feel better seeing the Impie Marines close by, but watching the motionless Imperial squad, he could only wonder why, if the Impies were so good, the Assassins had been deployed to Schluter at all.
Dev had joined a few of the late night talk sessions in the Assassins’ barracks, even though he was still a newbie and an outsider. The Imperials thought of the Hegemony units as cannon fodder, some of the other 1/5 pilots were saying. After all, why risk highly trained marines and their pretty black machines when the locals were available to blunt the enemy’s attack? Strangely, such comments didn’t appear to carry any bitterness or anger. Their nature was closer to the inter-service rivalry between navy and army, joking and almost good-natured. Dev was willing to admit that, in his current frame of mind, he couldn’t really appreciate the banter.
Why the hell weren’t they as scared as he was?
“Right, newbie,” Lanier said, interrupting dark thoughts. “Stay alert. HEMILCOM Asgard’s called a Class-Two alert. They’ve tracked a solid DSA, right beneath our feet.”
“A Deep Seismic Anomaly? Here?”
“Yup. Looks like the Xenies’re coming back for seconds.”
It was an eerie sensation, knowing that the Xenos were there, swimming through solid rock a few hundred meters beneath the crater floor, but unreachable, untouchable. Dev and the other newbies had been shown recordings of the Xenophobe attack at the site seven weeks earlier—at just about the same time, he knew now, as the alert that had paralyzed communications during his first day on Loki.
Warstrider Page 9
