Authors: William H. Keith
Her eyes scanned her prelaunch window, checking the glowing array of discretes. “Comm, go.”
“Channel selection at taccom one-four-three-three. ICS on.”
“Taccom one-four-three-three, roger. ICS, check.”
“I2C on and phase-linked.”
“I2C, on.Linked.”
“Switch WCS to standby.”
Kara mentally engaged her Weapons Control System, then waited for the discrete light to come on in the prelaunch window opened in her mind.
“Op Con, One-one. Weapons systems, set to standby. On safe.”
“All units, engage navigational communications, set to direct receive at four-one-niner, on standby.”
“Nav com at four-one-niner.Rog.”
“Power plant on.”
“Rog.”
“Bring power feed to point five.”
“Feed at point five, rog.”
“Link feeds engaged.”
“Link feeds. Rog.”
“Secondary nav systems on, set to standby.”
“Rog.”
“Self-diagnostics on.”
“Rog.”
“AI systems on.”
“Rog.”
“Power check.”
“Power nominal.”
“Initiate mag drives.”
“Drives cycling up.”
Linked into her Black Falcon, Kara could feel the powerful GEMag 700E magphase accelerators spooling up to full power with a shuddering, deep-throated thrum that rose slowly through the audio spectrum, carrying a sensation of raw, barely restrained power. Green lights cascaded across her drive status board.
“Op Con, One-one.Drives online and nominal.”
She continued running through the prelaunch checklist, verifying both her own system settings and, through a sidebar window, the responses of the other members of her company, watching for any last-second downgrudge. Her Companion, she reflected, could have handled the routine more efficiently than she could, but both regulations and her own preference kept her in the routine, running down the list. It was a necessary ritual, a way to focus mind and spirit on what was coming.
In minutes, the prelaunch was complete, all warstriders in the company had signaled their readiness for release and combat, and she was watching the transition countdown ticking away the last handful of seconds. Her mouth was dry, her heart hammering in her chest… though such purely physical sensations were deeply submerged beneath her link with her warstrider. It was strange to think of readying for a combat launch in the Sol system… while waiting to make an Achiever jump here at Nova Aquila, twelve hundred light years away. The stunning advances… no, the revolutionary
changes
in technology over the past few years had utterly transformed the art of space warfare.
Fortunately, tactics had remained much the same. An ancient military misquotation, supposedly spoken by a cavalry officer from one of Earth’s late-Middle Ages wars, was the injunction to “get there fustest with the mostest.” What General Nathan Bedford Forrest had
actually
said was “I always make it a rule to get there first with the most men.” Either way, the rule still held true seven hundred years later.
Something else Forrest had said echoed in her mind. She’d been downloading military maxims from late-period Medieval warfare, lately, as part of her continuing military studies, and something about Forrest—a brilliant but often unrecognized military tactician—had resonated within her. “In any fight,” Forrest had said, “it’s the first blow that counts; and if you keep it up hot enough, you can whip ’em as fast as they come up.”
In the battle for Earth, the first blow had already been landed, a combination of the in-system Imperial forces and the ongoing laser barrage from Fudo-Myoo. The problem now was to “keep it up hot enough,” and pray that the enemy’s overwhelming advantage in numbers had been whittled down to manageable proportions.
“So what’s the hont?” Carla Jones asked over the ICS as they waited. “Any word on new kicker developments?”
Kicker was the new slang term in circulation for the bewildering array of Web combat devices. Drawn from the Nihongo
kikai,
“machine,” it carried the warrior’s grudging respect for the foe’s weapons… together with a faint taste of disdain for the fact that they fought their battles without even an attempt at tactics or subtlety.
And that, Kara thought, given their numbers, was a very good thing. Humans had damned few advantages in this war, where numbers were nearly everything.
“Not much,” Ran Ferris replied. “According to Cameron’s report, they seem to have given up on their Alpha approach. Their tactics are still running to swarm attacks.”
“No Alphas?” Roger Duchamp asked. “How are they coordinating their tactics?”
“Tactics?” Brad Sturgis said with a mental snort. “They’ve got
tactics?”
“Listen up, folks,” Kara said, breaking in. “Coming down to the final count, now. Ready… and three… and two… and one… and
hack!”
She felt the now-familiar shiver of mass displaced across twelve hundred light years, followed by a distinct, inward
thump
as they dropped once more into the gravitational ripplings of normal space. Once, only a few years before, even the DalRiss couldn’t have made such a long translation in a single jump, nor would they have dared aim for a spot so deep within a major gravitational field as this. With greater familiarity with the target region, however, came greater precision, longer range, and more certain control.
“Quite a bump there,” Jake Kaslewski called over the ICS.
“I’m getting a lot of traffic over the system Net feed,” Sergeant Sharon Comorro added. “Looks like things are linked in and burning!”
“I’ve got the kicker cloud at one-niner-five,” Brad said. “See it? Looks like it’s still taking hits from Luna.”
“Yeah,” Carla added. “We’re going to have to watch ourselves out there. It’s gonna be a bit sticky not getting pasted by Fudo-Myoo!”
“Sheer, random chance,” Ran Ferris pointed out. “The sun-bound kicker cloud’s something like five light minutes from Earth now. The cloud’s still pretty big and sprawling, so the chances of us accidentally wandering into the path of an incoming pulse is pretty damned slim.”
“Good thing, Lieutenant,” Comorro said. “It’s a bit tricky spotting a laser beam coming at you in time to jump out of the way.…”
The others laughed at that, then continued the excited chatter. Kara let them. Since the intercom was purely an internal communications system aboard the
Gauss,
chatter gave nothing away to the enemy, and it helped them focus their excitement… as well as giving her a good measure of their morale. Their
eagerness.
Then it was time. The outer lock hatch yawned open, and Kara looked down into sweeping stars and a vast, black emptiness. “That’s it, warstriders,” the voice of
Gauss’s
operations officer said over the command link. “We’re in the Sol system, backs to the sun, about sixty million kilometers out. First Company, First Battalion, you may launch when ready.”
“Right,” Kara said. “First Company, First Battalion, First Confederation Rangers…
launch!”
With a yell, she accelerated into night.
Kara felt no acceleration, of course. As at the Galactic Core, she was teleoperating her Falcon from the
Gauss’s
remote operations center. She was keenly aware, though, that the danger was little less than it would have been had she been tucked away inside her strider’s life-support pod. The possibilities of sudden death were still endless… and there was the danger, too, that the
Gauss
herself could be taken out by a Web attack.
That was a serious danger. The
Carl Friedrich Gauss
was not a warship, despite her armament and her contingent of striderjacks. If she were attacked in force, jumping outsystem once more would be the only way for her to survive. As soon as the last of the Phantoms were clear of her launch bays, in fact,
Gauss
would again allow herself to be engulfed by the
Shralghal,
and as soon as the DalRiss could manage the feat, it would jump back to the safety of New America, over forty-eight light years away. With the I2C linkage, of course, Kara and her squadron mates could continue to teleoperate their flyers from forty-eight light years away. They’d managed that trick easily enough across twenty-five thousand lights, between Nova Aquila and the Galactic Core.
Kara had been in combat enough times to know, however, that the best-laid plans rarely came off as smoothly as planned. Most important, time was needed for the DalRiss ship to recover the strength necessary to make a second interstellar jump. No one was sure how long that would take; the DalRiss ships were biological constructions, not mechanical and electronic, and they were subject to the inefficiencies and uncertainties of all organic systems. If the Web machines reached the vicinity of
Shralghal
and
Gauss
before the DalRiss ship was ready to jump, it could get very sticky indeed. Even if the
Shralghal
were charged up, her Achievers were locked in, and she were ready to go, a single lucky hit on
Gauss’s
long, cluttered spine could cripple her… or kill her crew before they had a chance to jump clear.
And there were still the problems of being linked to a warstrider at the instant it was destroyed. How many of the men and women with her, Kara wondered, would end up as ghosts in Nirvana… or brain dead, like Pritchard?
This was no time to think about
that.
At full acceleration, the forty-eight Falcons in close flyer formation boosted out from the
Gauss
and its larger ship-of-burden.
Glancing back through her aft sensors, Kara saw the
Gauss
and her far larger DalRiss carrier receding behind her. The sun’s disk was large and dazzlingly bright. As she kept accelerating, the
Shralghal
turned into a black, six-armed silhouette asprawl across the star’s brilliant face, with
Gauss
a black and knobby sliver close beside her.
Turning ahead once more, she concentrated on the enemy; Web machines were picked out in red by her Falcon’s AI, and there were so many of them that her HUD was showing a ragged blot of thin, red fog directly ahead. The battle, she noted as she scanned the displays and readouts that recorded a host of electronic data from the active Net around her, was a confused and scattered one. With three separate nodes of Web machines, with human reinforcements arriving at random intervals scattered across a span of many hours, with chaos still rampant throughout the system and among the confused units within it, putting any solid coordination or organization into the defense at all was virtually impossible. Each incoming unit was being directed to a specific point in space by fleet combat controllers at Hachiman… but those orders frequently had little in common with reality and as often as not were being overridden by a second set of controllers at Tenno Kyuden itself.
Kara wondered if the Emperor was looking in on things at the Combat Direction Center.
“Let’s wake the bastards up with a volley of Sharks,” she called to the formation. “Weapons set, safeties off. Arm and lock!”
The SRK-88 Sky Shark was a three-meter-long ship-killer with a T-940 QPT-initiated microfusion warhead and a yield of two megatons. Each of the Black Falcons had been loaded with two of the sleek and deadly weapons.
One by one, her squadron leaders reported all missiles armed and ready.
“Maximum dispersal,” she ordered. “Coordinate through
Gauss’s
attack AI. Stand by… and three… two… one… launch!”
Her view forward was momentarily obscured by a dazzling spray of white as the two big missiles slid from their tubes in her Falcon’s port and starboard flanks, then arrowed ahead at a hammering 150 Gs of acceleration. The boost momentarily slowed her Falcon, but she began picking up speed again, following the twin stars of the Sky Sharks’ exhaust plumes toward the heart of the Web.
Ninety-three other stars joined her two; one Falcon, Mike Chung’s in Third Squadron, had launched only one Shark. The second missile had failed to clear the tube. Possibly, Forrest’s thoughts about first blows applied to the Phantoms as well. Almost a hundred thermonuclear detonations scattered evenly throughout the Web cloud ought to whittle down those numbers out quite a bit. The question, of course, was whether it would be enough?
Minutes later, as the Phantoms continued to close with the enemy, the missiles went off—first one lone detonation flowering in silent, dazzling glory… followed by two more… followed by the sudden eruption of half of the sky in a blinding, pulsing, flaring cascade of silver-white-blue light.
There was no way to measure the actual damage done to the Web force, but as the light dissipated, it was clear that the sea of red pinpoints on Kara’s HUD had been considerably thinned out. Seconds later, the Phantoms—deployed in a long, flat crescent—penetrated the leading edge of the cloud.
Kara felt a kind of paralysis as the enemy began targeting her, but then she was into the routine, sliding her HUD’s targeting cursor across a big Web machine bearing down on her almost bow-on and stroking the fire command with her mind. Laser light flared, dazzling in the blackness as it struck home and turned stubborn metal and ceramic into white-hot vapor.
Laser fire brushed her skin; she triggered a full spread of independent, target-seeking Mark 70 missiles, then jinked to starboard. The red cloud filled her HUD display forward, turning night into a bloody backdrop. The nearest targets were scant hundreds of kilometers away now, streaking toward her at a velocity that would close that range in instants. Laser and particle cannon fire flared, the bolts silent, the lines and tracers of light visible at all only because the AIs managing the linkage were painting them in for the humans’ benefit. Kara picked a target, a five-meter collection of faceted, polygonal shapes hurtling almost straight toward her at a range of just under four thousand kilometers.
At such ranges, targets that small were, of course, invisible to organic eyes; what she saw was being fed to her from her strider’s AI, which could make guesses about shape and reflectivity based on the returns from the craft’s laser ranging system. She selected the target with a slight focusing of her thoughts, then fired, loosing a 20cm X-ray laser burst that boiled through the Webber’s lightweight armor and fried its internal circuits in a literal flash. Several small machines flashed past
Kara’s Matic
at velocities of several tens of kilometers per second, as her Falcon’s AI began selecting the largest and most dangerous targets ahead.