Battlemind (32 page)

The calls of the others in her company crisscrossed one another with the frantic tempo of space combat.

“One-niner, this is One-eight! Better pull in tight! We’ve got too many here for us to gel sloppy!

“Rog!Tucked and tight!”

“Deke! Check your six! You got two kickers on your tail!”

“I know! I know! I can’t shake ’em!”

“Phantom One-three, this is One-seven! I’m coming down on your four! Break right and give me a shot!”

“Goose it, Brad! I’m getting fried!”

“Hang on! Come right in three… two… one… hack! Okay! Fox! Fox! That’s missiles away!”

“Brad! Where are you? I can’t see?”

“Kilo! That’s a kill!”

“Gokkin’ straight! Look at that kicker burn!”

More Web devices burst past her, streaking sunward, and she captured their images, enhancing and enlarging them in her mind. Could
any
of these devilish machines detonate the sun… or only certain ones? Human experience was necessarily limited when it came to deliberately exploded suns, but those Webber devices seen entering the atmosphere of stars in the past had always been fairly large, eighty or a hundred meters in length at least, and massing a good many thousands of tons. It seemed unlikely that the smallest could do anything that would disrupt something as huge as a star.

Indeed, as fast as they were vaporizing under the caress of Kara’s lasers and those of her company, she found it hard to believe they could even approach a sun closer than a few million kilometers.

“All Phantoms!” she called over the command circuit. “This is One-one! Ignore the small stuff! We want to wax the big ones! I say again, leave the small stuff under a meter or two for the mop-up. Concentrate on the big kickers, the real ships!”

One by one, the individual members of her company acknowledged.

“My God, look at ’em come!” Carla Jones exclaimed.

“Easy pickings,” Ran added.

“Keep the chatter down, people,” Kara warned. Now was the time for concentration… not losing your combat edge gawking at the opposition. “Set your weapons triggers on automatic, with targeting parameters set at three meters plus. Remember, these things are fast and they’re maneuverable. Watch your six, everybody.”

And then they were in the heart of the cloud, and there was no more time for speeches.

Falcon warstrider/flyers and a bewildering menagerie of Webber devices passed one another faster than a blink, the human flyers and Web machine cloud interpenetrating one another in a furious exchange of laser fire, particle beams, and fusion warheads. Letting her AI take over the targeting of her lasers, Kara used her Falcon’s V54 Devastator particle gun to target a larger, more distant enemy machine—a flat, silver-blue, oblong shape with oddly sculpted angles—and fired. One face of the distant machine exploded in a brilliant eruption of pyrotechnics; pieces glittered in the sunlight as they spun away from the shattered craft.

Battle filled the night, raw and furious, and the sky was filled with fire. Savagely, she decelerated at full thrust, pulling Gs that would have reduced her body to blood-smeared jelly if she’d been physically aboard her machine. A fusion warhead—she had no idea whether it was a human nuke or something fired by the enemy—detonated, a silent pop of intense light that burned furiously against the night for several seconds before cooling to invisibility.

Kara brought her Falcon around, still dumping speed as fast as she could and firing her lateral thrusters at full G thrust. The Webbers had slowed sharply as they neared the sun, possibly to allow room for maneuvers, possibly because they were aware of the human ships materializing in their path and needed to leave themselves combat options.

She closed on a cluster of silvery devices, scattering toward the sun. The Web machines reminded Kara of insects, glittering and faceted, some with spindly and many jointed arms or appendages, some with spines or fins serving unimaginable purposes. Triggering the V54 again, she watched three of the kickers vaporize and a fourth begin tumbling wildly, spilling a cascade of white sparks from a shattered pylon. Vaguely, she was aware of the big lasers from Fudo-Myoo striking home on a dozen more Web machines, aware of other warflyer squadrons entering the fight. Everywhere she turned her enhanced senses, she could see Web kickers and twisting, dogfighting Falcons, Hawks, and P-80 Eagles. Hundreds of Web machines had been destroyed within the past few seconds… but a glance at her formation status board showed that the Phantoms were taking losses too.

Five down, so far. She hoped all of the striderjacks were waking up okay, back aboard the
Gauss.

Then something hit her, hard, and she heard the shriek of tearing metal, felt the jolt of a misfiring thruster until she was able to override the jet and correct her tumble. Her sensors warned that she’d taken a direct hit from a particle beam; her port-side attitude control systems were on the verge of total shutdown, and there was a fire in the port electronics module.
It’s okay if you take the big one,
she told herself, a mantra of survival, of sanity.
You’re safe. You’re aboard the
Gauss.
This isn’t happening to you.…

But to fly, to
really
fly, she had to be part of her strider. Savagely, she hit the system override, then waited as the damage control routines opened her damaged module to space and suppressed the flames.

It’s okay if you take the big one.…

Chapter 18

Throughout history, certain key technological developments or inventions have become drivers, advancing not only the particular field within which they were made, but the entirety of civilization. Fire was one, the domestication of animals another, the invention of movable type still another, discoveries that ushered in whole new ways of living, of learning about the world, of thinking.

Ultimately, it was the cephlink and its Naga-biolink successor that utterly revolutionized society, transforming the very nature of Man and how he saw himself to a degree greater than any invention or discovery that had come before.

—
Drivers of Change

K
ELLIN
J
ANDBRVOORS

C
.
E
. 2570

Dev was following the battle from his vantage point at Hachiman, on Luna, where streams of data from Mars, from the battleline before the sun, and from Earth-Lunar space were cascading through the combat center’s big quantum Oki-Okasan high speed computers.

The picture, Dev realized, was far too large and too complex for any one human mind to perceive. It was a little frightening, in fact, to realize that he
was
perceiving much of it, more than he possibly could have followed in his organic body. His interface with the Net, however, gave him a tremendous advantage in speed and processing power, when he used the Oki-Okasan as an extension of his own facilities. He wondered, though, if it might not be a good idea to try doubling himself again. Perhaps two of him… or four, or even more, could have better made sense of the flood of data cascading through his consciousness.

The battle near the orbit of Mercury seemed to be turning in Humanity’s favor at last; most of the largest Web machines had already been picked off by the Fudo-Myoo, which had been selectively targeting them since shortly after they entered the system. On Mars, things were not going well at all; at last report, Web kickers in huge numbers had brushed past or destroyed most of the Imperial Navy warships based there and were pounding both the planetary defense facilities at Phobos and military and civilian bases on the surface.
Yamato
was disabled and adrift. A dozen other ships had been destroyed or so badly damaged that they could no longer fight.

And closer at hand, in the volume of space encompassing Earth and Luna, the battle was still seesawing back and forth, with neither side yet winning a clear upper hand. The Web cloud detailed to strike at Earth and the Moon had been blasted down to a fraction of its original size, which meant that local planetary defenses and the Imperial ships stationed close by at least had a chance.

At the same time, though, the remnants of the Earth-assault cloud had been so badly scattered that many kickers were slipping through just because of their small size. Ships and ground facilities were being knocked out when tiny Web devices, some the size of a man’s hand, latched on and began eating their way through armor and hull metal; it was impossible to get them all, and the damage suffered from these leakers was building fast. More damage had been incurred from laser-sail impactors and nano-D pellets, driven at high velocity into human ships and base defenses.

More alarming still was the number of large kickers that had broken through the Imperial defenses and entered Earth’s atmosphere. Reports from the surface were confusing, often incoherent, but it sounded as though Web units were attacking cities and facilities across much of southern Asia, eastern Africa, and the Americas. Dev could track the enemy assaults by noting the deployment of Imperial Marine and Army warstrider units to key defensive positions. The foci of the kicker attacks were the sprawling city complexes at the bases of Earth’s three sky-els, at Quito, in the Andes; at Nanyuki, near Mount Kenya; and at Palau Linggae, south of Singapore.

But the major attack was developing in space, around the synchorbital facilities 36,000 kilometers above Earth’s equator. Through his far-flung electronic sensors, Dev watched several hundred large Web
kikai—
the biggest were nearly the size of a small Imperial frigate and must have massed three thousand tons apiece—attack Earth’s synchorbitals, the three separate clusters of habitats, factories, shipyards, and nanomanufactories that spread out along synchronous orbit at the top of each of Earth’s three sky-els. Each facility possessed massed banks of lasers, particle beams, and missile launchers; the possibility of a Confederation attack on the seat of the Empire’s government had long been a major concern of the Imperial Staff Command.

All three synchorbitals had taken heavy damage already, most from the laser sails and the smaller Web machines that had slipped past right under the guns of the trio of big ryu carriers and some hundreds of Imperial warflyers that served as the Empire’s innermost protective bastion and had begun eating away at the facilities’ outer hulls. The carriers
Gingaryu, Shinryu,
and
Hoshiryu
had maneuvered themselves close to each of the sky-el orbital complexes and deployed squadron after squadron of their best warflyers—mostly Ryusei- and Suisei-class fighters, though the larger and deadlier Shugekisha assault striders were in the fight as well.

Small warflyers were maneuvering among the girders and support beams of the synchorbitals, burning Web kickers off the structure wherever they could be found, and joining into squadron-sized assault units to hunt down and kill the larger enemy machines as they approached.

As Dev watched, a nuclear fireball blossomed, bringing a short, false dawn to the skies over South America; a Web machine had just turned itself into a small fusion warhead and detonated against the Quito Synchorbital, and wreckage was spreading out from the sky-el towertop in a glittering, sparkling haze.

Everywhere, the skies were sorcery unchained, an Armageddon of fire and death and destruction.

“I’ve got three big kickers,” Kara reported over the command net. “Five thousand kilometers, directly ahead of me, and on a flat, all-out run. They’re either headed for the
Gauss
or breaking through on a straight run for Sol.”

She was accelerating hard now, with the sun a swollen brilliance directly ahead. Her Falcon’s sensors were editing what she saw, of course, cutting down most of the light which, unfiltered, would have blinded her instantly. With computer processing and enhancement, even the granulation of the photosphere was visible, and she could make out the bright red arcs and geysers of the solar prominences rising above the raging star’s limb.

Her targets, three unusually large Webbers each about the size of a 3,000-ton frigate, were deployed in a perfect equilateral triangle, each craft a half kilometer from its neighbors.
These things tend to travel in clusters, she thought. I wonder if that’s the key to their coordination program?
If the Webbers operated as a group mind, they would need a way to communicate with one another and coordinate their actions. At Nova Aquila, the Alphas had been the coordinators. Here, though, the Web forces must be running their equivalent of control programs on multiple kickers, each, perhaps, serving as a node in a widely dispersed network. It couldn’t be too dispersed, however, since too great a distance would introduce a nasty time lag due to speed-of-light limitations. That need to stick together, to maintain a close and tight line of sight, might be a clue to the way they were coordinating their efforts.

The analysis flashed through her mind in less time than it took to select one of the three targets and lock in her Devastator. A coded thought fired the weapon, and a portion of the flat, angular Web craft vanished in a puff of vapor and sun-flashing fragments. She fired again, and the beam ripped through the target’s side halfway from stern to prow; as vapor exploded from the stricken craft, sending it tumbling wildly in the opposite direction, Kara shifted targets to one of the two remaining kickers, locking in and firing in a fast-paced succession of control thoughts. The second kicker exploded, fragments glowing white-hot as they spun through space.
“Kilo!”
she shouted, using the K-for-kill code current in warflyer ops. “That’s two!”

She was pouring fire into the third target when a K-242 Starstreak with a micronuke warhead streaked in from Kara’s left and detonated, the tiny matter-antimatter charge in its detonator generating the flash and the surplus of neutrons necessary to trigger a relatively small but precisely placed tenth-kiloton blast.