Jackers (6 page)

That had been when Dev had finally made meaningful contact with a Xeno. As a result, he’d received the Imperial Star and been made an Imperial
koman.
Katya had rejected the Empire, returning to her native New America to work with the Confederation government, and with Travis Sinclair.

She’d made the right choice, and Dev had made the wrong one. He knew that now. A government system as corrupt as the present Imperial/Hegemony stewardship of Terra could not be reformed from within. Maybe reform would have done some good once, but the rot had gone too deep, the people in power now had too much vested interest in maintaining that power, at any cost. Human governments had followed the same pattern time after time after bloody time in the past, reaching the point where only revolution could cleanse the slate and let people start anew.

With little choice in the matter, then, Dev had joined the rebels and participated in the Battle of Eridu, leading the assault team to capture the
Tokitukaze
at the planet’s synchorbital station while Confederation warstriders and native Eriduan militias had held off the Imperial Marines at Raeder’s Hill. They’d fought the Imperials to a standstill, partly because Dev and his raiders had dropped the captured Imperial destroyer into an orbit that took her across the battlefield. A salvo from the destroyer’s shipboard laser batteries had been more than enough to break that final Imperial attack.

Dev had no regrets about joining the rebellion… not really, though he’d frequently questioned the rebellion’s chances for any outcome in this war short of complete annihilation. It was just that he still wondered sometimes what he was, and why.

Senden,
demolished by the shotgun blast from the teleoperated Starhawk, appeared to be adrift now, powerless, her weapons down. Smaller ships accelerated out from Daikokukichi, only to be met by searing laser bursts from the hard-accelerating warflyers. The enemy’s defenses appeared uncertain, almost hesitant. Had the surprise been that complete?

A familiar, pulse-throbbing excitement surged behind the flutter and scroll of data cascading through Dev’s awareness. The sensation was an alluring one, enough so to bring with it a twinge of guilt. Sometimes, Dev wondered if he hadn’t begun enjoying war too much. It was at times like this, jacked into the AI of a ship going into combat, that he began to feel more than human, somehow, almost as though he were addicted to the surge of power, to the exultation thrilling through his being, and the feeling of invulnerability.

Full linkage often had that effect on him, especially in a tight meld with a good AI either aboard ship or within the towering, durasheathed embrace of a warstrider. In some people, the feeling arising out of such a union could be one of godlike power, a conviction that nothing was impossible as the linker wielded unthinkable energies through the medium of thought alone. Taken to extremes, that feeling could be classified as a psychotechnic disorder, TM, or technomegalomania, and it had grounded plenty of striderjacks and shipjackers in the past.

Gently, Dev disentangled himself from the pulsing, triumphant joy of electronic battle. “Communications,” he snapped. “Order all units to converge on the station. Keep repeating until they acknowledge.”

“Affirmative, Commodore.”

Concentrate on the fighting,
he told himself.
The warflyers are getting close now.
The enemy’s fire was increasing again in volume. Possibly, their fire control had just been briefly knocked off-line.

Damn, casualties were going to run high on this one. Dev just hoped the catch would be worth the butcher’s bill.

Chapter 4

Where warstriders are the descendents of twentieth century tanks, for all that they move over rough terrain on articulated legs rather than treads, warflyers trace their lineage back to the combat aircraft of the same era. Similar to conventional warstriders overall, they are equipped with fusorpacks and thrusters that give them a measure of maneuverability in zero-G conditions.

Scorned by the pilots of conventional space fighters, they are considered undergunned, over-armored chimeras, composites neither fish nor fowl designed to do all things, consequentially doing nothing well.

—
Armored Combat: A Modern Military Overview

Heisaku Ariyoshi

C.E.
2523

Long before his arrival at New America, Dev had downloaded to his personal RAM the complete text of Ariyoshi’s exhaustive study of armored warfare, a work already well on its way to becoming a classic of military history. He knew that Ariyoshi, together with most modern Imperial tacticians, still considered the warflyer to be something of a makeshift and make-do weapon, even though it had been in existence now for well over three centuries.

It
had
been a makeshift weapon, once. They’d started off as workpods adapted to the needs of warfare not long after the first combat use of warstriders; originally conceived as manned constructors designed to haul building materials and manipulate large, free-floating structures during work on space stations, synchorbital facilities, and other large, zero-G projects, they had considerable endurance, but all of the grace and maneuverability of a small asteroid. Even now they weren’t much more than jacked-up workpods fitted with missile batteries and lasers and run by a low-will onboard AI. They were so small that, as with warstriders, their jackerpilots thought of themselves as
wearing
the things rather than riding them, and a large number of flyers could be carried aboard even a moderate-sized ascraft. Their greatest disadvantage was still their low thrust-to-mass ratio, which was rarely more than 4 Gs or so. That made them
slow
in combat, and they had nothing like the high-G maneuverability of a true space fighter.

That meant that in any kind of stand-up fight, in orbit or in deep space, they were going to take heavy casualties.

Casualties were very much on Dev’s mind as
Tarazed’s
wing of warflyers dispersed, each pursuing a separate, parabolic path toward the orbital facility expanding in the ViRsimulated view ahead. Nine out of ten were decoys, piloted by low-level AIs too simple to understand their own deaths. The remaining tenth were better armored, yes, but vulnerable still to even a light caress of a 100-MW point defense laser.

What hurt was that most were piloted by
children…
well, by men and women younger than Dev’s twenty-seven standard years. He wondered if all revolutions were fueled by the idealistic fervor of children. Realistically, Dev knew that he could scarcely be considered old.

He just felt that way sometimes.

They’d started calling him
Lucky Rol,
and that was the name painted on the blunt prow of his DR-80 warflyer.

Tall, flamboyantly blond, with ice blue eyes, Torolf Bondevik was Lokan-Scandinavian, born and raised in Midgard in the shadow of the Bifrost Towerdown. He’d become a warstrider during the fighting with the Xenos there, joining Alessandro’s Assassins and participating in the Alyan Expedition of 2541. He’d stayed with the unit when it opted to join the Confederation forces and had gone to Eridu to support the Rebel Network’s rising there against Hegemony and Empire.

He’d been with the jackers who’d boarded an ascraft at Babel in a desperate bid to seize an Imperial destroyer docked at Babel Synchorbital. During the attack on the berthed warship, he’d remote-jacked a warflyer from the ascraft, his mind riding the craft into a barrage of laser fire until it was destroyed.

Torolf had been unharmed, of course. With the remote link broken, he’d simply awakened back aboard the ascraft, but he’d later joked with the other rebels about having been fried by a gigawatt laser during his approach. The tag “Lucky Rol” had naturally followed.

He hoped the name held true today, because he wasn’t jacking remote this time. He was tucked into the coffin-sized jackslot aboard the stubby DR-80, with nothing between him and the Imperial base’s laser batteries but a few centimeters of durasheath armor.

“Red Squadron!” he called over his tactical link. “This is Red Leader. I’m going to try for that array of struts and cross supports near the cryo-H tanks at two-five-zero.”

“Rog… that, Red Leader.Red Two, Red Three… with you!”

“Copy, Red… dron… on our way!”

The replies, blasted by ECM static and interrupted by his own movements and those of his fellow flyers, were fragmentary. Coordination at this point was nearly impossible; all he could manage was a ragged “this way!” and a hope that enough of his people saw what he was doing to follow.

A beam flashed, a dazzling green thread that seemed to miss him by meters, then brushed a decoy a kilometer to his rear, dissolving it in a soundless flash. The graphics had a feeling of unreality to them, like the cartoon images of a training ViRsim; the warflyer’s AI was painting in the beams to help him pick his approach.

Not that
seeing
the beams was any great help. How do you step out of the way of something that announces its arrival with the same gigawatt flash of light that turns the toughest armor to a flare of exploding plasma?

Still, the display did help him spot active laser batteries, in particular a bank of squat, staggered turrets arrayed stepwise along a parapet of open struts overlooking the main shipyard. Colored indicators flickered across his vision, each color, each shape bearing additional information. Two of those batteries had just bathed him in radar illumination, tracking him, locking on; their turrets were swinging toward him now, their charge coils building toward release…

Now!
Decelerating savagely, he backed down on a stream of white-hot plasma, careless of where that seething cone of tortured atomic nuclei washed across the framework of the orbital base. A ship’s plasma drive, even one as relatively small as that rigged to a warflyer’s hull, could be a deadly if short-range weapon, but the base’s crew were the enemy, weren’t they? Parts of the open structure glowed red hot in his exhaust as he spent delta-V like water. Maneuvering thrusters fired, and he thumped into a girder hard enough to momentarily blur his visual feed.

“I’m down!” he called over the tactical link, though “down” was strictly a term of convenience in zero-G. Panels opened in his black hull, like a flower’s petals unfolding. Jointed arms unlimbered, telescoping clear of the warflyer’s body. Two clamped to the girder with nano-hardened fingers, gripping fast, halting the flyer’s clumsy rebound and sideways drift; a third trailed the power cable for a bulky, 250-MW laser.

Their radar lock on his flyer broken, the laser turrets on the parapet rotated, weapons elevating to track other, incoming targets. More decoys flared and vanished… as did two DR-80s with flesh-and-blood jackers aboard. Bondevik sensed their screams an instant before contact was broken.

Another warflyer pod struck home, fifty meters to his left.
Passion Flyer
was the name painted on its armored prow just below a garish image of a nude, seductively posed woman. Sublieutenant Enrique St. John was New American, fresh out of recruit training and just assigned as Torolf’s wingman.

“Whee-oh! What a ride!” St. John called, jubilant. His DY-64 Raiden was longer and bulkier than Torolf’s Tenrai, massing a good twenty-four tons. The arms were heavier, the blunt snout of an electron cannon more threatening than the ’80’s laser.

“Rocky!” Torolf called. “Cover me, at two-five-zero!”

“You got it, toke!”

Levering past the duralloy struts and beams,
Passion Flyer
released a cloud of dumb missiles, then loosed a bolt from the electron gun. Lightning arced, violet-white and jagged, as it grounded from one of the laser turrets.

Torolf was moving in the same instant, propelling himself across the gantry framework with smooth, powerful articulations of his multiply jointed arms. Targeting sensors detected an energy flux building, his AI threw a red targeting reticle over a power feed juncture…

Fire!

Metal vaporized in white heat; a pressure hull breached, spilling atmosphere in a silver cloud of swiftly crystallizing air and moisture. Something dark tumbled after, a body, possibly, rapidly swallowed by the night. Torolf shifted targets, firing again, and all the while he kept his flyer moving toward the lasers, now some two kilometers distant. It occurred to him how silly the machine must look, skittering leg-over-leg across the gantrywork like some outlandish, metallic spider.

Other warflyers landed, grappling with the gantry framework, swaying themselves across gaps in the structure on jointed arms, or firing harpoons trailing buckythread cables and reeling themselves across on hard-driven winches. A few tumbled past, helpless or dead, some with hulls still glowing white-hot and softened to featureless lumps.

The Confederation had adopted the Imperial system for deploying fighters and warflyers: two ships to an element, two elements to a flight, three flights to the squadron. Six squadrons, seventy-two ships in all, plus another ten as spares, recon vehicles, and worker drones. He was skipper of Red Squadron, twelve paired Raiden and Tenrai warflyers so newly organized they hadn’t even had time yet to choose a unit name. How many of them had been lost already, Torolf wondered. Three? Four? No time to think about that, no time to think about anything except knocking out those batteries.

A laser bolt seared close, brushing a squat, gray sphere embedded in the framework like a fly in a spider’s web. Metal sparkled, turned to vapor… followed close by a jet that looked like steam, which was actually slush hydrogen boiling free into space. Who’d fired? It didn’t matter. The vapor cloud, briefly opaque, offered cover. Torolf focused a coded thought, triggering his boosters. The kick sent him soaring low across the station’s framework, plunging into shadow as he moved behind the rapidly expanding cloud. Emerging into red-hued sunlight once more, he found himself with a better vantage point. The laser turrets were clearly visible from here, lined up as neatly as ViRsim targets in a newbie recruit’s shooting gallery.