by Ian Douglas
Fortunately, that was all that was really necessary. With those in Imperial hands, resistance might continue in more remote areas, but it would be isolated and scattered, and it would be the Empire that controlled the planet's production and economy. Complete victory was only a matter of time, if the invaders moved with deliberation, calculation, and overwhelming force.
Kawashima knew well that it was still possible to lose what he had already gained here, through carelessness, through haste, through ill-preparedness.
He was determined to make no such amateur's mistakes.
"Vic! Watch it! Hang on!"
The Warlord dipped and spun as heavy caliber rounds snap-snap-snapped overhead. Vic, still sitting in the open command module with Katya and her unconscious weapons tech, leaned forward against Katya's back, pressing her forward into the slot. "Hide your eyes!" he snapped, and an instant later, the Warlord's left CPG discharged with a crackling blast of blue-white energy and the acrid stink of ozone. The fog lit up, though Vic could see neither the target nor the effect of the shot. Above and behind him, the Warlord's rotary cannon suddenly spun and shrieked, the racket tearing at his ears for an agony of seconds.
"Okay, Captain," Witter's voice said, speaking in his mind. Somehow, despite the commotion, Hagan had managed to keep his palm implant against the interface. "We got him."
"What was it?"
"Another Tachi. We fried him, don't worry. You guys okay up there?"
He leaned back, letting Katya straighten up again. In front of her, Francine DelRey was still slumped back into her lap. Turning, Katya met his eyes and nodded, her short, dark hair bobbing inside her transplex helmet.
"We're okay, Witter," Hagan said. "Keep moving."
"I'm getting targets all over the place, Captain. Movement and heat. Negative on IFF. Y'know, I think we're surrounded."
"Keep working east. There's got to be a way out, even if we have to wade through the sea to find it."
"Yes, sir."
Katya eased herself back, pressing against him. "Captain?" she said over his headset. "Helmets off."
He hesitated. In the past few minutes they'd had to take several detours to avoid lowlying patches of nano-D, and removing their helmets could be deadly. Still, they were on the fringe of the battle here. The smoke was thinning, enough so that the sun was sending dusty shafts of yellow light slanting down through the overcast, and there'd been no nano warnings for some time now. The warstrider swayed gently beneath them as it continued pacing off the meters. Reaching up, he unsnapped his helmet release and pulled it off, as she did the same with hers.
"Just for a moment, Vic," she said, turning in the slot so that she could look back at him. "I didn't want your crew eavesdropping."
"Sure. What's on your mind?"
"I want you to drop me off. Here. Right now."
His throat tightened, and he shook his head, an almost convulsive denial. "Negative! No way!"
"Captain Hagan, use your head! You can't fight this machine with the damned hatch open. The first time an Impie takes a shot at you, he'll fry you, me, Francine, and half your control circuits. You have to button up if you're to have a chance of getting out of here."
"But—"
"Shut up and listen. There's room in there for you and Francine. I know. I shared a ride that way once. It'll be tight, but you can link while she rides on a PLSS. The portable life-support system'll keep her alive until you can get her back to a med center."
"What about you? Damn it, Katya, I can't just drop you off here, a million klicks behind enemy lines!"
"We're not a million klicks behind enemy lines. It's more like five or six, okay? And there's plenty of cover. That's the strip district up there, and beyond that, Braxton and the port manufacturing center. I'll be able to lie low, move quiet, and slip through the lines when it gets dark."
"That'll be hours, yet!" His heart was hammering in his chest. Damn it, she couldn't ask this of him!
He knew he was more than half in love with this woman, that he had been for a long time. He'd served with her for six years, ever since the days of the old 2nd New American Minutemen, and then later on Loki, on Alya B-V, and Eridu. His had always been a kind of love from afar; she was his commanding officer, and though neither Hegemony nor Confederation regulations forbade such a relationship, it was never a good idea for the grunts to become romantically involved with their commanding officers.
Too, he'd been well aware of her close relationship with Devis Cameron. He'd deliberately kept his distance then, sensing Katya's interest in Cameron, and knowing the dangers of lovers' triangles in any mixed military unit.
Of course, he'd also been aware of the fact that Katya and Cameron had become more distant again, starting with an argument they'd had on Earth just before the Eridu mission. Ever since, he'd been wondering whether that meant he actually now had a chance with her.
Except that he knew Katya, knew that she was a professional and that she didn't like mixing that profession with close, personal entanglements, especially now, after her breach with Cameron. Hagan rather suspected that she'd broken some self-imposed rule by getting involved with the guy in the first place, and that she now regretted it.
And Vic Hagan, for all of his years in the militia, the Hegemony Guard, and now in the Confederation Army, was shy, at least when it came to women. Hell, he'd not even been able to ask Katya to recjack with him, though he'd had plenty of opportunity aboard the Eagle and here on New America. He was afraid that she would think he was just looking for entertainment, a jackin' Jill for a quick plug-in. As a result, much of his RJ downtime was spent in erotic simulations with AI personas that looked and sounded and smelled very much like Katya Alessandro.
And now the real Katya was wedged into the open slot with him, practically in his arms . . . and she was telling him to drop her off, to save himself and the others while she wandered around the battlefield on foot.
"Damn it, Katya, you don't know what you're asking!"
Reaching up, she touched his lips with one gloved forefinger. "I think I do. Vic."
The way she stressed his name sent a shiver through him. Did she know what he felt for her? How could she? He'd never said a word. . . .
"Vic, if I stay, the next time we run into an Impie strider the three of us get fried, and maybe your crew as well. Do you want that? I'm not going to abandon Francine."
"Look, we can put you in one of the other slots. If you snuggled up with Witter or Sergeant Toland—"
"No!" The negative was so sharp, so urgent, it startled him to silence. "No," she said again, more gently. "Damn it, Vic, just follow your orders, okay?"
"I don't understand. This is a three-slotter. We could make it, all of us. . . ."
She sighed. "Maybe I don't either. I . . . I don't like being shut in, Vic. I don't think I could take it!"
"But you're a striderjack, for God's sake!" By definition, that required her to shut herself up in darkened, narrow cubbyholes. "Look, we can jack you to Mission Link and I'll be the passenger."
She shook her head. "It would take too long to reprogram your AI to accept my patterns, and we should keep moving, anyway. Vic, if you'll just—"
The explosion tore into the ground meters away, sending great clods of earth and gravel hurtling into the air.
"Captain!" The voice came from his helmet phones, tinny and distant with the helmet beside him. "We got two bandits, comin' in on our six! They were hiding behind that building!"
He resisted the urge to look. What Witter could see through the strider's optics would still be invisible to him. The warstrider lurched hard to the left, pivoting, its weapons coming up. Battle fog swirled past, impenetrable.
"Come on, Katya! Squeeze in with—"
"No!" Reaching up, she gave him a quick, hard kiss on the mouth. For an instant, he felt her warmth . . . and then she was gone, grabbing the PCR-28, rolling over the side of the Warlord's fuselage and dropping three meters to the ground.
"
Katya!"
"Go, Vic!" Scrambling to her feet, she waved him on. "Go!"
Another high explosive shell snapped overhead, as the Warlord reared back on angled legs, then loosed three quick CPG bolts at the unseen attackers. Hagan dropped back into the slot, pulling Francine down on top of his legs and stomach. He fumbled with the console, unable to find the right button . . . and then the module hatch sealed shut, plunging the two of them into crowded darkness. One-handed, he managed to reach various cables and feeds, plugging them into her bodysuit. It was a tight squeeze, and he had to wiggle back and forth to make the connections, but the life-support feeds would keep her alive and out of shock. That done, he jacked three plugs home into his sockets, two temporal, one cervical, and palmed the interface.
With a crackle of light, sight and sound were restored. He was again a warstrider, his vision piercing the encircling fog. Two . . . no, three Tachis were moving in, range two hundred meters and closing fast. The Warlord was tracking them, weapons ready. Another shell whizzed in, detonating with a ringing crack against the Warlord's upper hull. Katya had been right. If the module had been open when that shell had hit . . .
Where was Katya? He extended his scan left and right, searching. There . . . darting away swiftly past the warehouse wall, heading in the direction of the spaceport strip.
What the hell was that all about? he wondered.
"What was that, Captain?"
He'd not been aware that he'd put his thoughts out over the link. "Nothing, Ken."
"Where's the Boss off to? She won't last ten—"
"Never mind that! That Tachi on the right. We're gonna take him! Lewis!"
"Sir!"
"Target! Bring him down!"
"Yes, sir!"
He watched Katya vanish into the rubble of a fallen building. He felt sick.
Chapter 11
Historically, of course, economic access was the great divider of society. There were the rich, upper classes which didn't need to work and could devote their time to recreation or to the management of their society; the middle classes which used their skills and their limited economic access to acquire the means of joining the upper classes; and the lower classes, condemned by their lack of economic, educational, and political access, by and large, to remaining where they were.
Early developers of cephlinkage hardware were confident that the old rules of power and class distinctions had been broken at last, that direct, electronic linkage to global information nets would at long last provide economic and educational access for all, abolishing forever class distinctions.
Of course, we now know that they were completely wrong.
—The Rise of Technic Man
Fujiwara Naramoro
C.E. 2535
What's wrong with me? Why couldn't I go with him?
Katya leaned back against a cracked and smoke-stained wall, gloves and helmet off, the combat rifle cradled in her lap. It was growing dark at last, the long, long New American day dragging to an end with the sun's slow drop below the horizon. It was a true night, too, with both Columbia and the bloody pinpoint of 26 Draconis B already long since set. Through a shattered wall and ceiling on the other side of the room, the sky glowed an angry orange-red, reflecting the light of burning buildings. The crump and thud of far-off gunfire proved that the battle continued.
She'd found this building—a bar called The Newamie's Down—hours earlier, while it was still light, choosing it partly because it was a large building, offering plenty of hiding places, but mostly because she thought she might find food and water there. Though her warstrider umbilicals kept her blood chemistry balanced and kept her from becoming dehydrated while she was linked, they did nothing for her physical hunger. She'd not eaten for nearly fifteen hours, since she'd been back at the 1st Rangers' Port Jefferson headquarters, and her stomach was growling.
So she'd devoted several hours to exploring The Newamie's Down, using its sanitary facilities, prowling the mealprep area in search of food, helping herself to a glass and some water from a still-working sink behind the bar. Finally she'd settled down here to wait, in the bar opposite the tall, arched entrance to the main dining area.
Obviously, the place had taken a direct hit sometime during the fighting that had raged back and forth across this part of Cape Dickson that morning. Tables and chairs had been swept to one side of both the bar and the restaurant in smashed tangles of plastic and carbonweave, and the area behind the bar was awash in broken glass, mingled with pooled liquor and those bottles that had miraculously escaped intact. The mealprep area proved useless; the building's power was out, and she hadn't been able to open any of the storage lockers or vats where food cultures were grown.
She'd finally found several packs of soy crackers and settled for those and water as dinner. It was ironic; there was a bewildering variety of alcoholic drinks available in those bottles that had somehow survived the battle without being broken, but Katya didn't drink liquor, wine, or beer. She'd tried one or the other a time or two, of course, back in her shipjacking days, but she didn't care for the taste of the vile stuff, nor did she like the loss of control or the false values it created.
The alcohol did tell her something about this place, and this neighborhood, though, as did the Level 1 comm banks in the building's foyer and the lack of full-link ViRcom pods or sim modules. This was definitely a lower-class neighborhood, and Katya was glad that patrons of this place were gone.
The people who came here would have Level 1 hardware, no more, and many might even be nullheads, kept at the very bottom of the economic and educational ladder by being unable to interact with technic society at all. Level 1 hardware—distributed free by the state—consisted of a palm interface and a single T-socket, sufficient to download ID and credit information, to interact with computers and AIs, and to receive low-res input from public entertainment channels.
Two temporal sockets and extended cephlinkage hardware allowed high-level access, including full ViRcommunications and sims. With double T-sockets you could jack in on a bewildering variety of recjack programs, from mild euphoric stimulation to elaborate, interactive ViRdramas to virtual sex. And a third socket in the base of the neck provided neural feedback, allowing high-level jacking of remotes or direct-link machines, like warstriders.
People with two-or three-socket implants rarely drank alcohol. Cerebroactive chemicals, especially depressants, could drastically affect cephlinkage control, and that was not only bad, it was stupid. Too, linkers didn't need them as diversion or anaesthetic, not when there was such a broad range of diversions to enjoy with a clear head and clean circuits. Oh, Katya had heard of brainburners and current norkers, of course. Who hadn't? Those were the isolated exceptions, though. You needed discipline to handle nano-grown hardware woven into your personal wetware, and since zapping your pleasure center for an unending orgasm was nothing more than a very pleasurable way to commit suicide, undisciplined linkers were rather neatly deselected out of the net, a high-tech version of survival of the fittest.
Every once in a long while, though, Katya wished she could let herself get drunk. It might be nice to lose control, if just for a little while, and maybe dull some of the sharp edges to the self-recrimination that always seemed to be circling out in the shadows that hedged in around the borders of her mind.
Her hands tightened on the ribbed foregrip of her rifle.
What's wrong with me? she asked herself again, then shook her head. Delete that. You know why you couldn't go with Vic. The question is why you can't lick this. Damn it, girl, you're as habit-hobbled as a brainburned twitchie. And you'll be about as useful as one, too, if you don't get your wetware jacked under control!
She'd carried this, this quirk of hers for a long time, ever since her starship days back before she'd joined the Hegemony Guard, in fact. She'd been jacking a ship, the Kaibutsu Maru, when a failure in the ship's AI interface while she was linked had left her in sensory deprivation for a period of hours—a small eternity
in subjective time.
Katya never talked about it, didn't even like to admit it to herself, but to this day she had trouble with near or total darkness. The smothering, claustrophobic feelings darkness raised in her made her acutely uncomfortable in any closed-in space, and jacking into a ship's navsim was now all but impossible for her.
She'd wrestled with the thing for a long time, now, long enough to begin thinking of it as her "beast," as though it were an annoying and sometimes demanding pet. Vic was right. It didn't make sense for her to dislike shut-in spaces, not when she had to shut herself into one every time she strapped on a warstrider. But in one way it was logical. As a striderjack, she could grit her teeth as she lay down in the war machine's slot and felt the hatch seal shut over her, could bear the second or two of smothering closeness until her hand touched the interface and the darkness vanished, replaced by the limitless panorama of her AI's sensory feed to her brain.
Linked in, the warstrider serving as her body, its sensors more sensitive and more discerning by far than her own eyes and ears, she was no longer crippled by her beast. It was her mind that was claustrophobic, she often told herself, not her body; it didn't matter that her body was shut up, blind and catatonic, so long as she had a feed from the outside world, so long as her real self was jacked in, free and unrestrained. For some few individuals, linking with a warstrider was a kind of recreational drug, inducing a technomegalomania that robbed them of judgment and rational discernment as efficiently as alcohol. For Katya, linking to a strider was a drug of an entirely different kind, providing, if not a cure, then at least a temporary healing that banished the darkness that always seemed to be pressing in around the borders of her mind.