Warstrider: Jackers (Warstrider Series, Book Three)

by Ian Douglas

  "Yoku irasshaimashita, Taisasan!" the man said, smiling and bowing low. "Welcome, sir! I am Chusa Shioya, of the Imperial corvette Tosshin. Your transmission acknowledged! Please transmit special clearance codes and ID. Over."

  Shioya's Nihongo was precise and polite, with no hint of a challenge behind the words.

  "Ah, Chusasan!" he said, allowing the computer to shape words in Ihara's cold, rough growl. They sounded strange in his mind's ears. "I am here on the express special orders of Gensui Yasuhiro Munimori, Commander of the First Fleet and Senior Admiral of the Imperial Military Staff. My business is with Chujo Kawashima, and it is classified kimitsu." He paused, to give the words a dramatic emphasis. "There is no need for you to know more. You will tell no one that I am here. Over."

  Shioya did not react to the words immediately, of course. The image remained statue still, as though frozen in time, as Dev's reply headed back across the light-seconds.

  This was the most critical part of the deception. If Shioya demanded code authentication that Dev could not give, the mission was over. There'd be nothing more to do but turn and flee for K-T space, abandoning Sinclair and Katya and the rest to New America's invaders.

  But discipline within the Imperial fleet, as Dev knew well, was imposed from the top down by successive hierarchies of power. A corvette's commander would make a special report to Kawashima only if he'd been specifically ordered to do so; in the absence of such orders, if "Captain Ihara" ordered him to tell no one, invoking the authority of Munimori himself, well, there was a good chance that he would let them pass.

  The word kimitsu—the military classification equivalent to "top secret"—would carry a great deal of mass with Shioya as well. No Imperial naval officer, especially one as junior as a commander, would willingly risk tangling with the TJK, the Imperial intelligence service. A single word from a Teikokuno Johokyoku official could ruin almost any military officer's career.

  Shioya's image had been waiting patiently throughout the time necessary for the communications lasers to carry Dev's answer back to the Tosshin at the laggardly speed of light, then for Shioya's reply to return. Suddenly, the image stirred, then bowed.

  "Hai, Taisasan! As you command! You are clear to shape course for the inner system. This is Imperial picket Tosshin, out!"

  The transmission ended, fading to black.

  Dev sagged within the linkage, relief flooding through him as Arasi's bridge faded away and was replaced by the more familiar view of stars and black-velvet space. They weren't out of the radiation belt yet, not by seven hundred rads, but they'd taken the first, vital step . . . and managed to carry it off.

  Eagle continued accelerating in-system.

  The LaG-42 Ghostrider entered the forest clearing and stopped, the wide-band scanners mounted in its chin turret sweeping left and right with quick, urgent flicks, its nanofiage rippling to a pale, dappled pattern of greens and yellows as the sunlight struck it.

  At twenty-five and a half tons, a Ghostrider was less than half the mass of a Warlord and had only two slots for jackers, positioned side by side along the top of its long, blunt fuselage. It had less muscle, too; its primary weapons were two Kv-70 weapons packs mounted above and to either side of the hull, plus a hundred-megawatt laser jutting from its chin turret in an improbable and unintended piece of phallic imagery.

  Smaller and less powerful offensively the LaG-42 might be, but Katya preferred jacking the Ghost to the Warlord. It was faster, more nimble, and felt more responsive to her guiding thoughts. When she was jacking a Warlord, Katya walked; when she wore a Ghostrider, however, she danced, and the machine's bright feedback played across her cortex receptors like a song.

  She took a moment to absorb the play of light and shadow of the forest. New America's native trees were slender below, feathery above. Their movement in even the slightest wind set light to glittering on the wiry tangle of forest undergrowth. Nearby, a swarm of sundancers—smaller, distant cousins to morninglories—bounced and jittered on a shaft of sunlight.

  Come on, come on, Katya thought to herself. Where are they?

  Movement stirred the fronds at the clearing's far edge. Katya tensed as readouts indicated approaching life-forms, man-sized and man-warm. Was it?

  It was. The patrol filed into the clearing, looking less than military as they milled about in an uncertain clump, ten meters from the Ghostrider's guns.

  "Keep her hot, Chet," she told her Number Two. Sublieutenant Chet Martin was another newbie, painfully young and enough like Ken Maubry in looks and speech and attitudes to have been the dead jacker's brother.

  Cannon fodder, she thought bitterly as she broke linkage, then unsealed her slot. Daylight flooded her narrow pilot's module. Worse. Sempu fodder.

  Scrambling from the open slot, she worked her way to the ground on handholds strategically placed down the inside of the strider's leg. She'd been thinking along such lines ever since her return to friendly lines, grim, unworthy thoughts, she supposed, for someone who was supposed to be fighting for liberty and justice and all of the other fine words in Sinclair's Declaration.

  Why were revolutions won—or lost—on the blood of children?

  The people waiting for her in the clearing were children too, of a different sort. The genie who called himself Tharby was there, with fifteen of his mannies, twelve males, three ningyo women.

  Two, she noticed, were missing.

  "Hello, Tharby," she said. "Welcome back."

  The former nanochemical techie didn't even know how to salute yet. Instead, he bobbed his head, the movement clumsy in his broad, flaring helmet. "Hey, Colonel," he said. "We're back."

  "So I see. How far did you get?"

  The genie leader shifted his Pk-30 laser carbine uncertainly from hand to hand. " 'Bout twenty klicks. There's Impies there. Lots of 'em. Couldn't go no further."

  "Good! That's what we wanted you to find out. How many Impies? Where are they?" When he hesitated, she said, "Show me." Stooping, she began sketching out a rough map of the Gaither Valley approaches to Stone Mountain, using a stick to scratch the lines into soft, bare dirt.

  The genies had still not been accepted by the Confederation command, at least not completely. Sinclair's authorization had cleared some of the red tape, securing uniforms, light infantry armor, and weapons for them, but she found she still had to be careful not to mention what—or who—the equipment was for to officious supply officers or suspicious bureaucrats. Prejudice against arming genies was not to be found solely among civilians. Military personnel had started off as civilians, after all, and they dragged their prejudices along with them when they joined the service.

  The genies stayed in a special camp outside of Stone Mountain, more or less sequestered from other troops. Even so, there'd been trouble. Three days ago, one of the ningyo women had been grabbed by several drunken militia troops and raped. The soldiers responsible were in the brig under the mountain now, awaiting trial. Ever since, there'd been grumbling among the enlisted men to the effect that the prisoners had done nothing wrong. After all, that was what ningyo were for, wasn't it?

  Officially, the genies were now the Port Jefferson Scouts, a special unit attached to the 1st Confederation Rangers and directly under Katya's personal command. CONMILCOM had balked at authorizing the unit . . . and then, just one of New America's long days after Katya's return to friendly lines, Jefferson had fallen to the invaders. Everywhere, it seemed, Confederation and militia forces were in full retreat. The 1st Confederation Rangers had drawn up in a semicircle blocking the enemy's advance northwest out of Jefferson, sitting astride a line of rugged, heavily forested ridges and controlling access through a series of broad valleys.

  With the Imperials maintaining almost total control of the skies, without even satellites to provide data on Japanese troop movements or ship landings, there was now a truly desperate need for scouts, men and women who could slip close to enemy positions in small groups, record what they saw, and return the information to Ston
e Mountain. Several Confederation infantry platoons were being converted to this sort of mission, ditching their heavy weapons and assault gear in favor of light armor, nanoflage, and laser carbines.

  And Congress had authorized the recruitment of genies.

  Katya had been working with them now for only a little over a week. Starting with the ten who'd followed her out of Port Jefferson, she'd added twelve more who'd escaped from the capital, heard that genies were in training at Stone Mountain, and made their way through the wilderness to join them. Technically, the Scouts were just beginning recruit training . . . except that there was no time to do a decent job. If they were to become soldiers, they had to do it now, learning the hard way, in combat.

  Which made Katya feel no better about what she'd done. It was bad enough throwing trained infantry at warstriders. Hurling untrained newbies—and genies at that—onto a modern battlefield was little short of murder.

  For that reason, her training sessions with them so far had actually concentrated on keeping them out of battle. She'd noticed during their passage across the lines that they moved silently, with a grace and an efficiency that Katya herself, with all her experience, was hard-pressed to match. Genies might be a bit slow to catch on, but they were not clumsy. And while few had ever been outside of an urban environment, they seemed to have no trouble adapting to moving about in the woods. They didn't appear to have a typical city dweller's prejudices about forests or rough terrain.

  So far as their tailored behaviors went, Katya had seen few differences between Tharby and the other genies and ordinary humans. If any vestige of their "docile" or "obedient" natures remained, it had been blasted by their experiences outside of Port Jefferson the night after the invaders landed. They seemed more than willing to try anything asked of them, and in some ways they seemed as adaptable as their human counterparts.

  Which made sense, Katya admitted. They still had human DNA in their cells, even if it had been tinkered with. If they could just be trained to watch and listen, to sneak up on enemy positions, or stay motionless in a camouflaged listening post for hours at a time, then report back what they'd observed, they would make great scouts.

  So far, they'd done well. Though they carried weapons and she'd shown them how to use them, they'd not yet been in a firefight, and she'd impressed on them the need to fade back into the forest if they came under fire.

  Her map of Stone Mountain and the Gaither Valley complete, she handed the stick to Tharby. "Where did you run into Impies?" she asked. "Twenty klicks, you said?"

  Tharby's brow furrowed as he studied the scratches in the dirt. Map reading was not an intuitive skill for him. It involved a use of symbology that, while not beyond the brighter genies, was not second nature to them, either. "This is valley?" he asked at last, pointing to two slashes leading down the side of the mountain.

  "That's right."

  "This is maglev?" He drew a line winding past the southwestern face of the mountain. Katya's eyebrows raised. He did understand the symbology. "Yes! Good!"

  "Here," he said, marking a spot on the lower end of the valley. "Near maglev where it passes bottom of valley."

  "Okay," Katya said, concentrating in turn. This procedure would have been a hell of a lot easier if she could have shared a ViRcom holomap with Tharby, getting him to mark positions in color and 3-D . . . but the genies didn't have cephlinks and wouldn't have known what to do with them if they had.

  "And what did you see? Warstriders?"

  "Warstriders," Tharby said, nodding. "Four. And soldiers on foot, with guns. And . . . and something else."

  "What?"

  This was the hardest part of dealing with the genies, getting them to accurately identify what they saw. Four warstriders . . . were they Tachis or Daimyos? Details like that could make a difference. And what was this "something else" that Tharby claimed they'd seen?

  The genie was drawing in the dirt again. "Never seen this before," he told her. "Like warstrider, sort of, but no legs. Big."

  "No legs? How did it move? Did it fly?"

  "No. Wheels . . . and, and something going around th' wheels."

  "Tracks?"

  He shrugged, but sketched a line of circles, representing wheels, and enclosed them in what could be treads.

  "Buildings on top," he continued, still sketching. The drawing was so crude Katya could hardly fit the pieces together into a whole, but Tharby's words raised fresh dread in her. She thought she knew now what he'd seen.

  "Guns here . . . and here," Tharby continued. "It . . . it saw Rita and Gove. Killed them. We faded back into woods, like you told us. Soldiers in armor followed us, but we lost 'em."

  A few words, but Katya could picture it easily. A sensor sweep had detected the genies where they lurked in the brush. Antipersonnel weapons—machine guns, light lasers, or sempu—had opened up. Death . . . panic . . . and the crash of the enemy thrashing through the woods in pursuit.

  "You said this thing was big. How big?"

  "Uh . . . maybe as long as from here to . . . to those trees."

  Eighty meters, near enough. Even allowing for exaggeration . . .

  "Tharby. Don't tell me you saw a siege crawler!"

  "Don't know 'bout siege crawlers," Tharby said. He gestured at the child's drawing proudly. "But it looked like this!"

  Siege crawlers—massive, mobile fortresses as long as a city block, riding on multiple sets of tracks and massing two thousand tons or more. If the Imperials had siege crawlers on New America, they must be planning for a major push right up the Gaither Valley. Nothing in the Newamie arsenal could stop one of those. Not much could, in fact, except for nukes, and the Imperials had been very careful to maintain a monopoly on nuclear weapons. Possibly a massed warstrider assault . . .

  She glanced up at the sky, empty for the moment. There'd been an awful lot of shuttling back and forth to and from orbit by the Imperials, lately. If they'd brought down a crawler, that explained some of the activity. Crawlers were so large they were ferried to and from a planet's surface in pieces, and assembled in place.

  "You did wonderfully, Tharby," she told him. "I'm sorry about the two people you lost."

  Tharby shrugged. "War means killing," he said simply. "We understand that."

  In that moment, Katya could no longer think of the genie as dull-witted or a child.

  Chapter 16

  You tell me I can't stand up to monstrous Ajax?

  I tell you I never cringe at war and thundering horses!

  But the will of Zeus will always overpower the will of men,

  and tears away his triumph, all in a lightning flash,

  and at other times he will spur a man to battle.

  Come on, my friend, stand by me, watch me work!

  See if I prove a coward dawn to dusk—your claim—

  or I stop some Argive, blazing in all his power,

  from fighting on to shield Patroclus' corpse!

  —Hector, in The Iliad

  Homer

  ca. 800 B.C.E.

  Space surrounding New America seemed crowded with ships. True, even a vessel as large as a Ryu dragonship was tiny to vanishing insignificance compared to the volume of space through which it orbited, but the IFF and communications code signals flashing across Dev's visual download gave the impression of ships, big and little, jostling one another for slots in low planetary orbit.

  Donryu and the five largest cruisers were clustered in a tight, defensive group alongside Highport, orbiting some three hundred kilometers up. Most of the light stuff, corvettes like the Tosshin, and a few frigates, had been dispersed across a defensive, three-dimensional perimeter some forty AUs out. Complete coverage of such a vast area was impossible, of course, but they could keep watch for the neutrino bursts marking incoming starships, and they could report anomalies to Donryu.

  The rest of Ohka Squadron, the light cruisers and destroyers, had scattered about New America in separate, world-hugging orbits. That was standard Imperial fleet pr
ocedure, and Dev had counted on that when he'd worked out Eagle's possible approach vectors. He'd timed the destroyer's approach for a period when the planet was hidden behind the cratered, slow-moving bulk of Columbia, masking her. Then, as Eagle emerged from behind the moon, skimming scant kilometers above dust gray maria and the silver flash of airless, dust-rounded mountain peaks, Highport and Donryu were just slipping down behind the horizon of New America.

  "Nice timing, Commodore," Lara had told him, admiration audible in her mental voice. "That was easy feed slick!"

  "The AI showed me how to do it," Dev told her. "All I did was follow directions."

  "Yes, but you thought of it in the first place."

  Perhaps, but Dev would have been happier with the congratulations coming later. Each step, each minute took Eagle deeper into Ohka Squadron's operational area, a mouse challenging a pride of lions.

  Yet, Eagle's solitude and her daring were her chief weapons now, those and her AI's simulations of a Japanese ship captain's link persona. Even with full watch kept by the Imperial pickets, one ship, traveling silently, was all but lost in emptiness, so vast is space.

  With a final hard-driving, 6-G burst of deceleration, Eagle slipped into low orbit around the planet a few hours after skimming Columbia's mountains, safely shielded from Donryu by the planet itself.

  "Incoming laser communication," Eagle's comm officer warned. "We're being hailed by the Yubari. Naka-class light cruiser. Taisa Mitsuru Hasegawa, commanding."

  "I'll take it," Dev said, opening his mind to the ViRcom transmission.

  Again, he stood on a ship's bridge. This time, since Taisa Hasegawa was senior to Taisa Ihara in the size and importance of his command, Ihara's image was summoned to the bridge of the Yubari. Too, Hasegawa was older than Arasi's captain. Dev couldn't estimate his age closely but judged that he was certainly in his fifties. Protocol demanded that Ihara/Dev defer to Hasegawa.