Warstrider: Jackers (Warstrider Series, Book Three)

by Ian Douglas

  And a human possessing cephlink implants, with inwardly grown and artificial memory storage, with direct mental access to computer networks and AI control systems, with senses and a clarity of senses unknown to his ancestors . . . is he less human than the naked child drawn squalling and new from its mother's womb?

  —Man and His Works

  Karl Gunther Fielding

  C.E. 2488

  "Here they come!"

  Aerospace interceptors, sleek Se-280 Soratakas stooped out of the gold-blue sky. Missiles drew white, thread-thin scratches across the heavens before impacting in savage, earth-shaking detonations.

  Katya pivoted her Ghostrider, tracking incoming targets. "Targeting!" she cried as red cursors locked on to one plunging Se-280, pinning it against the background of her awareness. The cursors flashed: target lock. Fire!

  Laser energy dazzled as it reflected from the root of a wing . . . then flashed brilliantly as metallic vapor exploded outward. Slush hydrogen boiled into air . . . then ignited catastrophically. Fragments of metal and alloy composite rained down through the sky, trailing smoke, and a thunderclap rolled across the Heraklean valley.

  "Good shot, Katya!" Vic Hagan called over the tactical link. "Now move it! There are too many of the bastards!"

  "On my way!"

  The assault pods were already touching down on the slopes of Mount Athos. The base at Morgan's Hold had been turned into a red-hot scar smoldering beneath a pillar of black smoke staining the afternoon sky. Everyone at the base had escaped, barely, by piling into every vehicle that could move. The convoy was heading north, now, a ragged line of magflitters and four-legged transport walkers, guarded to sides and rear by twenty of the warstriders that Dev had taken with him to Athena.

  Those striders were all the rebels had to protect themselves with now. The fleet was already scattering as the Imperial squadron moved into orbit. Two rebel ships had been destroyed before all radio communications had been lost in a firestorm of Imperial broad-spectrum jamming. Many of the Confederation government people were almost certainly still in the sky-el, trapped until a ship could be dispatched to rescue them.

  There were no ships coming.

  On the ground, the convoy had been attempting to reach the shelter of the air generation plant. They'd been only halfway there when the first Imperial interceptors had appeared overhead. A running battle had developed, the warstriders pausing only long enough to target and fire before continuing their northward trek. The rugged plain between Mount Athos and the generator plant was already littered with the funeral pyres of crashed and burning ascraft, which were not as robust as a typical warstrider and tended to disintegrate easily when tagged. Still, there were so many ascraft now, launched from the orbiting Donryu, that numbers were beginning to tell. Two warstriders had already been lost to laser and missile fire from the sky, and three more badly damaged.

  "I've got one incoming at three-one-one," Sublieutenant Lanager called over the Ghostrider's ICS. "Elevation one-two. He's tracking on us."

  "Got him, Tomid. Target lock! Fire!"

  Laser light flared; the Se-280 wobbled, then pulled up, a thin streamer of smoke trailing from its port engine. The interceptors were harassing the column, trying to slow it enough so that the assault striders could sweep in and finish them off.

  "General Sinclair!" Katya called over the tactical laser frequency. Sinclair was up ahead somewhere, riding in one of three KC-212 cargo transporters, four-legged, eighty-ton monsters more commonly called Rhinos. "General Sinclair, do you copy?"

  "I'm here, Katya. Go ahead."

  "General, I think the only way out of this is for me to take half of the warstriders and make a stand here. The rest of the striders will escort you VIPs to the generator."

  "Now see here, Colonel," General Smith cut in. "You're not in command here. . . ."

  "I'm in command of the tactical element," she replied. "And you people aren't going to make it to the generator unless we manage to slow up the pursuit. Besides, we should take some of the heat from those interceptors off of the rest of you."

  There was a long, heavy silence. "Colonel, I don't really see any alternative. However, I want you to delegate the authority. We need you now, more than ever."

  To communicate with the Heraklean Naga, now that Dev was . . .

  "Sorry, General. Can't do it." She'd already abandoned too many friends, too many comrades, for the sake of following orders.

  "Colonel, that is not a request. That is an order. We cannot afford to lose you, our only expert on communication with the Naga."

  "Katya, listen to him!" That was Vic Hagan. "Let me take the defense!"

  "You stick with the transports, Vic. Get them to the generator."

  "But—"

  "THAT'S A GOKING ORDER!"

  "Colonel, we can't let you do this . . ." That was Smith again.

  "And you, General, will have a goking hard time stopping me!" Abruptly, she swung out of the line of march. "Yo! I need nine volunteers to kick some Imperial ass!"

  "Here!"

  "You got me!"

  "Affirmative!"

  "I'm with you, Katya!"

  As the acknowledgments rolled in, Katya switched to ICS to speak with the young man slotted with her in the Ghostrider. "You can take off, if you want, Tomid. If you quick-step it, you can snag a ride on one of the magflitters. I was volunteering me, not you. I can handle this lummox on my own."

  "That's a negative, Colonel," Lanager replied. "You think I could live with myself, leaving you slotted in here alone?"

  Katya could find no answer for that. "Okay, Tomid. Thanks. But it's going to be a damned bumpy ride."

  "That's why I came along, Colonel. Watch it! Incoming at two-five-niner, elevation one-five!"

  An explosion hurled clumps of earth skyward, shaking the ground.

  "Targeting! Fire!"

  **I am afraid.

  *Why?

  **I am not . . .

  *. . . what I was.

  **I am no longer human.

  *I am no longer Self.

  Loneliness . . . and curiosity. What am/are/I/we?

  **Let's go to the surface of the Void.

  *Why?

  **To . . . perceive. I sense vibrations there. Shocks transmitted . . .

  *. . . through the Rock. I sense . . .

  **. . . Events.

  *. . . Agreement. And the taste . . .

  **. . . of pure metals and churning . . .

  *. . . magnetic fields.

  **I feel them.

  *Curiosity. But the surface of the Void is a horrible, alien place, a gulf of not-Rock vaster and emptier than anything imaginable.

  **The surface of the Void is where I belong. Where humans belong. And the Empire has come. Do you sense their ships, beacons of mass and magnetism and flowing power suspended in the Void?

  *I/we sense them. But you/we are no . . .

  **. . . longer human. Agreement. Sadness . . . loss and loneliness. I need . . .

  *. . . want . . .

  **. . . to sense . . .

  *. . . the surface . . .

  **. . . Katya . . .

  **. . . directly. Agreement. We go . . .

  **How?

  *So. . . .

  Chujo Kawashima's body was ensconced within his link slot aboard the Donryu, orbiting Herakles at synchorbit, thirty-two thousand kilometers up. His mind, however, was soaring with one of the Se-280s, linked to the aerospace craft's AI and primary sensor suite. The linkage gave him an excellent view of the overall landing area, and of the skirmish harrying the fleeing rebels on the ground.

  The Sorataka banked left, wind shrieking as it was cleaved by the ascraft's stubby wings. "We have them running, Chujosan" the ascraft's pilot told him.

  "Indeed. Order your squadron to press the attack. It looks as though they are deploying half of their warstriders along that ridge in order to give the others time to escape."

  "Affirmative. Shall we attack the line, or the larg
e transports?"

  Kawashima considered. "The transports. If we can slow them before they reach the generator facility, we can trap them all. We will smash the defenders on the ridge from orbit, then move in with the assault striders."

  "Hai, Chujosan! Downloading your command now. . . ."

  Dev emerged from an opening halfway up the side of the artificial mountain of the atmosphere generator. Unlike the pyramids of ancient Egypt, this mountain's sides had not been covered with smooth, sloping sides, nor did they exhibit the stacked block architecture of the pyramids as they existed today. Instead, the surface was an open latticework of extruded iron and fabricrete plates and bars interlocking in a complex, three-dimensional array, providing support for the mountain's inner workings, and easy passage for the gases going in and out.

  The wind on that slope of crisscrossing girders was stiff, but Dev scarcely noticed it. The Naga had encased him in a bulky but sleekly serpentine form as it had borne him up through the tunnel, but so complete was the linkage of natural and artificial senses that Dev did not feel as though he was in a Xenophobe snake; he was the snake, a coiling black sinuosity that issued from one of the mountain's numberless black passageways, emerging into the open air accompanied by an exploding cloud of nano. He savored the sheer power of his connection with the immense and far-flung brain.

  No longer in direct physical touch with the Naga's supracells, the steady give-and-take of data continued through a newly forged radio link. Building the transmitters and receivers had been the work of a second or two, as nanotechnic fragments arranged themselves according to patterns provided by the absorbed but carefully recorded hull of Dev's warstrider.

  As he emerged, radio noise assaulted him, a shrill keening of ear-rending harmonics and hissing white noise. Dev recognized the signal for what it was—Imperial jamming—and decreed a quieter atmosphere at radio wavelengths. The blast of radio noise generated within the vast and chthonic bulk of the Naga and directed with pinpoint accuracy toward each of the airborne transmitters blew circuits and burned out power couplings, then crackled along insufficiently shielded electronic circuits like the EMP from a nuclear detonation.

  Kawashima was momentarily adrift in darkness. Then his vision cleared, and he was back within the virtual reality of Donryu's combat coordination center. What had happened? His laser link with the interceptor squadron commander had been broken off abruptly.

  It took a swift download from damage assessment to determine that a powerful electromagnetic pulse had, indeed, burned out perhaps sixty percent of all air-to-air and air-to-space communications. What was peculiar was the intense and highly directional nature of the pulse, aimed at individual aircraft, rather than broadcast over a large area.

  What kind of new weapon did the rebels have down there?

  No matter. Soon there would be nothing left on the surface of Herakles but his own troops and scattered, broken groups of rebels begging for permission to surrender.

  "Weapons!" he barked. "Stand by to receive coordinates for surface bombardment!"

  "What the hell is going on?" Katya had heard the blast of radio noise, and her sensors had detected the immense surge of an EMP . . . but one so tightly focused that its effects had barely brushed across her machine, or the other warstriders waiting on the ridge.

  One Sorataka spun helplessly out of control and slammed into the ground. Others seemed to stumble in midair, struggled for a moment to regain control, then began pulling back. Clearly, they'd been caught by surprise . . . but by what?

  Explosions jabbed and flashed across the ridgeline. The Imperial warstriders were moving up the ridge fast, at least thirty combat machines coming at a dead run and, a kilometer to the rear, a line of four-legged armored personnel walkers, each carrying a platoon of marine infantry. The Imperials were launching an all-out assault, striders and ground troops together.

  Laser energy flared off Katya's hull and she dropped her machine into a partial crouch, returning fire. No time to think about mysterious radio bursts now. The rebel line of warstriders began firing, a ragged volley of laser and missile fire that slashed into the advancing Imperials.

  The being that had once been Dev Cameron reared higher on its mountain ledge, scanning sky and horizon with a complex amalgam of senses—human sight and hearing, combined with eighteen external Naga senses ranging from the perception of magnetic fields to the rippling feel of flowing electrons to the dimly sensed mass of bulky objects bending space. He was sundered completely now from the main Naga body; the special supracell had enfolded itself totally into his body, and the molecular fuzz connecting him with the other supracells, the "whole," had dissipated. Within the shimmering black-to-silver-to-black again snake shape of his traveler, he looked completely human.

  But the mind behind steel gray eyes was not. All that Dev Cameron had been was now a tiny part of what was there, perceiving, remembering, calculating, sensing, and above all thinking with a fiercely precise rationality that excluded sentiment and emotion. All that remained of emotion now was the shuddering thrill of power. Without even knowing his limits, without knowing if he even had limits, Dev knew now that he held powers literally godlike in scope. Through a broad-band radio receptor now embedded within his skull, he could hear the flood of voices over working radio circuits, could hear all of the separate channels at once, could separate each in his mind and understand what it was saying.

  More . . .

  Effortlessly, he reached out, following a particular thread of radio communication. In an instant, he was within an Imperial warstrider, an assault force Tachi, as it paced relentlessly after the fleeing rebel column. Dev perceived a strange kind of virtual reality, a narrow space that was not space centered within the Tachi's circuitry. He could sense the brooding presence of the strider's AI there, and the larger, slower, but more adaptive mind of the Tachi's human pilot.

  Reprogramming the Tachi's onboard computer was simplicity itself. Change here . . . and here . . . push there . . . Within two seconds, Dev's awareness had flicked to a second Tachi, as the pilot of the first tried frantically to restore power to weapons systems, power to the controls, power to any operations system until even his link net went down and he was left stranded and awake in the dark enclosure of his slot.

  One after another, across the battlefield, the Tachis began to fail.

  "Katya!" Vic called. "What the hell is going on?"

  "I wish I knew, Vic. Something's taking them down . . ."

  "Yeah, but what?"

  "I've got some odd scatter off some of the high-band radio," Torolf Bondevik put in. "Looks like high-speed data transmissions, but I can't read any of it."

  "I see it. Damn! It almost looks . . ."

  "Looks like what, Katya?"

  "A standard transmission algorithm, same as we use. But it's been speeded up . . . looks like a download at something like ten to the fifth times normal speed."

  "Impossible!"

  "That's what I was about to say."

  "We have the ridge targeted, Chujosan. Targeting something as small as individual warstriders at this range is impossible, but we should be able to destroy most or all with an area burst."

  "Excellent. You may fire."

  "Hai, Chujosan! Firing now.. . ."

  A thunderclap assaulted Katya's ears, accompanied by the brightest, greenest light that she had ever seen. She was falling . . . falling . . . and then her Ghostrider struck the ground with a grinding crash. Her control circuits were gone . . . as was her link. She was awake, locked inside the padded confines of her slot.

  She slapped the intercom 'face. "Tomid! Tom, can you hear me?"

  No answer. She had to get out . . . and fast. She imagined that she smelled smoke. Pressing the hatch release bar, she gasped relief as the hatch blew clear, admitting a flood of golden light. Outside, the entire ridge had been transformed. Moments ago, it had been sere and rocky; now it was all flame-blackened dirt and loose rubble, all of it smoldering beneath a towering clou
d of roiling smoke.

  Dazed, she clambered from her strider, which was lying on its side, one leg gone, the other twisted back at a crazy angle. The hull had been scorch-blasted clean of nanoflage, and most of the exterior sensors and antennae had been stripped away. Either she'd just lived through a nuclear burst at close range . . . no. Holding up her left palm and moving her hand about, she could detect no radiation. The ridge must have been targeted for a high-wattage laser burst from space. Elsewhere, others of the warstriders on the ridge lay in junkheap piles. One was burning, half the hull melted away. Oh, God in heaven . . . that was Torolf's Scoutstrider. . . .

  Tomid Lanager kicked out his own hatch cover and climbed out onto the smoking ground. The air was thick with the sharp stench of burnt plastic and lubricants.

  "Kuso, Colonel . . ."

  "Orbital lasers," she said. Suddenly, all the strength went from her body and she dropped to her knees. The ground through her skinsuit was still uncomfortably warm. "We never had a goking chance. . . . "

  Many of the Tachi warstriders had been halted in their tracks, but others were swarming up onto the ridge now, closely followed by the lumbering, four-legged APWs. Imperial troops in black armor dashed down open ramps, gesturing with laser rifles. One rebel trooper brandished a handgun and was instantly cut down by an arc-brilliant flash from a plasma gun. The stink of burnt meat mingled with the odors of smoke and oil.

  A pair of Imperial Marines advanced on Katya, lasers raised. Slowly, she raised her hands, palms out. There was nothing left in her for heroics.

  "Up!" one snapped in harshly accented Inglic. "Both of you, hands up high!"

  "Do as he says, Tomid."

  "But Colonel—"

  "Do it, damn it! I don't want you dead too!"

  The marines gestured again. Grimly, Katya raised her hands.

  Chapter 27

  Throughout the length and depth of recorded history, Man worshipped a god created in his image. With genetic engineering, with implanted cephlink technology, with antisenescence drugs, meteffectors, and somatechnic reconstruction, with AIs and nanotechnology, Man at last began to remake his own image into that of God.