by Ian Douglas
Willis seemed to consider this. "You know," he said after a time, "we're not so different here from the brain-dead. Guys like Pritch, they just couldn't hold the pattern, you know? And . . . and some of us are losing it too. I'm having trouble thinking of . . . of myself as me. As an individual. It would be so very easy to just let go . . . to slide off into the sea. . . ."
"What sea?"
Kara sensed hesitation . . . and an inability to put thoughts into words. Part of that, she thought, was a growing unwillingness to carry on this conversation. She wondered if her thoughts, still anchored in flesh and blood and bone, were too slow for him. Or simply too rooted in things now inconsequential for the two of them to have anything at all in common. "We call it . . . we call it the ether here. From the old idea that there had to be some substance to space for light to vibrate in. You know?"
She nodded, then wondered how well Daniels could even see her. "I know."
"The electronic sea, the world of Nirvana, that's the sea that our thoughts vibrate in. It's a beautiful place. Simply . . . beautiful. No word can describe it. And it's just so easy to drift away. . . ."
Kara closed her eyes, fighting back what would have been tears in her organic body. At Kasei, during the raid she'd led there, four brave men had gone with her into the Imperial planetary defense network at Phobos, high above the terraformed seas and forests of the once-Red Planet. Vasily Lechenko had died there. The other three had been Pritch, Phil Dolan . . . and Willis Daniels. Of the four, Willis was the only one left, and he now occupied a twilight existence, neither living nor dead.
For Kara, it felt as though her world were crumbling.
She was sorry she'd let her anger cut short a possible meeting with Ran. Damn it, life was too uncertain to let minor annoyances or petty hurt feelings slam doors on people who'd become important parts of your life.
"Gok it, Daniels! Don't you let go! I need you back, back in the company. Back with me and my people!"
"The Web's not really that important, Captain. It's not like they were telling us before the Core expedition at all. If it wins, if Earth is destroyed, and 26 Draconis, and all the rest, well, we all have to die sometime. No big deal."
"Nirvana will be destroyed if the Web overthrows human civilization. You know that, don't you? There'll be no immortality if the Net system supporting Nirvana goes down."
"It doesn't really matter. We didn't ask for this gokking immortality. We didn't ask for life."
"What's wrong with life?"
"The sameness. The unchangingness. The fact that all of this around us was manufactured, someone's dream . . . but it wasn't our dream. It's so boring. . . ."
"Have you talked to the AIs running this place about providing some challenges for you? You know, some virtual worlds are supposed to be pretty rugged."
There was no answer, and after several minutes of calling into the light, Kara was forced to assume either that Daniels was gone, slipping away into that sea he'd spoken of, or that he simply was no longer interested in communicating with the living. Reluctantly, at last, she broke her connection with the ViRworld and climbed out of her commod.
She checked her time sense. It was nearly time for the final briefing.
She found herself longing for the warm touch of flesh and blood . . . and interests solidly anchored in what was real, what could be touched, what could be clung to.
Kara wondered if she still had time to see Ran, to be with him alone.
And in near-Earth space, Dev Two continued to watch the battle unfold at the leisurely pace dictated by the vast distances involved. Hours passed . . . and the battle slowly ground its way into the inner Solar System. The Fudo-Myoo lasers kept up their steady bombardment, leading particularly dense clumps of Web machines by the several minutes necessary for the laser pulses to cross the distance between Luna and the oncoming cloud. Yamato, caught in a swirling vortex of attacking craft, was disabled when a thousand-ton Web machine detonated in a nuclear fireball within a few hundred meters of her hull, knocking out her weapons, navigation, and power systems and setting her adrift above the plane of the Asteroid Belt.
Before long, Kasei was under attack. As Dev continued to sample the data flow of the system's Net, he could hear the panicked cries of officers and commotechs from the bases on and around the world once known as Mars, some calling for help, some trying to direct a battle that clearly had become hopeless. Kasei, by Imperial law, could only be approached by Nihonjin. Dev considered slipping into the Phobos planetary defense network to get a closer look at what was happening there but decided against it. The Battle for Kasei would not settle the fate of either Earth or Sol; if he could help, it would not be at Mars.
The Overmind was still in the fight, controlling continuing laser fire from the Fudo-Myoo facilities against the Web clouds. It, too, had decided that the Kasei group posed no immediate threat and for a time had concentrated on the Earthbound cloud. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of Web machines had been destroyed and the cloud was now considerably thinner than it had been. When it had pushed through to within a few million kilometers of its target, however, it had become far too diffuse for the Fudo-Myoo lasers to have much of an effect. When a given stab of megajoule laser light only vaporized one or two Web devices at a time instead of tens or hundreds, it was no longer an efficient means of fighting the millions of machines remaining in the force. At that time, the anti-asteroid lasers had been shifted to cover the cloud approaching Earth's sun, much more distant, but still compact and closely spaced.
Unfortunately, that meant the surviving machines of the Earth attack force were now free to plunge into the space between Earth and Luna, forming into smaller groups and conducting fast-paced and deadly attacks on all ships and installations. High on their list, obviously, were the facilities on and near Luna that had been delivering such devastating and accurate fire for the past hours.
Before long, the Hachiman complex was under direct attack. Sensor arrays on Luna detected the fact that they were being bathed in intense beams of broad-spectrum laser light originating with a number of the largest Web devices. Dev watched as Hachiman's AIs measured the light's intensity, then extracted an absorption spectrum from each light source. Those lasers being fired from near the orbit of Mars were not weapons in themselves—the distances involved were too vast—but the black absorption bands showed that objects, many thousands of them, composed of silicon, iron, carbon, and a dozen trace elements, were racing straight toward Luna, driven along by the light with breakneck accelerations of over three hundred gravities.
Dev had seen weapons like this before, at Nova Aquila. Each was a wisp of mirror-silver gossamer a molecule or two thick, driven by the pressure of laser light. When they struck the target, the kinetic energy of even a few grams moving at near-light velocity carried the shattering impact of high explosive. Those not traveling fast enough to be utterly destroyed on impact would land on the target and cling there as their molecular structures were rearranged into masses of nanodisassemblers, capable of literally dissolving the target atom by atom.
Dev, interfaced already with the Hachiman Defense Network, slipped a coded order into the system ordering the launch of thirty missiles from the antispace batteries located at the south end of Mare Crisium. As the tense minutes passed, the oncoming Web sails began radiating heat, now showing emission spectra mixed with the absorption spectra of the driving laser light. Space within the Solar System is not empty; matter has collected there to a density of about one atom per cubic centimeter; as the probes passed 0.5 c, they began heating up from friction, while generating tiny plasma tunnels as they plowed through hydrogen gas that seemed—from their relativistic points of view—to be growing increasingly dense.
At Dev's programmed command, the missiles detonated well short of the sails, but the multiple explosions scattered clouds of fragments in their paths. When the fiercely radiating gossamer wisps struck those fragments, they were utterly annihilated in the sudden burst
of white-hot energies liberated by each impact.
Elsewhere, though, Imperial ships were dying, overwhelmed by superior numbers, battered by lasers and laser-driven sails, particle beams, and clouds of nano-disassemblers. Reinforcements were beginning to arrive in system, but slowly . . . far too slowly.
Already, it was clear that the tide of battle was beginning to shift against the defenders of the Earth.
Chapter 17
The new inventions of the last twenty years seem to threaten a great revolution in army organization, armament, and tactics. Strategy alone will remain unaltered, with its principles the same as under the Scipios and Caesars, Frederick and Napoleon, since they are independent of the nature of arms and the organization of the troops.
—The Art of War
ANTOINE HENRI DE JOMINI
C.E. 1837
Alphanumerics danced, scrolled, and flickered in Kara's head, reporting battle readiness . . . and the fact that the huge DalRiss cityship that had engulfed the Gauss an hour before was now ready to make its translation from the region close by Nova Aquila to the less familiar space of Earth's Solar System.
Part of the delay had been due to the need to upload the navigational data the DalRiss Achievers needed to make the jump, information provided shortly before by Dev Cameron.
He'd also brought a grim and up-to-date report on the progress of the battle there, and she wondered how things were going. The last information to come in over the Net indicated that Web machines were drawing close to Earth itself, while others were already fighting on Mars. Perhaps most worrying of all, however, was word that a third Web fleet would soon reach Sol. If it succeeded there, penetrating the solar corona, no human ships would be able to touch them . . . and the nova that followed would reduce both Earth and Mars to charred cinders, whatever the results of the battles there.
As a result, the ConMilCom staff planners had ordered the bulk of the Confed forces at Nova Aquila to jump to a point just outside the orbit of Mercury, where they could take up a blocking position against this third, sunwardbound Web cloud. According to Dev, the Overmind was now directing most of its fire against that cloud, wearing it down, but the enemy still vastly outnumbered anything the humans could hope to assemble. The next twelve hours would tell whether the effort to save the home system of mankind had paid off.
The appearance of the Overmind was promising, of course . . . but did not guarantee a victory. The Battle of Nova Aquila had been won when the Overmind suborned the Web's communications protocol. Obviously, this time the Overmind was having trouble cracking the Web's network, having to resort to brute force to whittle away at the enemy's numerical superiority. So far as Kara was concerned, she didn't understand the Overmind and wasn't about to rely on its intervention. She preferred things that operated by well-known and trustworthy laws, systems that worked as an extension of her thoughts—like Mark XC Black Falcons.
And as for Earth . . . well, Kara would do her damnedest to stop the Web, but she had little feeling for the planet one way or another. She'd never been closer to the place than Kasei, and the visit had not exactly been a happy one. So far as she was concerned, if Earth's incineration stopped the damned Empire from its constant maneuvers to drag the Confederation back into the Imperial fold, then maybe a small nova was just what that troublesome planet needed. In saner moments, she was willing to concede that the vast majority of Earth's billions were no more Imperial than she was, might have even more reason than she did to hate the Empire and Dai Nihon, and couldn't be blamed for the fact of their allegiance to the Japan's Terran Hegemony.
But this was not a particularly sane moment. She was jacked into her new Black Falcon warstrider/warflyer combo, a fifty-ton colossus folded into a tight, gleaming black hull, awaiting the final word for jump and launch. Like her Falcon at the Galactic Core, this one had its ebon surface nanoflage programmed to break the black finish only with the small phantom caricature that was the company's unit insignia, and the name she'd chosen for the machines she rode: KARA'S MATIC.
The scene spread out in Kara's mind was a strider-sensor's view of Bay Five in the Gauss's spin-grav section. Her strider was being lowered on magnetic clamps into the launch lock, along with the sleek, black shapes of the forty-seven other machines of First Company. Gauss was already in the grip of a DalRiss cityship, so the spin-grav section was motionless, the ship in zero-G. Strapped into her conmod and jacked into her strider's interface, Kara could not feel the endless falling sensation of microgravity.
"Okay, people," she said quietly, speaking over the unit intercom, the ICS, to the other members of the company. She felt the jolt as the strider was loaded into the lock, which sealed around her with a sharp hiss. "Shralghal has reported that they're ready to make the transition. Remember, we're going to be deploying within a few minutes of breaking out into normal space, just as long as it takes for the Gauss to clear Shralghal's ventral area. Be ready to jack in hard the moment you get the word."
"Yes, Mother," Ran Ferris said, and several of the people in the company chuckled.
"Let's hit the prelaunch," Kara said, ignoring the banter. She opened the channel to Operations Control. "Op Con, this is Phantom One-one. Phantoms are ready for prelaunch."
"Phantoms, Op Con," a voice replied inside her head. "Initiating prelaunch sequencing. Communications net."
Her eyes scanned her prelaunch window, checking the glowing array of discretes. "Comm, go."
"Channel selection at taccom one-four-three-three. ICS on."
"Taccom one-four-three-three, roger. ICS, check."
"I2C on and phase-linked."
"I2C, on. Linked."
"Switch WCS to standby."
Kara mentally engaged her Weapons Control System, then waited for the discrete light to come on in the prelaunch window opened in her mind.
"Op Con, One-one. Weapons systems, set to standby. On safe."
"All units, engage navigational communications, set to direct receive at four-one-niner, on standby."
"Nav com at four-one-niner. Rog."
"Power plant on."
"Rog."
"Bring power feed to point five."
"Feed at point five, rog."
"Link feeds engaged."
"Link feeds. Rog."
"Secondary nav systems on, set to standby."
"Rog."
"Self-diagnostics on."
"Rog."
"AI systems on."
"Rog."
"Power check."
"Power nominal."
"Initiate mag drives."
"Drives cycling up."
Linked into her Black Falcon, Kara could feel the powerful GEMag 700E magphase accelerators spooling up to full power with a shuddering, deep-throated thrum that rose slowly through the audio spectrum, carrying a sensation of raw, barely restrained power. Green lights cascaded across her drive status board.
"Op Con, One-one. Drives online and nominal."
She continued running through the prelaunch checklist, verifying both her own system settings and, through a sidebar window, the responses of the other members of her company, watching for any last-second downgrudge. Her Companion, she reflected, could have handled the routine more efficiently than she could, but both regulations and her own preference kept her in the routine, running down the list. It was a necessary ritual, a way to focus mind and spirit on what was coming.
In minutes, the prelaunch was complete, all warstriders in the company had signaled their readiness for release and combat, and she was watching the transition countdown ticking away the last handful of seconds. Her mouth was dry, her heart hammering in her chest . . . though such purely physical sensations were deeply submerged beneath her link with her warstrider. It was strange to think of readying for a combat launch in the Sol system . . . while waiting to make an Achiever jump here at Nova Aquila, twelve hundred light years away. The stunning advances . . . no, the revolutionary changes in technology over the past few years had utterly transfo
rmed the art of space warfare.
Fortunately, tactics had remained much the same. An ancient military misquotation, supposedly spoken by a cavalry officer from one of Earth's late-Middle Ages wars, was the injunction to "get there fustest with the mostest." What General Nathan Bedford Forrest had actually said was "I always make it a rule to get there first with the most men." Either way, the rule still held true seven hundred years later.
Something else Forrest had said echoed in her mind. She'd been downloading military maxims from late-period Medieval warfare, lately, as part of her continuing military studies, and something about Forrest—a brilliant but often unrecognized military tactician—had resonated within her. "In any fight," Forrest had said, "it's the first blow that counts; and if you keep it up hot enough, you can whip 'em as fast as they come up."
In the battle for Earth, the first blow had already been landed, a combination of the in-system Imperial forces and the ongoing laser barrage from Fudo-Myoo. The problem now was to "keep it up hot enough," and pray that the enemy's overwhelming advantage in numbers had been whittled down to manageable proportions.
"So what's the hont?" Carla Jones asked over the ICS as they waited. "Any word on new kicker developments?"
Kicker was the new slang term in circulation for the bewildering array of Web combat devices. Drawn from the Nihongo kikai, "machine," it carried the warrior's grudging respect for the foe's weapons . . . together with a faint taste of disdain for the fact that they fought their battles without even an attempt at tactics or subtlety.
And that, Kara thought, given their numbers, was a very good thing. Humans had damned few advantages in this war, where numbers were nearly everything.
"Not much," Ran Ferris replied. "According to Cameron's report, they seem to have given up on their Alpha approach. Their tactics are still running to swarm attacks."
"No Alphas?" Roger Duchamp asked. "How are they coordinating their tactics?"