by Ian Douglas
"Tactics?" Brad Sturgis said with a mental snort. "They've got tactics?"
"Listen up, folks," Kara said, breaking in. "Coming down to the final count, now. Ready . . . and three . . . and two . . . and one . . . and hack!"
She felt the now-familiar shiver of mass displaced across twelve hundred light years, followed by a distinct, inward thump as they dropped once more into the gravitational ripplings of normal space. Once, only a few years before, even the DalRiss couldn't have made such a long translation in a single jump, nor would they have dared aim for a spot so deep within a major gravitational field as this. With greater familiarity with the target region, however, came greater precision, longer range, and more certain control.
"Quite a bump there," Jake Kaslewski called over the ICS.
"I'm getting a lot of traffic over the system Net feed," Sergeant Sharon Comorro added. "Looks like things are linked in and burning!"
"I've got the kicker cloud at one-niner-five," Brad said. "See it? Looks like it's still taking hits from Luna."
"Yeah," Carla added. "We're going to have to watch ourselves out there. It's gonna be a bit sticky not getting pasted by Fudo-Myoo!"
"Sheer, random chance," Ran Ferris pointed out. "The sun-bound kicker cloud's something like five light minutes from Earth now. The cloud's still pretty big and sprawling, so the chances of us accidentally wandering into the path of an incoming pulse is pretty damned slim."
"Good thing, Lieutenant," Comorro said. "It's a bit tricky spotting a laser beam coming at you in time to jump out of the way. . . ."
The others laughed at that, then continued the excited chatter. Kara let them. Since the intercom was purely an internal communications system aboard the Gauss, chatter gave nothing away to the enemy, and it helped them focus their excitement . . . as well as giving her a good measure of their morale. Their eagerness.
Then it was time. The outer lock hatch yawned open, and Kara looked down into sweeping stars and a vast, black emptiness. "That's it, warstriders," the voice of Gauss's operations officer said over the command link. "We're in the Sol system, backs to the sun, about sixty million kilometers out. First Company, First Battalion, you may launch when ready."
"Right," Kara said. "First Company, First Battalion, First Confederation Rangers . . . launch!"
With a yell, she accelerated into night.
Kara felt no acceleration, of course. As at the Galactic Core, she was teleoperating her Falcon from the Gauss's remote operations center. She was keenly aware, though, that the danger was little less than it would have been had she been tucked away inside her strider's life-support pod. The possibilities of sudden death were still endless . . . and there was the danger, too, that the Gauss herself could be taken out by a Web attack.
That was a serious danger. The Carl Friedrich Gauss was not a warship, despite her armament and her contingent of striderjacks. If she were attacked in force, jumping out-system once more would be the only way for her to survive. As soon as the last of the Phantoms were clear of her launch bays, in fact, Gauss would again allow herself to be engulfed by the Shralghal, and as soon as the DalRiss could manage the feat, it would jump back to the safety of New America, over forty-eight light years away. With the I2C linkage, of course, Kara and her squadron mates could continue to teleoperate their flyers from forty-eight light years away. They'd managed that trick easily enough across twenty-five thousand lights, between Nova Aquila and the Galactic Core.
Kara had been in combat enough times to know, however, that the best-laid plans rarely came off as smoothly as planned. Most important, time was needed for the DalRiss ship to recover the strength necessary to make a second interstellar jump. No one was sure how long that would take; the DalRiss ships were biological constructions, not mechanical and electronic, and they were subject to the inefficiencies and uncertainties of all organic systems. If the Web machines reached the vicinity of Shralghal and Gauss before the DalRiss ship was ready to jump, it could get very sticky indeed. Even if the Shralghal were charged up, her Achievers were locked in, and she were ready to go, a single lucky hit on Gauss's long, cluttered spine could cripple her . . . or kill her crew before they had a chance to jump clear.
And there were still the problems of being linked to a warstrider at the instant it was destroyed. How many of the men and women with her, Kara wondered, would end up as ghosts in Nirvana . . . or brain dead, like Pritchard?
This was no time to think about that. At full acceleration, the forty-eight Falcons in close flyer formation boosted out from the Gauss and its larger ship-of-burden.
Glancing back through her aft sensors, Kara saw the Gauss and her far larger DalRiss carrier receding behind her. The sun's disk was large and dazzlingly bright. As she kept accelerating, the Shralghal turned into a black, six-armed silhouette asprawl across the star's brilliant face, with Gauss a black and knobby sliver close beside her.
Turning ahead once more, she concentrated on the enemy; Web machines were picked out in red by her Falcon's AI, and there were so many of them that her HUD was showing a ragged blot of thin, red fog directly ahead. The battle, she noted as she scanned the displays and readouts that recorded a host of electronic data from the active Net around her, was a confused and scattered one. With three separate nodes of Web machines, with human reinforcements arriving at random intervals scattered across a span of many hours, with chaos still rampant throughout the system and among the confused units within it, putting any solid coordination or organization into the defense at all was virtually impossible. Each incoming unit was being directed to a specific point in space by fleet combat controllers at Hachiman . . . but those orders frequently had little in common with reality and as often as not were being overridden by a second set of controllers at Tenno Kyuden itself.
Kara wondered if the Emperor was looking in on things at the Combat Direction Center.
"Let's wake the bastards up with a volley of Sharks," she called to the formation. "Weapons set, safeties off. Arm and lock!"
The SRK-88 Sky Shark was a three-meter-long ship-killer with a T-940 QPT-initiated microfusion warhead and a yield of two megatons. Each of the Black Falcons had been loaded with two of the sleek and deadly weapons.
One by one, her squadron leaders reported all missiles armed and ready.
"Maximum dispersal," she ordered. "Coordinate through Gauss's attack AI. Stand by . . . and three . . . two . . . one . . . launch!"
Her view forward was momentarily obscured by a dazzling spray of white as the two big missiles slid from their tubes in her Falcon's port and starboard flanks, then arrowed ahead at a hammering 150 Gs of acceleration. The boost momentarily slowed her Falcon, but she began picking up speed again, following the twin stars of the Sky Sharks' exhaust plumes toward the heart of the Web.
Ninety-three other stars joined her two; one Falcon, Mike Chung's in Third Squadron, had launched only one Shark. The second missile had failed to clear the tube. Possibly, Forrest's thoughts about first blows applied to the Phantoms as well. Almost a hundred thermonuclear detonations scattered evenly throughout the Web cloud ought to whittle down those numbers out quite a bit. The question, of course, was whether it would be enough?
Minutes later, as the Phantoms continued to close with the enemy, the missiles went off—first one lone detonation flowering in silent, dazzling glory . . . followed by two more . . . followed by the sudden eruption of half of the sky in a blinding, pulsing, flaring cascade of silver-white-blue light.
There was no way to measure the actual damage done to the Web force, but as the light dissipated, it was clear that the sea of red pinpoints on Kara's HUD had been considerably thinned out. Seconds later, the Phantoms—deployed in a long, flat crescent—penetrated the leading edge of the cloud.
Kara felt a kind of paralysis as the enemy began targeting her, but then she was into the routine, sliding her HUD's targeting cursor across a big Web machine bearing down on her almost bow-on and stroking the fire command with her min
d. Laser light flared, dazzling in the blackness as it struck home and turned stubborn metal and ceramic into white-hot vapor.
Laser fire brushed her skin; she triggered a full spread of independent, target-seeking Mark 70 missiles, then jinked to starboard. The red cloud filled her HUD display forward, turning night into a bloody backdrop. The nearest targets were scant hundreds of kilometers away now, streaking toward her at a velocity that would close that range in instants. Laser and particle cannon fire flared, the bolts silent, the lines and tracers of light visible at all only because the AIs managing the linkage were painting them in for the humans' benefit. Kara picked a target, a five-meter collection of faceted, polygonal shapes hurtling almost straight toward her at a range of just under four thousand kilometers.
At such ranges, targets that small were, of course, invisible to organic eyes; what she saw was being fed to her from her strider's AI, which could make guesses about shape and reflectivity based on the returns from the craft's laser ranging system. She selected the target with a slight focusing of her thoughts, then fired, loosing a 20cm X-ray laser burst that boiled through the Webber's lightweight armor and fried its internal circuits in a literal flash. Several small machines flashed past Kara's Matic at velocities of several tens of kilometers per second, as her Falcon's AI began selecting the largest and most dangerous targets ahead.
The calls of the others in her company crisscrossed one another with the frantic tempo of space combat.
"One-niner, this is One-eight! Better pull in tight! We've got too many here for us to get sloppy!"
"Rog! Tucked and tight!"
"Deke! Check your six! You got two kickers on your tail!"
"I know! I know! I can't shake 'em!"
"Phantom One-three, this is One-seven! I'm coming down on your four! Break right and give me a shot!"
"Goose it, Brad! I'm getting fried!"
"Hang on! Come right in three . . . two . . . one . . . hack! Okay! Fox! Fox! That's missiles away!"
"Brad! Where are you? I can't see?"
"Kilo! That's a kill!"
"Gokkin' straight! Look at that kicker burn!"
More Web devices burst past her, streaking sunward, and she captured their images, enhancing and enlarging them in her mind. Could any of these devilish machines detonate the sun . . . or only certain ones? Human experience was necessarily limited when it came to deliberately exploded suns, but those Webber devices seen entering the atmosphere of stars in the past had always been fairly large, eighty or a hundred meters in length at least, and massing a good many thousands of tons. It seemed unlikely that the smallest could do anything that would disrupt something as huge as a star.
Indeed, as fast as they were vaporizing under the caress of Kara's lasers and those of her company, she found it hard to believe they could even approach a sun closer than a few million kilometers.
"All Phantoms!" she called over the command circuit. "This is One-one! Ignore the small stuff! We want to wax the big ones! I say again, leave the small stuff under a meter or two for the mop-up. Concentrate on the big kickers, the real ships!"
One by one, the individual members of her company acknowledged.
"My God, look at 'em come!" Carla Jones exclaimed.
"Easy pickings," Ran added.
"Keep the chatter down, people," Kara warned. Now was the time for concentration . . . not losing your combat edge gawking at the opposition. "Set your weapons triggers on automatic, with targeting parameters set at three meters plus. Remember, these things are fast and they're maneuverable. Watch your six, everybody."
And then they were in the heart of the cloud, and there was no more time for speeches.
Falcon warstrider/flyers and a bewildering menagerie of Webber devices passed one another faster than a blink, the human flyers and Web machine cloud interpenetrating one another in a furious exchange of laser fire, particle beams, and fusion warheads. Letting her AI take over the targeting of her lasers, Kara used her Falcon's V54 Devastator particle gun to target a larger, more distant enemy machine—a flat, silver-blue, oblong shape with oddly sculpted angles—and fired. One face of the distant machine exploded in a brilliant eruption of pyrotechnics; pieces glittered in the sunlight as they spun away from the shattered craft.
Battle filled the night, raw and furious, and the sky was filled with fire. Savagely, she decelerated at full thrust, pulling Gs that would have reduced her body to blood-smeared jelly if she'd been physically aboard her machine. A fusion warhead—she had no idea whether it was a human nuke or something fired by the enemy—detonated, a silent pop of intense light that burned furiously against the night for several seconds before cooling to invisibility.
Kara brought her Falcon around, still dumping speed as fast as she could and firing her lateral thrusters at full G thrust. The Webbers had slowed sharply as they neared the sun, possibly to allow room for maneuvers, possibly because they were aware of the human ships materializing in their path and needed to leave themselves combat options.
She closed on a cluster of silvery devices, scattering toward the sun. The Web machines reminded Kara of insects, glittering and faceted, some with spindly and many jointed arms or appendages, some with spines or fins serving unimaginable purposes. Triggering the V54 again, she watched three of the kickers vaporize and a fourth begin tumbling wildly, spilling a cascade of white sparks from a shattered pylon. Vaguely, she was aware of the big lasers from Fudo-Myoo striking home on a dozen more Web machines, aware of other warflyer squadrons entering the fight. Everywhere she turned her enhanced senses, she could see Web kickers and twisting, dogfighting Falcons, Hawks, and P-80 Eagles. Hundreds of Web machines had been destroyed within the past few seconds . . . but a glance at her formation status board showed that the Phantoms were taking losses too.
Five down, so far. She hoped all of the striderjacks were waking up okay, back aboard the Gauss.
Then something hit her, hard, and she heard the shriek of tearing metal, felt the jolt of a misfiring thruster until she was able to override the jet and correct her tumble. Her sensors warned that she'd taken a direct hit from a particle beam; her port-side attitude control systems were on the verge of total shutdown, and there was a fire in the port electronics module. It's okay if you take the big one, she told herself, a mantra of survival, of sanity. You're safe. You're aboard the Gauss. This isn't happening to you. . . .
But to fly, to really fly, she had to be part of her strider. Savagely, she hit the system override, then waited as the damage control routines opened her damaged module to space and suppressed the flames.
It's okay if you take the big one. . . .
Chapter 18
Throughout history, certain key technological developments or inventions have become drivers, advancing not only the particular field within which they were made, but the entirety of civilization. Fire was one, the domestication of animals another, the invention of movable type still another, discoveries that ushered in whole new ways of living, of learning about the world, of thinking.
Ultimately, it was the cephlink and its Naga-biolink successor that utterly revolutionized society, transforming the very nature of Man and how he saw himself to a degree greater than any invention or discovery that had come before.
—Drivers of Change
KELLIN JANDERVOORS
C.E. 2570
Dev was following the battle from his vantage point at Hachiman, on Luna, where streams of data from Mars, from the battleline before the sun, and from Earth-Lunar space were cascading through the combat center's big quantum Oki-Okasan high speed computers.
The picture, Dev realized, was far too large and too complex for any one human mind to perceive. It was a little frightening, in fact, to realize that he was perceiving much of it, more than he possibly could have followed in his organic body. His interface with the Net, however, gave him a tremendous advantage in speed and processing power, when he used the Oki-Okasan as an extension of his own facilities. He wondered, though,
if it might not be a good idea to try doubling himself again. Perhaps two of him . . . or four, or even more, could have better made sense of the flood of data cascading through his consciousness.
The battle near the orbit of Mercury seemed to be turning in Humanity's favor at last; most of the largest Web machines had already been picked off by the Fudo-Myoo, which had been selectively targeting them since shortly after they entered the system. On Mars, things were not going well at all; at last report, Web kickers in huge numbers had brushed past or destroyed most of the Imperial Navy warships based there and were pounding both the planetary defense facilities at Phobos and military and civilian bases on the surface. Yamato was disabled and adrift. A dozen other ships had been destroyed or so badly damaged that they could no longer fight.
And closer at hand, in the volume of space encompassing Earth and Luna, the battle was still seesawing back and forth, with neither side yet winning a clear upper hand. The Web cloud detailed to strike at Earth and the Moon had been blasted down to a fraction of its original size, which meant that local planetary defenses and the Imperial ships stationed close by at least had a chance.
At the same time, though, the remnants of the Earth-assault cloud had been so badly scattered that many kickers were slipping through just because of their small size. Ships and ground facilities were being knocked out when tiny Web devices, some the size of a man's hand, latched on and began eating their way through armor and hull metal; it was impossible to get them all, and the damage suffered from these leakers was building fast. More damage had been incurred from laser-sail impactors and nano-D pellets, driven at high velocity into human ships and base defenses.
More alarming still was the number of large kickers that had broken through the Imperial defenses and entered Earth's atmosphere. Reports from the surface were confusing, often incoherent, but it sounded as though Web units were attacking cities and facilities across much of southern Asia, eastern Africa, and the Americas. Dev could track the enemy assaults by noting the deployment of Imperial Marine and Army warstrider units to key defensive positions. The foci of the kicker attacks were the sprawling city complexes at the bases of Earth's three sky-els, at Quito, in the Andes; at Nanyuki, near Mount Kenya; and at Palau Linggae, south of Singapore.