This was where things began getting ticklish. As with all sky-els, the synchorbit base served as the command center for all military around the planet. Literally overlooking an entire hemisphere with the laser and PAC batteries of the planetary defense network, it held a superb advantage of position. Kara was now trying to access one of those batteries, an action certain to call attention to itself… and to her.
“Coordinates received,” the AI told her. “Awaiting orders.”
“Initiate range check and target lock,” she said, mentally holding her breath. “Code red-one-one, priority immediate. Execute.”
She sensed the AI triggering the alarm.…
Chapter 12
No new weapons can be introduced without changing conditions, and every change in condition will demand a modification in the application of the principles of war.
—Armored Warfare
MAJOR GENERAL J.F.C. FULLER
C.E. 1943
Damn! She wasn’t sure what she’d just done wrong, but something in the system had just sent out an alert. It had felt like an automated alarm, probably something in the system’s programming that was triggered by an unusual sequence of commands. She would have internal computer security all over her in a moment if she didn’t act fast.
Personas in ViRsimulations were like clothing worn in real life, appearances that could be donned or doffed with considerably less effort than sealing up a blouse or spraying on a skintight. Kara had a camouflage persona ready, and it took only a thought to call it up and set it in place.
In computer terms, Kara was a program running on the Aresynch Net’s extensive and widely dispersed hardware. What separated her from other software elements running in the Net at the same time was primarily her complexity, greater in some ways even than the AIs that moderated and controlled much of the system’s operations. It was possible, however, to shelter that complexity behind an extremely simple exterior, a shell program that presented the outward appearance of a routine housekeeping program, one devoted to nothing more dramatic than searching out lost clusters in the system’s capacious memory and devouring them.
There were two disadvantages to the disguise. First of all, to maintain her guise she would have to curtail all, or at least most, of her surveillance activities, to act in fact like a program interested in nothing more than electronic housekeeping.
And second, her disguise was in fact about as effective as donning a wig and dark glasses might be for a human, too shallow to bear close examination. If anyone—especially a human operator—decided to examine her at all closely, he would penetrate the disguise and see her for what she was.
The ascraft received automated clearance for final approach from Kasei’s Aresynch Traffic Control, despite the fact that it was well outside the usual landing approach corridors for any of the principal surface settlements. Approaching west to east over the planet’s night side, it dropped into the atmosphere high above the Elysium Planitia, a momentary meteor in the night sky over the twinkling lights of Cerberus. Aerobraking hard, bleeding airspeed now in searing heat and the thunder of a roiling shock wave aft, the vehicle descended over Amazonis on a blazing wake of ionization, passing just south of the cloud-capped snows of Olympus. Moments later, the sky-el rose to starboard, its needle-slender shaft illuminated by winking anticollision lights and the tiny, pinpoint gleams of travel pods as it speared the night sky above the Towerdown city-glow of Pavonis Mons.
Ahead, less than five hundred kilometers off now, was a scattering of town lights and communities along the shores of the Labyrinth of Night.
Noctis Labyrinthus had been the westernmost arm of the five-thousand-kilometer rift valley gouged along the Martian equator known as the Vallis Marineris, the Valley of the Mariner spacecraft. With Phoebefall and the warming of the planet, the Mariner Valley had been flooded, becoming an arm of the Boreal Sea that extended west to the Labyrinthine Bay, within a few hundred kilometers of Pavonis Mons.
Banking left, the ascraft’s pilot pulled the vehicle into a gentle turn to the north, passing briefly two hundred meters above the ink black waters of the bay before gliding silently above forested land once more. According to the op plan, someone up in Aresynch seventeen thousand kilometers overhead should have accessed the planetary defense system by now and targeted MilTech’s Noctis Labyrinthus facility with a ranging laser.
That laser, shining down from the synchorbital base overhead, was only a targeting/range-finder beam, harmless and invisible to unaided human senses. To the pilot’s jacked-in senses, though, the pinpoint of laser light touching the team’s objective glowed like an emerald beacon, guiding the ascraft in toward the right stretch of beach. Judging her approach with practiced accuracy, she brought the lander’s nose up, then triggered the belly jets in a shrieking yowl of superheated plasma. The ascraft shuddered, sinking as it lost airspeed. Landing legs unfolded, insectlike, as dust and wind-whipped sand roiled skyward. It touched down on the beach, landing pads sinking into wet sand and the curling edge of the surf.
Even before the belly jets throttled down, however, the ascraft’s main cargo deck was opening. As the ascraft gentled to the ground, landing struts yielding to receive the vessel’s weight, molded egg shapes, each as black as the night, spilled from the open cargo hatch on spidery legs. Each pod was five meters long, its hull smooth and polished and organically shaped. First out was a Cutlass, Sergeant “Butcher Mac” McAllister’s Cutlery in its warstrider configuration. Close behind him was Third Squad’s CO, Lieutenant Ferris, in his Red Saber, Saberslash. The war machines hit the Martian surface, legs pistoning to find balance and a secure foothold.
Not a single word was transmitted; until they were positively spotted and pegged as hostile, they would maintain radio silence… but words were not necessary. This part of the op, at least, had been rehearsed by all of them time and time again in simulation. Their target, still pinpointed by the laser from seventeen thousand kilometers up, was less than eight hundred meters ahead, behind a low line of sand dunes and desert pines behind the beach.
They began moving… every man and woman in the unit well aware that things never went as smoothly in real life as they did in ViRsimulation.
Ishimoto had detected the tremor of an alarm running through the Net. There was a saboteur here, someone accessing the Net with improper authorization. Swiftly, and with the help of the system’s primary AI, he downloaded the alarm’s log. The cause was simple enough to pinpoint: an improper access to the Planetary Defense System. The code inputs had all been correct, but whoever had uploaded them had neglected to include an apologetic greeting, a brief, electronic “may I trouble you for” that was customary with all artificially intelligent Nihonjin systems… and when the intruder had given the execute command, he’d neglected to say “please.” The computer AI didn’t care one way or another, of course, whether humans were polite to it or not, but a simple subroutine run from the Internal Computer Security node could detect the absence of that phrase and set off an alarm.
There was a small irony there, Ishimoto knew. The citizens of the Western-descended frontier worlds—many of them, at any rate—disliked the Japanese treatment of genie artificial life forms, yet most gaijin treated AI systems merely as cleverly programmed machines. The Japanese—possibly because of a philosophical tradition that populated even inanimate objects with kami, divine spirits—had always been polite to their computers… and that tiny difference in social attitudes may have just helped expose a gaijin spy within the Aresynch Net.
Ishimoto began narrowing down the search area.
Her camouflage shell in place, Kara began experimenting in small, careful increments, seeking the limits of what she could do without attracting undue attention to herself. Leaving the ranging laser under the control of a simple-minded looping routine, she exited the planetary defense system’s weaponry control and found a quiet and out-of-the-way niche for herself in the defense network’s surface monitoring node.
This
portion of the Aresynch Net was designed as an adjunct to the defense system’s tracking control, a way to track and target enemy forces on the surface of Kasei as a backup to the standard weapons operating systems. In peacetime, it served the additional, more mundane purpose of monitoring the weather on the Marineris hemisphere, providing the inhabitants of this face of Kasei with up-to-the-minute weather maps and predictions.
Without giving herself away, she found she could open an observational window and call up an image from one of the ground-facing long-eye cameras mounted along the length of the sky-el. A set of commands put one strategically sited camera under her direct control. She panned it right, shifted down twelve degrees, and then initiated a zoom.
Instantly, she was looking down on the MilTech Laboratory Complex from a vantage point that seemed to be less than a hundred meters up, though the image lacked depth and wavered occasionally due to atmospheric distortion. She could see the complex easily, however, despite the darkness, laid out in a rough, seven-pointed star shape just inland from a beach and marina complex on the northwest shore of the Labyrinthine Bay. Eight hundred meters to the southwest and made clearly visible in the infrared frequencies by its heat signature, an ascraft had grounded right at the waterline. She couldn’t see the warstriders, which were designed to be less than easy to spot even at infrared wavelengths, but if things were going according to plan, they should be about there, deployed in three extended lines, marching across the terrain in parade ground order, like regiments in formation in the era of the musket and the bayonet charge. She thought about Ran.…
There was no response yet from the complex, and this was the point in the plan where a great deal of guesswork entered the picture. CMI did not know what kind of security was in place at the MilTech labs; there would be something, certainly, especially given the importance of the I2C testing program, but that something could be anything from a private security force armed with hand lasers to a regiment of Imperial Marines. The reality was almost certainly something between those two extremes, but though speculation had been rampant during the long passage out from New America, no one in a position of authority had been willing yet to guess whether it would be closer to one or the other.
The answer would be revealed any moment now, though, just as soon as the lab’s inhabitants realized that they were under attack.
To Lieutenant Ferris’s senses, he was moving rapidly across sandy, open ground, working his way up a gently sloping hill with the sea at his back. It was pitch dark—the thread-thin string of lights to his right marking the sky-el shed no more illumination than did the stars and was nothing at all like the day-bright glow of Columbia in New America’s midnight sky.
But he was running on enhanced input, and the night around him was day-bright. Even so, he could just barely make out the shadowy forms of the other warstriders in his platoon as they deployed for the attack. The nanoflage on all of the combat striders had been set for night operations, drinking every photon that hit their surfaces and rendering the huge machines completely and eerily black. Increasing his pace, he crested the top of the hill and for the first time had a clear look at the objective.
The MilTech Labs were brightly lit, the entire compound bathed in intense white light from pole fixtures, from magnetically levitated gloglobes, and from large floatation reflectors set adrift above the compound that shone brilliantly when bathed by low-power laser light beamed at them from the ground. Several vehicles were moving down there, some rolling about on the ground, others flying overhead. Much of the activity appeared to be centered about the lab’s landing facility, where several small ascraft were grounded. An early version of Operation Sandstorm had called for the assault ascraft to go into the port disguised as an Imperial shuttle bringing in a load of supplies, but that plan had been scrapped because CMI agents working both on Kasei and on Earth had been unable to find the proper ID numbers and codes for a landing at a Level Seven secure facility.
Ran Ferris strode rapidly over the crest of the hill, unwilling to silhouette Saberslash against open sky for a second longer than was necessary. He sensed movement ahead… and in the same instant, his strider’s motion detector flashed an alarm, bracketing a pocket of deeper shadow against the blackness beneath a clump of trees a hundred meters to the left.
“Strikers, Striker Two-one!” he called. “I’ve got a bogie at three-five-five, range one hundred!” He wanted a solid ID before he started shooting… but even as he barked his warning, the shadow moved with sudden speed and a graceful unfolding of spidery legs, shifting left up the hill and past Ferris’s position. As it moved, it pivoted and fired, strafing as it ran sideways.
White fire exploded across Ferris’s forward view, and red cautionary lights winked on, indicating hits… and damage, all superficial so far. Ferris returned fire at almost the same instant, loosing a burst of hivel cannon fire in a buzz saw shriek of high-velocity metal that snapped and sparked and shrilled as it ricocheted wildly from the other strider’s armored hull. He followed up with a shot from his KC-20 particle accelerator cannon, the PAC loosing blue lightning in a sizzling bolt that struck the other machine squarely, then vented itself into the ground in sheets of blue-white fury.
Data scrolled down past the right side of Ferris’s view forward, listing mass, weaponry, power levels, range. A Tsurugi…
An explosion shattered trees to his right, hurling splinters and a geyser of sand and earth into the sky. Suddenly, the night was filled with crisscrossing streams of blue and orange fire, as forces hidden in the shadows suddenly advanced, weapons blazing.
“Sandman, Sandman!” he called over the tactical link. “Striker Two is engaged! Estimate… ten, possibly twelve enemy warstriders within sensor sweep range. Request air support!”
“Striker Two, Sandman. On the way!”
The Tsurugi had been damaged, either by the blast from Ferris’s PAC or by the heavy fire it was taking from other Black Phantoms moving now across the ridge. He could see the enemy strider clearly now by the sullen red glow of near-molten duralloy near a gaping wound in the machine’s side. He triggered a volley of lasers, then unfolded his 70mm grenade launcher in its side-mounted tube. The weapon thumped, and a second later the enemy strider was silhouetted by a savage flash behind it. The blast staggered the machine, dropping it to the ground, but its legs flexed, lifting it clear of smoking ground and carrying it, limping, back toward the lab compound.
With an inner jolt, Ferris realized that there was no fear now, nothing but a pounding, raw excitement, an eagerness to come to grips with the bastards and take them apart. Yelling to the rest of his squadron, Ferris followed the damaged Impie machine.
Kara sensed the message, an electric throbbing in the sea around her. Knowing that it would be coming sooner or later, she had been waiting for it, with subroutines in place at the likely communications nodes. Though not entirely certain what the exact form or protocol of the message would be, she was ready to adapt to the needs of the moment.
The message was from the MilTech Lab and it was coded Priority Urgent: Code One. Reaching out from beneath the shell, she intercepted it.
Even when interfaced with a computer network, humans had slow reactions; her thoughts were still being driven by biochemical reactions in her organic brain, after all. There was no way she could react quickly enough to stop the incoming message, which had already been received and routed to the Aresynch communications center by the time she was aware of it.
But she could change it… specifically the two binary bits designating its priority level. With a thought, the message’s priority tag dropped from “urgent” to “routine.”
Incoming fire flashed and stuttered across the sky. Jerry Brewster’s LCR-12 Lancer exploded, the white-hot flare of his fusor pack briefly turning night to actinic day. In the swiftly fading light, a big, four-legged Omata appeared for an instant in Ferris’s view forward, twenty degrees to the left; he pivoted hard and snapped in the weapons lock, embracing the Im
perial strider in green-glowing targeting brackets. Fire! A full barrage of laser fire and PAC bolts seared across the Omata’s hull, peeling open black armor, scouring away nanoflage to expose shiny hot metal underneath. One leg shattered, the struts and jointed footpad spinning through the air.
The battle was only seconds old, but Ferris could tell that they would need to escalate things fast or be overwhelmed.
“Sandman! This is Striker Two!” he yelled over the tactical channel. “Where the gok is that air?”
“Not much longer, Two. They’re deploying now.” There was a two-beat pause. “Striker Two, we’re reading new forces swinging in on your position from the north, range about five hundred. You’d better get airborne yourself or you’re going to get hemmed in.”
“Roger that!” He shifted to his squadron’s command frequency. “Striker Two, this is Two-one. Okay, boys and girls. Pick up your feet! We’re going to gausslev.” He initiated a reload command, changing the ammunition in his grenade launcher, then loosed a thumping staccato of rapid fire. QEC nano spread in a white cloud ahead of Ferris’s strider. A green light winked against his vision, indicating an active floater field.
“I’ve got readings at ten to the eight gauss!” he called. “I’m floating.…”
Saberslash slid forward, accelerating rapidly until it was moving far more swiftly than legs could have carried it.
His sensors picked up the flight of incoming warheads, rockets fired in a cloud from defenses within the MilTech perimeter. Rising and unfolding from its shielded recess in his hull, his hivel cannon pivoted on its universal mount and shrieked, hurling high-velocity slugs of ultra-dense metal into the warheads’ paths. Fresh explosions lit up the night, rippling and pulsing. One rocket slipped through, missed by his defense fire, detonating with a thunderous slam against Saberslash’s hull. The explosion rocked him back, the suspensor field yielding with the blow and absorbing some of the shock.
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