Warstrider 06 - Battlemind

by William H. Keith

  From where she was lying, she could see part of a large viewscreen set into one curving bulkhead of the wardeck. Her dream—her nightmare, rather—was still being played out there. She could see the floating pyramid aloft once more, see rippling, glittering movement on the ground in the distance that must be hordes of Web machines. The image was being transmitted by one of the survivors of her com­pany, still holding the perimeter back on Core D9837. Briefly, she closed her eyes, trying to reconcile conflicting emotions—her happiness at being away from there… and her anger and disappointment at having been ripped away from her people before the mission was complete.

  When she opened her eyes again, another figure, this one in white and wearing a major’s rank tabs, was leaning over her pod. “Captain? How are we feeling?” he asked.

  She didn’t care for the man’s multiple personality address, but she accepted his examination of her face, including the pupils of both eyes.

  “A little woozy, sir,” she told him.

  The insignia on his jumper identified him as a senior psych department officer, a psychtech. “Give me a con­tact,” he told her in a brusque, professional manner. “Left temporal, please.”

  She focused her thoughts, and a patch of her skin just above and in front of her left ear hardened to the shiny slickness of polished gold, then extruded itself as a slender filament. The psychtech reached out with his right forefinger and touched her link tendril as it twisted slightly in the air in front of her face. The tip of his finger was changing too, enveloping the tip of her contact. At the touch, she felt something like the flash of a strobe light go off just behind her eyes, then savored the faintly erotic rippling of data cascading at electronic speed from her Companion’s mem­ory stacks as it uploaded at the psychtech’s coded request. She caught a bit of peripheral information in the backflow; the psychtech’s name was Peter Jamal, he was from Liberty, and he was worried about what might have happened to these people “in there.” His daughter’s birthday was in two weeks, and he was disgruntled about having to miss it.

  “What’s your name?” His voice sounded inside her head, bypassing her ears and speaking aloud in her head.

  Recognition—and memory—were flooding back, banish­ing the vertigo and disorientation. “I’m okay,” she told him.

  “Let’s have your name,” the voice insisted.

  She nodded, knowing Jamal needed to check her re­sponses. “Kara Hagan,” she said. “Captain Kara Hagan, Confederation Military Command, First Company, First Battalion, First Confederation Rangers.”

  “Who are your parents?”

  “General Victor Hagan. Senator Katya Alessandro.”

  “What was your mission?”

  “To teleoperate a Mark XC Black Falcon through the Nova Aquila Stargate to the Galactic Core,” she recited, rattling off her mission statement from memory. “To at­tempt a landing on a rogue planet, Core D9837, to test Web responses and defenses, and to check out I2C teleoperational protocols and capabilities at intragalactic ranges.”

  The psychtech grinned at her as the direct electronic link between them was broken. “I think you came through okay, Captain.”

  She pulled in her contact, feeling the tendril melt back into her scalp. “How… how about the others? We were taking some pretty heavy subjective casualties.”

  The grin faded. “About what we expected. Nineteen seem unaffected, so far. Including you.” He nodded toward the viewscreen, where particle cannon blasts flared in silent, blue-white fury. “Nine more are still on the other side, though they’ll be pulling out soon, I imagine. The oth­ers…” He shrugged.

  She sighed. “Give me the bill, Major.”

  “Twelve are in various stages of withdrawal or link psy­chosis. Two are brain dead. Feedback through the I2C relay. The other six… well, we’re trying to revive them. It doesn’t look good, though. We’re working on downloading their personalities, but they may be headed for permanent citizenship in a ViRworld now. I really can’t say anything more definite than that.”

  Kara bit her lip. “Who were the two?”

  The psychtech’s eyes unfocused as he consulted some in­ner list downloaded through his biolink. “Warstrider Miles Pritchard,” he said after a moment. “And Lieutenant Pellam Hochstader.”

  Damn… damn! She squeezed her eyes shut, working to channel the pain that threatened her self control off into a harmless circling.

  She hadn’t known Hochstader that well; he was a good and reliable officer, but he’d only been with the unit about a year, and his quiet reserve had kept him a bit aloof from the other Phantoms, Kara included. Pritch, though, she’d known rather longer, and more personally. He’d been a friend and an occasional drinking and ViRsim buddy for a couple of years now, despite the difference in their rank—a social barrier that was far less imposing in the free-spirited Confederation than it was within the Imperial military. She knew she would miss his quiet humor… and the steadying effect he’d had on the rawer members of First Company.

  She could still remember his screams as his warstrider had melted around him.

  That, she reminded herself, remained one of the risks as­sociated with I2C teleoperations. It could well be that com­bat would never be safe, despite the new advances in teleoperated warcraft.

  Two years earlier, the possibility of renewed war between the Confederation and the Shichiju had been averted—or at least deferred—when a disguised Kara had led a raid against an Imperial research facility on Kasei, the world in the Sol system once known as Mars. Her prize had been a brand new advance in the Imperium’s study of quantum physics, Instantaneous Interstellar Communications, or I2C, for short.

  The technology still seemed wondrous, even magical. Create two electrons, or any other pair of quons—particles small enough to fall into the Alice-in-Wonderland weirdness of quantum physics—in a single event. The electron pair will be identical in that elusive quality of electronness called “spin,” even though it has no more to do with rotation than a charm quark has to do with the rules of subatomic eti­quette. Separate the two electrons, then subject one to an event that reverses its spin.

  The other electron will change its spin as well, instantly… even if the two are separated by a distance of many light years.

  It was as if the two electrons were somehow one and the same electron, a direct manifestation of one of the kinkier aspects of quantum theory. The effect, counter-intuitive and downright magical though it seemed, had been predicted since the mid-twentieth century and even demonstrated in early laboratory experiments, but at that time there’d been no practical way to exploit the phenomenon. Almost six centuries later, however, Imperial researchers had discov­ered how to trap each half of a paired quon in nanotechnic quantum electron cages, keying them to detectors that could read spin without affecting it, within the parameters set by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. This meant two com­puters could be linked together so that one could read the changes in an array of thousands of electron cages; each change, each flipped electron, could represent one bit of data in the age-old binary data structure of yes/no, on/off, spin-up/spin-down. When a particular sequence of electron spins was imposed on one array—the transmitter—the paired ar­ray registered the same sequence, light years away.

  In practical terms, this meant that communications could be set up between two computer systems that were abso­lutely secure—untappable, untraceable, and unjammable, even across vast interstellar distances.

  This, in turn, meant a titanic stride forward in military science. The ground military combat machines known as warstriders, and their spacefaring kin, warflyers, had long been operated by an on-board pilot who was linked—“jacked in,” in military parlance—to the machine’s oper­ating systems and AI in such a way that the machine actually became his body, responding to the slightest thought while the organic body, cocooned in a life-support pod, was tem­porarily cut out of the brain’s control network. Throughout the warstrider era, military systems desi
gners had dreamed of being able to have the pilots direct their electronic charges from a distance, teleoperating them into combat from a place of safety. After all, what did it matter if the imaging lenses feeding me pilot a view of his surroundings were half a meter away… or many kilometers? The control and sensory feedback systems all remained the same.

  But the modern battlefield was a poor place for experi­ments in remote control. Half at least of any conflict in modern warfare was waged in unseen dimensions, an elec­tronic battle fought between opposing computers on a plane and at speeds almost completely beyond the human ken; communications, any communications, could be intercepted and jammed. Control codes, any control codes, could be jammed or broken, countermanded, and even hijacked.

  Any, that is, except signals propagated through quantum pairing. With I2C, not only could unit COs keep track of events on a battlefield light years away, but the striderjacks piloting a company of warstriders could teleoperate them from a distance… even when that distance was measured in thousands of light years. It meant that at planetary dis­tances there was zero time delay due to speed-of-light lim­itations, that warstriders could be jacked from thousands of light years away, that the striders could be subjected to stresses that would have killed human pilots physically rid­ing them. During the passage from the Stargate to Core D9837, the striders in Kara’s company had been boosting at over two hundred Gs—an acceleration no human could survive—and the high-radiation background of the Galactic Core itself made direct exploration of that hellish environ­ment impossible, even with heavy shielding.

  It was a remarkable achievement, a military dream come true.

  Unfortunately, the dream so far had not succeeded in making warstrider military operations safe for the pilots. They might be well out of range of the enemy’s energy beams, but there were other, more insidious dangers in com­bat. Dangers affecting the mind.…

  Carefully, and with Jamal giving an assist, Kara sat up, then swung her legs out of the opened conmod. The pilot deck was a broad, low-ceilinged, brightly lit room occupied by dozens of coffin-shaped conmods identical to hers. Most of them, she saw, were already open and empty, their oc­cupants moved elsewhere after their warstriders on distant Core D9837 had been junked. But a handful were clearly still occupied, their covers sealed tight, and with small gal­axies of lights winking at the console life-function readouts mounted on their sides.

  The conning modules were the life-support pods of her comrades in the Phantoms, the warstriders still fighting for their lives in the Galactic Core.

  As she rose unsteadily to her feet, someone shouted on the other side of the room, an alarm sounded, and med techs rushed to gather beside one of the occupied modules just as the cluster of console lights began shifting from green to amber and red.

  The top of the coffin cracked open, then slid aside, re­vealing a still, jumpsuited form inside. Kara couldn’t see who it was, but from the location she knew it was someone in First Squadron.

  The figure sat up—a sharp, abrupt movement—and screamed, shrill, harsh, and ragged with stark terror. It was Willis Daniels, her First Squadron senior sergeant. The med techs were struggling to hold him down while one of them pressed a hypogun’s muzzle against his throat.

  Kara started toward the cluster of men and women, but the major reached out and stopped her, a hand closing on her elbow. “You can’t help, Captain.”

  She pulled away. “He’s one of my people, damn it.”

  By the time she reached the tableau of techs and the strug­gling striderjack, the anesthetic was taking effect and Will was slumping back into his conmod. His eyes were still wide, however, staring at some horror invisible to the others present. His hands were balled into tight, white-knuckled fists, and his face and uniform were drenched with sweat. Kara caught an acrid whiff of urine and the frantic tic of a muscle at the corner of his eye.

  One of the techs looked up and met her eyes, then shook his head slightly. “T-P,” he said. “A bad one.”

  T-P. Transference psychosis. It was the part of the down side of long-range teleoperations through FTL links. A war­strider, a good warstrider, was good precisely because he could so identify with the machine he was jacking that it literally became his body, responding to his slightest thought. The trouble with such close identification, though, was that when the machine was destroyed, it was impossible to convince the jacker’s brain that he was safe, perhaps light years from the slashed wreckage of his strider.

  With direct feeds to the striderjack’s brain, there literally was no way for the mind—specifically the subconscious mind—to remind itself that it wasn’t housed inside the strider itself—not with millions of years of evolution deter­mining how the incoming sensory perceptions were inter­preted. In the old days, when the pilot was actually inside a warstrider as it was being pounded to scrap, the pilot might manage to escape, he might die, or he could suffer serious mental trauma from the shock of feeling his “body” torn apart. Now, even though his organic body was safe, there was actually a greater danger of mental injury than there’d been in the bad old days of direct combat.

  It was nothing so simple as the old cliché of being fright­ened to death by too realistic a dream; despite advances in psychodynamics, the human brain was still in many ways a mysterious and poorly understood entity, and it was capable of throwing astonishing inner defenses into place against what it perceived as dire and immediate threats. With the physical, traumatic death of the striderjack no longer a pos­sible outcome of battle, it turned out that the chief dangers in combat were insanity, catatonic withdrawal, or any of a fair-sized constellation of stress-induced symptomatologies.

  Stunned, hurting inside, Kara turned away, nearly bump­ing into Major Jamal, who’d followed her across from her conmod.

  “I wonder,” she told him quietly, “if we’re doing any­body any favors with the teleoperational stuff.” She nodded toward the nearest of the empty pods. “My people are still getting killed in there. Or worse.”

  “You know,” he said a little sadly, “people used to argue that the machine gun would make war too horrible to exist. Same for nuclear weapons. Now here we have a new tech­nology that’s supposed to save lives, and we’re still losing them.”

  It seemed a strange sentiment for a military man… though perhaps it could be expected of a psychtech. Even so, Kara had to agree, and nodded. “Maybe there’s no way around it,” she added. “Just new and different ways of kill­ing people.”

  She wanted to say something more, something to the ef­fect that at least teleoperation seemed to be cutting down on casualty percentages—two dead out of forty-eight was not bad, after all—but that really wasn’t the point. There was still what she had come to think of as the suicide-mission factor to consider. Two years ago, something like Operation Core Peek—sending a couple of companies on a strictly one-way sneak-and-peek into the Web’s no-trespass zone at the Galactic Core—would have been unthinkable. If for no other reason than that, some way would have had to have been found to get the information out, the op would never have gone down unless the people who’d gone in had a fair chance of coming back again. Now, though, with warstrider pilots able to operate their craft from the theoretical safety of a command base ship, the politicos and brass were a lot likelier to draw up op plans for lamebrained missions that didn’t have a chance of success, missions where survivabil­ity didn’t need to be considered. As a result the pilots were certain to be subjected to even more combat stress than they’d faced before.

  Case in point. Hochstader and Pritchard would still be alive if they hadn’t been sent in on Core Peek, an operation where the mission parameters stressed that the warstriders would return to the Stargate and Nova Aquila if practicable… but which everyone actually involved in the planning had known would be a suicide mission. If traumatic deaths were down, the ratio of psychological injuries was certainly higher. How many in her company, she wondered, would spend the rest of their existence in the m
ake-believe of ViRworlds?

  At the thought, she felt a swift chill of fear. Ran…

  Ran Ferris’s con module was one of the very last that remained sealed. She glanced up at the viewscreen, ignoring the tangled and wildly shifting nightmare shapes and images flickering across it to concentrate on the columns of text winking on and off down the screen’s right-hand side. That image, she saw, was coming from Number Ten—Ran’s Black Falcon. He was one of four striders still in the fight; as she watched, med techs were gathering around two more of the high-tech coffins, and Jamal quietly excused himself to go attend another newly revived pilot. She glanced around the war deck, spotted the conmod for Number Ten, and hurried over. It was still sealed, of course, but med techs and engineers were already gathering around it.

  On the screen on the nearby bulkhead, the pyramid loomed colossal. Blue lightning flashed, stabbing, explod­ing.…

  The image shivered, then abruptly shifted to a different view, from a different strider. An alarm sounded, and the lights on Ran’s console began shifting from green to amber to red. One of the techs touched a control, and the top of the module hissed open, revealing Ran’s body inside, his face taut, pale, and drawn behind his breathing mask. His eyes opened, the pupils black and enormous, still staring into some horror invisible to the rest of them. As the room lights hit them, the pupils closed down to pinpoints, and he blinked.

  His autonomous systems are back on line, she thought. Thank God.…

  “They’re breaking through!” Ran’s shout drowned out the alarm and echoed through the war deck compartment. “Stop them! Stop—”

  He blinked again, suddenly aware that he was no longer inside his warstrider. Several technicians reached down to hold him; Kara brushed past them and laid one hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay, Ran!” she told him, urgently, and gen­tly. “It’s okay! You’re back. It’s over.”