Jackers

by William H. Keith

  “Uh, yessir.”

  A half dozen other warstriders stood nearby, silently waiting. There were some people on foot, too, a platoon of armored infantry and a handful of senior officers, come to watch the great experiment. Among them was Travis Sinclair.

  That’s the man who sent Dev down into the hole, she thought, and she was surprised by her bitterness. She’d admired Sinclair, even loved him, in a hero-struck way. Now she saw him as another damned politician, a man so caught up in the jacker’s rush of playing god that he didn’t see the people around him as people. Perhaps he had once… but no more. This damned revolution of his seemed programmed for nothing but to devour children, and in the end no one would be better off for their sacrifice.

  What had happened to her people—full humans and genies—back on New America?

  A burst of static hissed against the background of her thoughts, then cleared. Vic’s voice sounded, frantic with fear and speed. “… Hagan, do you read me? This is Hagan, does anyone copy?”

  “We’re here, Vic,” Katya sent back. Fear clutched at her throat. “What’s your situation?”

  “I’m… I’m coming out. Katya, I’m sorry. Dev is lost. Dead. He must be dead.”

  The words left her numb, though somehow, she’d known them even before Vic had spoken. “What… what happened?”

  “I don’t know. We’d just reached the point where we could see the Naga—”

  “You did see it, then?” Sinclair’s voice cut in. Katya could see him holding a palm comm link with a cord jacked into his left T-socket. “The Naga?…”

  “I saw it, yeah.” Hagan’s voice was dry. “It just… attacked. No reason that I could see. It just rose up and blasted into the tunnel and smashed Dev’s Scoutstrider to bits.”

  “What about the Eriduan Naga?” Sinclair asked.

  “I don’t know. The thing got Fred, too. Just kind of washed over the pod and swallowed it. I didn’t see any change in the thing’s behavior. It just kept coming!”

  “It’s okay, Vic.” Katya had to work hard to keep her mental voice steady. “It’s okay. Are you clear now?”

  “Yeah. I think so. It chased me maybe a kilometer up the tunnel, then quit. I don’t see any sign of it now.”

  “Maybe that was the change we were looking for,” Sinclair suggested. “The Eriduan fragment communicated—”

  “I don’t think so, General,” Hagan interrupted. “Like I said, it just kept coming. Like it was mad, or something.” There was a long pause. “Okay, maybe it did change its mind and turn back. But there hasn’t been any attempt to communicate. And I don’t… I don’t think I can go back down there.…”

  Katya heard the agony in Hagan’s voice, the unsteadiness, the indecisiveness. The man was on the raw edge of collapse, and when she closed her eyes and tried to imagine him far below the world’s surface, alone, surrounded by unyielding night, she could easily understand. “Vic, you can’t do anything else. Get the hell out of there.” The words burned in her mind.

  “But if the Naga tries to communicate—” Sinclair began.

  “Dammit, there’s nothing more he can do! There’s nothing more any of us can do!”

  “Maybe one of us could go down and look for Dev,” Lee Chung volunteered. “I’ll go.”

  “You’d be wasting your time, Lee,” Hagan said. “Katya. Don’t let him come. I tell you, I saw the thing tearing his warstrider to pieces! I don’t see how he could have survived. Oh, damn it, Katya. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.…”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Vic.” Tears were stinging her eyes, blurring her vision. “He might… Dev might still make it.”

  The thought was not wholly irrational. Katya remembered well her own contact with a Naga, far, far below the humid, poisonous surface of Eridu. Somehow, the Naga she’d contacted—she found herself thinking of it as Fred’s parent—had analyzed her body chemistry, then manipulated it to keep her alive, even when her survival mask’s oxygen had given out. She remembered little of that encounter still, save for the first terrifying moments of it, closeted away in blackness absolute, with the weight of a world pressing down unseen above her head.

  It was hard to tell, sometimes, what was memory of actual events, and what was remembered nightmare. She shuddered, pushing back unwelcome images of being buried alive.

  Could the Naga hidden somewhere below the atmosphere plant keep Dev alive? She didn’t have enough information to formulate an answer. The Naga was capable of it, certainly, as the Naga on Eridu had proved with her. But if Dev had already been dead when it engulfed him, even a Naga’s near-miraculous mastery of chemistry would not have saved him. Xenophobes possessed remarkable powers of mind and of manipulation almost at the atomic level, but they were not gods.

  No miracle of mere chemistry or of nanotechnics would call back the dead.

  And if the thing had been trying to kill the human trespassers in its tunnel, it would have no reason to preserve his life.

  She wanted to believe Dev still lived, however, and she clung to that slender thread, clutching against her awareness like a talisman.

  “Vic?” Sinclair said. How she hated that voice now! “Can you patch a feed to us of what you saw?”

  “Y-yeah. Stand by.”

  Dreading the images as she was, Katya nonetheless lay back down in her slot and jacked home her C- and T-sockets. Full linkage with Hagan’s Fastrider resumed as he sent recorded images of what he’d seen in the tunnel. Briefly, horribly, Katya relived the nightmare darkness and close-pressing walls, saw the black tide surge forward, saw Dev’s Scoutstrider hit, jarred backward, then swept under by the flood. She saw Vic’s last glimpse of the RLN-90, the severed, metal limbs swallowed by the onrushing wave.

  She was trembling as she broke linkage, and again unbuttoned the Ghostrider’s hull and sat up, blinking back tears in the pale gold sunlight.

  She didn’t want to accept what she’d just seen.

  Hours later, Vic’s Fastrider appeared at the nearest entrance to the man-made mountain. The LaG-17 looked none the worse for its experience in the bowels of the planet, but it walked with what might be described as a beaten, even a despondent slouch of alloy legs and drooping hull. In all that time, there’d been no further word from underground, and Katya’s desperate hope that Dev might still be alive was relentlessly unraveling.

  “You all head on back to base,” Katya told the others. “I’m going to stay here.”

  “Katya…” Vic began.

  “Damn it, Vic! Get out of here!”

  “Let’s go, people,” Sinclair said. “Katya and Lanager will keep watch here, just… just in case Dev makes it out.”

  He didn’t sound as though he believed it.

  Katya knew she didn’t. Somehow, though, she still couldn’t make herself believe that he was really gone.

  The other warstriders filed away, leaving the Ghostrider in motionless, silent mourning outside the man-made mountain.

  Chapter 24

  If humans are master technicians, the beings known as Xenophobes are master chemists, possessing, apparently, a number of inward-turned senses that can analyze individual molecules in great detail. It is quite likely that they grow and program their own nano, and that much of their consciousness centers around, not their surroundings, but their own, inner workings.

  It has been suggested that this peculiar evolution arose to keep creatures sane that, though possessing super-genius minds, remain locked away for eons in the black bowels of their unchanging caverns.

  —Reflections on Intelligence

  Jame Carlyle

  C.E. 2543

  Three days later, the Imperial squadron dropped out of K-T space on the fringes of the Mu Herculis system.

  Two Kako-class cruisers, Haguro and Kinugasa. Four light cruisers, Nagara, Mogami, Suzuya, and the newly grown and assembled Zintu. Four destroyers, including the Amatukaze-class Urakaze, “the Wind in the Bay.” A dozen lesser craft, corvettes and light-hulled frigates.

&nb
sp; And leading them all was Kawashima’s flagship, the massive, kilometer-long dragonship Donryu.

  Kawashima was linked into Donryu’s AI network, with schematics of the system unfolding with a computer’s speed and crisp precision before his inner eye. Green diamonds glowed against the backdrop of stars, one embracing the golden glare of Mu Herculis A and almost lost in its light, a second surrounding the dim, red speck that was the system’s red dwarf pair, and a third tagging a single, brilliant white star shining just to one side of the primary. The graphic diamonds marked nearby sources of neutrinos; the stars produced neutrinos naturally, as part of the nuclear processes burning in their cores; the white “star,” however, was not a star, but a planet. A quick check of Donryu’s data base called up long scrolls of data on the Mu Herculis system. The world was Mu Herculis A III, and both the planet’s surface and nearby space should be dead, with all fusion plants shut down years ago. The neutrinos marking the planet indicated that someone was using fusion plants there, that they’d either fired up the big power system aboard the orbiting fragment of the sky-el, or they were generating power aboard orbiting spacecraft and with smaller plants on the ground.

  Kawashima had guessed right.

  Certain at first that Cameron must have gone to Lung Chi, he’d changed his mind after reflecting further. The young rebel Cameron, after all, knew as well as did Kawashima that the Imperium had full access to the histories of both him and his father. Cameron would guess, surely, that any deliberate search for him must include the Lung Chi system, even if the searchers were unaware that he had with him a fragment of tame Xenophobe and hoped to use it to make contact with the strange beings.

  Dev Cameron’s record, or such of it as he had access to through Donryu’s data base, indicated that he had a talent for doing the unexpected. If he thought the Empire might search for him at Lung Chi, he would go to Mu Herculis instead.

  Or not. The damned gaijin rebel was capable of carrying the they-know-that-I-know game back through any number of regressions. But Kawashima’s gut instinct insisted that Cameron had brought the refugees from New America here, to a Xeno-dead system that no one had even thought about for twenty years. Just in case he’d guessed wrong, Kawashima had sent the remainder of Ohka Squadron—minus the destroyers he’d left at New America and the smaller craft sent to check Loki, An-Nur II, and Sandoval—to Lung Chi.

  But the rebels, Kawashima had been certain throughout the month-long voyage from 26 Draconis, would be here.

  Donryu’s AI swiftly sorted through the flood of data swept up by the flagship’s scanners, analyzing it and feeding the conclusions through to her masters. The neutrinos were from a number of sources, all closely clustered together either in low orbit or on the Heraklean surface itself. The orbital sources were consistent with the neutrino signature of ten to fifteen shipboard fusion plants set to low output, plus numerous smaller ones… a picture wholly consistent with the number of ships stolen from the Imperial shipyard at Daikoku and the raiders that had taken them. The ground sources were smaller and much more tightly grouped, fusorpacks aboard warstriders or other large vehicles, most likely, and possibly base or shipboard fusion plants as well.

  He’d found the rebels.

  “Captain Obayashi,” he called, rasping out the order over the ship’s link network.

  “Hai, Chujosan!” Gonichi Obayashi was Donryu’s commanding officer, Kawashima’s flag captain in the parlance of an earlier, seafaring age. An efficient, tight-discipline officer with an impressive record, he’d commanded a cruiser during the Alyan Expedition and received command of Donryu as reward.

  “We will implement the Noguchi option. Please make all necessary preparations.”

  “Ah.” He could almost hear the reordering of Obayashi’s thoughts. “Sir. So bold a maneuver could have unfortunate—”

  “Please implement the Noguchi option, Obayashisan.” He edged the polite phrasing with duralloy. “Indulge me.”

  There was the slightest of hesitations. “Hai. It will take a few moments for the program to run.”

  “Notify me when you are ready to engage. And pass the order to the other vessels in the squadron. When we move, we will move together.”

  Noguchi was the name of a mathematics wizard—some called him the modern Einstein—who lived and worked at Tsukinoshi, on Earth’s moon. The Noguchi Equations were a complex set of variable field matrices that allowed shipboard AIs to better calculate the effects of local space curvature on orbiting singularities and to adjust the singularity harmonic tuning more precisely. In effect, they permitted warships to leave and enter K-T space far more deeply within the complex gravity wells of an inner planetary system than had ever been possible before.

  Starship captains, a notoriously conservative lot, still resisted taking their huge and expensive charges under K-T drive closer than one or two astronomical units to a star; nor were the Noguchi Equations foolproof. Several vessels had been lost while experimenting with the new programs, and complex multiple star systems such as 26 Draconis increased the chance of disaster to near certainty.

  Mu Herculis, however, was a simpler system; the B and C stellar components were small and far away, and Herakles, unlike New America, had no moon.

  And if Kawashima took Ohka Squadron into the inner system in the normal way, it would be several days before they reached Herakles and entered planetary orbit. The rebels—he checked his inner timekeeping sense, then cross-checked it with the navsim feed—would know the Imperials had arrived in another three hundred minutes. By the time the Imperials reached the planet, the rebels would be packed up and gone, accelerating toward the far side of the Mu Herculis system at 4 Gs or better.

  If he could jump closer now, however, before his own ship’s neutrinos crawling planetward at light speed warned the rebels of the squadron’s arrival, they would achieve complete and devastating surprise.

  Such surprise was worth the risk. Kawashima wanted these people, wanted to end this ragtag revolution once and for all. Embers might smolder still on New America and Eridu, but with the leaders dead or mind-strung puppets, there would be no Confederation, no rebellion.

  Within his link, he felt the flow of orders between ships, the data feeds, the terse acknowledgments. The special inner system control programs were running on all ships.

  “Ohka Squadron, attention to orders!” he called, rapping out the command with brisk and military efficiency. He named four of the smaller ships in his group. “Motiduki, Oboro, Amagiri, Tomoduru. You will maintain course and speed through fourspace. Seek to cut off stragglers or damaged vessels that escape our net.” As the acknowledgments flashed back from the frigates, he addressed the rest of his ships. “The rest of you, come with me. We will appear out of nowhere and confound these rebels who scorn the name and honor of our Emperor. Dai Nihon! Banzai! Banzai!”

  The cheering echoes of the replies across the squadron’s link net were still ringing within Kawashima’s mind as he gave the mental order. As one, eleven Imperial capital ships and eight frigates and corvettes vanished from normal space.

  “RED ALERT! RED ALERT! ALL HANDS TO BATTLE STATIONS!…”

  The link-downloaded call jolted Katya, dragging her up from dark and smothering musings. She’d been off duty and had taken the time to wander a little way from the Mount Athos base, finding a rocky crag overlooking the sweep of what once had been the Augean Peninsula.

  It had been three days. Dev must really be dead.

  She pulled out a communicator and snicked the jack home in her right T-socket. “COM Control!” she snapped. “This is Alessandro! What is it?”

  “Colonel, it’s an Imperial fleet! We read nineteen targets, closing fast!”

  “What range?”

  “About eight hundred thousand kilometers—“

  “What? How the hell did they get that close? Was somebody asleep on the jack?”

  “Negative, negative, Colonel! They just, just appeared! Dropped out of K-T space a few moments ago!
I saw them emerge on the broad-scan radar!”

  “Kuso! I’ll be right there!”

  Katya sprinted back up the slope to the rebel base, which by unspoken popular assent had become known as Morgan’s Hold. It was a long run, but she was in good shape and the nano meteffectors in her bloodstream were designed to enhance her physical performance on demand. She reached the fabricrete dome housing the base command center out of breath, with heart pounding, but on the way up she’d been able to tap a direct feed of data from the base, relayed down from orbit from the Tarazed. Eleven capital ships, including a Ryu-class, almost certainly the Donryu. Eight lesser craft. How in all the bleak hells of Buddha had the Impie bastards managed to figure out so quickly where the rebels had gone? And how had they managed to fine-tune their drives so precisely that they could emerge from the K-T plenum practically next door to Herakles?

  “What’s the status on our ships?” she shouted as she burst into the command center. It was a utilitarian control room, a bit cramped, lined with link couches and centered on a holoprojector that was currently showing a view of Herakles from space. The long, ruler-straight thread of the cast-off space elevator hung to one side. Nearby, a cluster of gold pinpoints hovered in space—the Confederation fleet. Outward, at the very edge of the projection field, a cluster of red lights gleamed balefully.

  The Imperials were shockingly close.

  “Almost to full-power and ready to break orbit,” Sinclair told her. She was vaguely aware of a half dozen other senior military officers there in the control room with him, Grier and Darwin Smith among them, but their ashen faces were fixed on the projection. She doubted that they even knew she was there. The couches were occupied, for the most part, by younger men and women, coordinating the communications and battle control for fleet and ground forces.

  “We weren’t expecting them so soon,” Sinclair said.

  It took a moment for Katya to realize he was speaking to her. “Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later,” she replied. “They must be on the jack over there, though, to have figured it out this fast.”