Battlemind (5 page)

The nuke’s expanding blast wave had pulverized the pyramid’s smaller cousins as well, sweeping most from the ground like clots of dust scattered by the descent of a broom and leaving the larger ones wrecked and half-melted. She scanned her tactical display.
Kuso!
Seventeen warstriders left operational, out of the original company of forty-eight.

“Ran!” she called over the tactical channel. His strider was still operational, thank God, the only one of her three lieutenants. She tried to stifle a small stab of relief; she had special and quite close feelings for Ran Ferris… but ones that she kept tightly reined in when they were on duty. Even the hint of favoritism—especially sexual favoritism—could destroy the best of military units. “Ran, do you copy?”

“Right here, Captain,” he replied.

“Let’s pull in the perimeter. Everyone who’s left, pull in tight for mutual defense.”

“Affirmative,” Ran said. “Will! Cyn! Are you on-line?”

“Here, Lieutenant,” Sergeant Cynthia Gonzales replied.

“Me too,” Sergeant Willis Daniels added.

“You heard the Captain. Let’s get ’em rounded up.”

Together, the officers and NCOs began herding the dazed, surviving warstriders across the flame-scoured plain, gathering them at a wreckage-strewn depression in the earth not far from where they’d originally touched down. The surface of the battlefield might have been swept clean by nuclear fire, but the Webbers had been emerging from underground as well as descending from me sky, and Kara had every reason to believe that more would be appearing at any moment.

Kara reached the depression and surveyed the blasted landscape. The other surviving striders began appearing now, dragging their way through the rubble or floating just above it in awkward dips and lurches. A quick scan of the display showing the company’s readiness figures gave her the bad news. Only six of me warstriders possessed all of their weapons intact, and two—Ed Furillo’s and Angel Shannon’s—were completely unarmed, with all weapons burned away or sealed uselessly inside faulty hull panels.

Her tactical display showed something else as well. There was movement in the shadows of the towers around the LZ, and in the sky high above the spreading cap of the mushroom. The Webbers were emerging once again onto the fire-savaged surface of this world.

“Maybe those of us who can should fire our Sabers,” Cynthia suggested. “Targets of opportunity… while we still can.”

“Negative on that,” Kara told her. “This is recon, not search-and-destroy. We’ll wait and use them if we have to, and only in self-defense.”

She caught the other woman’s mental shrug, and a hint of disagreement. “As you say, Captain.”

“Captain Hagan!” Will called. “Check the pyramid!”

Pivoting, she focused her damaged sensors on the ruin of the artificial mountain. The gaping hole in its side and bottom appeared to be closing, the edges softening and blurring as the countless small machines that had made up its bulk in the first place rearranged themselves. She could see individual pieces flowing down the canted surfaces or dripping off the rim of the base to the ground below. Was it repairing itself… or dissolving back into its component parts? She couldn’t tell, but it was uncomfortably clear that the nuclear strike had not solved their problem.

It had only postponed it.

She stared for a long moment at that huge and enigmatic structure. Looking into the hole in the thing’s side was like staring into a cavern, a mysterious black place filled with unknown horror. The horror was made worse by the knowledge that she’d gambled, and lost. Her decision to use nukes had been a bad one; the enemy had been slowed, but not stopped… and the price she’d paid had been half of the company, and probably the success of the operation as well.

“Ran?”

“Yeah?”

“You’ve got command. Hold the perimeter.”

“Now wait a minute, Kar.…”

“We need more data. We still don’t know how they’re coordinating, how they’re working together. Maybe I can get close enough to find out.”

“That’s not necessary, Captain,” the voice of Overwatch said.

“I think it is.”

“Kara, you can’t go in there!” Ran told her. “Not alone!”

“Who’s going to stop me?”

Ran’s strider unfurled one gleaming manipulator, jointed and oil-shiny. She watched the glitter of several imaging lenses as they scanned her.

“What are you going to do, Ran?” she asked quietly. “Dismantle me?”

The appendage hesitated, then gave an eloquent mechanical imitation of a shrug. “Damn it, Kar,” he said, using a private channel now. “What is it? You’re feeling guilty about the nuke?”

“Negative,” she snapped. She knew she was lying, and she knew Ran heard the lie in her voice. “Take over. Hold until relieved.”

False bravado, that. And useless.
Wasteful.
But she was out of answers and she had to do
something…
something besides wait for the enemy to overwhelm the last of the warstriders huddled together on Core D9837 and bring me operation to its final and inevitable conclusion. She pushed past Ran without another word, making her way toward the distant, towering pyramid.

She was afraid.

She had liked it better fighting the Empire… not that those days were over, by any means.

Since the dawn of Man’s emergence as a spacefaring species—since the end of the twentieth century, in fact, when the old United States and the Russian Commonwealth had turned their backs on the high ground of space—Mankind’s destiny, both on Old Earth and off, had been directed by Dai Nihon, the empire of Greater Japan. Through control of orbital industrial facilities and, ultimately, the secrets of faster-than-light travel and the quantum power tap, they’d spread that empire to the stars, building the Shichiju, an empire of over eighty colonized worlds and hundreds of research, mining, and military outposts scattered across a sphere of space over a hundred light years across.

Thirty years earlier, an unlikely union of diverse worlds and states scattered along the Shichiju’s periphery had declared independence and, after a short, bitter war, united as the Confederation, with its capital at New America. The peace that followed had been fragile and uncertain. Imperial Japan and its Hegemony far outnumbered the newly independent worlds, and no one was betting mat they would keep their newfound independence for long.

The immediate threat of renewed war had ended, though, when Dev Cameron—or his downloaded personality, at any rate—had returned unexpectedly to human space after a twenty-five-year absence with a portion of the DalRiss exploratory fleet, bringing warning of the strange civilization that appeared to be energetically transforming the Core of the Galaxy.

The Web. For the first time, it was clear that
Man
was at risk… not just some one faction or political group. For survival, Confederation and Empire had allied with one another, joining their fleets and their efforts in an imperfect military union. A battle had been fought at Nova Aquila as the Web came through the Stargate from the Core; victory had been won, though not so much by the efforts of the Unified Fleet as by the intervention of the Overmind, a still poorly understood phenomenon arising out of the combined interaction of billions of interlinked minds working through the human computer network. Since that battle, Confederation and Imperium had maintained their uneasy truce, studying the Web and preparing for its next emergence.

For two years, now, the Unified Fleet had maintained its watch at Nova Aquila. A science team aboard the
Carl Friedrich Gauss
continued to study what little data had been gleaned thus far, both about the Web and the Nova Aquila Stargate. Teleoperated probes were sent through, both for information garnering and as a part of Shell Game, the attempt to plant disinformation about the human worlds for the Web to pick up.

And there’d been raids like this one, both Confederation and Imperial.

She looked again at her warning discretes. Her strider would never make it into space again anyway; any attempt by her to get off this barren world would be doomed to failure.

So she might as well make the sacrifice of her strider count for something.

Her progress across the open ground had been slow. Her magnetics were generating scarcely enough lift against the faltering local magfields to hold her aloft, much less to propel her forward. She was compelled to drag herself along with her manipulators, and that made for slow going.

The pyramid was less than five hundred meters away now, towering upward above her and canted slightly forward, as though it might at any moment topple over and crush her beneath its immense weight. From this range, the surface appeared to be crawling, writhing with a pseudolife of its own. The crater blasted into the thing’s side was definitely smaller now, as though the machines making up the pyramid’s bulk were realigning themselves to fill it in. She could make out movement inside and the blue flicker of something that might be artificial lightnings at the very edge of her resolution.

“If you can get a little closer, Captain,” the voice of Overwatch told her, “we might be able to get a look at what’s going on in there.”

“That was the idea,” she said. It was good to know Overwatch was supporting her decision now. Well, through the telemetry, they could see the same readouts that she could. They knew she was never going to get this strider off-world again.

“Watch it! Watch it! They’re breaking through!”

“Lieutenant Ferris! We need support over—”

“C’mon, people! Tighten up! Watch your fronts!”

“I’ve got kickers! Kickers breaking through sector one!”

“Valda! Where are you?”

“Valda’s bought it—”

In the distance, she could hear the shouts, the screams, the firm commands and harsh emotions. It sounded as though battle had just been joined back at the perimeter. She wasn’t tuned into their tactical frequency now, but she was hearing their voices from someone’s commo console back at the command center. She was tempted to open the tactical channel again, to find out what was happening, to find out if Ran was still okay… but she suppressed it. The rest of the Phantoms were on their own now.

As was she.

She saw a scuttling of shapes ahead and froze in position, panning left to right with her particle cannon. The shapes—long-legged and as gracefully sleek in their movements as spiders—were visible for but an instant, and then they were gone, lost in the rubble. She was close to a spill of debris from a building knocked flat by the nuke. Reaching out to some of the twisted metal-alloy ribs that had formed the structure’s foundations, she hauled herself along more quickly, moving hand-over-hand like a monkey swinging through the trees.

The enemy kickers ignored her. Possibly, she thought, she’d been spared this long because she was only a single machine. She was beginning to get the idea that the Web did not fully understand the concept of individuals carrying out operations apart from the activities of
other
individuals.

An interesting datum, that, and possibly one that would prove useful.

A laser flared, the beam striking her hull from the left and boiling away a few hundred grams of the now-dead Naga shell. The Web, it seemed, was taking an interest in her again. Possibly she’d moved too close to the pyramid, which bulked high above her like a vast and overhanging cliff of polished rock. The laser fired again, missing her by centimeters. Pivoting, she returned fire with her particle cannon, the electrical discharge snapping across the blackened rubble of the fallen building with the dazzle of an arc-welder’s torch.

The cavern, shrunken now somewhat, was still immense, a vast hollowing of the cliff above her head, the interior aglow with soft, blue light. She tried to make out the shapes there, tried to make sense of them, but there was nothing for her mind to grasp hold of. All she could really see was…
movement.

Insect-shapes.Millions of them, many as small as her hand, some as large as a personal flitter, a few bigger than a house. They were cascading down off the walls of the burned-out cavern, spilling out into the open air, dropping to the ground and surging forward. Laser fire sniped and hissed around her; she hit the ground heavily, her strider rolling to port, as her manipulators were burned away in the sudden onslaught.

She couldn’t move.

That was the worst part of the nightmare, the feeling of unendurable helplessness as those glittering little monsters poured across the rubble toward her, a swarm as unstoppable as the incoming New American tides at Columbiarise. She could hear the gnaw and chink as they began disassembling her warstrider, feel the machine rocking heavily as they rolled it further onto its side, sense the stripping of the last of her surface armor.…

She gave the mental command to abort, but all systems were shutting down now in a cascade failure, nothing responding, her senses switching off one by one. Her last optical image before the camera was wrenched apart by bright-alloyed jaws was of the Great Annihilator, hanging low above the fire-swept horizon.

Then she felt them opening up the body of her strider, breaking it apart with the ugly sound of shredding metal.…

Chapter 4

One of the great enlightenments arising from the past few centuries of technic revolution is the knowledge that it doesn’t matter whether our sensory input is passed along a few centimeters of optic or audial nerve tissue, or is being beamed across thousands of kilometers of empty space. Late in the twentieth century, a private commercial venture placed a small, primitive, and simpleminded robotic device on the surface of Earth’s moon; for a fee, attendees at an entertainment center on Earth could teleoperate the device, steering it across the face of the moon as onboard cameras relayed views of what lay ahead.

In this way, thousands of people, youngsters and adults, shared in the thrill of exploring the moon in person… while never leaving their seats in that entertainment center on Earth. This, arguably, was the first of a long chain of experiments in large-scale teleoperational presence.