Battlemind (7 page)

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 make-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.”

He struggled for a moment, then relaxed, opening his eyes and fixing his gaze on Kara. “You’re… okay?” he asked, his voice hoarse.

“Fine. How do you feel?”

“Don’t ask. Kuso, that’s the best argument I can think of for immortality. I
hate
getting killed!”

“The worst part is coming back to do it all over again,” Kara said, nodding agreement. “Can you sit up yet?”

“I think so.”

As she helped him get up and out of the conmod, she wondered if Core Peek had been worth the price they’d paid for too damned little in the way of solid intel.

“I wonder if it was worth it?” Ran asked, staring up at the image on the viewscreen and echoing her own dark thoughts. He seemed to sense her mood and reached out to put his arm around her shoulder. Normally, she discouraged such PDAs—public displays of affection, as they were known in the military—but she was tired and unhappy, and she needed that fleeting brush of human contact.

“Damned if I know, Ran,” she said, letting him squeeze her close. “Damned if I’ll
ever
know.”

Chapter 5

Anyone not convinced that genuine differences in thought processes, in worldview, in concepts such as self, duty, or society, exist between the members of different intelligent species
—
the products, remember, of separate and distinct evolutions, biologies, and histories
—
is invited to consider those differences as they are manifest between different cultures within the same species
—
Man. Japanese of traditional backgrounds perceive themselves quite differently in many fundamental respects than do, say, Hispanics, Europeans, or Americans. They are more in tune with their social surroundings, less tolerant of difference, more willing to sacrifice personal comfort or freedom for the good of society. It has been suggested that their talent for working together toward common goals is responsible for their remarkable success in the twenty-first century, when theirs became the dominant culture on Earth.

—
Rising Sun’s Glory

D
ARLENE
H
U

C
.
E
. 2530

Admiral Isoru Hideshi was completely naked, as were the other five—three men, two women—sharing the shuttle pod’s small passenger compartment for the passage across open space to Tenno Kyuden. The six of them were strapped into six of the twelve couches filling the pod’s claustrophobic cabin. Acceleration provided their only sensation of weight.

His nudity bothered him scarcely at all; it was a small loss of
men
—the word could mean either face or mask—that was more than compensated for by the rich symbolism of the act. By shedding their clothing, Hideshi and his fellow passengers were acting out a kind of play, symbolically leaving material possessions behind as they took passage to the very Gates of Heaven.

And, of course, their nudity made it easier for the security personnel, who were examining them even now with a ruthless, near-microscopic scrutiny through the array of sensors embedded in the surrounding bulkheads and in the seats to which they were strapped.

Impassively, Hideshi watched the Great Wheel unfold before him on the vessel’s viewall.
Tenno Kyuden
—the Imperial Palace—was far more splendid, more spectacular than any holo, even than any ViRsimulation could possibly render it.

In some ways, the Palace reminded him of one of those immense, glittering, crystal-heavy chandeliers that some Western cultures affected in ballrooms or fancy dining halls. It had begun as a simple wheel attached at its hub to the jackstraw-tangled complex of the Singapore Synchorbital station, but in the past few centuries, construction had been unceasing as more and more modules and apartments and Imperial functionary habitats had been added. Now the structure was wider than the largest
ryu
dragonship and far more massive. Its rotation provided varying levels of spin gravity for the habitats within, the precise acceleration of a given level depending on how far it was from the hub, where it was essentially zero.

The Wheel’s hub was attached to a tangle of zero-gravity structures that zigzagged out along the orbital. The entire complex was positioned at the synchorbit slot above Earth’s Singapore Sky-el, the slender elevator tower that connected the island of Palau Linggae on the equator, located just south of Singapore, with that spot in orbit some 36,000 kilometers directly overhead where orbital period precisely matched Earth’s twenty-four-hour rotation.

Moments before, the pod had left the main sky-el receiving bay and was drifting now across open space toward the Wheel’s hub.

“Pod
Swan’s Flight,
this is Palace of Heaven Approach Control,” a voice said softly inside his head, speaking through his cephlink. “Passenger One. Verify, please, your identity.”

Hideshi gave a single sharp, precisely military nod.
“Hai.
Rear Admiral Isoru Hideshi, of the Imperial carrier
Soraryu.
I open myself to your inspection.”

He could feel the cold fingers of a security observer aboard the Palace probing his cephlink, then pushing through the nanotechnically grown circuitry to his personal RAM, opening files, extracting data, examining, comparing.…

Such stringent security safeguards were necessary, of course, and Isoru accepted them without reservation. His career, no, his entire life had been dedicated to the Empire and to the ideal of the god-Emperor, and the Emperor’s safety was of paramount importance. The shuttle was one of a small fleet of service and orbital transport vehicles kept at Singapore Synchorbital for the sole purpose of carrying visitors to and from the Imperial Palace. Passengers aboard those shuttles, as well as on the handful of tube shuttles that connected the hub of the Great Wheel with the rest of the Synchorbital, could be meticulously scrutinized during their approach. Any deviation from the expected, any suspicious shadow picked up within his body by the X-ray and infrasound scanners, any change in the arrays of data stacked within his personal RAM, and he would be immediately apprehended by the army of security personnel waiting within the Palace. If the threat were deemed serious enough, he would be cut down before docking by one of the remote lasers mounted in the bulkheads… or if the threat were more serious still, the pod could be detonated long before it was close enough to be a threat to the Palace or the person of the god-Emperor.

Hideshi cast a wary eye on his naked companions. One of the men was Captain Shigeru Ushiba, his chief aide, but the other four were strangers to him. He hoped he wasn’t about to be vaporized because one of them was detected carrying a bomb in his or her abdominal cavity.