Jackers (15 page)

Chapter 10

Time is everything; five minutes make the difference between victory and defeat.

—Admiral Lord Nelson

ca.
C.E.
1805

The weapon was called
sempu,
“whirlwind,” and it was built into the hull of some warstriders as a close-range antipersonnel measure. Often it was set to fire automatically and indiscriminately, when any moving target came within range. A 40mm shell disintegrated as it cleared the weapon’s muzzle, loosing an expanding cloud of lead pellets like a shotgun blast. The pellets were strung together by tangled meters of monofilament, threads no thicker than a single molecule and far stronger than steel. Dispersing in a filmy, high-velocity cloud, the stuff sliced through everything in its path, vegetation, light armor, muscle, bone, all with equal ease.

Lying facedown in the pavement rubble, Katya felt the ripping wind of the horror’s passing half a meter above her back. An instant later, a CPG blast struck the Tachi like a lightning bolt, dazzling her even through tight-shut eyelids, ripping the strider’s dorsal armor apart in a splatter of molten duralloy. It took another step, then crashed forward, and the concussion jolted Katya through the ground.

There was a long moment of relative silence; the roar and thud and crackle of battle still thundered all around her, but it was quiet here. Then she heard a stifled sob over her helmet’s speakers, and something that might have been a groan.

Shakily, she rolled over, looking back. Francine, blood-splattered but not obviously hurt, was lying on her side, staring with shock-gilt blankness at a nearby tangle of steaming, neatly diced flesh and viscera. The
sempu
blast must have caught Ken Maubry full-on as he dove for cover. The left side of his head from nose to ear lay unmarked on the ground, the unwinking eye staring at Katya with something that might have been accusation.

“Come on, Francine,” she said, rising to her knees.

“He… he…”

“We can’t help him.”
That
was obvious. “Let’s move!”

Francine tried to sit up and her left arm dropped from her body in a sudden gush of blood. The weapons tech just sat there, staring stupidly at the limb, severed just below her elbow, where it lay on the ground in front of her.

Damn!
A loop of the
sempu
cloud must have snicked through her arm, and she hadn’t even felt it. Shock was numbing her now, could kill her if Katya didn’t move fast.

Moving to Francine’s side, she gentled the woman to the ground, then used a length of bloody flexcloth—she thought it must be a strip sliced from Maubry’s bodysuit—to tie off the stump.

She was giving Francine an injection of emergency medical nano from her belt first aid kit when the hum and creak of a moving strider close behind her made her turn and look up.

Relief flooded through her. It was
Mission Link,
the Warlord’s hull torn and scratched in places, but undamaged. The big machine’s blunt fuselage dipped toward her, a parody of a bow, and the central bulge of the commander’s module opened up. Vic Hagan sat up in the slot and waved. “Katya! Katya, you all right?”

She waved back. “I’m okay! Francine’s hurt.”

“We have to odie, Boss. They’re pullin’ us out.”

He slid out of the open slot, clambered to the ground, and hurried across to Katya and Francine. Together, they half carried half dragged the woman back to the motionless Warlord. The medical nano was already taking effect, sealing off the bloody stump and easing her into a painless haze. If they could get her back to a med center, nanosomatic engineers would take care of the rest, right down to growing her a new arm.

If
they could get her back. According to Vic, the Confederation forces were already in full retreat from Cape Dickson and the spaceport.

“
Kuso!
” she swore. “Who gave a nullheaded order like that?”

“It was right from the top,” Vic replied. “General Grier. At least he was the one who told me.”

Katya shook her head. “But we were winning, damn it!”

“That’s what Witter said. I dunno, Boss. I just work here.” Carefully supporting the almost unconscious Francine, they scrambled up the Warlord’s flank, then squeezed into the riderslot together. Warstriders weren’t designed with passengers in mind; the commander’s module was coffin-sized, large enough for one person lying down… or possibly two if they were very friendly.

Or for three squeezed in and sitting upright with the hatch open. Katya clung to a handhold on the hull as Vic barked an order and the machine straightened upright again. He spoke again, his words picked up by the strider’s external audio sensors, and the warstrider pivoted sharply, then swept forward with long-legged, ground-eating strides.

Odd. When she was linked, Katya was never aware of this lurching, swaying motion as the machine paced across open ground. She hoped she wasn’t going to disgrace herself by being sick inside her helmet.

Vic had his glove off, his palm pressed against the command module’s interface, an expression of studied concentration on his face as he stayed in communication with the strider’s pilot.

“Okay,” he said, opening his eyes and pulling his hand off the contact. “Bad news, I’m afraid. Witter says a lot of our people got hit while they were trying to disengage. The line’s falling apart.”

Katya could picture it. Of all tactical maneuvers, the hardest are those carried out in the face of the enemy, especially if they require a force already engaged to break off the action. When the force trying to withdraw is composed primarily of newbies and raw recruits, the maneuver is almost certain to disintegrate into a confused, every-man-for-himself rout.

This was not the way it was supposed to work, Katya thought. The plan had called for her ambush force to punch the invaders off the north end of the spaceport, sweeping across the apron like the swinging of a gate, then joining up with the rest of the 1st Rangers in the spaceport strip. If the Imperial assault unit could be driven into a tight enough pocket, its numbers sharply reduced, it would be trapped against the sea, unable to maneuver, unable to do anything but surrender or be destroyed.

The order to retreat with the maneuver still only half-completed had turned the situation completely upside down. Katya’s striders were streaming off toward the east and southeast now, desperately vulnerable to a sudden counterpunch from the hard-pressed Imperials.

“I’m going to have some words with Grier when I see him again,” she promised.

If I get out of this alive.

“What the hell were you thinking of!” Sinclair demanded. Held up in a meeting at the new government headquarters under Stone Mountain, Sinclair had arrived on-line only moments ago, to find the battle already begun… and already lost. Floating above the sprawl and color of the virtual reality battlefield, he could see the Imperial striders emerging from the pocket into which they’d been jammed, rushing forward in fireteams of two and four machines, slicing into the disorganized rabble that was the Confederation retreat.

Grier bristled. “What do you mean?
Kuso,
Travis, Alessandro’s wing was dangling way out in the open, completely exposed! If I hadn’t given the order to retreat, she’d have been cut off and destroyed!” He pointed, a sweep of a virtual arm. “And these Imperial landings on the mainland! All they have to do is move here, and our entire army on the cape is trapped!”

Sinclair studied the flow of red and blue for a moment. “Your timing, General,” he said slowly, “is off. Another twenty minutes, and Katya would have had the lid welded shut!”

“I saved the army!”

“I think, General, that you don’t fully understand what is at stake here. If we simply hold on, if we simply survive, we lose.”

“But—”

“We needed that spaceport, General! To get our people out. Our only hope was to bloody the Imperials badly enough to make them pull back and maybe reconsider a second landing. Now… I don’t know.”

“We… we could order our people back into the attack.” Grier sounded contrite now. “The Imperials aren’t well organized yet. We could still throw them off the spaceport and into the sea.”

“No. Look there, and there. They’ve already taken the offensive back. And our people are too disorganized to stop them now. It’s going to take hours to form them up again. We’ve already lost it.”

Minutes more passed, and the retreat continued all along the line. In the air above the spaceport, a tiny, golden beetle flitted across the battlefield, moving west to east. It was followed closely by a second… then a third.

Sinclair knew instantly what those glittering objects were without having to tap the AI’s data base. Ascraft—big transport ascraft, Stormwinds and Typhoons—dropping down from orbit, circling the battle-torn spaceport and settling to the apron on blasts of fusion-heated plasma. Focusing closely on one, he saw new warstriders unfolding from the riderslots in their bellies.

Other ascraft were coming out of the west in waves.

“That’s it,” he said slowly. “The heavies are coming down. All we can do now is save what we have.”

These, he was sure, were the Imperial heavy striders, the second assault wave consisting of powerful Daimyos and Katanas and Samurais. Too massive to pod-drop from orbit, they had to ride down aboard ascraft, landing at a spaceport already secured by advance forces. No doubt the enemy commander’s plan had called originally for seizing the spaceport so that the heavies could land, then throwing the newcomers against Jefferson itself.

Obviously, the enemy had altered that plan; as long as they could find a place to touch down, the heavies could be used as effectively as reinforcements at the spaceport as anywhere else.

And they were coming down squarely in the rear of Colonel Alessandro’s forces, trapping them between themselves and the surviving Tachis.

Sinclair blamed himself. He might pride himself on his ability to choose good people, but, though Grier was not a bad officer, he’d been a poor choice for this particular slot. He’d been the weak link in the chain, and Sinclair should have been here, helping to manage the battle.

“Okay, General,” he said gently. “Let’s see what we can salvage out of this mess.”

Donryu
remained in orbit about New America, close beside the planet’s space station. Though her weapons personnel were all linked in, her most powerful laser and CPG batteries ready to fire, she did not participate in the fighting for Port Jefferson. For one thing, since she was in low orbit, her actual time over a given target was measured in minutes, an extremely brief period of time for sensor scans to be updated, then evaluated by AI terrain and military specialists in order to single out worthwhile targets. More important, the landing forces were everywhere closely engaged with the rebels, both on the spaceport apron and on the mainland outside of the capital. Nowhere could the orbiting forces target rebel warstriders or equipment without risking hitting their own people, and Tetsu Kawashima, like every good military commander, was well aware of the dangers posed by so-called friendly fire.

Better to remain patient, keeping
Donryu
and her consorts here in command of local space, and leaving the fighting on the surface to the men trained to do it. Ozawa and Mishima, Kawashima’s two assault commanders, were the best there were for this sort of combat. The heavy assault striders under Takeo Fuchi would be touching down by now as well, and Fuchi was a veteran of Lung Chi, Loki, and Alya A-VI.

It was always chancy, launching an invasion from space against any world. Even with complete control of local space, orbiting spacecraft could scan and track only a fraction of what was going on in and beneath a planet’s atmosphere. Too, they were operating against an entire
world,
with a population of tens of millions, a surface area composed of hundreds of millions of square kilometers of ocean, woods, mountains, and rugged outback terrain. There were too many hiding places, too many villages, settlements, remote encampments for space or ground forces to control everything. The best the invaders could hope for was to seize and hold certain key positions—factories and manufacturing centers, the spaceport and airfields large enough to serve as ports, the capital.

Fortunately, that was all that was really necessary. With those in Imperial hands, resistance might continue in more remote areas, but it would be isolated and scattered, and it would be the Empire that controlled the planet’s production and economy. Complete victory was only a matter of time,
if
the invaders moved with deliberation, calculation, and overwhelming force.

Kawashima knew well that it was still possible to lose what he had already gained here, through carelessness, through haste, through ill-preparedness.

He was determined to make no such amateur’s mistakes.

“Vic! Watch it! Hang on!”

The Warlord dipped and spun as heavy caliber rounds snap-snap-snapped overhead. Vic, still sitting in the open command module with Katya and her unconscious weapons tech, leaned forward against Katya’s back, pressing her forward into the slot. “Hide your eyes!” he snapped, and an instant later, the Warlord’s left CPG discharged with a crackling blast of blue-white energy and the acrid stink of ozone. The fog lit up, though Vic could see neither the target nor the effect of the shot. Above and behind him, the Warlord’s rotary cannon suddenly spun and shrieked, the racket tearing at his ears for an agony of seconds.

“Okay, Captain,” Witter’s voice said, speaking in his mind. Somehow, despite the commotion, Hagan had managed to keep his palm implant against the interface. “We got him.”

“What was it?”

“Another Tachi. We fried him, don’t worry. You guys okay up there?”

He leaned back, letting Katya straighten up again. In front of her, Francine DelRey was still slumped back into her lap. Turning, Katya met his eyes and nodded, her short, dark hair bobbing inside her transplex helmet.

“We’re okay, Witter,” Hagan said. “Keep moving.”