Netlink (19 page)

Ran Ferris strode rapidly over the crest of the hill, unwilling to silhouette
Saberslash
against open sky for a second longer than was necessary. He sensed movement ahead… and in the same instant, his strider’s motion detector flashed an alarm, bracketing a pocket of deeper shadow against the blackness beneath a clump of trees a hundred meters to the left.

“Strikers, Striker Two-one!” he called. “I’ve got a bogie at three-five-five, range one hundred!” He wanted a solid ID before he started shooting… but even as he barked his warning, the shadow moved with sudden speed and a graceful unfolding of spidery legs, shifting left up the hill and past Ferris’s position. As it moved, it pivoted and fired, strafing as it ran sideways.

White fire exploded across Ferris’s forward view, and red cautionary lights winked on, indicating hits… and damage, all superficial so far. Ferris returned fire at almost the same instant, loosing a burst of hivel cannon fire in a buzz saw shriek of high-velocity metal that snapped and sparked and shrilled as it ricocheted wildly from the other strider’s armored hull. He followed up with a shot from his KC-20 particle accelerator cannon, the PAC loosing blue lightning in a sizzling bolt that struck the other machine squarely, then vented itself into the ground in sheets of blue-white fury.

Data scrolled down past the right side of Ferris’s view forward, listing mass, weaponry, power levels, range. A Tsurugi…

An explosion shattered trees to his right, hurling splinters and a geyser of sand and earth into the sky. Suddenly, the night was filled with crisscrossing streams of blue and orange fire, as forces hidden in the shadows suddenly advanced, weapons blazing.

“Sandman, Sandman!” he called over the tactical link. “Striker Two is engaged! Estimate… ten, possibly twelve enemy warstriders within sensor sweep range. Request air support!”

“Striker Two, Sandman. On the way!”

The Tsurugi had been damaged, either by the blast from Ferris’s PAC or by the heavy fire it was taking from other Black Phantoms moving now across the ridge. He could see the enemy strider clearly now by the sullen red glow of near-molten duralloy near a gaping wound in the machine’s side. He triggered a volley of lasers, then unfolded his 70mm grenade launcher in its side-mounted tube. The weapon thumped, and a second later the enemy strider was silhouetted by a savage flash behind it. The blast staggered the machine, dropping it to the ground, but its legs flexed, lifting it clear of smoking ground and carrying it, limping, back toward the lab compound.

With an inner jolt, Ferris realized that there was no fear now, nothing but a pounding, raw excitement, an eagerness to come to grips with the bastards and take them apart. Yelling to the rest of his squadron, Ferris followed the damaged Impie machine.

Kara sensed the message, an electric throbbing in the sea around her. Knowing that it would be coming sooner or later, she had been waiting for it, with subroutines in place at the likely communications nodes. Though not entirely certain what the exact form or protocol of the message would be, she was ready to adapt to the needs of the moment.

The message was from the MilTech Lab and it was coded Priority Urgent: Code One. Reaching out from beneath the shell, she intercepted it.

Even when interfaced with a computer network, humans had slow reactions; her thoughts were still being driven by biochemical reactions in her organic brain, after all. There was no way she could react quickly enough to stop the incoming message, which had already been received and routed to the Aresynch communications center by the time she was aware of it.

But she could change it… specifically the two binary bits designating its priority level. With a thought, the message’s priority tag dropped from “urgent” to “routine.”

Incoming fire flashed and stuttered across the sky. Jerry Brewster’s LCR-12 Lancer exploded, the white-hot flare of his fusor pack briefly turning night to actinic day. In the swiftly fading light, a big, four-legged Omata appeared for an instant in Ferris’s view forward, twenty degrees to the left; he pivoted hard and snapped in the weapons lock, embracing the Imperial strider in green-glowing targeting brackets.
Fire!
A full barrage of laser fire and PAC bolts seared across the Omata’s hull, peeling open black armor, scouring away nanoflage to expose shiny hot metal underneath. One leg shattered, the struts and jointed footpad spinning through the air.

The battle was only seconds old, but Ferris could tell that they would need to escalate things fast or be overwhelmed.

“Sandman! This is Striker Two!” he yelled over the tactical channel. “Where the gok is that air?”

“Not much longer, Two. They’re deploying now.” There was a two-beat pause. “Striker Two, we’re reading new forces swinging in on your position from the north, range about five hundred. You’d better get airborne yourself or you’re going to get hemmed in.”

“Roger that!” He shifted to his squadron’s command frequency. “Striker Two, this is Two-one. Okay, boys and girls. Pick up your feet! We’re going to gausslev.” He initiated a reload command, changing the ammunition in his grenade launcher, then loosed a thumping staccato of rapid fire. QEC nano spread in a white cloud ahead of Ferris’s strider. A green light winked against his vision, indicating an active floater field.

“I’ve got readings at ten to the eight gauss!” he called. “I’m floating.…”

Saberslash
slid forward, accelerating rapidly until it was moving far more swiftly than legs could have carried it.

His sensors picked up the flight of incoming warheads, rockets fired in a cloud from defenses within the MilTech perimeter. Rising and unfolding from its shielded recess in his hull, his hivel cannon pivoted on its universal mount and shrieked, hurling high-velocity slugs of ultra-dense metal into the warheads’ paths. Fresh explosions lit up the night, rippling and pulsing. One rocket slipped through, missed by his defense fire, detonating with a thunderous slam against
Saberslash’s
hull. The explosion rocked him back, the suspensor field yielding with the blow and absorbing some of the shock.

Recovering, Ferris darted ahead, zigzagging lightly across the gently descending ground to make things as interesting as possible for the Imperial gunners and to avoid presenting an analyzable pattern to the MilTech facility’s defensive AI. The MilTech lab perimeter was just ahead; the facility was still brightly lit, and he could see the dark, scrambling shapes of people dashing among the buildings.

Heavy fire was coming from the lab now. God, the place was armed and armored like a fortress! Ferris paused to deliver a volley of suppressive laser fire at one of the enemy batteries, then pressed forward, sending his strider skimming across the ocher sand in uneven swerves.

Despite his maneuvers, a hivel round slammed into
Saberslash.
The shock rang through the warstrider and it dipped wildly to the left… then recovered on magnetic lifts. Panels opened and closed on stubby fins, using airflow to adjust the machine’s attitude. A missile streaked across the desert at an altitude of two meters; his AI spotted it, calculated that it would strike within two seconds, and destroyed it with a hivel burst that erupted across the desert floor like a thundering line of geysers.

“Sandman! Striker Two!” he yelled. “Where’s that goking air support?”

“On the way, Two. Hold on!”

And then the aircraft were there, four A/V-48 Gyrfalcons, booming up over the dune ridge at his back, great, black, complex shapes held aloft by stubby, variable-geometry wings and howling air-breather plasma jets. Laser fire flashed from chin nacelles and ventral turrets, lighting the sky. The deadly fire being concentrated on the warstriders shifted suddenly as the gunners retargeted on the aircraft.

Larger than warstriders, the Gyrfalcons were also more powerful, more heavily armored, and capable of astonishing stop-and-go pinpoint maneuvers. One machine darted overhead, came to a halt, hovering, turning slightly as it bathed the lab complex in searing, rapid-fire pulses from its autolasers, then skittered to the side to avoid an answering barrage. Ferris saw sparks struck from its nanoblackened hull, but the machine recovered, then darted ahead once more with a high-G acceleration that would have made any nonlinked pilot black out. Air-to-surface missiles shrieked overhead, lancing into the lab compound and detonating in quick-fire thunderclaps.

“Move it, Striker Two!” he yelled. “Rush ’em! Now!”

Under cover of the hovering, darting Gyrfalcons, the Third Squadron hurtled forward, hitting the facility’s mesh-fence perimeter and smashing through.
Saberslash
faltered momentarily as it drifted over a low-gauss patch of the ground suspensor field, and Ferris put out two legs to steady the strider and pole it forward a few meters. Then the field reestablished itself and he was levitating again. A shoulder-launched rocket exploded against his armor, scouring off a patch of nanoflage. The other striders were losing their ebon-black invisibility, too, as repeated hits scraped off their light-drinking coats faster than they could be regrown.

No matter. The night no longer afforded concealment. Firing a rippling volley of grenades to spread the surface nanofield well into the compound, he edged forward, returning fire when he received it, spraying anything that looked like a possible weapons hard point as his AI pointed it out.

“Striker Two, this is Sandman.”

“Sandman, Striker Two! Go ahead!”

“Strikers One and Three are moving now. Watch your fire and wait for solid IDs.”

“Roger that. Two! Did you all catch that? Watch who the gok you’re shooting!”

Operation Sandstorm had called for an initial three-part assault, with Squadrons Two, Three, and Four splitting up at the landing zone, then converging on the MilTech Lab from the north, west, and—wading through the shallow waters of the bay—south. First to engage the enemy, Third Squadron had caught the brunt of the resistance in the center, serving as a diversion while the other two squadrons swung out and around and into position, squarely on the Imperials’ northern and southern flanks. Shifting his view to the right, he could see two of Fourth Squadron’s Cutlasses emerging from the inky waters of the Labyrinthine Bay, clambering up onto the waterfront between a pair of sleek hydrofoil skimmers moored at the piers. Gunfire from the base greeted them, but it was scattered and ill-coordinated.

There is in every battle a tempo, a sense of the pace of things, that lets those attuned to it feel which way the fight is going. Ferris felt that tempo now throughout the combat link, an electric excitement in the voices of his squadron mates over the tactical channel, that told him that the enemy defenses had broken, that they were victorious.

An Imperial strider emerged from cover, adrift on its own QEC nano, already badly damaged and barely able to move. Ferris tracked, targeted, and fired in a seamless series of mental commands, and the enemy machine exploded in hurtling, flaming fragments.

“Sandman, this is Striker Two!” he called. “Nike! Nike!”

The name of the ancient Greek goddess of winged victory was the code word to initiate the next phase of the operation.

Kara heard Ran’s “Nike” call, but she was too busy to pay attention at the moment. Aresynch’s communications center had just received a report of an enemy attack at Labyrinthine Bay, and with a Priority Urgent flag. She’d already intercepted eight similar reports of increasing urgency and priority, downscaling each to routine, but at last a transmission came through with a coded priority that she could not touch… and seconds later, a search ordered by the communications officer of the watch discovered all of the “routine messages” reporting an attack by unidentified enemy armored forces at the MilTech lab complex at Noctis Labyrinthus, and repeated desperate calls for help.

The alarm was out; Kasei’s military command knew now both that they were under attack and that something was amiss within the Kasei Net. Instantly, the security level for the cybersystem flicked up to full alert, and a search was begun for intruders.

She would not be able to remain undetected for much longer.

Chapter 13

Never forget. A computer ViRsimulation is just that, a simulation. Its sole reality is in the interplay of informational input and electrochemical impulses within the brain.

Of course, it has been argued that the physical universe around us has no objective reality at the quantum level, save what is instilled in it by our own brains. So perhaps there is at some level an element of real-world reality in the ViRsims after all.…

—
ViRsim Journeys: A Personal Voyage

A. V. B
ARKER

C
.
E
. 2440

The outside battle for the MilTech lab compound area was nearly over, though hivel bursts and laser fire continued to shriek and howl above shattered fabricrete walls and burning buildings, and numerous Imperial strongholds continued to loose sharp volleys at random intervals. The warstriders had secured the compound area, however, ringing the buildings to protect them against the expected enemy counterattack, and moving through the facility on foot, rooting out the stubbornly resisting survivors pocket by pocket. As the Gyrfalcons circled overhead, providing covering fire, two massive Vz-980 assault transports roared over the rise to the west, skimming scant meters above the ground.

The lead Vz-980 cut its suspensors as it drifted over the open ground immediately in front of the lab’s main building, descending gently with legs unfolding, grounding on yielding landing jacks. Hatchways popped open on both sides and in the rear, disgorging armored ground troops who spilled across the lab grounds, weapons at the ready.

The ground strike force’s commander was Lieutenant Hal Clifford, who at forty-one standard was one of the oldest of NAMA’s graduates and certainly was old for his relatively new lieutenant’s commission. The marines had a tradition, though, one extending back to a time when “marines” meant troops who came ashore from the sea in amphibious operations, of giving NCOs with leadership skills and plenty of combat experience the opportunity of taking a commission.