Netlink (2 page)

“Air attack!” she yelled over the squadron’s tactical channel. A threat warning winked at her from the lower right portion of her visual field, responding to the caress of hostile targeting radar and ladar sensors. Her strider’s nanoflage coating was still absorbing most of the radiation, but the bad guys were close enough now that they almost certainly had the assault squadron pinpointed. “Kim! Daniels! Watch the sky!”

Seconds later, a pair of Imperial sky-ground attack drones screamed through an azure sky, banking sharply left above the sea at the warstriders’ backs and vanishing behind a line of Martian palms along the beach.

“Kuso!”
Sergeant Jack Hayden’s voice said in her mind. “Where the gok did
those
come from?”

“They didn’t tell us we’d be facing hunter hawks!” another voice added.

“Freeze it, people,” Kara snapped. “Keep it iceworld! Nobody promised you
easy!”

As if to underscore that thought, another barrage of explosions tore through the sandy soil to Kara’s left as the two
ryoshitaka
attack craft reappeared, low above the horizon to the east. She rode with the blast, her combat machine’s legs giving to absorb and distribute the impact. Before the dirt had stopped falling, her KS-1090 Cutlass had pivoted, its hivel cannon flipping out of its foldaway recess in the mirror-slick black shell, its sensors locking onto the nearer of the Imperial fighters and highlighting the machine in flashing red. The hivel screamed, slashing into the banking aircraft with a white-hot scythe of depleted uranium slugs. There was a blinding flash as the hunter hawk’s fusion containment fields collapsed… followed an instant later by a second explosion as Warstrider Kim hivel-popped the other one.

She checked her systems readouts. Everything was still online, still well in the green. Warstriders were
tough.…

Shrugging off the last of the gravel spilled across her back, she moved forward, cresting a low rise. The objective was in sight now, a sprawl of domes and fortress turrets several kilometers distant.

From Kara’s point of view, she
was
the Cutlass, black-hulled, humming with power as she drifted over the mist-cloaked terrain. Just three meters long, the warstrider had an egg-sleek surface, with an organic look reminiscent of some living DalRiss machine. The only violation of its light-drinking nanoflage surface was the grinning shark’s mouth on the prow, and the flyer’s name in gold script—
KARA’S
MATIC
. Earlier generations of warstriders had been ponderous, heavy-limbed, walking targets by comparison. The advent of Companions and Naga-DalRiss biotech had made possible new levels of control in the man-machine interface.

And advances in nanotechnology—the technology of the very small—had transformed the ancient art of war as well.

“Okay, boys and girls!” Kara snapped off the Companion-linked order. “Time to pick up your feet!”

She’d already loaded her warstrider’s main grenade launchers with QEC projectiles. She extended her arm… and the strider’s AI interpreted her thought as a command, cutting loose with a long, thumping staccato of rapid fire. White smoke exploded from a dozen points around and ahead of Kara’s strider, a thick and heavy mist that refused to rise or billow, that flowed across the uneven ground more like a liquid than a gas. The other striders in Kara’s squadron joined in, lacing the ground with the milky fog. In seconds, the entire area for kilometers around was covered, the fog swiftly seeping away into the ground. A green light winked against her vision, indicating the presence of an active floater field.

“I’ve got localized readings at ten to the seven gauss!” she reported over the tacnet, watching the flicker of numbers scrolling past the right side of her visual field. “Now ten to the eight! I’m floating…”

True antigravity remained one of the classic impossibilities of physics, one of those technological dreams that had teased at Man’s imagination for centuries. The nano fired from Kara’s strider and from the other striders of her squadron, however, was programmed to work its way down into the ground and begin reshaping itself and the dirt around it, creating uncounted trillions of quantum electron cages.

QECs were highly specialized molecules. Trapped within each buckyball cage was a single electron, its position balanced by the attitude of the atoms around it, its spin rigidly locked in a delicate and specialized violation of Heisenberg Uncertainty; the immediate result of so many electrons held with polarized spins was a magnetic field strong enough for a warstrider to grab hold of with its own maglev fields. At another thought from Kara,
Kara’s Matic
retracted its spidery legs, folding them away into its body as the machine hovered two meters above the ground.

One by one, the other fifteen striders of the Black Phantoms’ First Squadron folded their legs as well, drifting forward over the smoking ground in an open-V assault formation. Gausslev movement had the inevitable tradeoffs characteristic of all combat innovation. It made the machines faster and more maneuverable, but they would be restricted to the area blanketed by nano smoke, and the ground field would become increasingly patchy and intermittent as it degraded under the assault of surface explosions and enemy antinano countermeasures. The field would last, however, for several minutes—an age in this type of battle—and it was easy enough to replenish as long as the QEC-programmed nano held out.

Kara swiftly found the rhythm of thought and movement that matched her pace to that of the other drifting machines. A warstrider moved in response to the same signals a human brain generated to make its body walk; Kara was not piloting her warstrider so much as she was wearing it, the same way she wore her own body.
Kara’s Matic
slid forward, accelerating rapidly until it was moving far more swiftly than legs could have carried it.

Ahead, light flared and strobed around their target, a sprawling, multiply domed structure on the horizon. Kara wished the assault team could have been dropped closer to the objective, but simulations trying on-site insertions had invariably been slashed to pieces by the fortress’s defenses, usually before the warstriders could even deploy. The question now was whether they had any better chance deploying some kilometers away from the Imperial complex, then advancing through a wall of fire to reach it.

The technology of modern warfare was changing so rapidly it was becoming hard for any one person to keep up with it. The changes in warstriders alone in the past twenty-five years—as in the nanotechnic man-machine interface—were astonishing. Companions, for instance…

“I’m getting movement between us and the objective,” Sergeant Lechenko’s voice said quietly over her NCO command channel. “I make it eight… no, ten hostiles, in open deployment.”

Between the Black Phantoms and the complex, shapes were moving… deploying in an unfolding pattern with the speed of thought. “I see them,” she replied. “All units. Prepare to engage!”

Laser fire flicked out toward the assault team as they floated down the gentle slope into the open. Kara checked her sensor readouts and suppressed an inner twinge of dismay. Those warstriders were Imperial Tsurugis, large, powerful, and thoroughly nasty machines. The CMI—Confederation Military Intelligence—had reported the possibility that at least a squadron of Tsurugis was stationed in the Noctis Labyrinthus area of operations, and the raid had been planned with that possibility in mind.

Ten—no, twelve, now—twelve Imperial warstriders were blocking the way. Ten more were deploying closer to the fortress.

“Gok it, Lieutenant!” That was Warstrider Phil Dolan’s mental voice on the tactical link. “We can’t face that mob!”

“We can and we will,” she replied. “Let them come to us. Defensive Plan Echo.” That would put the burden on the hostiles and possibly even the odds a bit. The two sides were trading heavy fire now, with laser beams and particle cannon bolts lacing the air between them. Defensive formation or not, though, the Black Phantom assault force had to keep moving to avoid being pinned or cut off by the enemy movement.

Particle accelerator fire blossomed in blue-white lightnings. Lindsey Smeth’s Cutlass took a direct hit that carved her machine open from prow to dorsal carapace, and Kara felt the inner shock as the other warstrider’s mental link with the squadron snapped off. Damn…!

Her death left a hole in the Phantoms’ right flank, and the enemy striders were pouring through. “Pivot right!” Kara yelled over the link. “Block them! Block them!”

“Block the gokers!” Sergeant Vasily Lechenko echoed. “Newbury! You heard the lieutenant! Move your tail!”

In seconds, Defensive Plan Echo was a swirling confusion of drifting, fire-spitting machines, both lines broken and the battle reduced to isolated pockets of one-on-one and two-on-one. Kara had a tac display of the battle up in a small corner window of her visual field, but there was little to discern there beyond an almost chaotic choreography of moving points of light.

No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy. Who had said that, she wondered? She’d downloaded that bit of aphoristic military sentiment during her training at NAMA, the New American Military Academy, but she couldn’t at the moment recall the author. The failure was irritating, a small proof that no technology was perfect. What else, she wondered, had been downloaded into her skull during those years that she’d somehow failed to retain?

Kara was twenty-two standard years old; most of her squadron mates were younger. Cephlink downloads made it possible for warriors to be fully programmed before they were eighteen, a fact that let the Confederation military take advantage of the peaks of their mental and physical strength and flexibility. A few—Sergeants Lechenko and Daniels, especially—were older, balancing the reflexes of youth with experience and seasoning. As in every army since the time of Nimrod, NCOs were the military’s heart and backbone.

And like every good officer, Kara had learned to rely on her sergeants.

“Vasily!” she called over her NCO channel. “Take four or five people through
there.”
She indicated a route with a set of thought symbols overlaid on the tac map. “See if you can get behind them!”

“Right,” Lechenko replied. “Blasey! Pascoe! Newbury! Maslov! With me!
Move
it!
Move
it!”

On her map, five of the green blips representing her forces began sliding east, getting between the enemy units and the fortress. That threat might break the impetus of the Imperial attack. She found herself willing the strategy to work.…

The problem was that the enemy had already won, simply by forcing the Phantoms to stop and duel with them. The objective of this raid was the fortress ahead, not battling Imperial warstriders.

Kuso! If those rear-end, fantasy-linked, nullbrained gokers in Ops Planning would just wake up to the possibilities of the Aresynch mission…

“I’ve got a problem here!”

That was Phil Dolan. On the map, it looked as though he’d managed to get himself cut off from the rest of the Phantoms, a single green blip surrounded by reds. Kara was closest; she urged her machine forward, swinging wide to the left to clear Dolan’s stricken machine from her field of fire. There he was… the focus of three Tsurugis who were taking an intent and personal interest in his strider. With a thought, she targeted the nearest Imperial machine and opened up with her particle accelerator cannon. Blue lightnings flared, sun-brilliant and dazzling. One Tsurugi, its floater field failing and smoke spilling from a savage rip in its side, drifted unsteadily down a gentle slope, legs extending. The other two pivoted in midair, bringing their weapons to bear on Kara.

Her PAC was still recharging from the last burst so she switched weapons and triggered a volley of VR-89 rockets, tiny, texture-homing projectiles that sprayed the nearest Tsurugi in a rippling cascade of small, sharp explosions; the last Imperial machine fired a PAC bolt that grazed her starboard side, jolting her back on her floater field and sending a cascade of red warning indicators flashing across one side of her visual field. Spinning and drifting to the left, she returned fire with a burst of nano-D rounds, thumb-sized shells bearing disassembler nanoprogrammed to eat through warstrider armor.

The Tsurugi’s black hull turned blotchy under the assault, the damage chewing across its surface until its nanoflage layers could reprogram and stabilize under the assault By then Kara’s PAC was recharged, and her full-powered bolt of artificial lightning punched through weakened armor like a hard-driven fist through cardboard. The Tsurugi tumbled backward, rolling on its gausslev field until the mags failed and it smashed into the ground.

The other two had limped clear of the immediate area, so Kara turned her attention to Dolan’s crippled strider, which was lying on its side in a shallow ravine. The machine’s name,
Philosopher,
had been almost entirely scoured away, along with much of the outer, light-sensitive nanoflage layer. Arms extended from
Kara’s Matic’s
side, long and multiply jointed; nanomorphic clamps grasped hold of
Philosopher’s
hull, the nano of the clamp welding itself so completely to Dolan’s armor that the two became one. Leaning back against the new weight, she began dragging Dolan’s strider out of the ravine.

“Dolan!” she called over the tacnet. “Are you okay?”

There was no response, but it was possible his com was down. His machine felt dead, however, and he wasn’t able to help. Worse, her own magfields were failing. Red-highlighted messages warned of damage to her gaussfield generator couplings… and the local floater field was degrading as well, the nano-QEC alignments disrupted by the violent electrical groundings of multiple PAC discharges. She overrode a power-shutdown alert, then extended her legs. An electrical failure in her stabilizer system threatened to pitch her to the side, but she compensated with a burst of new-grown circuitry and an emergency patch from her power reserves.

Damn…
she was leaking power,
bleeding
power like the hemorrhage from a deep, slashing wound. Her fusorpack was limping along at eighteen percent of capacity, and the warning flags were coming at her faster than she could deal with. She tugged harder at
Philosopher’s
fire-savaged bulk, struggling to drag it back into an area where the floater fields were still intact. Even if Dolan’s self-repair systems were down, it might be possible to give him a charge of circuitry nano or even send her own Companion across to recharge his systems and get his gausslev units back on-line. If—