Jackers (14 page)

Grier knew well the dangers of micromanagement from the rear.

From his unique vantage point, however, he could sense the flow, the pacing of the battle, from the circular expanse of Port Jefferson to the clustered glass towers of Jefferson itself. He’d watched the Imperial assault troops land, watched patches of the terrain stained red, showing areas of Imperial control. Weiss’s 1st Rangers and battalions of local militia were moving to cut off the incursion. Their main defensive line had been thrown up along the northern outskirts of Port Jefferson, in the sprawling manufacturing center and spaceport strip known as Braxton.

He’d seen Colonel Alessandro’s dramatic emergence from the sea off the coast, a single line of over thirty striders sweeping across the fabricrete apron and neatly trapping over a hundred of the Imperial Tachis near the spaceport’s main buildings.

But Grier, trained in Imperial military theory, could not shake certain of its basic preconceptions. A weaker force could not drive or pen a stronger one; at least a three-to-one advantage was necessary for attack; internal lines of communication and movement were superior to LOCs around the outside of a circle; infantry could not stand in the field against warstriders.

The Confederation forces, though they possessed larger and more powerful striders, only roughly matched the attackers in numbers. The Japanese commander surrounded at Port Jefferson could move in any direction and find only a single, slender line of Confederation machines blocking his path. Breaking that line would be easy, and the first step toward annihilating the defenders piecemeal.

Worse, at least two Imperial assault companies had come down on the mainland, scattered across a broad area of towns, ridges, and farmland between the spaceport and the capital; the Newamie militia under General Kruger was giving a good account of itself so far, but inevitably the invading warstriders would pull their scattered forces together and begin pushing the defenders back, isolating Cape Dickson from the mainland. When that happened, the 1st Rangers still at the spaceport would be trapped, cut off from the rest of the Confederation defenses. Grier could see the trap unfolding, could see it… and know just what he had to do to stop it.

Grier had considered calling in Travis Sinclair, Darwin Smith, or one of the other senior Confederation leaders, but immediately discarded the idea. Grier had become comfortable with the idea of himself as savior of the New American forces; Sinclair had approved his deployment and his battle plan. He would show these New Americans what a man from Liberty with a
real
military education could do!

“Colonel Weiss,” he called, searching for the tagged holographic image of the Rangers’ CO. “Colonel Weiss! Come in!”

There was no reply, and Grier wondered if Weiss had been killed. Who was Weiss’s 2IC? Downloading the Rangers’ command structure, he frowned. Alessandro? Technically the woman was a colonel, but Grier scarcely regarded that. Until last month she’d never topjacked anything bigger than a company, and he frankly doubted her ability to handle anything so complex as a regiment now.

Chikusho!
Where the gok was Weiss?

As he studied the neatly ordered arrays of colored figures on the map, he was briefly tempted to let things go a while longer. The ambush by Alessandro’s forces certainly appeared to be driving the Imperials, knocking them off-balance and sending them reeling back.

But no, the danger was simply too great. The blank spaces on the map were spreading across large areas of the spaceport and the terrain between Cape Dickson and the capital. That meant remote sensors were being knocked down or were succumbing to the corrosive effects of nano agents hanging over the battlefield. If he waited much longer, he would lose control of the situation entirely, and the Rangers, the only specifically Confederation force on the planet, could be lost.

He wouldn’t risk it. Saving the army, in Grier’s opinion, was far more important than winning the battle.

“Colonel Weiss! This is General Grier, CONMILCOM! Come in!”

“This… this is Weiss.” The voice was ragged with strain. “I’m… kind of busy right now. General.”

Zooming in closer from his gods’-eye point of view, Grier could see Weiss’s machine now, a command-rigged Warlord highlighted by a flashing star. The machines with him were crouched behind a hastily nano-fabricated barricade protecting the industrial facilities and manufacturing plants of Braxton. The defensive line was solid at the moment, sealing off Cape Dickson, but pressure from the assault force had been mounting steadily for several minutes. A steady flow of infantry was already streaming back off the spaceport and through Braxton, in full retreat from the clash of titans behind them.

“Weiss, listen to me! The spaceport is lost, and you’re in danger of being cut off. Open your link for a tactical download.”

“Link open.”

With a thought, Grier sent a summary of the mapboard simulation funneling through Colonel Weiss’s link. The data showed clearly what Weiss could not see for himself, that the broad peninsula he was defending was in danger of being cut off by the Imperials between him and Jefferson.

“I… see it, General,” Weiss flashed back after a moment. “What do you recommend?”

“Fall back to Monroe.” Monroe was a large town, a suburb of Jefferson on the mainland squarely between the capital and Port Jefferson. “Consolidate your line with General Kruger. I’m dispatching the reserves to back him up.”

“Order acknowledged,” Weiss replied. “We’re falling back.”

“Colonel Alessandro,” Grier called. “Do you copy?”

Again, silence. This was what Grier disliked most about topjacking a large unit. Individual commanders tended to be independent, too caught up in battlelust, with no time to spare for the senior officers overseeing the battle from behind the lines. Katya Alessandro, from what he knew of her, was no exception.

Colonel Alessandro! This is CONMILCOM! Respond!”

“CONMILCOM, this is Captain Hagan,” a man’s voice replied. “The Colonel’s down, and I think her comm’s out.”

“Understood. Who is senior officer in the detachment, Hagan?”

“Uh, I guess I am, sir.”

“The order is break contact and retreat. Rally with Colonel Weiss at Monroe.”

“Uh, CONMILCOM, that isn’t possible just now. We’ve got—”

“Don’t tell me what is possible, damn it! You’re in danger of being cut off and surrounded! Now get your people and machines out of there. Captain! Now!”

Sometimes, Grier thought, you just had to know how to deal with these stubborn junior officers. They tended to see only their narrow slice of a battle and forget that there were much larger things at stake. He noted with satisfaction that Weiss’s warstriders were already falling back through the manufacturing complex, abandoning their jury-rigged barricade. Hagan’s thirty-some striders were isolated far around the enemy flank but appeared to be breaking off all along the line. Good. If the Imperials gave them half a chance, they should be able to get clear, swing around the Imperial flank, and easily reach the rendezvous at Monroe.

A brilliant maneuver, he concluded, requiring only immediate obedience on the part of his officers.

Almost imperceptibly on the map, the pace of the retreat was increasing.

“Chikusho,
Captain!” Sublieutenant Witter’s protest mingled anger and hurt. “We were winning! Why are we retreating now?”

“I guess they know something we don’t know,” Vic Hagan told his pilot, already coding the general message to the rest of the unit ordering them to break off and retreat.

He was worried, though. Confederation and Imperial forces were by now so intermingled there was no front line, and breaking contact with the enemy at this point was a hell of a lot easier ordered than done.

Besides, Katya was down… her position overrun moments before by a pack of swift-moving Tachis. He could see her machine, inert on the fabricrete a hundred meters away, but with no telemetry from her Warlord he couldn’t tell if she was alive or dead.

“We can’t just leave the Boss in there,” Sergeant Toland, his number three, said.

“Agreed. Witter, take us in closer. Sarge, give me the lasers. You take the rest. I want those Tachis down!”

“Now you’re talking, Captain. Let’s get the gokin’
sheseiji!
”

But Vic was more concerned for Katya.

One of the two Tachis had stopped meters from the fallen strider, was stooping, bringing a heavy laser to bear on the wreckage. Hagan cut loose with the twin, fifty-megawatt lasers mounted like an insect’s pincers to left and right of the Warlord’s fuselage. The bolts seared into the Tachi’s side; Hagan thrilled to see the machine twist and snap back, looking for all the world like some huge, two-legged beast that had just been sharply stung.

The second Tachi took a step forward and opened fire.

Katya was not sure whether or not she’d been unconscious. When her linkage with
The Boss’s
AI was broken, she’d awakened inside the narrow, padded coffin of the machine’s center linkslot, with no light at all save that from a tiny constellation of green and amber marking the slot’s manual controls. Claustrophobia encircled her. Her breathing came in short, hard gasps as she slapped her palm across the interface, trying to relink.

Nothing. The Warlord was dead.

She knew how lucky she’d been. That surge of power from the Tachi’s electron gun could have fried her brain. Fortunately, the link safeties had worked as advertised; the Warlord’s AI had cut her out of the circuit even as it died.

Had the others aboard come through too? Using the auxiliary interface, she opened an intercom line. “Francine! Ken! Are you there?”

“God, what happened?” Maubry asked.

“Okay, Skipper,” DelRey said. “I’m in the dark, but okay.”

“All systems are off-line,” she told them. “Time to odie, gang.”

Odie, soldier’s slang from the Nihongo word for “dance,” meant to get the hell out, fast. Swiftly, she unhooked the wires and feed tubes that connected her with the Warlord’s now-dead life-support system from her bodysuit receivers, then removed breather helmet and gloves from a side compartment. New America might be one of those rare worlds in the Shichiju where humans could walk and breathe unaided, but the modem battlefield was deadly to anyone foolish enough to enter it unprotected. Poisonous fumes from wrecked striders, volatile gases from binary explosives, and, most deadly, unseen mists of nano-D guaranteed that unprotected humans would be dead in minutes.

She made a final check through the interface—good, local concentrations of nano-D were low—then broke contact and sealed her gloves. She typed a code into the panel manually, then braced herself as the outer hatch slid open.

As always when she stepped in person onto a battlefield, she was surprised by how dark and murky the air actually was. When she was linked, her AI provided an enhanced view of the world around her; like most jackers she tended to forget just how much a strider relied on superhuman sensors, on fog-piercing radar and infrared, and on the combat-loaded AI’s educated guesswork.

It was like stepping into a heavy, silver fog. Her Warlord lay nose-down on a broken rubble of shattered fabricrete, one leg folded beneath the hull, the other extended behind it like a broken trail of steel struts and wreckage. The other two slots, set to either side of hers on the dorsal hull, were open, and their occupants were scrambling out, like her attired in gray bodysuits and transparent life-support helmets. Francine DelRey cradled a PCR-28, the high-velocity combat rifle she’d brought with her from her days in the infantry. Maubry and Katya both wore megajoule hand lasers holstered on their hips.

Toys against warstriders, useless. Katya sensed motion close by and looked up.

Looming out of the fog, the Tachi stood only a bit more than twice as tall as a man but was bulkier, twenty tons or so precariously balanced on slender legs angled sharply back at the knees. Its hull rippled through shades of gray as its nanoflage responded to changing light. The legs and gait gave it the menacing look of some huge and dangerous bird as it stilted over cracked pavement and loose rubble… or of a carnivorous, bipedal dinosaur.

Only the hazy outlines of the thing were visible through the drifting smoke. Katya raised her hand, warning the others in her crew to silence. The audio sensors on a strider were quite good, as were its visual and motion sensors. Damn, it ought to see them already.

Ah! That was why. The Imperial strider was busy with something else, a Confed strider lurking unseen somewhere in the murk. Black smoke was curling from a gash in its side, and its stubby weapons packs were tracking something in the mist to Katya’s right. There was a flash and a sound like swarming bees, and Katya was left blinking purple afterimages from her eyes. A moment later, a triplet of explosions cracked off the strider’s ventral hull, sending a patter of shrapnel across the ground. With dawning horror, Katya realized that the three of them were in danger of being caught in the open between two warstriders in combat. The only thing worse from a crunchie’s point of view was having a warstrider actually chasing you.

Urgently
,
she signaled the others.
This way! Fast!

They ran as a CPG bolt caught the Tachi in the side
,
ripping it open
,
gutting the machine and spilling its internal assemblies in smoking fragments across the pavement. The three kept running
,
picking their way across blocks of broken fabricrete.…

… and stopped. A second Tachi was there
,
lurching forward out of the smoke just ten meters away
,
each footstep a clash of metal on stone
,
the monster close enough that Katya could see the surface nano rippling back from an ominous bulge mounted on its flank. The black muzzle of an AP pod gaped at her like a questing eye.

“Down!” Katya screamed. “Cover!”

The 40mm cannon mounted in the Tachi’s antipersonnel pod barked as she dove for the nonexistent shelter of the mangled pavement.