Jackers (7 page)

Anchoring himself, Torolf locked on to the nearest turret and opened fire. A tiny sun flared at the breach of one of the two mounted lasers; chunks of metal and freezing air wafted into space, along with the slow, end-for-end tumble of a 10cm laser’s barrel. He shifted his aim to the next turret, then the next…

“Lieutenant!” St. John’s voice was shrill, near ragged panic. “To your left!”

He was already reacting when the bolt hit, moving left and rotating his flyer’s torso. Red alerts flashed across his vision, warning of energy overload, of charged particles washing across the smooth surface of the warflyer, channeled by the network of fine, superconducting threads embedded in the armor.

Lightning arced. Three of his sensors went dead, leaving him blind to port, but he’d turned far enough to see the enemy warflyer, angling toward him across the station’s framework like a knobby, black-shelled crab.

He didn’t recognize the model, though it looked a bit like a spacegoing version of the Daimyo warstrider, powerful and heavily armored. Torolf snapped off a laser shot even as he was casting free from his anchor point. One of his arms came free, still clinging to metal, its struts melted through by the overload from other’s proton cannon. Damn. That black hull seemed to
drink
laser light.…

At his mental command, another arm dropped from a ventral hatch, an arm bearing a bulky cylinder perforated on one end with four-centimeter holes that flashed and spat rippling flame. Recoil acted like a rocket, accelerating Torolf’s DR-80 backward and giving it a slight tumble; the projectiles, M-490 4cm rockets with deplur penetrator warheads, slashed through the enemy warflyer’s armor shell like fléchettes through flesh, plunging deep, then detonating with sharp, rapid-fire explosions that sent chunks of duralloy spinning through space.

Swiftly, Torolf reached out with his remaining grasping arm, snagging a crossbeam and arresting his tumble. His laser was up and locked in, ready for another shot, but the enemy was dead, a black hulk trailing wires and interior plumbing like entrails as it fell away into blackness.

A shadow passed over him and he shifted to his dorsal sensors.

Eagle
was there, slowing on forward maneuvering jets. In every direction, other Confed warflyers were either under thrust or moving along the Daikoku base’s framework, making their way toward a central, domed tower crowned by antenna arrays that must house the facility’s control center. The defensive laser fire seemed to have fallen off.

Cautiously, he released his handhold and boosted forward.

Randi Lloyd bit off a curse, then pushed off from a bulkhead, sailing across the control deck to an EC panel. “Randi!”
Sho-i
Cynthia Collins said, pleading in her voice. She was struggling to unsnap herself from her link couch. “What’s going on?”

“We’re under attack, damn it,” he snapped back in reply. “And the
sheseiji
won’t let us fight!”

A babble of voices reached after him but he ignored them, as he ignored the distant shrilling of a pressure alarm elsewhere in the station. Bumping to a halt at the environment control panel, he dropped his palm on the interface and phased the overhead dome to transparency. He wasn’t sure what he expected to see; the attackers had been too distant to make out with the naked eye when he’d been linked seconds before. But as he floated up into the dome, he could see suns and the curved horizon of Daikoku, the complex sprawl of the Yards, and the leapfrogging motion of advancing warflyers.

And ships. There was
Senden,
still close to the station, drifting free now, a lifeless hulk. Another ship, the Amatukaze-class he’d IDed on his original scan, loomed overhead like a great, black cloud, slowly eclipsing first one of the red suns, and then the other. The ship was staggeringly huge this close up, almost four times longer than the battered
Senden,
far bulkier, and massing over forty-five times as much in sheer gross tonnage. Paired anticollision lights flashed, marking off the bulk of star-swallowing blackness, shaped like a fat cigar embraced by streamlined fairings and cupolas. He found himself staring up into the wicked, crystalline eyes of gigawatt lasers and felt his heart hammering inside his chest. There was no way the Yards could possibly resist such firepower at point-blank range.

A flash caught his attention—its brilliance stepped down by the dome’s optics to protect human vision—and he turned in time to see the last of Daikokukichi’s defensive laser batteries tumbling into space.

Still palming the interface, Lloyd requested more data.
Shiden
and
Raimei
and
Asagiri…
where were they?

Colored symbols flickered across the dome, almost as stark and clear as if they were part of a projection within his own brain.
Shiden
was under boost… but away from Daikoku on a parabolic path that would take her out through the planetoid belts.
Raimei
and
Asagiri
were still in their berths, both powering down in token of surrender. Evidently, their captains shared Lloyd’s appraisal of the tactical situation.

The battle, mercifully brief, was already over.

And it serves the bastards right!
The thought, fierce and unrelenting, caught him by surprise. Just where did he stand in this unexpected fight?

Randi Lloyd was from Earth, from Metrochicago in the North American Hegemony Protectorate. He’d been in space back in ’36, the year of the Metrochicagan Riots, but when he’d heard about them at his next planetfall, he’d assumed, as had the rest of the Earth-born crew, that rabble-rousers and troublemakers had broken the peace, had provoked the slaughter of civilians as a means of making a political point. He’d not learned that his sister was numbered among the dead until he returned to Earth almost a full year later.

So many months robbed his loss of urgency, if it could not ease shock and grief. Who was to blame? Who
could
be blamed for what was officially a miscalculation—a junior Guard officer had panicked as the mob spilled out of Grant Park and advanced onto the Michigan Moving Way, and summoned Imperial reinforcements. The crime had not been so much in the shooting—the mob was breaking the peace, after all, and had been warned to disperse—but in the way they’d kept on firing after the crowd had begun to scatter. Was the system to blame, Lloyd had wondered, or a handful of poorly trained Imperial peaceforcers caught up in the moment’s bloodlust?

Lloyd had decided to blame the individuals, if only because there was nothing within the vast and impersonal bureaucracy of Earth’s Hegemony and the Nihonjin Empire for him to point a finger at and say,
“There!
That is evil, and must be changed.”

He’d shipped out aboard a merchant ship as quickly as he could, putting distance between himself and Earth; several years later, given a chance at converting his merchantman’s second officer’s stripes to a
shosa’s
commission in the Hegemonic Guard, he’d grabbed at the opportunity, passed the tests and officer’s training, and been assigned to a ship, the Guard corvette
Epsilon Lyrae.

Two years and one promotion later, he’d ended up… here, on a shipbuilding yard on the backside of nowhere, booted off-line by officious Imperials, watching unknown forces swoop down on his station.

Still at a level-one link, he felt something happening. Querying the base AI, he learned that Tanemura was busily purging data files. Reluctantly, he drew his hand away, breaking the link. His eyes met Cynthia Collins’s. “What is it?” she asked. “Who’s attacking us?”

“Must be rebels,” he replied, grinning wryly as he said it. Damn, either the rebels had picked up one hell of a lot of delta-V, lately, or the government had been lying to them all about how good the rebels were. They’d snuck on Daikoku out of nowhere, launched a sharp, short, professional attack, and crippled the station in the space of seconds.

Through the dome, the destroyer loomed above the station, terrifying in its size, its scale made evident as a second ship passed slowly between the destroyer and the Yards. The newcomer looked like a K-T drive freighter, considerably modified; there were laser turrets attached to its long, square-angled body, but they had the look of improvisation about them… as well as haste.

Thrusters flared briefly, outshone by the pulse of anticollision strobes. The freighter was drawing closer to the control center’s external lock.

Lloyd squared his shoulders. “I guess we’d better square away to receive visitors.”

As if to prove his words, a hollow clang sounded from the main airlock beneath the control deck.

Chapter 5

In all the military works it is written: To train samurai to be loyal, separate them when young, or treat them according to their character. But it is no use to train them according to any fixed plan. They must be educated by benevolence. If the superior loves benevolence, then the inferior will love his duty.

—Tokugawa Ieyasu

early seventeenth century

Resistance had ceased throughout the Daikoku orbital base, a victory more sudden and more complete than Dev could possibly have hoped for. With
Vindemiatrix
docked directly with the station’s main airlock, New American troops were storming aboard, armed with laser rifles and slug pistols and wearing combat armor instead of their accustomed warstriders.

Dev remained aboard
Eagle,
surveying the prize through electronic senses. Though he was linked to the tactical channel being used by the boarding party, his attention was on the take. Eighteen warships, including three Yari-class destroyers. He felt a thrill there. His father had been put in command of an Imperial Yari destroyer, the
Hatakaze,
the ship with which he’d saved the refugees over Lung Chi.

They’d done it!
He’d
done it, and with only four casualties out of his strike force, and seven warflyers damaged.

It was too bad, he thought, that there wasn’t some way to take over this entire facility. New America and a few other worlds in the Confederation had shipyards, but they weren’t as large or as well equipped as this one.

In theory, it would one day be possible to
grow
an entire starship, complete right down to the brightwork and the loaded AI programming, by turning appropriately instructed nano loose on a lump of asteroidal iron and assorted, raw trace elements. In practice, the sheer size and complexity of even a small starship required each vessel to be grown in sections, which were extracted from the nanovats and assembled like enormous three-dimensional puzzles by swarms of remotes, workpods and constructors, or even genegineered workers. The assembled hulls were then repeatedly bathed in a nano flux that added their durasheathing, layer upon layer of diamond, monomolecular duralloy, and ceramics, together with the microscopic superconducting grid that afforded protection from charged particle radiation in space. Finally, highly specialized nano flowed through the ship’s interior nervous system, programming AI components, plating out and completing electrical connections, and hardwiring the control circuitry. Weapons, except for the largest and most massive systems like spinal mount PPCs that were part of a ship’s overall design, were added later, dropped into hardpoints and wired into the control network by specially programmed nano.

From the embrace of his slot aboard
Eagle,
Dev surveyed the assault force’s prize with growing excitement.

Through the crisscross of girders, Dev could make out long, black ships moored between gantries and docking access tubes on the facility’s third level, eighteen military vessels of various types, ranging in size from cutters and corvettes to three small destroyers. All appeared to be brand-new, their gleaming, durasheath hulls night-hued, unmarred by dust impacts or wear. They hadn’t even been painted yet with unit markings or the insignia of Imperium or Hegemony. More ships were visible in the fitting and drawing yards close by, still resting in their nanovat cradles or newly emerged from their armoring flux and awaiting only the finishing details of drive controls or weapons or AI installations to make them fully operational.

All that most of those ships needed were crews and full loads of cryo-H in their tanks. Several more—a close inspection would tell them how many—were ready save for weapons. Even unarmed, they would be valuable additions to the Confederation fleet, and something could be done about arming them back at New America.

As for the rest, Dev studied each with a small pang of regret. They included the monster frame of a half-assembled Kako-class cruiser and two Naka-class light cruisers, as well as twelve smaller vessels; if only they could be made operational!

Unfortunately, there was no time. Imperial or Hegemony ships could arrive at any moment, and it was critical that Dev both get the captured ships back to New America and preserve the original members of his squadron. All he could do was order the destruction of the unfinished ships.

After the shipyard was secured. According to the boarding party, most of the base’s complement of Imperial Marines were either on the ground or still in their barracks, a duralloy cylinder attached to the control center by a long access way, already sealed off as though they were expecting a siege. A handful of marines in the station proper resisted; the firefight—the fire
fights,
actually, since the skirmishing was widely scattered and completely uncoordinated—were over in minutes.

“We’ve got ’em,” Lieutenant Gary Langley reported over the net. “Control center secure!”

“On my way.” Dev broke contact.

Minutes later, he made his way through the zero-G tangle of corridors toward the orbital base’s control section. With him were several members of his shipboard staff, including Simone Dagousset, a Confed computer expert with her command team. Bodies floated there, broken and bloody, though mercifully few. More of the Imperials had chosen to surrender than to fight, it seemed.