Warstrider: Jackers (Warstrider Series, Book Three) (22 page)

"All hands," Dev broadcast. "Get ready. Remember, we're supposed to be Imperials. Don't shoot unless I give the word." He measured the flow of data through the navsystem. "Thirty seconds."

Then it was time.
Breakout
.

They dropped out of K-T space on the mark, ten AUs out from 26 Draconis A, with red dwarf B a tiny ruddy disk hanging in space to the left. There were ships . . .
lots
of ships, and all were broadcasting Imperial IFF on the fleet frequencies.

"Start squawking," Dev said. Lara gave an order, and
Eagle
began broadcasting IFF of its own.

The code had been part of the package handed over by Lloyd back at Daikokukichi, recorded when Ohka Squadron had docked at the Yards. With luck, fleet units in-system would register
Eagle
as another Imperial destroyer, arriving late, or as reinforcements from Earth.

It would take some minutes for the burst of neutrinos marking
Eagle
's arrival, traveling at the speed of light, to reach Imperial ships sunward. Under Lara's steady guidance, the destroyer accelerated sharply, then fell toward New America, visible in the navsim display as one bright star among many.

Minutes passed . . . slow-dragging. Certainly, the Imperials knew by now of
Eagle
's arrival. Dev and the others waited, listening, wondering what the response would be.

"D983, D983," a voice called over the ship-to-ship audio. The number referred to
Eagle
's borrowed identification code. "This is Imperial picket
Tosshin
. We have received your IFF code transmission. Please confirm your ID visually. Over."

So. They weren't going to take the IFF's word for it. Smart . . . and unfortunate, though Dev had been expecting a challenge. The stakes had just gone up a notch.

"Transmitting vessel at zero-five-eight, ascension two-zero,"
Eagle's
AI said, as a targeting diamond marked the corvette's position ahead and warbook data scrolled across Dev's vision. The picket was a small vessel, a Hari-class corvette of 800 tons, with a twenty-five-man crew. No match for a destroyer, its orders would be to challenge intruders and report to the Imperial's in-system headquarters.

"Range, fourteen point four million kilometers," the AI continued after a brief pause. 'Time delay at that range, forty-eight seconds."

"That's it," Dev told the human components of
Eagle's
linked network. "Let 'er rip!"

One of
Eagle's
watch officers gave the actual command, loosing a ViRcom laser transmission stored in
Eagle's
memory. Traveling at the speed of light, it would reach the Imperial corvette in less than fifty seconds.

Then, in fifty seconds more, allowing for the time delay of any return broadcast,
Eagle's
anxiously waiting crew would know how effective their preparations had been.

In the days before cephlinks and virtual reality, of course, EW
—
Electronic Warfare
—
was restricted to mean those tactics employed by opposing forces to learn about the enemy's dispositions by listening in on his radio and radar transmissions, while simultaneously baffling his attempts to do the same through jamming and various types of electronic countermeasures
.

With ViRcommunications, of course, the game became far more complicated, and deadly
.

—
Man and the Stars: A History of Technology

Ieyasu Sutsumi

C.E
. 2531

When Dev and Katya had lifted off from Eridu in an ascraft months before, they'd been pursued by Imperial warships, by Amatukaze-class destroyers identical to the
Eagle
, in fact. As with all ship-to-ship communications, the ViRcom exchanges between Dev and
Arasi
's captain
had been recorded, both by Dev's own cephlink and by the ascraft's lasercom circuits. By downloading those records to
Eagle
's link network, the destroyer's AI had been able to create a computer analogue of the captain of the Imperial destroyer
Arasi
.

This is
Taisa
Yasuo Ihara
, the computer-generated image had said, mimicking perfectly the real Ihara's gruff manner and harsh-slurred Nihongo.
Captain of the Imperial destroyer
Arasi.
I require direct passage to Ohka Squadron's operational area. Over
.

The time lag, as
Eagle's
lasercom transmission had crept across intervening space to the waiting corvette, then again as the corvette's lasered reply crawled back, had seemed interminable. Randi Lloyd had provided all of the current Imperial codes and passwords stored at Daikokukichi, as well as every scrap of electronic data he'd been able to record when Ohka Squadron had stopped at his base, but there was always the possibility that Ohka possessed some secret recognition code that Lloyd had not intercepted, or that a
real
messenger from Munimori would have some private access word agreed upon back on Earth. Of particular concern was whether
Arasi
and Captain Ihara were still at Eridu, as seemed likely, or whether in the past few months they'd been reassigned to Ohka.

It would be suspicious, to say the least, if a destroyer claiming to be the
Arasi
dropped out of K-T space with a secret communique for Kawashima . . . and the real
Arasi
was already parked in orbit a few kilometers off
Donryu
's starboard side.

"We have a return laser,"
Eagle's
communications officer reported over the link. "They've acknowledged!"

"Play it."

A scene formed in Dev's mind as he accepted the transmission downlink. Giving a mental command, Dev took on a new ViRcomm persona . . . that of
Taisa
Ihara on
Arasi
's bridge, as reconstructed by
Eagle's
AI. According to ViRcomm protocol, the setting for any exchange was aboard the ship belonging to the higher-ranking officer; juniors always reported to their senior's bridge, never the other way around. Dev's persona was seated on a thronelike and purely imaginary seat, surrounded by the bulky jack modules for the bridge crew. Before him stood the persona of a Japanese naval officer in an immaculate dress uniform.

"Yoku irasshaimashita, Taisasan!"
the man said, smiling and bowing low. "Welcome, sir! I am
Chusa
Shioya, of the Imperial corvette
Tosshin
. Your transmission acknowledged! Please transmit special clearance codes and ID. Over."

Shioya's Nihongo was precise and polite, with no hint of a challenge behind the words.

"Ah, Chusasan!"
he said, allowing the computer to shape words in Ihara's cold, rough growl. They sounded strange in his mind's ears. "I am here on the express special orders of
Gensui
Yasuhiro Munimori, Commander of the First Fleet and Senior Admiral of the Imperial Military Staff. My business is with
Chujo
Kawashima, and it is classified
kimitsu
." He paused, to give the words a dramatic emphasis. "There is no need for you to know more. You will tell no one that I am here. Over."

Shioya did not react to the words immediately, of course. The image remained statue still, as though frozen in time, as Dev's reply headed back across the light-seconds.

This was the most critical part of the deception. If Shioya demanded code authentication that Dev could not give, the mission was over. There'd be nothing more to do but turn and flee for K-T space, abandoning Sinclair and Katya and the rest to New America's invaders.

But discipline within the Imperial fleet, as Dev knew well, was imposed from the top down by successive hierarchies of power. A corvette's commander would
make a special report to Kawashima only if he'd been specifically ordered to do so; in the absence of such orders, if "Captain Ihara" ordered him to tell no one, invoking the authority of Munimori himself, well, there was a good chance that he would let them pass.

The word
kimitsu
—the military classification equivalent to "top secret"—would carry a great deal of mass with Shioya as well. No Imperial naval officer, especially one as junior as a commander, would willingly risk tangling with the TJK, the Imperial intelligence service. A single word from a
Teikokuno Johokyoku
official could ruin almost any military officer's career.

Shioya's image had been waiting patiently throughout the time necessary for the communications lasers to carry Dev's answer back to the
Tosshin
at the laggardly speed of light, then for Shioya's reply to return. Suddenly, the image stirred, then bowed.

"Hai, Taisasan!
As you command! You are clear to shape course for the inner system. This is Imperial picket
Tosshin
, out!"

The transmission ended, fading to black.

Dev sagged within the linkage, relief flooding through him as
Arasi
's bridge faded away and was replaced by the more familiar view of stars and black-velvet space. They weren't out of the radiation belt yet, not by seven hundred rads, but they'd taken the first, vital step . . . and managed to carry it off.

Eagle
continued accelerating in-system.

The LaG-42 Ghostrider entered the forest clearing and stopped, the wide-band scanners mounted in its chin turret sweeping left and right with quick, urgent flicks, its nanofiage rippling to a pale, dappled pattern of greens and yellows as the sunlight struck it.

At twenty-five and a half tons, a Ghostrider was less than half the mass of a Warlord and had only two slots for jackers, positioned side by side along the top of its long, blunt fuselage. It had less muscle, too; its primary
weapons were two Kv-70 weapons packs mounted above and to either side of the hull, plus a hundred-megawatt laser jutting from its chin turret in an improbable and unintended piece of phallic imagery.

Smaller and less powerful offensively the LaG-42 might be, but Katya preferred jacking the Ghost to the Warlord. It was faster, more nimble, and felt more responsive to her guiding thoughts. When she was jacking a Warlord, Katya walked; when she wore a Ghostrider, however, she
danced
, and the machine's bright feedback played across her cortex receptors like a song.

She took a moment to absorb the play of light and shadow of the forest. New America's native trees were slender below, feathery above. Their movement in even the slightest wind set light to glittering on the wiry tangle of forest undergrowth. Nearby, a swarm of sundancers—smaller, distant cousins to morninglories—bounced and jittered on a shaft of sunlight.

Come on, come on
, Katya thought to herself.
Where are they
?

Movement stirred the fronds at the clearing's far edge. Katya tensed as readouts indicated approaching life-forms, man-sized and man-warm. Was it?

It was. The patrol filed into the clearing, looking less than military as they milled about in an uncertain clump, ten meters from the Ghostrider's guns.

"Keep her hot, Chet," she told her Number Two. Sublieutenant Chet Martin was another newbie, painfully young and enough like Ken Maubry in looks and speech and attitudes to have been the dead jacker's brother.

Cannon fodder
, she thought bitterly as she broke linkage, then unsealed her slot. Daylight flooded her narrow pilot's module.
Worse
. Sempu
fodder
.

Scrambling from the open slot, she worked her way to the ground on handholds strategically placed down the inside of the strider's leg. She'd been thinking along such lines ever since her return to friendly lines, grim,
unworthy thoughts, she supposed, for someone who was supposed to be fighting for liberty and justice and all of the other fine words in Sinclair's Declaration.

Why were revolutions won—or lost—on the blood of children?

The people waiting for her in the clearing were children too, of a different sort. The genie who called himself Tharby was there, with fifteen of his mannies, twelve males, three
ningyo
women.

Two, she noticed, were missing.

"Hello, Tharby," she said. "Welcome back."

The former nanochemical techie didn't even know how to salute yet. Instead, he bobbed his head, the movement clumsy in his broad, flaring helmet. "Hey, Colonel," he said. "We're back."

"So I see. How far did you get?"

The genie leader shifted his Pk-30 laser carbine uncertainly from hand to hand. " 'Bout twenty klicks. There's Impies there. Lots of 'em. Couldn't go no further."

"Good! That's what we wanted you to find out. How many Impies? Where are they?" When he hesitated, she said, "Show me." Stooping, she began sketching out a rough map of the Gaither Valley approaches to Stone Mountain, using a stick to scratch the lines into soft, bare dirt.

The genies had still not been accepted by the Confederation command, at least not completely. Sinclair's authorization had cleared some of the red tape, securing uniforms, light infantry armor, and weapons for them, but she found she still had to be careful not to mention what—or who—the equipment was for to officious supply officers or suspicious bureaucrats. Prejudice against arming genies was not to be found solely among civilians. Military personnel had started off as civilians, after all, and they dragged their prejudices along with them when they joined the service.

The genies stayed in a special camp outside of Stone Mountain, more or less sequestered from other troops.
Even so, there'd been trouble. Three days ago, one of the
ningyo
women had been grabbed by several drunken militia troops and raped. The soldiers responsible were in the brig under the mountain now, awaiting trial. Ever since, there'd been grumbling among the enlisted men to the effect that the prisoners had done nothing wrong. After all, that was what
ningyo
were for, wasn't it?