War Bodies, page 13
Immediately, he had access to the flight controls which he’d earlier used physically. They were deeper into his psyche this time, equivalent to the actions of simply walking or running, or any other movement of his organic body. The weapons systems had felt the same the last time he’d used them, but now he found a barrier there, and sensed another presence. The interloper angered his reptile, or him, and he probed that barrier, seeing its function was to stop him automatically using the weapons. That he could easily rip it down if he wanted to ameliorated some of the anger, though a core of resentment remained.
‘Cut that out,’ said the agent, his voice coming directly into Piper’s mind.
‘Just checking,’ Piper replied, teeth gritted and without moving his mouth.
‘You need to pay more attention to your com,’ Inster observed.
It was there as it had been before, but with a tangle of icons and an overarching access. He opened it and fell into the Polity military com sphere. Or battle sphere, as Meersham had called it, as if into a hidden world. Positional data came first. He saw the others relative to him, just briefly as the whole thing opened out. Perception was confusing, but his bones, his reptile or his inner self responded as they absorbed programming and got the locations of everyone else in the force – their vectors too and size. That was one level, but more levels opened as the telemetry integrated. He got weapons capability, munitions and power levels, shielding capability, flight plan and formation.
‘Fuck,’ he said.
‘Quite a thing, isn’t it?’ said Inster.
‘Yes,’ was all Piper could say, as even more levels integrated.
Now the enemy and the battle plan started making themselves known to him. He got a 3D visualization of four underground installations, with many ‘unknown’ volumes. He saw weapons turrets that had risen to the surface to reveal heavy guns, beam weapons and missile launchers. The war bodies and Enforcers were there too – most on the ground at the moment to conserve battery power. The battle plan slid in over this, predicting fusillades from the ground weapons as they approached, and what the losses would be. He noted a large amount of the available shielding had been assigned to him. As he ran low just above the ground, a force was distributed around him, and one of the shuttles provided protection from above. He wondered at the necessity of that but, as the time series of the protean battle plan opened out, he saw how many Enforcers he was predicted to take down. Yes, he was an essential component in this.
The plan unfolded further again, incorporating other probable responses from the enemy, as well as possible ones, and then those deemed unlikely but still possible. At that point it became too much for him, and his bones began aching again. Yet, even as he pulled back and focused on the specific, he felt his bones adapting and knew that he could take it all in if he pushed. That frightened him, just for a second, until aggression rolled over it.
Instead, he concentrated on the enemy and went deeper into their data. More on weapons, but with many ‘unknowns’, as well as their likely strategies, predicted telemetry, munitions and power available. Refuelling and charging points to be targeted, should the fight become extensive. And then identifiers were also linked to names. Many names he didn’t recognize, yet on seeing them he felt a strange familiarity, as if he should know them. Others were well-known Old Guard. With his objective clear, he searched through them and there found the name he’d been seeking: Castron. The stratum of anger waxed and waned in consonance with a vicious joy. Piper highlighted him and ran programming that would keep him apprised of the dictator’s location at all times.
‘In your own time,’ said Inster dryly.
Piper checked timings. He’d only been investigating the com sphere for forty seconds but, apparently, that wasn’t fast enough for Inster. He took the war body higher, hardly having to think about manoeuvring as he slotted it into the formation flying below the shuttle, even as the rebel army set out. Now integrated with the battle sphere, he moved at the same speed. Checking positional data, he found marines flying around him, including Meersham and the other three. His escort was in place.
‘Okay,’ said Inster. ‘Now, since Castron just penetrated our battle sphere, our plans have changed.’
‘What?’ Piper glanced round at him with eyes he felt sure had turned yellow and snake-like.
‘Hard and fast,’ said Inster, sending the new plan to him directly, so it wouldn’t incorporate into the sphere.
‘Right, shit,’ said Piper, noticing that without his mother’s slaps his inclination for profanity had increased. Her words concerning self-control fled through his mind. It had been to keep him hidden from the Old Guard, but he should still retain it. He sat under a different kind of close inspection now, which he didn’t entirely trust, with an inner self forming that he didn’t think it safe to reveal fully. He took a breath, searched for calm and instead found only crazy excited clarity, then kicked acceleration to full power.
The seat closed around him and tightened, the mask swinging across to push air into his lungs. In his mind, he viewed the original battle plan as he rapidly departed from it. It still showed him in place with the steadily advancing armada. With any luck, Castron wouldn’t see the ruse until it was too late. Through omniscient sensors, he saw his escort accelerating too, but since they had limited thruster power in their suits, they merely edged ahead of the main force and couldn’t catch him up. He took the war body low, passing over a spread of purple lichen and blowing up a cloud of shredded debris behind. Then even lower, over green lichen, and weaving fast between three-metre-tall spore spikes like iron swords. Beyond this area the landscape transformed into dusty, dry, rolling hills, sparsely populated with colour strokes of lichens, roller bushes and cistern cacti. He went lower still, blowing up a dust trail.
‘A little higher,’ said Inster.
‘I can handle it,’ Piper replied. He’d already run a program to fix his level relative to the ground, and lined up dodge manoeuvres should anything appear ahead he wasn’t already seeing in the battle plan data.
Ahead, a hazy disc appeared in the air, while behind them the thrusters had changed their output – the flames now issuing like braided cables into the dust. Only now did he ascertain his speed and check it against certain immutable laws. The war body was travelling at three times the speed of sound here, and its hull was heating up. Even as he registered this, he saw the armoured shutters drawing closed on the chain-glass bubble. But only the line of their edge, since they had a screen function on the inside, and the line disappeared when they finally closed.
‘I wondered how long it would be before you noticed,’ said Inster.
Now Piper really did notice, and with a fierce delight: the meta-material layer it had all over, the new function of the thrusters, and the electrostatic field, generating weird effects in the air all around them. The sonic boom had been dampened by technology the Cyberat simply didn’t possess.
‘You still need to go higher,’ Inster added.
‘Why?’
‘The dust trail,’ Inster replied.
Piper felt briefly stupid, his reptile writhing in response. He ran calculations on the vortex he was creating, then set his level six metres higher. He ran a hard thruster turn around a pile of boulders, mapped ahead and plotted a course that would take them through the low points between the hills. Further calculations showed him that thruster burns beyond acceleration would be more detectable, so he set an optimum speed to steer on grav around the hills, and the rear thrusters died down.
Time to target: four minutes. Piper just hoped Castron hadn’t noticed that initial dust trail, then he considered something else. Why hadn’t Inster warned him of that when he started taking the war body down low? He had enough confidence in the man to know it wasn’t something that had just occurred to him. Surely, with this attack being so important, he wouldn’t have neglected something like that?
‘We’ll have twelve minutes over the target before the others arrive,’ Inster commented. ‘That’s a long time in combat.’
‘Yes,’ Piper said, not sure what the man was implying.
‘We go in, do the job, and then get out fast.’
‘Okay,’ said Piper, but it wasn’t okay. His anger rose with sickening force, utterly focused on Castron. And so personal, though he’d only ever known the man via broadcasts, the occasional visits to his father’s factories and latterly his appearance when Piper had been injured. He tried to rationalize this oddity. He wasn’t going into this fight just to shut down as many of the other side as possible; he was after the Cyberat who had killed his father. Yes, he’d all but lost himself in the recent changes and technology activated in his body, but the hard reality remained that Castron had murdered Doge. Piper winced at that, eyes feeling dry and sore, and sensed the anger wane again as if in confusion. It was about his father, surely? Yet still the fury felt wrong – somehow misplaced. Again, a detached part of his mind noted: probably hormonal. But the anger was there and he would act on it. He glanced at Inster, thinking, assessing.
Inster was very far from stupid and had to realize Piper’s intentions. Was this the reason for the two seats in here and why the agent had accompanied him? He began meticulously checking through the war body’s system, looking for traps, any hostile programming, checking interfaces to see if somewhere Inster had a way of seizing control. Throughout his three-minute search he found nothing. Perhaps it was a physical option in the war body itself. He searched there too, using diagnostics and internal sensors. Again, the odd shape of the armour impinged on him, but he could find nothing there either. That didn’t mean there wasn’t anything, of course – Polity technology was advanced, very advanced. But he had no time left, because they were into it.
Coming around yet another hill, he saw installations on the ground ahead. War bodies and Enforcers were rising into the sky and a missile battery had just fired three missiles – streaking along above the ground towards him. He wanted to respond and found himself pushing against the soft barrier Inster had installed, even as the rotogun opened fire. Piper took that in, set a dodge program running, then concentrated inwardly.
Thousands of nodes had suddenly blossomed into being. He quickly ran up his programming, broadcasting the animuses for weapons shutdown and dispersal. The invisible signal, visualized internally as thousands of animuses trailing data threads back to him, struck the enemy like a visible weapon. Thousands of thrusters ignited, scattering Enforcers and an appreciable number of larger war bodies too. He next opened up one of the Enforcer nodes that hadn’t responded. Here he found telemetry updates running every second, there to fight animus programming and re-establish the old. He examined the stuff in the telemetry and found a response that had been designed to deal specifically with what he’d done before. It seemed the Old Guard were learning fast. However, the updates were quite singular and not prepared for anything new. Seeing at once how he could counter this, he felt angry delight warring with reluctance. But now they were firing on him.
A missile Inster triggered weaved its way past anti-munitions fire and fell on the missile battery, lifting the thing up on the blast, and the missiles still in place detonated too. Rotogun slugs zinged off his armour. More missiles looped up and then down from the Old Guard. Particle beams probed, but ablated before reaching him. Inster returned fire – the rotogun constant in this target-rich environment, and then the particle beam stabbing out with extended range. He saw it strike a war body like a giant steel nematode, blow out part of its side, and the thing dropping on stuttering thrusters. This was life and death and his qualms died in the body of the reptile.
Back inside the programming, Piper sent a new instruction and it was quite simple: shut down grav. Chaos then erupted ahead as Enforcers, and again some war bodies, simply dropped out of the sky. They fired up thrusters to try and slow their descent but had been heavily reliant on their grav-engines. A war body consisting of a collection of spheres hit the ground hard, then bounced straight into a weapons turret, snapping it clean off as the spheres themselves broke apart. Enforcers and war bodies crashed against each other in the sky, or otherwise hit the ground hard. He counted automatically, seeing he had now taken every single Enforcer out of the fight, and nearly a quarter of the war bodies. The extent of it, and the ease of it, stunned him. He then focused in on one particular war body, a very definite and undeniable hate driving him.
Castron was dropping fast, but not because his grav had failed. Piper tried to connect him to one of the nodes floating in their thousands in his internal virtuality. There was something there, but it kept fading in and out. He needed to clear away some of the rubbish. Another program, flung up by the thing in his bones, mapped those Enforcers and war bodies which had crashed, and it erased them from his consciousness. He set the same program onto those Enforcers he’d dispersed with their weapons shutdown, intending to erase them too. But, with the hint of an idea arising, he instead consigned them to their own file for now. With his mind less cluttered, he again concentrated on Castron’s node – trying to open it out, trying to gain access. The fading indicated Castron was updating his telemetry in fast bursts, but in the interim blocking all signals. Perhaps that telemetry could be his access? But it seemed Castron, having seen most of his force taken out or put into disarray, had other things on his mind.
His war body continued dropping, down to where a ring of weapons turrets circled a hole delving deep down into the earth. There was some kind of open silo there, but what lay below it, and around it, was designated ‘unknown’. Piper watched him disappear then switched his attention back to the immediate action. Yes, the dispersed Enforcers . . .
‘We can pull out now,’ said Inster. ‘This will be over when the others arrive.’
Piper ignored him, lost deep in Cyberat code and down into the roots of his other self, or perhaps his full self. Castron was out of reach for the moment, but not permanently so. War bodies and ground installations stood in Piper’s path. Many of the Enforcers Piper had dispersed were just floating out beyond the battlefield. With his programming now running instinctively, he delved into them. He altered their reception bands, taking out their telemetry, then instituted his own directly through their installed animuses. Their weapons came back online and they got thruster control back. Following through on previous Old Guard programming, they began to come back into the fight – accelerating. Piper gutted that programming and laid in new orders. With that, he felt something new: objection in some, acceptance in others, and a relish in still others. It seemed the extent of his connections reached deeper into them than just their hardware.
‘Enforcers,’ said Inster. Then, ‘Fuck,’ when those Enforcers began attacking Old Guard war bodies.
It wasn’t a good match, as once the Old Guard understood the Enforcers were attacking them, they responded with superior weapons. Fiery bolides took out clusters of Enforcers. Cyberat particle beams at close range, and with the power supply of war bodies, had a devastating effect. However, this created the chaos Piper wanted. He flew in, hard.
‘I said we can pull out now,’ Inster repeated calmly.
Piper would need control of his war body’s weapons. Almost negligently, he shunted Inster out of them. The man swore, then tried to fight his way back in through internal processing. The linkage was close and, though the Polity tech had its defences, Piper was able to open a semi-node for the agent’s aug. Programs came to hand, leaping eagerly to his control, and he launched them. Beside him Inster grunted and bowed his head. A second later, a missile exploded just to their right, flipping the war body over. Piper fought for control and sought targets, firing on a rising war body that was spewing missiles towards him. He sliced it with the particle beam and saw it slew to one side then, flipping back over, he dropped. Missiles launched. Targets selected on the ground. And the weapons turrets exploded. A particle beam scored him and he replied with his own, slicing down a remaining turret. He finally made it over the hole Castron had fled into, the dictator’s node dissolving away in the process.
What now?
Piper dropped his war body towards the hole, but then abruptly threw it sideways as something huge came up. Suddenly his war body was jerking through the air on multiple slug impacts – a powerful multi-barrel cannon firing from below. And then the ship rose into sight. Piper gazed at the vessel, reminded of something, but he was too deep into the code and too deep into the battle to find that stray data. All he knew, as the ship ascended, was that Castron was getting away. He snarled, looped his war body around and ran for distance. Coming out of the battle, he saw the approaching force on the horizon. He decided he would circle back, firing whatever weapons were remaining to him. He’d ramp up to the maximum acceleration obtainable and, if the weapons didn’t do the job, final impact would.
But then something cold thumped against his forehead. He brought it into focus and saw one of Inster’s flimsy-looking guns – a ‘thin gun’. Despite its appearance, he knew the thing’s lethality: it would burn a hole right through his skull.
