William H. Keith - Warstrider 03 by Jackers

Author:Jackers [Jackers]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2012-06-09T15:29:19+00:00

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 nanoflage 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.

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