Battlemind by William H Keith Read Free Book Online Page A

onslaught.
    She couldn’t move.
    That was the worst part of the nightmare, the feeling of unendurable helplessness as those glittering little monsters poured across the rubble toward her, a swarm as unstoppable as the incoming New American tides at Columbiarise. She could hear the gnaw and chink as they began disassembling her warstrider, feel the machine rocking heavily as they rolled it further onto its side, sense the stripping of the last of her surface armor.…
    She gave the mental command to abort, but all systems were shutting down now in a cascade failure, nothing responding, her senses switching off one by one. Her last optical image before the camera was wrenched apart by bright-alloyed jaws was of the Great Annihilator, hanging low above the fire-swept horizon.
    Then she felt them opening up the body of her strider, breaking it apart with the ugly sound of shredding metal.…

Chapter 4
     
One of the great enlightenments arising from the past few centuries of technic revolution is the knowledge that it doesn’t matter whether our sensory input is passed along a few centimeters of optic or audial nerve tissue, or is being beamed across thousands of kilometers of empty space. Late in the twentieth century, a private commercial venture placed a small, primitive, and simpleminded robotic device on the surface of Earth’s moon; for a fee, attendees at an entertainment center on Earth could teleoperate the device, steering it across the face of the moon as onboard cameras relayed views of what lay ahead.
In this way, thousands of people, youngsters and adults, shared in the thrill of exploring the moon in person… while never leaving their seats in that entertainment center on Earth. This, arguably, was the first of a long chain of experiments in large-scale teleoperational presence.

    — The Physics of Mind
    D R . E LLEN C HANTAY
    C . E . 2413

    Kara blinked into darkness. She was lying on a couch, molded to conform to the curves of her body; the air was close and stale, and tasted of her own sweat. There was no light save the gleam of console readouts near her head, winking pinpoints of green, red, and amber.
    Fear continued to claw at her mind, raw and savage and demanding. She was being disassembled.…
    Then, with a sound of broken vacuum, the lid to her coffin-sized chamber swung open. Four technicians in blue and gray jumpsuits were there, bending over her, removing the oxygen mask from her face, unclipping the electronic leads that attached to the metallic plates showing in her head, hands, and forearm.
    “Captain?” one of the figures, wearing sergeant’s chevrons on her jumpsuit sleeve, said. “Captain Hagan? How do you feel?”
    Catatonia beckoned, warm and inviting. Her sense of self shifted uncertainly; she had to think for a moment about who she was, what she was doing.…
    “Like I just got stepped on.” Her voice cracked. Her mouth was very dry. For a handful of seconds, her inner compass spun blindly, and she didn’t recognize this place. “Where…?”
    Comtech Sergeant Ellen Gillespie was used to the muddle-headed confusion of striderjacks emerging from their pods. “It’s okay, Captain. You’re back. And safe. You’re aboard the Carl Friedrich Gauss, at Nova Aquila, on the war deck. The link held long enough to pull you back.”
    The link. She swallowed, trying to clear her mind. It was always a bit confusing after a long-range teleoperational link, but this one had been a lot worse. She’d been there.…
    With an effort of will, she dissolved the link endpoint contacts, letting her Companion transform them once more into unadorned skin.
    Her Companion, a one-kilo Naga fragment living inside her body in close symbiosis with her nervous system, could nanotechnically reform skin, bone, and muscle tissue into contact endpoints for machine interface—a vast improvement over the older cephlink design with its permanently grown implants in brain and skin. Called “morphing” after an