Battlemind by William H Keith Read Free Book Online Page B

ancient computer technique for manipulating images on a computer, the technique had redefined how many humans thought of their bodies… and how they used them. Several of the technicians bending over her now had cosmetic morphs—delicately reworked ears for one, a decorative set of scales and ridges above golden cat’s eyes for another.
    Kara felt confused, lost in a spinning disorientation. She remembered, now, having climbed into this life-support pod several hours before. Indeed, she’d never forgotten… quite. But jacking a warstrider required intense concentration and a complete elimination of outside distractions. During the past few hours, her body had been isolated from her brain, kept alive by the pod’s life support systems and Gauss’s primary medical AI while her brain had jacked her warstrider by remote control.
    The military high command was still calling teleoperated warstriders the Great Experiment. She wondered how many of the Fleet’s senior officers had tried this experiment for themselves. She closed her eyes, trying for a moment to blank out the confused tumble of images, to remind herself that this was real, that that had been a kind of waking dream.
    From where she was lying, she could see part of a large viewscreen set into one curving bulkhead of the wardeck. Her dream—her nightmare, rather—was still being played out there. She could see the floating pyramid aloft once more, see rippling, glittering movement on the ground in the distance that must be hordes of Web machines. The image was being transmitted by one of the survivors of her company, still holding the perimeter back on Core D9837. Briefly, she closed her eyes, trying to reconcile conflicting emotions—her happiness at being away from there… and her anger and disappointment at having been ripped away from her people before the mission was complete.
    When she opened her eyes again, another figure, this one in white and wearing a major’s rank tabs, was leaning over her pod. “Captain? How are we feeling?” he asked.
    She didn’t care for the man’s multiple personality address, but she accepted his examination of her face, including the pupils of both eyes.
    “A little woozy, sir,” she told him.
    The insignia on his jumper identified him as a senior psych department officer, a psychtech. “Give me a contact,” he told her in a brusque, professional manner. “Left temporal, please.”
    She focused her thoughts, and a patch of her skin just above and in front of her left ear hardened to the shiny slickness of polished gold, then extruded itself as a slender filament. The psychtech reached out with his right forefinger and touched her link tendril as it twisted slightly in the air in front of her face. The tip of his finger was changing too, enveloping the tip of her contact. At the touch, she felt something like the flash of a strobe light go off just behind her eyes, then savored the faintly erotic rippling of data cascading at electronic speed from her Companion’s memory stacks as it uploaded at the psychtech’s coded request. She caught a bit of peripheral information in the backflow; the psychtech’s name was Peter Jamal, he was from Liberty, and he was worried about what might have happened to these people “in there.” His daughter’s birthday was in two weeks, and he was disgruntled about having to miss it.
    “What’s your name?” His voice sounded inside her head, bypassing her ears and speaking aloud in her head.
    Recognition—and memory—were flooding back, banishing the vertigo and disorientation. “I’m okay,” she told him.
    “Let’s have your name,” the voice insisted.
    She nodded, knowing Jamal needed to check her responses. “Kara Hagan,” she said. “Captain Kara Hagan, Confederation Military Command, First Company, First Battalion, First Confederation Rangers.”
    “Who are your parents?”
    “General Victor Hagan. Senator Katya Alessandro.”
    “What was your