Jackers by William H Keith Read Free Book Online Page B

They were so small that, as with warstriders, their jackerpilots thought of themselves as wearing the things rather than riding them, and a large number of flyers could be carried aboard even a moderate-sized ascraft. Their greatest disadvantage was still their low thrust-to-mass ratio, which was rarely more than 4 Gs or so. That made them slow in combat, and they had nothing like the high-G maneuverability of a true space fighter.
    That meant that in any kind of stand-up fight, in orbit or in deep space, they were going to take heavy casualties.
    Casualties were very much on Dev’s mind as Tarazed’s wing of warflyers dispersed, each pursuing a separate, parabolic path toward the orbital facility expanding in the ViRsimulated view ahead. Nine out of ten were decoys, piloted by low-level AIs too simple to understand their own deaths. The remaining tenth were better armored, yes, but vulnerable still to even a light caress of a 100-MW point defense laser.
    What hurt was that most were piloted by children… well, by men and women younger than Dev’s twenty-seven standard years. He wondered if all revolutions were fueled by the idealistic fervor of children. Realistically, Dev knew that he could scarcely be considered old.
    He just felt that way sometimes.

    They’d started calling him Lucky Rol, and that was the name painted on the blunt prow of his DR-80 warflyer.
    Tall, flamboyantly blond, with ice blue eyes, Torolf Bondevik was Lokan-Scandinavian, born and raised in Midgard in the shadow of the Bifrost Towerdown. He’d become a warstrider during the fighting with the Xenos there, joining Alessandro’s Assassins and participating in the Alyan Expedition of 2541. He’d stayed with the unit when it opted to join the Confederation forces and had gone to Eridu to support the Rebel Network’s rising there against Hegemony and Empire.
    He’d been with the jackers who’d boarded an ascraft at Babel in a desperate bid to seize an Imperial destroyer docked at Babel Synchorbital. During the attack on the berthed warship, he’d remote-jacked a warflyer from the ascraft, his mind riding the craft into a barrage of laser fire until it was destroyed.
    Torolf had been unharmed, of course. With the remote link broken, he’d simply awakened back aboard the ascraft, but he’d later joked with the other rebels about having been fried by a gigawatt laser during his approach. The tag “Lucky Rol” had naturally followed.
    He hoped the name held true today, because he wasn’t jacking remote this time. He was tucked into the coffin-sized jackslot aboard the stubby DR-80, with nothing between him and the Imperial base’s laser batteries but a few centimeters of durasheath armor.
    “Red Squadron!” he called over his tactical link. “This is Red Leader. I’m going to try for that array of struts and cross supports near the cryo-H tanks at two-five-zero.”
    “Rog… that, Red Leader.Red Two, Red Three… with you!”
    “Copy, Red… dron… on our way!”
    The replies, blasted by ECM static and interrupted by his own movements and those of his fellow flyers, were fragmentary. Coordination at this point was nearly impossible; all he could manage was a ragged “this way!” and a hope that enough of his people saw what he was doing to follow.
    A beam flashed, a dazzling green thread that seemed to miss him by meters, then brushed a decoy a kilometer to his rear, dissolving it in a soundless flash. The graphics had a feeling of unreality to them, like the cartoon images of a training ViRsim; the warflyer’s AI was painting in the beams to help him pick his approach.
    Not that seeing the beams was any great help. How do you step out of the way of something that announces its arrival with the same gigawatt flash of light that turns the toughest armor to a flare of exploding plasma?
    Still, the display did help him spot active laser batteries, in particular a bank of squat, staggered turrets arrayed stepwise along a parapet of open