Battlemind (6 page)

—
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 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 mission?”

“To teleoperate a Mark XC Black Falcon through the Nova Aquila Stargate to the Galactic Core,” she recited, rattling off her mission statement from memory. “To attempt a landing on a rogue planet, Core D9837, to test Web responses and defenses, and to check out I2C teleoperational protocols and capabilities at intragalactic ranges.”

The psychtech grinned at her as the direct electronic link between them was broken. “I think you came through okay, Captain.”

She pulled in her contact, feeling the tendril melt back into her scalp. “How… how about the others? We were taking some pretty heavy subjective casualties.”

The grin faded. “About what we expected. Nineteen seem unaffected, so far. Including you.” He nodded toward the viewscreen, where particle cannon blasts flared in silent, blue-white fury. “Nine more are still on the other side, though they’ll be pulling out soon, I imagine. The others…” He shrugged.

She sighed. “Give me the bill, Major.”

“Twelve are in various stages of withdrawal or link psychosis. Two are brain dead. Feedback through the I2C relay. The other six… well, we’re trying to revive them. It doesn’t look good, though. We’re working on downloading their personalities, but they may be headed for permanent citizenship in a ViRworld now. I really can’t say anything more definite than that.”

Kara bit her lip. “Who were the two?”

The psychtech’s eyes unfocused as he consulted some inner list downloaded through his biolink. “Warstrider Miles Pritchard,” he said after a moment. “And Lieutenant Pellam Hochstader.”

Damn…
damn!
She squeezed her eyes shut, working to channel the pain that threatened her self control off into a harmless circling.

She hadn’t known Hochstader that well; he was a good and reliable officer, but he’d only been with the unit about a year, and his quiet reserve had kept him a bit aloof from the other Phantoms, Kara included. Pritch, though, she’d known rather longer, and more personally. He’d been a friend and an occasional drinking and ViRsim buddy for a couple of years now, despite the difference in their rank—a social barrier that was far less imposing in the free-spirited Confederation than it was within the Imperial military. She knew she would miss his quiet humor… and the steadying effect he’d had on the rawer members of First Company.

She could still remember his screams as his warstrider had melted around him.

That, she reminded herself, remained one of the risks associated with I2C teleoperations. It could well be that combat would
never
be safe, despite the new advances in teleoperated warcraft.

Two years earlier, the possibility of renewed war between the Confederation and the Shichiju had been averted—or at least deferred—when a disguised Kara had led a raid against an Imperial research facility on Kasei, the world in the Sol system once known as Mars. Her prize had been a brand new advance in the Imperium’s study of quantum physics, Instantaneous Interstellar Communications, or I2C, for short.

The technology still seemed wondrous, even magical. Create two electrons, or any other pair of quons—particles small enough to fall into the Alice-in-Wonderland weirdness of quantum physics—in a single event. The electron pair will be identical in that elusive quality of electronness called “spin,” even though it has no more to do with rotation than a charm quark has to do with the rules of subatomic etiquette. Separate the two electrons, then subject one to an event that reverses its spin.

The other electron will change its spin as well, instantly…
even if the two are separated by a distance of many light years.

It was as if the two electrons were somehow one and the same electron, a direct manifestation of one of the kinkier aspects of quantum theory. The effect, counter-intuitive and downright magical though it seemed, had been predicted since the mid-twentieth century and even demonstrated in early laboratory experiments, but at that time there’d been no practical way to exploit the phenomenon. Almost six centuries later, however, Imperial researchers had discovered how to trap each half of a paired quon in nanotechnic quantum electron cages, keying them to detectors that could read spin without affecting it, within the parameters set by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. This meant two computers could be linked together so that one could read the changes in an array of thousands of electron cages; each change, each flipped electron, could represent one bit of data in the age-old binary data structure of yes/no, on/off, spin-up/spin-down. When a particular sequence of electron spins was imposed on one array—the transmitter—the paired array registered the same sequence, light years away.

In practical terms, this meant that communications could be set up between two computer systems that were absolutely secure—untappable, untraceable, and unjammable, even across vast interstellar distances.

This, in turn, meant a titanic stride forward in military science. The ground military combat machines known as warstriders, and their spacefaring kin, warflyers, had long been operated by an on-board pilot who was linked—“jacked in,” in military parlance—to the machine’s operating systems and AI in such a way that the machine actually became his body, responding to the slightest thought while the organic body, cocooned in a life-support pod, was temporarily cut out of the brain’s control network. Throughout the warstrider era, military systems designers had dreamed of being able to have the pilots direct their electronic charges from a distance, teleoperating them into combat from a place of safety. After all, what did it matter if the imaging lenses feeding me pilot a view of his surroundings were half a meter away… or many kilometers? The control and sensory feedback systems all remained the same.

But the modern battlefield was a poor place for experiments in remote control. Half at least of any conflict in modern warfare was waged in unseen dimensions, an electronic battle fought between opposing computers on a plane and at speeds almost completely beyond the human ken; communications,
any
communications, could be intercepted and jammed. Control codes,
any
control codes, could be jammed or broken, countermanded, and even hijacked.

Any, that is, except signals propagated through quantum pairing. With I2C, not only could unit COs keep track of events on a battlefield light years away, but the striderjacks piloting a company of warstriders could teleoperate them from a distance… even when that distance was measured in thousands of light years. It meant that at planetary distances there was zero time delay due to speed-of-light limitations, that warstriders could be jacked from thousands of light years away, that the striders could be subjected to stresses that would have killed human pilots physically riding them. During the passage from the Stargate to Core D9837, the striders in Kara’s company had been boosting at over two hundred Gs—an acceleration no human could survive—and the high-radiation background of the Galactic Core itself made direct exploration of that hellish environment impossible, even with heavy shielding.

It was a remarkable achievement, a military dream come true.

Unfortunately, the dream so far had not succeeded in making warstrider military operations
safe
for the pilots. They might be well out of range of the enemy’s energy beams, but there were other, more insidious dangers in combat. Dangers affecting the
mind.…

Carefully, and with Jamal giving an assist, Kara sat up, then swung her legs out of the opened conmod. The pilot deck was a broad, low-ceilinged, brightly lit room occupied by dozens of coffin-shaped conmods identical to hers. Most of them, she saw, were already open and empty, their occupants moved elsewhere after their warstriders on distant Core D9837 had been junked. But a handful were clearly still occupied, their covers sealed tight, and with small galaxies of lights winking at the console life-function readouts mounted on their sides.

The conning modules were the life-support pods of her comrades in the Phantoms, the warstriders still fighting for their lives in the Galactic Core.