getting killed in there. Or worse.”
“You know,” he said a little sadly, “people used to argue that the machine gun would make war too horrible to exist. Same for nuclear weapons. Now here we have a new technology that’s supposed to save lives, and we’re still losing them.”
It seemed a strange sentiment for a military man… though perhaps it could be expected of a psychtech. Even so, Kara had to agree, and nodded. “Maybe there’s no way around it,” she added. “Just new and different ways of killing people.”
She wanted to say something more, something to the effect that at least teleoperation seemed to be cutting down on casualty percentages—two dead out of forty-eight was not bad, after all—but that really wasn’t the point. There was still what she had come to think of as the suicide-mission factor to consider. Two years ago, something like Operation Core Peek—sending a couple of companies on a strictly one-way sneak-and-peek into the Web’s no-trespass zone at the Galactic Core—would have been unthinkable. If for no other reason than that, some way would have had to have been found to get the information out, the op would never have gone down unless the people who’d gone in had a fair chance of coming back again. Now, though, with warstrider pilots able to operate their craft from the theoretical safety of a command base ship, the politicos and brass were a lot likelier to draw up op plans for lamebrained missions that didn’t have a chance of success, missions where survivability didn’t need to be considered. As a result the pilots were certain to be subjected to even more combat stress than they’d faced before.
Case in point. Hochstader and Pritchard would still be alive if they hadn’t been sent in on Core Peek, an operation where the mission parameters stressed that the warstriders would return to the Stargate and Nova Aquila if practicable… but which everyone actually involved in the planning had known would be a suicide mission. If traumatic deaths were down, the ratio of psychological injuries was certainly higher. How many in her company, she wondered, would spend the rest of their existence in the make-believe of ViRworlds?
At the thought, she felt a swift chill of fear. Ran…
Ran Ferris’s con module was one of the very last that remained sealed. She glanced up at the viewscreen, ignoring the tangled and wildly shifting nightmare shapes and images flickering across it to concentrate on the columns of text winking on and off down the screen’s right-hand side. That image, she saw, was coming from Number Ten—Ran’s Black Falcon. He was one of four striders still in the fight; as she watched, med techs were gathering around two more of the high-tech coffins, and Jamal quietly excused himself to go attend another newly revived pilot. She glanced around the war deck, spotted the conmod for Number Ten, and hurried over. It was still sealed, of course, but med techs and engineers were already gathering around it.
On the screen on the nearby bulkhead, the pyramid loomed colossal. Blue lightning flashed, stabbing, exploding.…
The image shivered, then abruptly shifted to a different view, from a different strider. An alarm sounded, and the lights on Ran’s console began shifting from green to amber to red. One of the techs touched a control, and the top of the module hissed open, revealing Ran’s body inside, his face taut, pale, and drawn behind his breathing mask. His eyes opened, the pupils black and enormous, still staring into some horror invisible to the rest of them. As the room lights hit them, the pupils closed down to pinpoints, and he blinked.
His autonomous systems are back on line, she thought. Thank God.…
“They’re breaking through!” Ran’s shout drowned out the alarm and echoed through the war deck compartment. “Stop them! Stop—”
He blinked again, suddenly aware that he was no longer inside his warstrider. Several technicians reached
“You know,” he said a little sadly, “people used to argue that the machine gun would make war too horrible to exist. Same for nuclear weapons. Now here we have a new technology that’s supposed to save lives, and we’re still losing them.”
It seemed a strange sentiment for a military man… though perhaps it could be expected of a psychtech. Even so, Kara had to agree, and nodded. “Maybe there’s no way around it,” she added. “Just new and different ways of killing people.”
She wanted to say something more, something to the effect that at least teleoperation seemed to be cutting down on casualty percentages—two dead out of forty-eight was not bad, after all—but that really wasn’t the point. There was still what she had come to think of as the suicide-mission factor to consider. Two years ago, something like Operation Core Peek—sending a couple of companies on a strictly one-way sneak-and-peek into the Web’s no-trespass zone at the Galactic Core—would have been unthinkable. If for no other reason than that, some way would have had to have been found to get the information out, the op would never have gone down unless the people who’d gone in had a fair chance of coming back again. Now, though, with warstrider pilots able to operate their craft from the theoretical safety of a command base ship, the politicos and brass were a lot likelier to draw up op plans for lamebrained missions that didn’t have a chance of success, missions where survivability didn’t need to be considered. As a result the pilots were certain to be subjected to even more combat stress than they’d faced before.
Case in point. Hochstader and Pritchard would still be alive if they hadn’t been sent in on Core Peek, an operation where the mission parameters stressed that the warstriders would return to the Stargate and Nova Aquila if practicable… but which everyone actually involved in the planning had known would be a suicide mission. If traumatic deaths were down, the ratio of psychological injuries was certainly higher. How many in her company, she wondered, would spend the rest of their existence in the make-believe of ViRworlds?
At the thought, she felt a swift chill of fear. Ran…
Ran Ferris’s con module was one of the very last that remained sealed. She glanced up at the viewscreen, ignoring the tangled and wildly shifting nightmare shapes and images flickering across it to concentrate on the columns of text winking on and off down the screen’s right-hand side. That image, she saw, was coming from Number Ten—Ran’s Black Falcon. He was one of four striders still in the fight; as she watched, med techs were gathering around two more of the high-tech coffins, and Jamal quietly excused himself to go attend another newly revived pilot. She glanced around the war deck, spotted the conmod for Number Ten, and hurried over. It was still sealed, of course, but med techs and engineers were already gathering around it.
On the screen on the nearby bulkhead, the pyramid loomed colossal. Blue lightning flashed, stabbing, exploding.…
The image shivered, then abruptly shifted to a different view, from a different strider. An alarm sounded, and the lights on Ran’s console began shifting from green to amber to red. One of the techs touched a control, and the top of the module hissed open, revealing Ran’s body inside, his face taut, pale, and drawn behind his breathing mask. His eyes opened, the pupils black and enormous, still staring into some horror invisible to the rest of them. As the room lights hit them, the pupils closed down to pinpoints, and he blinked.
His autonomous systems are back on line, she thought. Thank God.…
“They’re breaking through!” Ran’s shout drowned out the alarm and echoed through the war deck compartment. “Stop them! Stop—”
He blinked again, suddenly aware that he was no longer inside his warstrider. Several technicians reached
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