This, she thought, was the dumbest thing that had ever happened to her. She couldn’t believe that she was in this position. Had let herself be in this position. Fuck.
The Texans came up over the rise, and she settled back into her chair. It was just as uncomfortable as it had been the first time she sat down in it. The big screens on the wall of the semi-trailer were lit up with ranges and windspeed and time-on-target figures, as well as several rapidly cycling views of the big tanks and APCs climbing out of the wadi.
Her fingers flew over the big touch-screen in front of her, dragging fire-source icons onto the out lines of the lead tanks; when she was finished allocating fire, about two-thirds of the tanks were hilighted red; none of the APCs were covered, and the infantry advancing in the big vehicles’ lees were still mostly uncovered. Soft kills, she thought; once the tanks were all taken out, she could reallocate fire to the APCs and hope it would take out the infantry.
Hope. It was the thing with wings; but things with wings were few and far between on both sides at this stage in the war.
“I think we’re fucked,” said a voice in her ear. Male, warm but sort of grizzled sounding. Competent, like an uncle who’d seen some shit and was ready to offer advice.
“We, my ass,” she said. “You’re backed up in a data center in San Jose.”
“It doesn’t really work that way, and you know it.” The AI sounded grimly amused. She did know it: if the big bank of solid-state computational hardware that took up the other half of this trailer was destroyed, another version of this AI could be bootstrapped from its backups, but it wouldn’t be the same... person.
“Any word on where the fifteenth is?” She didn’t spare a glance at the red-and-blue icons on the map screen: she already knew that the 15th Mechanized was twenty kilometers away, defending a stretch of highway that the Texans had wisely decided to avoid.
Which left her, her AI, and her fire-control screens to stand off what looked to be a battalion of mechanized Lone Star infantry. The big guns at Essex and the smaller field pieces being defended by the 15th up the road would light those fucking tanks up right quick, but not enough of them, and not fast enough; at some point -- some near point -- they’d find her heat signature, and get one of the tanks or GCVs or -- God help them, they even had Strykers out there, the big guns would go through those things like -- well, provided that she got to them.
What, she thought, was she even doing here? An independent California... she’d voted for it, but... pushing a button on a voting website was very different from standing alone on the path of a Texan invasion force. Sitting. Whatever. Did it really matter that much who was in charge, when it came right down to it? It seemed like it had, at one point.
Anyway, in about -- she looked over the displays -- three minutes, she’d start the guns going, and she figured that she had maybe five or six minutes after that before the first of the Texans got into range of her trailer; after that it was totally up to the tank driver’s reflexes and the Texan targeting systems how long she’d live.
She gave the spread one more go-over: the targeting systems seemed to be holding steady on the vehicles she’d hilighted, and everything that could work seemed to be working.
“Sniper drones up,” she said. The little four-rotor autonomous vehicles leapt off the roof of the trailer; they’d move in different directions, attempting to give off confusing heat patterns to draw fire while using their little guns to go after the infantry.
She swiped the ‘execute ready’ slider on the screen and held her hand over the green ‘execute’ button button that replaced it.
One more time over the targeting priorities: First the tanks, then the APCs, then... well, there probably wasn’t going to be a then. Well, there was no point in being pessimistic: each of the vehicles had a priority...
She crossed herself, and touched the green button.
Nothing happened immediately: guns were firing miles away, the longest range first, timed so that the first barrage would hit together, do maximum damage while the enemy was still unaware that they were under attack. Theoretically.
Given the way the Texans were deployed and moving up the slope, she was pretty sure they were expecting something to shoot at them.
She was going over targeting priorities yet again, fighting off the sinking, despairing sensation of dread with busy work, when her screens suddenly flared, then righted themselves as software compensated for the flashes coming over the cameras: something had just hit the Texans in the rear.
It looked like... yes, it was a volley of shoulder-mounted anti-armor rockets, and they’d hit the Strykers all at once; the little eight-wheeled machines had been in the rear of the Texan formation, their thin armor making them most vulnerable; now they were being lit up, one of them actually blown off its wheels.
What the fuck, she thought, as the Texas formation ground to a halt and began to turn to face the new, unseen threat. The Texan infantry went down as one man as the tanks turned; their command-and-control automation, while nowhere near the level of the Californian equipment, was working.
She could hear confused shouting from the Texan comms even as she panned around the battlefield, video processing algorithms scanning and hilighting as she set it searching for non-Texan infantry.
There: a freeze frame of a big, bearded man ducking behind a rock, the tube he’d just fired blurred as it came off his shoulder. A red bandana around his head, a black vest...
Angels, she thought. Thank God for the Angels.
As the thought sprang into her head, the thumping sound of engines pitched completely differently from the low grumbles of the tanks and APCs came over her earphones, and then the motorcycles were in among the Texas infantry, big all-terrain things with the winged skull logo stenciled on the gas tanks and robotic flechette guns firing laterally off the sides.
They wouldn’t last long once the tanks got turned around, she knew, but...
The first rounds of the artillery hit, like the fist of God hammering armored vehicles to scrap.
She just had time to shift targeting priorities: the smart shells had a very limited post-firing adjustment margin, but most of the Texans were within the margin, and...
The tank shell went through the trailer even as she made the last of the adjustments; she had just enough time to realize that something had happened before it all blinked out.
The Texans came up over the rise, and she settled back into her chair. It was just as uncomfortable as it had been the first time she sat down in it. The big screens on the wall of the semi-trailer were lit up with ranges and windspeed and time-on-target figures, as well as several rapidly cycling views of the big tanks and APCs climbing out of the wadi.
Her fingers flew over the big touch-screen in front of her, dragging fire-source icons onto the out lines of the lead tanks; when she was finished allocating fire, about two-thirds of the tanks were hilighted red; none of the APCs were covered, and the infantry advancing in the big vehicles’ lees were still mostly uncovered. Soft kills, she thought; once the tanks were all taken out, she could reallocate fire to the APCs and hope it would take out the infantry.
Hope. It was the thing with wings; but things with wings were few and far between on both sides at this stage in the war.
“I think we’re fucked,” said a voice in her ear. Male, warm but sort of grizzled sounding. Competent, like an uncle who’d seen some shit and was ready to offer advice.
“We, my ass,” she said. “You’re backed up in a data center in San Jose.”
“It doesn’t really work that way, and you know it.” The AI sounded grimly amused. She did know it: if the big bank of solid-state computational hardware that took up the other half of this trailer was destroyed, another version of this AI could be bootstrapped from its backups, but it wouldn’t be the same... person.
“Any word on where the fifteenth is?” She didn’t spare a glance at the red-and-blue icons on the map screen: she already knew that the 15th Mechanized was twenty kilometers away, defending a stretch of highway that the Texans had wisely decided to avoid.
Which left her, her AI, and her fire-control screens to stand off what looked to be a battalion of mechanized Lone Star infantry. The big guns at Essex and the smaller field pieces being defended by the 15th up the road would light those fucking tanks up right quick, but not enough of them, and not fast enough; at some point -- some near point -- they’d find her heat signature, and get one of the tanks or GCVs or -- God help them, they even had Strykers out there, the big guns would go through those things like -- well, provided that she got to them.
What, she thought, was she even doing here? An independent California... she’d voted for it, but... pushing a button on a voting website was very different from standing alone on the path of a Texan invasion force. Sitting. Whatever. Did it really matter that much who was in charge, when it came right down to it? It seemed like it had, at one point.
Anyway, in about -- she looked over the displays -- three minutes, she’d start the guns going, and she figured that she had maybe five or six minutes after that before the first of the Texans got into range of her trailer; after that it was totally up to the tank driver’s reflexes and the Texan targeting systems how long she’d live.
She gave the spread one more go-over: the targeting systems seemed to be holding steady on the vehicles she’d hilighted, and everything that could work seemed to be working.
“Sniper drones up,” she said. The little four-rotor autonomous vehicles leapt off the roof of the trailer; they’d move in different directions, attempting to give off confusing heat patterns to draw fire while using their little guns to go after the infantry.
She swiped the ‘execute ready’ slider on the screen and held her hand over the green ‘execute’ button button that replaced it.
One more time over the targeting priorities: First the tanks, then the APCs, then... well, there probably wasn’t going to be a then. Well, there was no point in being pessimistic: each of the vehicles had a priority...
She crossed herself, and touched the green button.
Nothing happened immediately: guns were firing miles away, the longest range first, timed so that the first barrage would hit together, do maximum damage while the enemy was still unaware that they were under attack. Theoretically.
Given the way the Texans were deployed and moving up the slope, she was pretty sure they were expecting something to shoot at them.
She was going over targeting priorities yet again, fighting off the sinking, despairing sensation of dread with busy work, when her screens suddenly flared, then righted themselves as software compensated for the flashes coming over the cameras: something had just hit the Texans in the rear.
It looked like... yes, it was a volley of shoulder-mounted anti-armor rockets, and they’d hit the Strykers all at once; the little eight-wheeled machines had been in the rear of the Texan formation, their thin armor making them most vulnerable; now they were being lit up, one of them actually blown off its wheels.
What the fuck, she thought, as the Texas formation ground to a halt and began to turn to face the new, unseen threat. The Texan infantry went down as one man as the tanks turned; their command-and-control automation, while nowhere near the level of the Californian equipment, was working.
She could hear confused shouting from the Texan comms even as she panned around the battlefield, video processing algorithms scanning and hilighting as she set it searching for non-Texan infantry.
There: a freeze frame of a big, bearded man ducking behind a rock, the tube he’d just fired blurred as it came off his shoulder. A red bandana around his head, a black vest...
Angels, she thought. Thank God for the Angels.
As the thought sprang into her head, the thumping sound of engines pitched completely differently from the low grumbles of the tanks and APCs came over her earphones, and then the motorcycles were in among the Texas infantry, big all-terrain things with the winged skull logo stenciled on the gas tanks and robotic flechette guns firing laterally off the sides.
They wouldn’t last long once the tanks got turned around, she knew, but...
The first rounds of the artillery hit, like the fist of God hammering armored vehicles to scrap.
She just had time to shift targeting priorities: the smart shells had a very limited post-firing adjustment margin, but most of the Texans were within the margin, and...
The tank shell went through the trailer even as she made the last of the adjustments; she had just enough time to realize that something had happened before it all blinked out.
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