Symbionts (10 page)

“I hope so, sir. If there’s any way at all to get the DalRiss on our side, we’ve got to explore it. No matter what.”

“The Congress,” General Smith muttered, “is as incompetent now as it was before we left New America. I still think we should do what’s right, not sit around waiting for idiot delegates to get off their asses. Uh, present company excepted, of course.” Sinclair still held his position as a congressional delegate from New America.

“Military rule, Darwin?” Sinclair asked the man mildly.

Smith considered the question, then curtly nodded. “If we have to, sir, yes. Desperate times require desperate measures.”

“That ‘desperate times’ line has been used before in history, General,” Dev suggested quietly. “Usually to justify dictatorship.”

“We will not win this war by becoming the very monster we’re fighting against,” Sinclair said. “We will observe the forms of democracy, even if the substance is meaningless as yet. Congress, even an ad hoc one such as this, is the only thing that gives us legitimacy with the people we want to join us. Those ‘idiot delegates,’ as you put it, are the future of this Confederation.”

“Well, at least,” Admiral Sigismun Halleck said, laughing, “we don’t have as many of the sons of bitches to contend with now.”

The Confederation Congress was considerably reduced in numbers now, over a year since it had first assembled in Jefferson, the capital of New America. When Congress had fled New America just ahead of the Imperial landings, most of the delegates who’d opposed independence for the Confederation had stayed behind. Those who’d escaped to Herakles had, for the most part, been those dedicated to a complete political break with the Terran Hegemony.

But that didn’t mean that all was harmonious among the remaining five-hundred-odd delegates to the Confederation Congress. Serious differences between several of the worlds continued to threaten the young government, the issue of freedom for gene-tailored people being among the most serious. The “genies” so vital to the economic strength of Rainbow were being championed by the abolitionist parties on Liberty, and the feud had spread to other worlds as well. The divisions had created enemies; battles for or against newly proposed plans had become political struggles that had little to do with whether or not those plans would help or hinder the Confederation, and everything to do with the foundations of personal power.

Of particular concern to the Congress lately had been the deployment of the Confederation’s tiny fleet of warships. Too small to stand up to an Imperial battle group, it had proven good so far for little more than commerce raiding… and then only if it didn’t run up against serious opposition.
Eagle
was still the single largest warship in the Confederation’s arsenal, and even a small Imperial squadron generally included two or three ships of
Eagle’s
class as escorts for the larger cruisers and Ryu-carriers.

While Travis Sinclair had been elected by Congress to the command of the Confederation military, he still had to answer to Congress for his decisions… and accept its recommendations when they were put to a vote. The rebel government was as divided over what to do with its fleet now as it was over the question of freedom for the genies. Some supported the idea of using it in the long-planned, long-argued Operation Farstar; others insisted that the fleet should be kept close to the Confederation capital. Many of the delegates were still undecided, and it was their vote that Sinclair hoped to win with the news from Alya A.

“Is your crew taken care of, Captain?” Sinclair asked him.

“Yes, sir. Commander Canady, my XO, is securing the ship. She’ll be letting the first liberty section come across to the Rogue starting tonight.”

“That’s fine. I’m afraid we still don’t have much in the way of the amenities, either here or on the surface of Herakles. Things are still damned crowded up here, and a bit primitive down on the surface.”

“I think more than anything else, General, they just need to see something other than the inside of
Eagle’s
bulkheads. And maybe eat something other than Nihon chow. I don’t suppose?…”

“Ah, I’m afraid the food prep programs are still serving up the finest in Japanese cuisine,” Sinclair said. “The techs have been too busy keeping the power plant up and running and getting the weapons and deep space scanners on line to worry much about the menu.”

“In other words, Dev,” a familiar voice said, “it’s rice, vegetables, and fish for dinner again tonight.”

Turning, Dev saw the slender, dark-haired woman in military browns just entering the concourse lobby. “Katya!”

“So you finally decided to come back, eh?” she said with a twinkle.

“The colonel, here,” Sinclair said gravely, “has been threatening to use her Rangers as a search party if you didn’t come back to us soon. We’re all relieved that you made it back.” He paused, consulting an inner voice. “Well, we have about twelve hours before Congress is scheduled to reconvene, and I, for one, have to review this new information that the captain has brought us.” He glanced from Dev to Katya and back again. “Will you two be able to attend the staff briefing afterward?”

“Of course.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. I’ll see you then. In the meantime, perhaps Katya will be good enough to show you to your quarters and get you settled in.” He grinned at them. “I imagine you have some catching up to do.”

“Thank you, sir.” With military personnel coming and going on extended missions from the Rogue, quarters were assigned on a short-term and rotational basis, while personal effects were stored in a cargo module near the sky-el’s hub.

Dev turned to Katya as Sinclair and his entourage walked away. “Hello, stranger.”

“Hello, Dev. Welcome back. It’s… awfully good to see you.”

“It’s wonderful to see you.” He glanced around the crowded concourse. “So… it looks like privacy is still at a premium.”

“It’s worse than ever, Dev. The port and hab facilities down at New Argos are growing fast, but not fast enough to keep up with our growth. We’ve had almost eight thousand more people arrive in the past four months, from all across the Shichiju. The word’s spreading, Dev. The whole Frontier wants independence.”

“Which leaves us looking for a place to get reacquainted.” He glanced around the concourse. The sky-el hab had originally been designed as a roomy outpost for a staff of, at most, a hundred Imperial observers and
Sekkodan
scouts. Now, with the facility serving both as government center for the Confederation and as headquarters for the CONMILCOM, the Confederation Military Command, it had a permanent population of over seven hundred and a transient population of perhaps a thousand more. Many people lived aboard the various transports in orbit, but they had to rotate between shipboard assignments and the spin-gravity habs of the sky-el in order to stay fit and healthy. Too long a stretch of zero G made the strongest man a helpless cripple.

Most of the growing population, of course, lived on the surface. “No time to go down to Herakles, I suppose,” Dev said, a little wistfully.

“Not with us as short on ascraft transport as we’ve been. We wouldn’t make it back for at least a day or two. I think we’d better settle for a couple of com modules.”

“Well, lovely lady, you provide the modules,” Dev said, smiling. He tapped the side of his head with his forefinger. “And I’ll provide the place. Lead on!”

Later, Dev and Katya shared a virtual reality, their bodies unfelt within separate ViRcom modules, their minds linked by software. Waves crashed along a sandy beach; the sun, westering, touched the ocean with gold and sparkling white, as sea gulls wheeled in an afternoon sky. Nearby, white foam chased skittering clusters of sandpipers up and down the sand. Dev wasn’t even sure if the reality behind the scene existed anymore, so polluted had most of Earth’s inshore waters been for at least the past five centuries.

But it stirred memories of home in him, and for Katya as well. Her New America had no sea gulls, but she remembered its oceans with their slow but vast, moon-driven tides, quite well.

“That’s better,” Dev said, turning to face her. “Alone at last!”

“Welcome home, fella,” she said. “It’s been awhile.”

“Way too long.” He reached out, took her in his arms. Their analogues in this simulation wore casual clothing, shorts and pullovers, and they were barefoot in the sand. She felt wonderful inside the circle of his arms. The simulation was exact enough that it even reproduced the smell of her hair, plucking it from his memory. “You don’t know how I’ve been missing you!”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. What makes you think I don’t?”

They kissed. Long minutes later, Dev pulled back. “Okay. Maybe you do know.” Gently, he pulled her down to the sand with him, then slid one hand up beneath her shirt, caressing bare skin.

She reached up and caught his hand, pinning it against her breast. “Dev, I’m sorry…”

“Oh, yeah.” Gently, he pulled his hand out from under her shirt. “Sorry.”

“Can we wait until we can do it… for real?”

“Of course.”

Katya had disliked virtual sex as long as Dev had known her, even though the sensations were indistinguishable from the real thing. Sex, like any other activity and sensation, was perceived in the brain and it mattered not at all whether the stimulation came from the body’s nerve endings or from an interactive data feed from an AI link. Dev never had learned why Katya felt the way she did about recjacking, but he was usually more than happy to go along.

The only problem was his aching need for her
now.
It had been four months since he’d seen her last, and the one-sided recreational simulations of Katya he’d taken along during
Eagle’s
mission no longer seemed as fresh or as real as they once had. No AI, after all, could perfectly duplicate a real person’s speech and mannerisms closely enough to make them seem fresh indefinitely, not with only the linker’s own memories to draw on. Halfway through
Eagle’s
passage back to Herakles, Dev had decided that it was the
unexpected
in a relationship that kept a relationship alive.

Maybe, he thought, that was why two-person recjacking linkages were so much more interesting than solos.

Since Katya didn’t like virtual sex, though, they were going to have to find times and places to tryst in person, and that was likely to be impossible until they could get down to Argosport together. The “quarters” that Sinclair had mentioned was one of a number of open barracks at the quarter-G level, where as many as twenty men and women might be spending their downtime at any given hour, asleep or using the small, adjoining rec room. In a multiworld metaculture that viewed virtual sex as casually as it did downloading ViRdrama, public physical sex was tolerated, even accepted. Dev, from Earth and thoroughly familiar with the
shakai,
or Imperial overculture, was used to the idea of sex in public, though he’d never done it himself. Specific cultures within the metaculture, however, especially on the Frontier, required privacy for that most personal of personal experiences. Katya, Dev knew, was more likely to enjoy ViRsex with him than she was to engage in physical sex in one of the hab’s open dorms.

Well, he told himself, he’d gone four months without the reality of Katya in his arms. He could go a few days more. It was enough just to be able to see her, to talk with her… at least for the moment.

“So,” Dev said, trying to cover his racing thoughts, “while we were out-system, was there any sign of… of the Naga?”

“Nothing,” Katya said cheerfully. “Not so much as a single black puddle. It seems to have retired pretty far down into the crust after it linked with you. Some of us have been speculating as to whether or not you scared it off.”

“Maybe I did. It sure as hell scared me.”

He shivered, and Katya reached out, putting his head in the crook of her arm and pulling him close against her side. They stared up at the slowly reddening sky.

“What do you think?” Katya said after a time. “Are they going to go with Farstar?”

“I guess that’s up to Congress and to CONMILCOM,” Dev replied. “I still think it’s the only logical option for us. And this, this news from Alya A, gives us a chance of making it work.”

“There are still people on the command staff who think the whole thing is a bad idea. In Congress, too. Sinclair has been fighting them on this idea since we got here.”

“I can imagine.” Dev shook his head. “I guess what continues nagging at me is, why
us?”

“Well, our experience with the Nagas makes that part of it obvious enough.”

“Why? We’re supposed to make some sort of alliance with the DalRiss. The Naga don’t have a thing to do with it.”

“It’s our experience,” Katya said. “With nonhuman logic. With nonhumans, whatever they look like. Anyway, the Naga at GhegnuRish
is
helping the DalRiss reclaim their homeworld. It’s part of the political picture out there.” Katya was silent for a long moment. “You know, General Sinclair probably wants you at ShraRish because you’re a hero to the DalRiss. If it hadn’t been for you…”

“What hero… me?
Kuso,
we don’t know that, Katya. We don’t know enough about how the DalRiss think! Maybe they don’t have heroes.” He snorted. “Hell, maybe they kill and eat their heroes, or sacrifice them to the Great Boojum.”

“Sorry. Great Boojum?”

“Sure. The Snark was a Boojum, you see.” When Katya gave him a blank expression, he shrugged. “Sorry. Lewis Carroll. I did a lot of literary downloading while we were in K-T space. Lots of the old classics. Carroll. Hemingway. Spielberg.”

“Sounds more like Lea Leanne,” Katya said, naming a popular ViRdrama actress known throughout the Shichiju for her performances blending virtual sex, suspense, and danger, and usually involving monsters, both alien and human.

“Katya, I’m not a hero. Hell, I shouldn’t even be a ship captain. I’m twenty-eight standard years old. Three years ago I was a legger, an enlisted grunt in the army. Now they have me commanding commerce raiders and serving as liaison to the only nonhuman civilization we know.”