Symbionts (19 page)

The dust had also suggested a strategy, one that Dev had been working on in simulations throughout most of the long passage from Herakles. They had deliberately emerged within the outer fringes of the star’s accretion disk, far enough out from ShraRish that the burst of energy released from the K-T plenum by their arrival should have gone unnoticed, as had the steady flux of neutrinos from their fusion power plants. The debris fields sheltered them from radar and ladar detection from the planet, of course, and shielded their own infrared emissions.

There, the tiny fleet waited for the arrival of the rest of the squadron. While fifth-generation K-T drives allowed ships to cross space at the rate of roughly a light year per day, the skill of the jackers, the unpredictable effects of currents within the godsea, or the pure, random bad luck of a malfunction could affect a ship’s expected arrival time by days one way or the other—more if a power plant or drive breakdown left the ship helplessly adrift in the deeps between the stars.

They could not afford to wait longer, however, even hidden within the outer edge of Alya A’s accretion disk. The neutrinos released by a ship’s fusion plant were not masked by interplanetary dust. The fact that the Confederation ships could detect the neutrino emissions of the Imperial ships meant that the Imperials could in turn detect them. Each passing hour increased the chance that the sensor suite aboard one of the Imperial ships in orbit would spot the Confederation vessels… or that mistake or bad luck would in some other way reveal their presence.

Dev had wished he could try deception to get close enough to launch an attack but knew that would not be possible here. There was too much chance that the enemy commander had heard of similar deceptions, at Athena and at New America. Besides, the rebels would have to use reconnaissance probes during the approach just to find out what they were up against, and no incoming Imperial squadron would ever do that.

An operational plan for direct attack, then, had been worked out before they’d left Herakles, and polished in sim during the voyage. The squadron would wait, lurking in the dust and maintaining communications silence for fifty hours past the arrival of the
Rebel,
by chance the first Confederation ship to reach Alya. During that time, all but three of the other vessels arrived—
Constellation,
the frigate
Valiant,
the corvettes
Intrepid
and
Audacious,
the big ex-tanker
Tarazed,
four of the five unarmed merchantmen, and, much to Dev’s relief, the
Vindemiatrix.
Still missing were one of the merchants, the corvette
Daring,
and the armed transport
Mirack.

That last absence could mean trouble.
Mirach
was carrying half of the 1st Confederation Rangers’ troops and equipment, and he didn’t want to commence the attack without her, but to wait longer exposed the squadron to discovery and attack. Briefly,
Vindemiatrix
docked directly with
Eagle’s
ventral access hatch, allowing personnel to cross from one ship to the other.

Eagerly, then, Dev waited for Katya in
Eagle’s
lounge.

Katya, too, had been lonely throughout the long passage out from Herakles.
Vindemiatrix
was roomy as starships went. Less maneuverable and with a lower acceleration than any warship, she required far smaller reserves of reaction mass and could devote a much larger percentage of her onboard space to passengers than could
Eagle.
But even with half of her huge, rotating cargo bays equipped for passenger accommodations,
Trixie
was carrying nearly eight hundred troops and maintenance personnel in addition to her crew of forty-five, twice
Eagle’s
complement crammed into vast, open dormitories that allowed no privacy at all save that of the inner world. The transport did have one hundred link modules installed in one of the zero-G bays, which meant that the passengers could enjoy a positively luxurious three hours of recjacking out of every twenty-four. The rest of the time was spent in training, shoulder-to-shoulder calisthenics in the dormitories, and classes in tactics, maintenance, field ops, and planetology delivered the old-fashioned way, by lecture instead of by cephlinkage… anything to keep the troops busy.

By the time they’d emerged from K-T space, though, her unit had been ready to face any odds, any enemy, if just to escape the gray-walled prison of the transport.

And Katya, too, for that matter. She was mildly claustrophobic, a hangover from an accident suffered while she’d been jacking a merchantman years before, an AI link failure that had left her awake but blind for long hours before her rescue. Normally, she was able to keep the feelings of dread when faced by small enclosures or pitch-blackness under control, but enduring fifteen weeks locked up in the hot, people-stinking closeness of the transport had taxed her self-control to what she was certain was her limit.

When Katya boarded
Eagle,
along with her battle ops staff, she half expected herself to fall into Dev’s arms in a most unmilitary display the moment she saw him. The incident aboard the ascraft months before was all but forgotten; what remained was her worry for him, and her need. But when the lounge door dissolved and she stepped into the compartment and actually saw him standing before the viewall, she found herself behind that long-held wall of her inner world, unable to bridge the gap between them.

“Welcome aboard, Katya,” he said. He was smiling, but Katya could sense the distance in him as well as in herself. Behind him, the viewall showed the
Trixie
backing off from the
Eagle,
taking up station a safe distance from the destroyer in preparation for the final jump into the inner system of Alya A. In the passageway outside, booted feet rattled across ferroplas deck plating; battle stations had been sounded, and
Eagle’s
crew was still responding.

“Thank you, Dev,” she said, almost shyly. “It’s… good to see you again.”

“We seem to be spending most of our time apart these days. I’m beginning to think we should see about getting ourselves assigned to the same ship… preferably a two-man scout.”

“I’ve had the same thoughts myself. Only if we did that, we might not get much work done.”

“True. And speaking of work, how would you like to link with me for the final approach?”

She nodded. “That would be good. I’ll especially want to see what you pick up on the Imperial dispositions on ShraRish when you get close enough to send in the probes.”

“Right. We don’t have anything yet, of course, but we’ll be launching the RD-40s as soon as we emerge from the next K-T hop. That ought to give us a pretty good look at what we’re up against.”

More than anything else, the Farstar squadron needed up-to-date intelligence. Exactly what kinds of Imperial ships were in orbit, and what was their operational status? How many troops were still on the surface? What kind of orbital defenses had they built? Had their defensive status changed since the DalRiss attack?

To find the answers to these and other, related questions, they’d planned to launch over one hundred RD-40 remote-linked scouts, a small cloud of teleoperated eyes and other senses that would provide a detailed, composite view of everything on and near ShraRish. Each scout was a small spacecraft, a thick-bodied saucer shape five meters across with almost all of its interior space devoted to reaction mass tankage. Its flattened ventral surface and stubby wings allowed the craft to operate within a planetary atmosphere. A compact Mitsubishi PV-1220 fusor unit provided thrust and shipboard power; a rather small-brained AI allowed the vehicle to be remote-jacked from one of the fleet’s larger ships. Capable of pulling 50 Gs of acceleration—Gs unfelt by their pilots, who remained safe aboard the ship that launched and directed them—the RD-40s were far faster and more maneuverable than any human-occupied fighter or warflyer, and since they were expendable, they did not need to reserve reaction mass for a return trip. They were unarmed, but a command from the craft’s pilot could switch off the fusorpack’s containment field, causing a plasma detonation almost as powerful as a small, low-yield thermonuclear explosion. The single major disadvantage of remote scouts lay in the difficulties of teleoperating such craft over distances of more than a small fraction of a light second. Time delays while radio or lasercom signals crawled back and forth at the sluggardly speed of light made any maneuvers at long range dangerous and rendered atmospheric maneuvering all but impossible.

As part of going to battle stations,
Eagle
was shifting from normal flight mode to combat mode. The rotation of her hab modules was slowed, then stopped, and the modules slowly hauled back into recesses within the ship’s armored hull. In zero-G, then, Katya and her ops staff followed Dev down a connector corridor from
Eagle’s
Number Two Hab to the main ship’s access passageway running along her spine. An enclosed transport pod whisked them aft to
Eagle’s
bridge, a chamber buried deep within the destroyer’s hull. There, crew members waiting in the disorienting bob and drift of zero-G helped Katya and Dev slide into the padded embrace of the ViRcom modules that lined the ship’s bridge and jack connectors into their C- and T-sockets. The module’s hatch became solid, and Katya nervously braced herself against a darkness relieved only by the wink of system status lights. Her left palm searched for the interface panel. When she found it, she downloaded the necessary link codes…

… and she was in space, staring into a light-frosted blackness given depth and volume by scattered stars, the glare of Alya A, and the soft-haired wisps of comets.

“Linked in?” Dev asked her, a voice in the emptiness beside her.

“All set.”

“Hey, Katya,” Lara Anders said over the pilot’s linkage. “Saw you come aboard but didn’t get to say howdy. How’s it feel to be aboard a real ship again?”

“As opposed to a cattle transport?Pretty good, Lara.”

“Here’s the feed on the Impie ships in-system,” Dev told her.

Data scrolled past her awareness, partly overlaying her view of space as graphic symbols marked targets and projected courses. Except for one far-distant reading that was probably a supply ship of some kind, all of the fusion-driven targets in the system save those of the Farstar squadron itself were still tightly clustered about Alya A-VI. Cross hairs were now centered over the pinpoint of light representing the planet. There was still no sign that Farstar had been detected, but she reminded herself that the radiations she was sensing now had begun their journey from the target world hours before.

In the background, Katya heard the commanders of other ships in the squadron reporting readiness for K-T space. Only the eight warships would be making this final translation; the four merchantmen would stay behind, to stay clear of the battle and to await the arrival of the three missing ships.

“Hang on, then,” Dev said. She heard the excitement building in his voice. “Things are going to be happening fast.”

“That’s affirmative,” Lara said. “K-T translation in five… four… three… two… one…
mark!”

Around her, space blazed into blue-white glory.

Eagle
leaped toward ShraRish at over three hundred times the speed of light.

Chapter 13

…
Axial tilt: 3
°
05' 12"; Temperature range (equatorial): 40°C to 50°C; Atmospheric pressure (arbitrary sea level): .75 bar; Atmospheric composition: N
₂
83.7%, O
₂
8.7%, O
₃
3.6%, SO
₂
2.4%, Ar 1.2%, H
₂
O (mean) .2%, H
₂
SO
₄
(mean) 850 ppm, CO
₂
540 ppm…

—
Shipboard ephemeris data

Extract on Alya A-VI

C.S.
Eagle

C.E.
2544

Their final immersion in the godsea lasted for less than one second, a burst of blue-white light exploding past
Eagle
in a shuddering surge of cold flame. The light faded again to black and the more familiar scatterings of the stars of normal fourspace as they emerged, close enough to Alya A-VI now that the planet showed a perceptible disk, close enough that there was no longer any question of masking their arrival from the enemy’s sensors. All eight Confederation warships emerged together, six hundred thousand kilometers out from the planet and still tightly clustered. With so short a jump, there was little difficulty keeping the squadron in close formation.

Dev rode the cascade of raw data surging through his mind and exulted. Targets that had been indistinguishable point sources of neutrinos a moment before could be resolved now in detail. Two of the ships in close planetary orbit were light destroyers, almost certainly Yari-class like the
Constellation,
and they were the heaviest ships the Imperials had on station. Most of the rest were transports and supply ships, guarded by
two
frigates and a pair of corvettes.

“Release probes!” Dev snapped over the squadron’s tactical frequency, and from each of the warships tumbled sticks of jet black projectiles, the layer of programmed nano coating their hulls drinking light and rendering them nearly invisible.

One after another, then in twos and threes and fives, the remotes accelerated, the drive Venturis tucked into the stern of each scout silently flaring as brightly as the surface of a sun. Balancing on slender cones of star-hot plasma, each scout saucer arrowed toward ShraRish, accelerating at 50 Gs until it was traveling at better than two hundred kilometers per second.